Google started to display author names in Google News, so you can easily find the articles written by your favorite journalists. If you click on the author's name, you'll find his most recent articles and you can subscribe to a feed or get alerts by email.
Another recent feature is the addition of links to Wikipedia articles that offer some helpful context. "Currently, we’re showing a small number of users links to Wikipedia topic pages that serve as a reference on current events," explained a Google spokesperson.
Caleb Eggensperger noticed that Google shows a multicolored bar above the search results when you search for [gay], [lesbian] and other related terms. Google's colorful bar is not accidental: at the end of June, there are many gay pride celebrations around the world.
"Googlers care deeply about creating a workplace that affords equal treatment for all our staff, and while we do it regardless of any accolades we think our efforts might bring, recognition from outside organizations does mean a lot to us. (...) It's particularly exciting given that this is a time of rapid growth for our population of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees (whose group name is, naturally, Gayglers) around the world," mentioned a blog post from 2007.
Google has always released services that are useful to better understand major events: new imagery that shows the impact of Hurricane Katrina, special search engines for last year's earthquake in China, search trends for 9/11.
Google Translate included an early version of a translation system for Persian, in response to the recent events from Iran. "We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information," says Franz Och, from Google.
The translation tool can also be used to read articles from Iranian sites, but the quality is less than adequate. For example, here's the translation of the latest 50 Twitter messages tagged #Iran and written in Persian (Farsi).
Blogger started to display a block of contextual ads after publishing blog posts. Until now, Google's blogging platform didn't include ads and it was only monetized by making it easy for publishers to use AdSense ads.
It seems that Blogger followed the advice of Evan Williams, the co-founder of Pyra Labs, Blogger's parent company: "Put Ads in the App Interface: For example, the published landing page alone must get millions of views a day. And it's the perfect point for someone to go elsewhere. See if you can target it off what they wrote about. No one will mind (much). And strengthening your revenue story will strengthen your position in the company."
Google's book search engine has a new interface that adds many missing features. The sidebar has been moved to the left, you can now embed a book by click on "Link" and selecting the embedding code, there's a new thumbnail view for pages and the table of contents can be accessed as a drop-down.
The search option that restricts the results to a book has been improved: Google sorts the results by relevance and it's easier to navigate betweeen the search results. "Now, for public domain and partner books, we've made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book," explains Google.
YouTube added the "wonder wheel" visualization tool for exploring related searches interactively. The feature has been launched last month for Google search and it's now available in a different context.
Type a general term in YouTube's search box, click on "Search" and then click on "Wonder wheel" to find some suggestions. As you click on the suggestions, YouTube shows the search results next to the wheel and it lets you go back to the initial search terms.
"The Wonder wheel visually presents connections between related searches and your search term as an interactive diagram. Click the different nodes in the diagram to see how searches can branch out," explains Google.
While the idea seems interesting, I didn't find the "wonder wheel" very useful. It only works for some searches and the suggestions aren't diverse enough.
Apparently, many people don't know what's a browser and they think it's the same thing as a search engine. I've recently quoted some posts from Google Chrome's help forum which were strange: users didn't like Chrome and they thought that the old search engine was better. "I want the old Google search engine, not Google Chrome. How do I go back to regular old Google? I want to change my default search engine from Chrome to Google."
Scott Suiter, a former Google intern, asked 50 passersby from New York what is a browser and the responses were almost unanimous: a browser is a search engine. Some even said that their browser is Google.
According to Wikipedia, "a web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web." But search engines are the applications that help you find web pages and they're so important that they became synonymous with web browsers. It's an involuntary synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part of an object is used to refer to the entire object.
When Firefox 3 was released, Yahoo Mail was the only webmail service that could be selected directly and the instructions for adding Gmail were complicated. Gmail has been added to the list of mail applications and it's easy to set it as the default email client in Firefox and open all the mailto: links in Gmail, without installing extensions:
* For Firefox 4+, click the Firefox drop-down menu and select Options > Options. For Firefox 3.0-3.6, go to Tools > Options. * select the Applications tab * search for mail * select Use Gmail from the list of actions associated with the mailto protocol * click OK to save the settings.
After adding themes to iGoogle and Gmail, Google intends to skin Chrome and some of the initial themes will be created by famous artists. New York Times reports that not all of the illustrators and designers contacted by Google were happy to license their works for free.
"While we don't typically offer monetary compensation for these projects, through the positive feedback that we have heard thus far we believe these projects provide a unique and exciting opportunity for artists to display their work in front of millions of people," explained a Google representative.
Some recent Chrome builds include the option to "reset to default theme", but Google doesn't offer a gallery of themes or some guidelines for creating your own theme.
Immediately after Chrome's launch, many people started to create themes for the browser by editing the default.dll file, but the file is overwritten by the automatic updater and the format was changed in the latest releases.
Note: the screenshot shows a theme created by Google. To install it, you need to install a developer version of Chrome and to enable extensions.
YouTube managed to achieve something incredible: browsers now cache YouTube videos and you can load the same video multiple times from the local cache. Try to go to a YouTube video, wait until the video is buffered and then reload the page. You'll notice that the video starts instantly and you can watch it directly from your browser's cache. This works even if you close the tab and open the same page later.
If you have a slow Internet connection or if you frequently watch some videos, the new feature allows you to cache the videos, close the browser and watch the videos at a later time. You may want to increase the size of your browser's cache to preload longer videos. Here are YouTube's recommendations for dial-up connections:
"For best results, you may want to start the video player and then click on the PAUSE button immediately. Then, wait until the red progress bar has reached the end of the video before playing it. Allowing the entire video buffer lets you watch it without interruption."
Videos will load from the browser's cache even if they're embedded in a web page, so this feature is not limited to YouTube's site.
