Google Docs Viewer added support for a lot of new file formats. You can now use it to open Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations from Office 2007 and Office 2010, Apple Pages files, PostScript documents, Microsoft XPS documents, TrueType fonts, graphics from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk AutoCad and SVG files.
"Not only does this round out support for the major Microsoft Office file types (we now support DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS and XLSX), but it also adds quick viewing capabilities for many of the most popular and highly-requested document and image types," informs Google.
Google Docs Viewer is integrated with Gmail and Google Docs, so you can now open many Gmail attachments and Google Docs files without installing additional software.
Google Social Search is not a new feature, but it wasn't that important until now. Google used to display at the bottom of the search results page a few links to pages created or recommended by your friends and social connections. The feature automatically obtained data from Google Reader, Google Buzz, Gmail Contacts, Twitter and other sites linked from your Google profile.
Google's blog announced that Social Search will be used to enhance Google results and will become a ranking signal. Social Search borrowed Hotpot's interface that annotates results with messages like "Dan rated this place 5 stars", so you can see why a page ranks so high.
"Social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you'll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they've shared or created. So if you're thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we'll bump up that post with a note and a picture," explains Google.
Sometimes a web page is more valuable if it has been recommended by a friend because you probably trust that person. Google uses data from your Google account or publicly available data to generate a list of social connections, but you can't highlight the people you trust or customize the list. What you can do is to add links to your Google profile and to import data that's not publicly available. The Google Accounts page will include an option that lets connect your accounts from services like LinkedIn and import your contacts.
If you use Google Chrome and you haven't disabled the built-in PDF plugin, you can now open PDF attachments from Gmail using your browser's viewer. Just click "View" next to the attachment and you'll notice that the PDF file opens faster and it looks much better.
If you disable the plugin or you use a different browser, Gmail continues to open PDF attachments using the Google Docs Viewer. Maybe Gmail should also detect Adobe Reader's plugin and use it instead of the online PDF viewer.
Google Apps blog informs that this feature will be available in Google Apps next week. You can get it faster by enabling "pre-release features" in the Administrator Control Panel.
The new navigation bar is slowly rolled out to all Google users. After more than 6 months of testing, the new navigation bar removes the clutter by grouping extraneous links in a menu inspired by Google Chrome. It also removes link underlining and replaces it with a colored bar. There's more spacing between the links, so the new navigation bar works better on a touchscreen device.
Another change is that Google shows your name instead of your email address. For some reason, Google doesn't link to the Google Profile and makes it more difficult to switch to a different account if you use multiple sign-in or Gmail delegation. Now you need to click "Switch account" to see the list of accounts you can use.
Unfortunately, Google didn't manage to add the bar to all its services, so you'll only see it if you use Google Web Search, Google Image Search, Google Realtime Search, Google Maps and Gmail.
Google launched a service that allows publishers to manage paid content and subscriptions. Google One Pass is a "payment system that enables publishers to set the terms for access to their digital content". Once you pay to access some content, you should be able to read it from a computer, a tablet, a mobile phone, even if you're using a browser or a different app.
Google One Pass tries to be flexible and easy to be implemented. "Publishers have control over how users can pay to access content and set their own prices. They can sell subscriptions of any length with auto-renewal, day passes (or other durations), individual articles or multiple-issue packages. Google One Pass also enables metered models, where a publisher can provide some content or a certain number of visits for free, but can charge frequent visitors or those interested in premium content based on the business model that the publisher prefers."
The service uses Google Checkout to handle payments and it's only available for publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and US. It's not clear if Google One Pass will integrate with Android's in-app payments. At the moment, the transaction fee for in-app purchases is 30%.
Apple has recently announced a subscription service for the App Store that uses the same revenue share from in-app purchases. "All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app." The transaction fee is way too high and hopefully Google won't make the same mistake.
The reading-level is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a model of the intrinsic complexity of the text. (...) We also used data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are considered advanced.
So the breakdown isn't grade- or age-specific, but reflects the judgments of teachers as to overall level of difficulty. Roughly speaking, "Basic" is elementary level texts, while "Intermediate" is anything above that level up to technical and scholarly articles, a la the articles you'd find in Scholar.
That's not exact, but it's a fairly robust model that works across a wide variety of different text styles and web pages.
Unfortunately, the feature only works for English and it's probably difficult to add support for other languages.
Google has released a Chrome extension that lets you block domains and sundomains from Google's results. If you never find the results from experts-exchange.com useful, you can now click "Block experts-exchange.com" next to a search result from this site and you'll add the domain to your personal blacklist.
Unfortunately, the extension does little more than storing a list of domains on your computer and hiding the results from those domains. It's not tied to a web service and the blacklist is not saved to your Google account, so that you could use it from a different computer or another browser.
Matt Cutts says that the list of domains you've blocked is sent to Google. "We will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results."
Google SearchWiki used to offer a similar feature, but you could only use it to hide certain results. Blocking domains is more powerful and it will be interesting to see if it will become a regular Google search feature. I think it's too powerful and it might lead to unintended consequences: for example, some users might hide a domain just because a web page is not very helpful.
Last month, Picasa Web Albums started to support HTTPS and now it's enabled by default. It's probably the only popular photo sharing site that uses an encrypted connection by default and that's really impressive.
Picasa Web Albums is not the only Google service that has recently switched to HTTPS. Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites are three other services that only use encrypted connections. You no longer have worry about editing the URL and replacing "http" with "https" because Google automatically redirects URLs to HTTPS.
