Set Basic HTML as Default Gmail View

If you use Gmail and you'd like a simplified interface that doesn't use AJAX, loads fast and works well in most browsers, try the basic HTML view. Gmail links to this version at the bottom of the page, but you can also access it if you go to http://mail.google.com/mail/h/.

Until recently, Gmail didn't have the option to set the basic HTML version as the default interface and you had to bookmark its URL or click on the link from Gmail's footer. Now there's an option to always go to the HTML version, every time you load Gmail.

Please keep in mind that the simplified version lacks many useful features:
* integration with Google Docs and Google Calendar
* keyboard shortcuts
* integrated chat
* composing options: spell checker, rich formatting, address auto-complete, custom From address
* ads (useful feature?), related pages, tracking packages and addresses
* contact management
* web clips.

Google recommends to use the basic HTML view for slow Internet connections, although you may find it useful when you use exotic browsers or when the standard version doesn't work. If you change your mind and you want to go back to the AJAX version, click on "Standard View". Apparently, the standard view loads much faster thanks to some aggressive optimization.

Product Images in Google Shopping OneBox

Google started to display a thumbnail in the Product Search OneBox, as you can see by searching for [usb flash]. The image illustrates the top search result, but links to the list of results. As part of the Universal Search, this OneBox can be displayed at the top of the search results page or at the bottom of the page, depending on its relevance to the query.

Another change is that the OneBox groups identical tech products and shows a range of prices. For queries that include clustered listings, Google no longer shows a link that restricts the results to products that can be bought using Google Checkout.

Here's an old screenshot of the Froogle/Product Search OneBox:

Google Doctype, an Encyclopedia for Web Developers

Google released Doctype (HTML version), an encyclopedia of the open web. "The open web is the web built on open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and more. The open web is a beautiful soup of barely compatible clients and servers. It comprises billions of pages, millions of users, and thousands of browser-based applications."

Google Doctype is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone who has a Google account and wants to keep it up-to-date or add new articles. The encyclopedia contains articles about web security, DOM manipulation, CSS, HTML best practices, references for HTML, DOM, CSS, complete with browser compatibility information. There's also previously-unreleased code used internally by Google that is now documented and available for anyone to use.

You could call it Wikipedia for web developers or cross-browser MSDN, but Google Doctype is a clear sign that Google wants to foster a community of developers and encourage building web application using open standards.


Mark Pilgrim, the author of "Dive into Python" and now a Googler, explains more about Google Doctype in the following interview:

Google Spreadsheets Can Be Edited by Anyone

Google Spreadsheets added an option in the sharing dialog that allows anyone to view or edit the spreadsheet just by knowing the URL. Until now, you had to send an invitation URL that contained a secret code and the people you invited had to login using a Google account. If you click on the Share tab and enable "Anyone can edit this document WITHOUT LOGGING IN", your spreadsheet becomes a wiki that can be edited by anyone.


To experiment the new feature, I set up a spreadsheet that compares the features of two desktop office suites (MS Office, OpenOffice) and two online office suites (Google Docs, Zoho). The spreadsheet has three sheets for: word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

In other spreadsheet-related news, you can now embed forms in a web site by just copying some code, there's a new option to duplicate questions and users can add their own answer to a multiple-choice question.

Update: You can view a snapshot of the spreadsheet after the first day of editing. The comparison has been extended with information about voice recorders, clay tablets, smoke signals, telepathy, Jedi mind control and more.

Update 2 (May 26): You can no longer edit the spreadsheet.

Use iGoogle and Google Reader in the Sidebar

A simple use for Google's iPhone interfaces is to add them as sidebars in Firefox or Opera. I mentioned last year some Google gadgets for Google Notebook, Google Talk, Google Docs, that could be displayed in a permanently-visible sidebar. Here are two interfaces optimized for iPhone that have permalinks:

iGoogle - all of the gadgets are displayed in a single column and you can switch between tabs at the bottom of the page.


Google Reader - a beautiful interface that lets you read posts inline, star them, share them and browse by tags or feeds. "This new version is designed to offer many of the same features as the desktop, while making it quick and easy to act on items," says Google Reader blog.


Normally, if you click on the two links for iGoogle and Google Reader in Firefox or Opera, you should be asked if you want to bookmark the page. To open it in the sidebar, go to the Bookmarks menu and click on the corresponding item or press F4 in Opera. If the links don't automatically create a sidebar:

* bookmark them and select "Show in panel" (for Opera)

* bookmark them, then go to the Bookmarks menu, right-click on the bookmarks, select "Properties" and enable "Load this bookmark in the sidebar" (for Firefox).

Google Shows Blurred Faces in Street View to Protect Privacy

Google prepares to launch Street View in Europe, Canada and Australia, where local laws regarding privacy in public places are less permissive than in the US. As promised, Google will blur faces for all the Street View imagery not just because of local laws, but also because the purpose of Street View is to show places, not people that happen to be there when Google's Street View cars go by.

To test the face detection algorithms, Google started with Manhattan, where Google replaced the Immersive Media imagery with newer and better panoramic images. "This effort has been a year in the making - working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery." The results are pretty good, although not all the faces are correctly detected and people can be identified even when their faces are blurred.


As Avi Bar-Zeev suggested, a better idea would be to remove people and cars from the images. "The main reason for removing people and cars is the same reason you'd want the base Google Earth imagery to lack clouds. These things tend to block your view. You can't really look behind them in a simple (essentially 2D) panoramic image. They only represent one snapshot in time vs. a broader/more virtualized essence of the place. They make it confusing to add dynamic versions of the same things on top of what's permanently baked into the imagery."

Google Maps Adds Real Estate Search

As a Google employee recently said, "Google Maps is evolving from a driving directions and business search tool, to a comprehensive representation of all the world's information, on a map." That's why Google Maps started to integrate different layers of information when you search for an address and it added a new "More" button to enable layers for photos and Wikipedia articles. Google Maps now includes in search results personalized maps, geolocated content from the web and mapped web pages.

There's a new option to search for real estate: click on "show search options" and select "real estate" from the drop-down. The search results don't seem to be powered by come from Google Base. Google shows structured information about houses and lets you refine the results by price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Even if there aren't too many advanced features, it's interesting to see that Google Maps wants to index all the information that could be displayed on a map.

Many real estate sites use Google Maps API and the first Google Maps mashup was HousingMaps, a site that displays Craigslist housing listings on a map. Last month, Trulia was one of the first sites that integrated Google Street View "to add efficiency to the real estate search experience and help home buyers discover more information about particular neighborhoods".


(The post was updated to reflect that the data is obtained from Google Base.)

Spreading OpenSocial Across the Web

Any web site can be a container for OpenSocial, any web site can add social features even if it's not a social network - that seems to be the idea behind Friend Connect, a new piece from Google's social puzzle. Friend Connect will allow the users of a site to add profiles, to import their friends from other social networks, to use social applications in the context of a site.

Paul Buchheit wrote last year that "there's no such thing as a social network". The social aspect of a site is just one of its many features. "Real products need more functionality in order to somehow deliver value to their users. It is this other functionality that defines the real purpose of a product, not the social network, which exists only to enable or enhance the core purpose."

Friend Connect is an enabler for making web sites more social, since the barrier to entry is really low. "First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web." Google will use OpenID or Google Accounts for authentication, OAuth or APIs like Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability to find your friends from other social networks and OpenSocial gadgets to interact with your friends.

"Social is in the air. It's the blossoming of a lot of work by a lot of people. We don't move in lockstep and don't need to. We converge on interoperable technology. There's more than one way to connect a site to the social Web. With Friend Connect, we're confident it's a good step forward. I'm sure there will be more ways to do that than what Friend Connect does. We wanted to start with easiest and safest starting point," said Google's David Glazer in a conference call.

A preview of Friend Connect will be available later today at http://www.google.com/friendconnect (update: the page is live) and the service should be launched in a couple of months.

Tips for Linking to Google Presentations

If you publish a presentation at Google Docs, you'll receive a simple URL that can be used to view the presentation online. Unfortunately, if you go to that URL without being logged in to a Google Account, Google will ask you to log in:


The explanation is that Google Presentations offers some advanced features that require authentication: chatting with other people that view the presentation and joining a presentation that's already in progress. To view the presentation without logging in, click on the small link from the bottom of the page: "View published presentation in a new window".

If you want to link directly to the presentation and skip the authentication page, just add "&skipauth=true" to the URL provided by Google and replace "Presentation" with "Present". Here's an example.

URL provided by Google:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?docid=ID

Modified URL:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ID&skipauth=true
(replace ID with the presentation's ID)

Most people will also want to download the presentation, but Google doesn't offer this feature in the view-only interface. You can link to the PPT file by using this format:

http://docs.google.com/MiscCommands?command=saveasdoc&exportFormat=ppt&docid=ID

Yahoo Search's Differential Features

Yahoo's strategy to increase the search market share is to add features that can't be found at Google or somewhere else. The problem is that these features need to be distinctive and useful enough to attract the attention and make people switch to Yahoo or at least use it a secondary search engine.

The first innovative feature added by Yahoo was Search Assistant, an integrated pane that combined autocomplete and related searches. Search Assistant was heavily inspired by Ask.com's left sidebar, but it included a distinctive feature that made it less obtrusive: the pane is only displayed if you stop typing for a couple of seconds or when your typing slows.

Google also tests a query suggestion feature and places a list of related searches at the top of the page, but Yahoo's implementation is more interesting.


This week, Yahoo started to add SiteAdvisor's warnings next to search results. "Safety ratings from McAfee SiteAdvisor are based on automated safety tests of Web sites and are enhanced by feedback from volunteer reviewers". Yahoo only shows warnings next to sites that use browser exploits, offer malicious software or send spam. Google also shows warnings next to web pages that may install malicious software, but McAfee SiteAdvisor seems to offer a more comprehensive protection and more information about the potential threats (you can also install a plug-in for IE or Firefox that works with the most popular search engines or manually find the testing results for a site).


Probably the most impressive new feature in Yahoo Search and the only one that's not yet live is SearchMonkey (an unfortunate play on GreaseMonkey), a way for site owners to enrich the snippets with structured information. "Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page."

Yahoo uses semantic web standards to retrieve structured information from web sites, but users are the ones who decide if they want richer search results from a site. Yahoo will support a small number of microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, XFN), "some of the vocabulary of Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, and MediaRSS, as well as RDFa, eRDF, and the OpenSearch specification".

Google chose a different approach - plus boxes that show additional information automatically detected: addresses, stock symbols, products etc. Google also lets you add subscribed links to search results pages, but very few sites took advantage of this feature.


If Yahoo manages to promote these features and site owners build interesting applications for SearchMonkey, people might discover that Yahoo has a pretty good search engine and search is not synonymous with Google. Exploring different ways to present search results will lead to a better user experience and to an improvement for all search engines, since the best features are usually copied by all of them. Yahoo Search hopes to become a serious alternative to Google by having a distinctive voice, but the history of Ask.com or Opera shows that being innovative is not the only necessary ingredient for becoming popular.