Custom Google Search

Google has been experimenting with letting users reorder and remove search results. This may seem strange if you think that Google cares a lot about algorithmically ranking search results. The new options allow you to promote some of the results at the top of the page, hide the results you think are not relevant and add new web pages that are missing from Google's results. These changes are saved in your Google account and only influence your results. For now, the users who see the experimental feature are randomly selected.


These new personalization options can be partly recreated using a custom search engine. You can build a custom search engine for the entire web, that should include all the sites from Google's index. Every time you find web pages or web sites that are not very useful, but have good rankings, you can edit the search engine and them to the exclusion list.


To promote search results, check this option in the custom search engine's settings: "Add my Subscribed Link to this Custom Search Engine". Then create subscribed links for some of the terms you search often. Alternatively, you could use Google Spreadsheets to define a list of subscribed links. The subscribed links are also included if you use Google's standard search engine, but they're displayed after the third search result.


The custom search engine lacks the user interface options from Google's experimental feature, but it's a pretty powerful way to customize your search experience.

Useful links:
Manage your custom search engines
Manage your subscribed links

{ The first screenshot is from Nimish. }

Useful Google Translate Addresses

Translate a web page:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=it|en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English.


Translate a web page into English (the input language is detected automatically):

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English, but without explicitly mentioning that the web page is written in Italian.


Use Google Translate as a proxy:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&u=URL

You basically want to read the page in its initial language, but loaded from Google's servers. LANG2 should be the code for your web page's language, while LANG1 can be any supported language so that LANG1|LANG2 is a valid language pair.

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=fr|en&u=http://craigslist.org shows Craigslist's home page using Google Translate as a way to bypass security restrictions.


Translate a text:

http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&text=TEXT

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=en|es&text=Hello, world! translates "Hello, world!" from English into Spanish.


Notes:

1. the language pairs are listed in this FAQ, while the language codes are included in this long list.

2. To disable Google Translate's annoying tooltips that show the original text, block this JavaScript file: http://209.85.135.104/translate_c.js, for example by adding a new rule in Adblock Plus for Firefox or by using Opera's content blocker.

Google's Design Guidelines

Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer for Google Apps, outlined some of the most important principles for designing interfaces at Google. In his presentation at the WritersUA conference, Jon listed the following guidelines:

1. Useful: focus on people - their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Fast: every millisecond counts.
3. Simple: simplicity is powerful.
4. Engaging: engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Innovative: dare to be innovative.
6. Universal: design for the world.
7. Profitable: plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Beautiful: delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Trustworthy: be worthy of people's trust.
10. Personable: add a human touch.

Let's see if Google's homepage respects these guidelines. It loads fast and it's pretty useful for those go to google.com. The design is very simple and has little distractions, so it's not intimidating. You don't need a manual to use Google search, but you can learn some tricks that may help you get better results. I'm not sure if Google's homepage is innovative, but many other sites copied its simplicity. Google's homepage is instantly recognizable, so it crossed the cultural barriers, even if Google had to adapt it in Korea and Japan. The profitability is a consequence of Google's focus on delivering useful ads that are contextually adequate: placing ads on the homepage would probably alienate the users. Google's homepage is spacious, elegant and has some sense of humor: "I'm feeling lucky" and the doodles add a human touch. As for trustworthiness, the straightforward design should reinforce users' perception that Google doesn't have a hidden agenda and tries to offer the best answers.



Related:
User experience at Google (video)

{ via Functioning Form }

Update: Google explains these design guidelines in a new page from its corporate site. "The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is Googley – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world."

Google Analytics Benchmarks

Two weeks ago, Google Analytics added a new feature that lets you compare your site's traffic with average data for other similar sites. To make this feature possible, you need to enable data sharing with the benchmarking service. "Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form." There's also an option to enable data sharing with other Google services that will allow a better integration between Analytics, AdWords and other services.


The benchmarking data is now live and you can see it if you go to Visitors > Benchmarking (Beta). Google compares the following values for the last 30 days: visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site and new visits. By default, your site is compared with other sites of similar size, but you can restrict the benchmark to general categories like: Internet, Travel, Shopping, Reference etc. Since the data is aggregated from the sites that agreed to participate in the program, it may not be representative. Google says it will add new categories once more sites will enable the data sharing option.

"When benchmarking is enabled, Google crawls the websites in the account then categorizes them by vertical and the amount of visits. The data is then made anonymous through aggregation. For sites of a similar size, a category of industry verticals can be chosen when there is a sufficient number of accounts in that category."


It's interesting to compare your site's traffic with these aggregate data as it will help you put things in perspective, but you shouldn't be disappointed if the comparison is not favorable. Each site is unique and has a different raison d'être.

Google's Broken Bookmarking Systems

Google hasn't yet launched a proper bookmarking system. Google Bookmarks was just a small extension of Search History and became more useful after the integration with Google Toolbar. Notebook lets you clip content from the web, but it's more useful for research and not for bookmarking web pages. Google Reader's shared items are limited to your subscriptions or to web sites that have feeds and they're not structured. The not-yet-officially-released Shared Stuff widget wants to unify the ways people share web pages and it's more like a meta social bookmarking service.

In this guest post, Michael Searcy expresses his frustration with Google's failed attempts to develop a service for bookmarking and sharing web pages.


Like most people I want Google to add a social aspect to "Google Bookmarks". The crazy part is they already have a disassembled version of a social bookmarks network. The parts are: Bookmarks, Reader, Notebook & Shared Stuff.

	Share	Web Pages	Feeds	Tags	Contacts	Bookmark	Profile
Bookmarks	no	no	no	yes	no	yes	no
Reader	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	yes
SharedStuff	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Notebook	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	yes	no

Bookmarks: it's great for across computer access but has no sharing, or interaction with other Google services.

Reader: It is awesome. It has changed my life! I find and share more stuff with it, than with normal browsing. You can "star" items that you want to lookup later for reference, but if you want to bookmark something you have to invoke some hackery (you can open the item outside of reader and bookmark it with a toolbar shortcut, or use a Greasemonkey script which doesn't work). Another limitation not shown in the chart is that you can't share anything you are not already subscribed to. Also on a shared reader page you don't get a summary view (for people with lots of posts), you can't search and you definitely cant slice it up by tags/labels.

Shared stuff: It's interesting because if you find something cool in Reader you can star it, then later when you get around to reading it again you can open it separate and bookmark it. Then if you open it from your bookmarks you can use the Email/Share toolbar item to Share it and it will Show a "star" saying its bookmarked. Other cool aspects are that you can Share through Google, share through other social networking services, email it to your low-tech friends, and you can even tag your items! You can do all that, but you can't bookmark with Google Bookmarks? You can use every bookmark service except Google. You're kidding me right? So now we can share bookmarked Items in a round about way, but we can't bookmark shared items!!!

Notebook: Its nice for a web notebook/clipboard with multiple headings or "notebooks" (which is repetitive but that's what they are called) and the sharing function is nice, if your into sharing notebook type content. Then they tried to incorporate bookmarks, but they imported them and called them "Unfiled Bookmarks", which means it's a bookmark and it's not associated with a "notebook". Which is extra weird if you "move" a bookmark to a notebook. Then you get your Markbooks confused with your Booknotes and ..... Wait. This is just madness. Its just 2 different classes of labels. But you can share "notebook" class labels but not "labels". So close.

Google Translate API

Google launched another AJAX API, this time for language detection and translation. The API works for the same language pairs that are available at Google Translate and lets you display the translation of a text inside your own page, without having to link to an external translation service.

The translation API could be used to automatically translate some content from a web page using the browser's preferred language, to create a Greasemonkey script that translates to English the posts written in other languages, to detect if a comment is written in English before posting it and for many other things.

Here's one example of use, where you can enter a text in one of the supported languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), Google automatically detects the language and it shows the English translation. The sample text is from Le Monde.

Le département de la défense américain a demandé à Google de retirer des clichés panoramiques de la base de Fort Sam, au Texas. Google Earth ou Google Street View révèlent des petits secrets que les services gouvernementaux militaires et de renseignement se passeraient bien de voir diffuser.

Faster Google Search on Your Mobile Phone

Searching the web using a mobile phone is not always a pleasant experience. You have to open a browser, go to a search engine, wait for the page to load and type your query. Google tried to eliminate two of these steps by providing small applications that add Google's search box on the phone's home screen. This way, the search box is always at your fingertips and you won't have visit Google's homepage to type your query.

For Blackberry, the search application is included in the Google Mobile Updater, which is available at mobile.google.com. Google offers a similar search shortcut for N-series and E-series Nokia phones and for Windows Mobile phones at the same address. Google will probably expand the availability of this app to other mobile phones, although not all of them allow search boxes on the home screen. For feature phones, Opera Mini is probably the best fastest way to access Google search.


Because the search box is more accessible and it's so easy to enter your query, people search more. "When we look at the combined usage numbers for BlackBerry and Symbian versions of this plug-in, we see that users are able to get Google search results up to 40 percent faster. And, BlackBerry and Symbian users with the plug-in installed search 20 percent more than those without it," concludes Google.

"We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage. We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating. The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth", said Google's Matt Waddell. iPhone was a great testbed for trying new interfaces and testing their impact as the Internet will slowly move to mobile phones.

{ Credits for the images: Google Mobile Blog. }

Google Spreadsheets Adds Gadgets, a Directory of Features

Google Spreadsheets, the most mature application from Google's online office suite, has suddenly become much better.

Now you can get email notifications when your collaborators make changes or edit some specific cells. You can also get notifications when someone submits new data using a form.


Google Spreadsheets autocompletes the value from a cell so it's much easier to enter repetitive data in a column.


If the existing features aren't enough for you, there's a new directory of gadgets that can be added to a spreadsheets and use existing data. You may remember the data visualization gadgets I found last month: they're part of this directory, which includes many other interesting gadgets. You can add interactive time series charts, Gantt charts, funnel charts, timelines, tables with filters and grouping, pivot tables, maps, search results and you can also create your own gadget that adds other missing features. As with any beginning, not all the gadgets work very well and the pivot table gadget created by Panorama doesn't seem to work at all.

To add a gadget, click on the "Insert" dropdown and select "Gadget". Each gadget can be embedded into web pages or added to iGoogle, which is extremely cool because the data is updated automatically.




Google Docs help center mentions a new visualization API connected with the new gadgets, but the documentation is not yet available. "The Gadgets-in-Docs for spreadsheets API should be used when you want to create user-facing features which are accessible from within the spreadsheet editor of Google Docs itself. This approach combines the Google Gadgets API with the Google Visualization API, to allow the developer to access data on the spreadsheet for use or presentation in practically any form they choose. Developers using this method should already be familiar with the development of Google Gadgets, and then only need to learn some basic additions provided by the Visualization API. Note that this approach currently only supports one-way interaction with the underlying spreadsheet (reading data), however, it has the advantage of enabling the publishing of gadgets created in a spreadsheet to other gadget-enabled sites, such as iGoogle."

If you find some interesting uses for the new gadgets, publish your spreadsheet and post a link in the comments.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Update. A cool visualization gadget based on GapMinder World (you'll find in Google Docs as "motion chart"):

Don't Be Evil, a Trigger for Ethical Questions

Everyone quotes Google's informal motto "Don't be evil" (it's not "Do no evil") when Google does something questionable. Wikipedia's article for "Don't be evil" includes a fragment from John Battelle's book "The Search" that explains its origins:

On July 19, 2001, about a dozen early employees met to mull over the founders' directive [to elucidate Google's core values] ... The meeting soon became cluttered with the kind of easy and safe corporate clichés that everyone can support, but that carry little impact: Treat Everyone with Respect, for example, or Be on Time for Meetings.

The engineers in the room were rolling their eyes. [Amit] Patel recalls: "Some of us were very anticorporate, and we didn't like the idea of all these specific rules. And engineers in general like efficiency — there had to be a way to say all these things in one statement, as opposed to being so specific."

That's when Paul Buchheit, another engineer in the group, blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google's corporate history. "Paul said, 'All of these things can be covered by just saying, Don't Be Evil,'" Patel recalls. "And it just kind of stuck."

... In the months after the meeting, Patel scribbled "Don't Be Evil" in the corner of every whiteboard in the company... The message spread, and it was embraced, especially by Page and Brin... "I think it's much better than Be Good or something," Page jokes. "When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that's good."

A Google poster that explained "Don't be evil". From Google - Behind the Screen

Paul Buchheit, Gmail's first engineer, who now works at a start-up called FriendFeed, remembers that user's trust was an important decision factor.

At the time that the phrase was created, paid inclusion was a big issue, and we generally felt that it was rather evil due to its deceptive nature. In general, anything that involves deceiving your users is likely to be evil.

I think the most important effect of "Don't be evil" is that it gives everyone license to question decisions instead of simply following orders. I expect that the result is therefore reflected in thousands of small decisions and debates rather than a few large, highly visible issues. The other effect of course is that Google is held to a higher standard.

It's difficult to keep this high standard when you're a big corporation that needs to stay competitive. The difference between Google and other companies is that you'll never see news articles that question if other companies did something evil.

Eric Schmidt sees "Don't be evil" as a starting point for interesting conversations:

One day, very early on, I was in a meeting where an engineer said, "That would be evil." It was as if he'd said there was a murderer in the room. The whole conversation stopped, but then people challenged his assumptions. This had to do with how we would link our advertising system into search. We ultimately decided not to do what was proposed, because it was evil. That kind of story is repeated every hour now with thousands of people. Think of "Don't be evil" as an organizing principle about values. You and I may disagree on the definition of what is evil, but at least it gives us a way to have a very healthy debate.

To sum up,

Don't be evil =

"When you are making decisions, it causes you to think." (Larry Page)
"The most important effect of Don't be evil is that it gives everyone license to question decisions instead of simply following orders." (Paul Buchheit)
"Think of Don't be evil as an organizing principle about values." (Eric Schmidt)

Evaluating Google Search Quality

A leaked copy of Google's quality rater guidelines (PDF), used internally to evaluate the quality of search results, reveals some interesting things about Google's approach to search. "According to the document, which is dated April 2007 and at least looks legitimate, a quality rater has the job to first research and understand a specific search query – say [cell phones] –, to then look at the quality of a website returned for this query," notes Philipp Lenssen.

Queries can be navigational (the user has a single site in mind, the official homepage of a company/product), informational (searching for information), transactional (trying to obtain something: buy a product, download a video) or a combination of these categories. Depending on the query, search results can be: vital (for navigational queries with a dominant interpretation), useful (comprehensive, authoritative resources), relevant (pages that don't cover all the aspects of a query), not relevant (marginally related to the query) or off-topic.


Google thinks that there must be a connection between queries and search results in terms of generality: broad queries are best matched by broad pages, specific queries by specific pages. Search results must take into account the dominant interpretation of a query in a certain location and at a certain moment.

Spam is treated separately from search results evaluation. A web page may be spammy even if it's considered "vital" for some queries or it's very authoritative. "Webspam is the term for web pages that are designed by webmasters to trick search engine robots and direct traffic to their websites," explains Google. Web pages that include ads and scraped content from other sites, but don't bring any original information are considered spam. "When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: If I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? If the answer is no, the page is probably Spam."

{ via Google Blogoscoped and SEO Book }

Explore Your Interactions with Google Reader

Web applications track many user actions and use them for different purposes: improving the products, finding patterns, building user profiles etc. For example, Google Reader records some of your actions without providing options in the interface to access the data. Here are some addresses where you can find historical data about the items you've subscribed to (click on "View all items" to see all the posts).


* All the posts you've emailed to your contacts:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-emailed

* All the posts you have marked as unread at some point (to keep a post unread, you need to uncheck "Mark as read" from the options bar; note that "Mark all as unread" will not maintain this state):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-kept-unread

* All the posts you have marked as unread and are still unread (Google Reader calls them "saved items"):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/kept-unread

* Did you click on a post's main link to go to the original location? You'll find it here:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-item-link-used

* Did you click on a link from a post's content? The post should be included in this list:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-body-link-used

* If you use the list view, you can find the list of posts you've actually read (or at least you have clicked on the title):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/read

* Are Google's recommended feeds interesting? Check the list of recommended feeds you've subscribed to:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/recommendations-subscribed

* Did you accidentally dismiss a recommended feed? You'll find it here:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/recommendations-dismissed

Add, Edit and Delete Places in Google Maps

After adding an option to edit locations, Google Maps allows people to add places. The option seems to work only for the US and you can enter few details about the local business or the place: address, name, phone, website and category. Google promises that "once you save your place, the whole world can find your addition by searching for it within a few minutes."

To find this feature, go to Google Maps, search for an address (e.g.: Madison Ave, NY) and you'll see a new option in the left sidebar: "Can't find what you're looking for? Add a place to the map."




You can also edit the details from existing listings and even remove places from the map. Among the possible reasons why you could delete a place you can find: the listing is a duplicate, the place doesn't exist, it is permanently closed or it's not of general interest. While business listings are changed almost instantly after you edit them, they can be removed only if someone from Google accepts your removal request. Each local listing can have a status like "Added", "Edited", "Removal requested" and the changes history is available to everyone.


Until now, only business owners could add places, using Google's Local Business Center. "We gather business information from numerous websites, Yellow Pages directories, and other sources to populate Google Maps search results. If you'd like to be included, you can easily enter your information into our online Local Business Center for free. (...) Once you've submitted your business information, you'll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in our results within six weeks," explains Google.

It's great to trust your users, but the places added using the new feature should be verified to make sure they are real. Turning Google Maps has a lot of practical advantages and could be used to keep the geographical information up-to-date.

Update: Google says you can edit places from the US, Australia and New Zealand.