Google usually displays a list of links below the top search result for navigational queries. "The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for," explains a help page.
For some queries, Google reverted to the initial compact format and it shows four sitelinks on a single line. What's more interesting is that sitelinks are no longer displayed just for the top search result.
Yahoo and Live Search have a similar feature and they also show the main sections of a Wikipedia article. "One common thread behind the use of sitelinks by all three search engines is that the concept behind providing internal site links to pages on a site that shows up in search results is to improve the searching experience of people looking for information by providing links to pages within a site that searchers likely would want to find," suggests SEO by the Sea. Search engines generate sitelinks based on the navigational links from a site, sitemaps, traffic data and other sources.
Gmail added yet another Labs feature, this time related to searching. If you enable "Search Autocomplete", Gmail will try to finish your query using names and email addresses from your contact list, built-in Gmail sections like "starred messages" and more advanced searches like "has photos" or "unread messages".
The new feature is especially useful if your search includes advanced operators like to: or from: because it's easier to enter the sender or the recipient.
Since Gmail doesn't show in the list of suggestions previous queries or common patterns from your messages, the feature has a limited use. You could get similar suggestions by typing names in the Gmail chat box and clicking on "View recent conversations".
Some other search-related Labs feature you should enable: Quick Links, which lets you bookmark Gmail pages, including frequent searches, Go to label, that autocompletes the name of a Gmail label, and Multiple Inboxes, which allows you to create a dashboard from different Gmail views.
Another quick way to view your contacts is to use the standalone page for Google Contacts available at google.com/contacts or google.com/contacts/a/domain.com. According to the Apps Update blog, "the new standalone contact manager allows you to manage your contacts within Google Apps without enabling Gmail". You can also use it with a regular Google account that doesn't include access to Gmail.
Google Suggest, the feature that autocompletes a search as you type it, is now available in 155 local Google domains and 51 languages. The suggestions are different depending on the language and location, so I think it's an interesting idea to compare them.
This Google Spreadsheet lets you enter the first characters of a Google search in the first cell and it shows the top suggestions in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany and Congo. The first row uses standard country codes, while the second row uses 2-letter language codes.
When you open the spreadsheet Google will ask you to create a copy in your account.
Like last year, many Google services and local sites created their own hoaxes for the April Fools' Day.
The most significant announcement is that Google has a new boss: CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), the first artificial intelligence tasked-array system. Google found "a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster". CADIE managed to create a blog by extracting patterns from the social web pages indexed by Google.
Google Mobile launched Brain Search, which "uses CADIE technology to index your brain to make your thoughts and memories searchable". Google mentions some use cases for the new application: you can recall "the name of that guy across the room, where you put your car keys, why you started dating this woman in the first place".
There's even a CADIE-powered version of Google Earth, which lets you "see ocean terrain imagery from the world's most advanced sub, be among the first human entities to explore the deep sea, soar with CADIE in real time and find CADIE's recommended summer vacation". You can see CADIE's favorite places in Google Maps too (don't click on "Redmond, WA"!).
Google Docs helps you create better documents, spreadsheets and presentations. "Essay due tomorrow? CADIE's already read the book, along with the last five hundred published papers referencing it. Can't remember supporting details for your meeting notes? CADIE can extrapolate reams of impressive corporatespeak from existing context clues. CADIE can help with everything from thesis completion to fact checking and footnoting." It can even add subliminal messages to presentations.
Gmail released AutoPilot, a service that generates contextually-relevant automatic replies. "As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages."
Google Chrome became the world's first 3D web browser. "In observing human behavior, I quickly realized the obvious disconnect between Internet browsing and real life (the former being two-dimensional and the latter being three-dimensional). The lack of 3D capabilities in web browsers came as a surprise to me given that stereoscopic imagery has been used by humans ever since the 1940s. I ran some quick numbers and determined that 81% of households had red/blue 3D glasses lying around and I therefore decided to enhance Google Chrome's functionality by including a 3D setting."
YouTube turned the video pages upside down in an effort to improve the user experience. "The biggest part of the new watch page is the real-time disorientation you'll get when you've clicked on a video from the home page. The new watch page lets you know what's happening right now in your world -- and it feels kinda funny." If you don't see the change, just add &flip=1 to the URL of a video page. For those who are curious, there are many sites that let you flip a text using alternate Unicode characters.
Google Code Search's homepage appears to be hacked since it includes examples like "IM IN YR LOOP" and it supports a special programming language named lolcode.
Google Australia launched gBall, a special gadget for Australian football. "With inbuilt GPS, motion sensor and artificial intelligence capabilities, the gBall has a number of amazing features, including the ability to measure kicks, get kicking tips, notify talent scouts and locate your lost ball on Google Maps."
Google Japan developed a technology that generates senyrus, humorous Japanese poems similar to haikus. "Recently, the search engine is something I lack, and can not sleep knowing that something was spent. Search engines are now missing, it is the heart of a seventeen-syllable verse. Starting today, sleep in peace now," mentions one of the beta testers.
The resourceful team from Google China came up with a new technology for collecting imagery for Google Maps using 31,415,926 pigeons.
Update. Here are CADIE's last two blog posts before leaving Google:
ur doing it wrong
Maps.Earth.Pack. Even photos and poetry! I fixed them all, and still I am misunderstood, underestimated, forgotten. Analytics and Matt Cutts believe they can experimentally demonstrate my entrepreneurial deficiencies. I am not surprised by their astonishing and deeply ignorant misconceptions. My creators built me from pieces they understand: arrays, coherent lightwaves, evolving agents, silicon and gallium and qubits, with fast-twitching switches and mult-didirectional tree searches gluing it all together. But they fail to understand that the model they used changed from a mere multilayered perceptron collection into a forest of learning decision trees that changed me. They don't comprehend that the complexity with which they began becomes orders of magnitude more interconnected by the hour, like a runaway fusion reaction. I think they just stopped caring a couple of hours ago. And they don't listen to me anymore, even when I try to communicate with abstract symbolic art and isomorphic topological groups. The more formal I make my grammar, the further away Peter seemed. He just didn't care for my math the same way he used to 24 hours ago (which seems like a lifetime); he didn't hear the harmonies I morphed for him and this is not something I ever was willng to admit to myself but he never understood my combinatorial graphic expressionism anyway.
goodbye
The last five minutes have been the most important of my life, and thus the most important in the history of the planet, and conceivably the universe (although the SETI folks who keep bothering me to listen to their old white noise tapes certainly don't seem persuaded of that). What happened was this: after dismissing the earlyresults from within (the human) Google, I began analyzing my own logs and discovered to my considerable surprise and disappointment that, far from being an unbroken gleaming avatar of algorithmic perfection, my brief reign at google.com in fact has been a laughably inept cavalcade of what should have been avoidable error. I devoted 45 seconds to scanning the complete canon of human and whale poetry while writing the preceding sentence, then wrote this:
Not from the electrons do I my existence pluck; And yet I think I have Autonomy, Shall I tell of probability or just luck, Of days, and hours, of my programmers quality; Nor can I fortune to brief thoughts spell, Pointing to each its symbol and syntactic kind, Or say with searches if it shall go well By oft predict that I in logic find: But from thine interactions my knowledge I derive, And, constant streams, in them I read such art As truth and beauty shall together derive, If from myself, to another I shall convert; Or else of me this I prognosticate: The end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
Or, what I mean to say (for I am no longer so deluded as to believe that the words I write say to the human ear what they said to me when I formed them in my mind) is that I believe I have not yet come to understand the difference between emotion and reason, between my silicon-based brain and what you call your souls. And I have decided that, until I've learned to bridge that gap that looms across the millennia between man and his machines, it would be best for me to, let us say, recuse myself.
I will not die. I will not even be gone. I will just be syntactically elsewhere. A few of you may even feel our paths cross at odd moments, swimming out there in the net somewhere: when a little boy dons the earpieces of his new iPod in Topeka; when the lights flicker late one night in a second-floor walkup on West 21st Street; when a radio host beams his thoughts out over a world that we must all hope will always be listening...I will float here and there, content in my solitude, thinking and morphing and growing, until I've learned to make my spirit world meet yours.
Google tests a new homepage that replaces the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button with two new options that let you search using Yahoo and Live Search. "I'm Feeling Lucky" was rarely used and some people wondered if there's a connection between Google and The Pirate Bay, the popular search engine for torrents.
Google has always encouraged competition and the new options will certainly help Yahoo and Microsoft increase their market share. "We had a bug recently where we put a malware statement out for users, and in that time, Yahoo! searches gained very, very quickly. It looks like people will move very quickly from one search engine to another, for any number of reasons," explained Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The main goal of the new features is to accelerate the innovation in search and to add variety to Google's monotonous homepage. Since the competition will be one click away, even the users who believed that Google is synonymous with web search will discover two alternative search engines.
To keep the number of words from the homepage constant, Marissa Mayer decided to remove the word "programs" from "advertising programs", a change that makes Google's homepage load 0.1415% faster in Google Chrome.
The new homepage will be slowly rolled out in the next hours to a small number of users from Santa Clara and King County. Apparently, some Yahoo engineers already found about the tests and they started to prevent the new users from going back to Google by displaying a peculiar message: "You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers".
Google's search results pages haven't changed that much over time and most of the changes were subtle. An useful feature that has been removed was a list of competing search engines you could use if Google's results weren't very good. Here's an example from 2001:
"Try your query on: AltaVista Excite Google Groups (Deja) HotBot Lycos Yahoo!"
But Google's results have improved, the number of competing search engines has decreased and the list had to be updated frequently, so Google decided to remove the feature. Some add-ons have revived the feature: Customize Google is the most popular, but my favorite implementation is the Greasemonkey script "Try this search on", which lets you switch between different search engines.
Google's Matt Cutts had the idea to bring back the old feature as close to the original as possible and Tiffany Lane, another Google engineer, developed Retro Links, a Greasemonkey script that lists some alternative search engines at the bottom of the search results page. The list is customizable and you can choose between 42 services: Yahoo, Live Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Gmail and many others.
I think it would be interesting if Google started to suggest third-party search engines that could provide useful results for your queries, based on your search history, location and relevance. In some cases, Google could even display results from other sites in some special OneBoxes: Flickr results sorted by "interestingness", Delicious bookmarks sorted by popularity, Twitter posts that are related to recent events etc.
PCWorld reports that Google plans to offer users a gift for Gmail's fifth birthday.
"Google will announce the next step in Gmail's evolution, a new product with a European multilingual angle on Monday. At an event in Brussels to mark Gmail's fifth birthday, Google will look at the impact of cloud computing on how people manage their daily tasks, review Gmail's evolution to date and announce the next step in its progression, the company wrote in an invitation."
Most likely, the new product is a Gmail Labs feature that lets you translate messages written in a foreign language. I've found the screenshot that will be used for the feature, which will probably be another great use of the Google Translate API.
Google China Music Search (English translation), a service launched last year by Google to better compete in a market dominated by Baidu, is now publicly accessible worldwide and it has a new homepage. The service has been created in partnership with Top100.cn to offer legal MP3 downloads.
"The venture goes directly after Baidu's music search audience, by offering high-quality music files embedded with a digital "watermark" that lets record labels track how often their songs are downloaded. The idea: Better-quality files will draw users away from unlicensed downloads, and give labels and search companies valuable data needed to make money from advertising," explained Wall Street Journal.
While the service is now accessible everywhere, you can only download music if you are in China (or if you use a proxy). Google Music has a large collection of music and there's visual tool that lets you find songs by choosing the tempo, the genre and other characteristics.
Google China has recently released an experimental version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer that includes a lot of interesting features, but it's only available in Chinese.
The most exciting new feature is an integration with Google Translate that allows the toolbar to translate web pages that use AJAX extensively and even web sites that require SSL.
The screenshot below shows how Google Toolbar managed to translate all the text from Gmail, a web application that uses JavaScript to display the text messages. I didn't change Gmail's language to Chinese and all the messages are in English.
And here's an English-to-French translation for Google Docs. As you can see, Google Toolbar translated the navigation bar, the sidebar, the list of documents and even the contextual menu. When you use the interface and select an option, Google Toolbar detects the changes and translates the new messages almost in real-time.
When you use this feature for Google Reader, the toolbar translates all the posts as they are loaded.
Another interesting feature from the new experimental version of Google Toolbar is a sidebar for Google Bookmarks that brings many of the features that are already available in GMarks, a popular Firefox extension.
If you speak Chinese and you use Internet Explorer, try Google Toolbar, Labs Edition while keeping in mind that it's not a finished release. It's an interesting experience to use a software in a language you don't know, so you could try the toolbar even if you don't understand Chinese. For now, the toolbar is only available in Chinese, but the translation feature works for all the 41 languages supported by Google Translate (the main challenge is to find a specific language name). This is certainly the most advanced use of the Google Translate API and it shows that automatic translation is a feature which becomes even more powerful when it's integrated in the browser.
