Google SearchWiki lets you customize the search results by promoting, demoting and adding new pages. You can also annotate the results. Some people think that the new feature clutters Google's clean search results, without bringing too much functionality.
Google doesn't offer a way to turn off SearchWiki other than logging out from your Google account, but you can install a Greasemonkey script that hides the interface for this additional functionality. If you use Firefox, install Greasemonkey extension, restart the browser and the add the No SearchWiki script. Google's search results will look clean again, even if you are logged in.
The script also works in Opera, which has built-in support for userscripts. Just go to Tools>Preferences>Advanced>Content>JavaScript Options, choose a folder in the "User JavaScript files" box and then save the script in that folder.
Note that the script doesn't disable the SearchWiki interface for the results you've already promoted so you can restore their default position and you can still see the removed results at the bottom of the page. To undo your changes, you can use My SearchWiki Notes page.
Google started to integrate a Gmail Chat widget in iGoogle's much-hated navigation sidebar. The page will load even slower and people will have one more reason to complain. If you don't like the chat box, Google recommends to sign out of chat, although you could also change your status to "invisible".
Another thing you'll notice in all versions of iGoogle is the integration of Google Suggest in the search box. As usually, this can be disabled in the preferences page by selecting "Do not provide query suggestions in the search box".
If these new features aren't yet enabled in your account, visit http://www.google.com/ig/v2invite to add them. For those who hate everything about the new iGoogle, from the unfinished Gmail gadget to the big sidebar and the annoying bug that displays the canvas view of the most recently opened gadget when you open iGoogle, there's an address that shows the old version of iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig?gl=all.
orkut, the other social network owned by Google, continues to add last season's Facebook features, now cleverly integrating Gmail Chat. "To get you started, we've come up with a formula that automatically predicts which of your orkut friends you probably want to chat with, and only tells those people that you're signed into Google Talk. Our formula takes a bunch of things into consideration, giving preference to people who you've labeled as 'best friends' or written scraps to recently, and people who have friends in common with you."
In addition to showing Google Talk contacts, orkut will also add some friends you are likely to chat with. Like iGoogle's sidebar chat, orkut's chat boxes are persistent so you can visit different orkut pages while continuing to chat.
The new orkut feature will be rolled out in the next weeks to orkut's huge userbase, so it's likely that you won't see it right away.
As anticipated last month, Google's experiment that lets you reorder and annotate search results is now live. Google SearchWiki should be available automatically if you are logged in to a Google account and it can be recognized by the visual clutter added to the search results.
Next to each result, you should see three new options: a way to promote a web page at the top of the results, an option to remove results from the page (they're still visible at the bottom of the page) and a feature that lets you share public comments about a result. After promoting a result, Google shows some unnecessary information about the other people who promoted the result.
It's important to remember that all the changes are saved to your Google account and they won't affect the search results for everyone, at least not directly. If you want to see an aggregation of all promotions, demotions and comments, go to the bottom of the page and click on "See all notes for this SearchWiki". This is the real wiki built by Google and it's easy to access by adding &swm=2 to the URL of a search results page: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google&swm=2.
Comments are not very useful, although you could find insights for some obscure queries. The absolute number of people who promoted a search result is not very useful either, especially when you'll see big numbers like 314,159,265.
SearchWiki's main idea is to give users the opportunity to manually customize the search results and make them more predictable. Since many people repeat common searches like [mail], [weather], [news] and Google's results are constantly changing, it's nice to pick your favorite results and display them at the top. If you can't find a site you like, click on "Add a result" and manually add a page in the list of top results.
Good things about SearchWiki: - you can now adjust Google's results for your typical queries and save time when repeating the searches - use Google instead of bookmarking web pages - for unfamiliar queries, check the wiki to find a different ranking and potentially useful comments. Try to avoid the wiki for queries that are likely to be spammed.
Bad things about SearchWiki: - visual clutter. The only way to remove the additional icons displayed next to each search result is to log out. - your changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: [google.com] in addition to [google]). That means you can't remove a web page or a domain from all search results - comments are public and there's no option to write private notes (Google removed the option to annotate results in Google Notebook) - an obvious feature would be to get a permalink for your edited results, but Google doesn't offer this yet - there's no option to toggle between your edited results and the standard results (you'll have to log out) - it's difficult to reorder results, since the only action allowed is to place a web page at the top, after all the other promoted pages. If you promote the page again, it will become the first result.
Google has always used people's clicks to improve the quality of search results, so the new options could influence the ranking algorithms in different ways. "At this time we aren't using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future," said Marissa Mayer. "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results. You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control," suggested Cedric Dupont, product manager for SearchWiki and Google Knol.
YouTube already provides an option to view higher quality versions for some videos and you can also append "&fmt=18" to the URLs for the other videos. If you add "&fmt=22", some YouTube videos are now available at an even higher quality, which makes the full screen view a very useful option. Compare:
To embed a higher quality version of a video, replace "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID" with "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" or "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" in YouTube's embeddable code.
Unfortunately, the new format (fmt=22) is not available for too many videos, probably because it's still experimental and most people upload compressed videos.
As more of its services are used in business environments, Google started to provide synchronization tools for mail, calendar and contacts, but their launch wasn't timely and they were pretty limited. For example, the Google Calendar/Outlook sync tool is limited to the main calendar, while the BlackBerry sync application doesn't upload preexisting events to Google Calendar.
You can find third-party tools that offer a better experience, but synchronization should be a built-in feature of Gmail and Google Calendar. Creating APIs is a good way to make sure that developers can create applications for more obscure platforms or less common needs, it's not an excuse for being lazy.
The good news is that Google's applications are constantly improving. The sync tool for BlackBerry added support for contacts synchronization. "This new functionality will enable you to sync your handheld's built-in address book with your Gmail contacts. This all happens in the background and over the air, so your information is always up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing," explains Google Mobile blog. To install the application, visit m.google.com/sync from a BlackBerry.
If there's one thing that T-Mobile G1, the first Android-powered phone, did it right is the seamless synchronization with Google's services: contacts are automatically synced with Gmail, while the events are synchronized with Google Calendar.
Following the footsteps of Google's personalized homepage, Gmail added themes. Once the new option is enabled in your account (as usually, Gmail's new features are slowly rolled out), you'll find a tab named "Themes" in the settings page and you'll be able to choose from 30 themes. "We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company," mentions Gmail's blog.
Unlike other webmail services, Gmail has never provided too many customization options and users had to rely on themes created for third-party extensions like Stylish, which usually slowed down Gmail and weren't resilient to code changes.
Gmail's help center provides an interesting tidbit about the new themes: "In some cases, you can also customize by location. Some themes change during the day, and we use the location information you provide to correctly time these changes with your local sunrise, sunset, and/or weather. If you select one of these themes, you'll see a Country/Region drop-down menu appear."
Gmail also adjusted the default theme, but you can always go back to the previous theme by selecting "Classic" in the settings page. I can't decide between Contrast Black, Cherry Blossom, Graffiti and Ninja. What's your favorite theme?
When your mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", you have to first gather the information. If it's not online, the first thing that needs to be done is to get the permission to use that data or to create a system that allows copyright owners to upload their works and to monetize them.
Google Image Search's index will increase with about 10 million high-quality images from the Life Magazine's photo archive. "This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s. Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints," explains Google.
It's interesting that Time reached an agreement with Getty Images to host the archive. "The collection contains the historic photos that LIFE published through the decades, in addition to many never-before-seen pictures of Hollywood stars, sports heroes, important people and events from the '30's though the '90's."
The photos are included in Google Image Search's index and you can restrict the results to the LIFE collection by appending source:life to your query: [apollo source:life].
Google Apps for Your Domain has been launched in 2006 as a solutions for organizations that wanted to use Google's applications on their own domains. In 2007, Google launched a premier edition for businesses that added corporate features, APIs, phone support and service-level agreement for Gmail.
But how many businesses use Google Apps? A post from July mentioned that "500,000 organizations adopt Apps as part of their business, with another 3,000 signing up every day", while another blog post from October informed us that "more than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business".
It's not clear how many of these organizations use the paid edition of Google Apps, but Google decided to make it difficult to even find the free version.
The second page says that "Google recommends Premier Edition for businesses in the cloud" and invites to me start a free trial. There's a small link below the "Begin free trial" button that lets you use the standard version, but it's difficult to notice.
If you click on that link, you'll get the page that compares the standard and the premier versions, which used to be displayed by default.
Google Apps is now in the same league as RealPlayer, which shows a small link to the free version, while using the rest of the page to promote a paid version. Just in case the link to the Google Apps Standard Edition goes away, here's how to sign up for free.
