Google's Services Converge in the New iGoogle

Is this Google Reader? It's actually an iGoogle feed in canvas view, which happens to borrow Google Reader's interface. If you click on the drop-down, you can access all your Google Reader subscriptions.


Is this Gmail? It's the Gmail gadget in canvas view, but you get almost all the features available in Gmail's standard interface.


Is this Gmail Chat? It's the chat feature from Gmail integrated in iGoogle's sidebar so that you can chat with your contacts while reading your feeds, watching videos, answering your mail or checking the weather.


The new version of iGoogle, currently available for a small number of randomly-selected users and for developers, will bring together all the Google services in a single fluid interface. At some point, iGoogle was a part of an initiative called Fusion that allowed users to combine content from across the web. The next major iteration of iGoogle goes further and it lets you actually access the full content, monitor the updates and share them with your friends.

Quick tip to access the new iGoogle:
- go to google.com/ig
- paste this in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');
- to go back to the old version, paste in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

Google Docs in Full Screen

If you need more space to edit your documents in Google Docs or if you want to read a document, there's now a full-screen mode that hides the menus and the toolbar. Just select View > Full-screen mode or type Ctrl-Shift-F to go into full-screen mode. Unfortunately, the same shortcut is also used by the Web Developer extension to display element information, but you can change it in the options.

Since you no longer have access to the menus, it's useful to know the keyboard shortcuts and to remember that Esc brings you back to the normal mode.


If you publish a document and you want to display it in fixed-with page view, just append &pageview=1 to the URL:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d0n7b3_3v1l&pageview=1

To hide the footer automatically added by Google, append &hgd=1 to the URL:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d0n7b3_3v1l&hgd=1

Gmail and Google Calendar to Add Offline Support

It seems that this year Google's most popular web applications will work offline. After Google Reader and Google Docs, two other services will integrate with Gears. Andrew Fogg saw a preview of the integration at Google's offices and found that Gmail and Google Calendar will add offline support in approximately 6 weeks.

In the past months, Google accidentally enabled the option in Google Calendar and some users saw the dialog illustrated below: "To view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you're not connected to the Internet, click OK."

Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by NOTICIAS-TIC.

Andrew also found out that Google will add SyncML support for Gmail contacts next month. He thinks this is "related to the sync that they worked on with Apple for 3G iPhone". SyncML is a standard for data synchronization supported by a lot of companies. "SyncML is most commonly thought of as a method to synchronize contact and calendar information between some type of handheld device and a computer (personal, or network-based service), such as between a mobile phone and a personal computer."

Update: Andrew Fogg deleted the tweets referenced in the post, but I have a screenshot.

Another update (Jan. 2009): Much later than expected, Gmail gets offline supports.

Portable Gmail Contacts

If you use Gmail, many Google services have access to your contacts list and you can easily add addresses using autocomplete or from a contact picker. But what happens when you need to enter an email address on a site that's not from Google? Many news sites have options to send a link to your friends and sometimes this is more convenient than loading Gmail and pasting a link to the article.

Google Contacts Autocomplete is a Greasemonkey script that brings your Gmail contacts everywhere you go on the web. When you start to type the name of your friend or his email address, the script shows a list of suggestions.


For now, the script only provides suggestions for a single email address, but I'm sure this could be easily fixed. Unlike Gmail, the script sorts the suggestions alphabetically, not by affinity.

Google Docs Templates

It's so difficult to start with a blank document, especially when it should have a standard format. Now you can use one of the 309 templates from the new Google Docs directory as a starting point for your timesheets, resumes, invoices, photo albums or party invitations.

"A template gives you a quick start towards creating a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. Each template has boilerplate content and preset design styles that are meant to be reused. (...) You can then edit the document, replacing boilerplate text and images with your own," explains Google.


The option to use a template is available in Google Docs when you click on New > From template and the list of templates that you've recently used can be found here.

While Google doesn't explicitly offer an option to create your own templates, you can save them as regular documents and use File > Save as new copy (Copy spreadsheet) to create duplicates. If you publish a spreadsheet, append &newcopy to the URL to obtain a template link.

Almighty Google

The Vacationeers have some new futuristic videos that show an omniscient Google which is already a part of people's lives. After the creepy video about Google Street View, the comedy group explored some other Google services.

Google SMS can sometimes offer free dating advice:

My Maps can anticipate your actions and add placemarks in advance:

Google Moon might show some things that you aren't supposed to know, like the fact that NASA never landed on the Moon.

{ via Jess Lee }

Google's "Edit Search Results" Experiment

Google tests an enhanced version of last year's experiment that allowed users to hide search results and to move some results at the top of the page. The new experiment adds an option to comment on a search results and to view everyone's edits.

According to the FAQ, "your comments and the webpages you add, promote, or delete, along with the user nickname for the account you're logged in with, may be viewed by other Google searchers also in the experiment." Google mentions that this is "an experimental feature served to a random selection of participants and may be available for only a few weeks".

Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by quasarkitten.

Google explains that the motivation behind this experiment is to test if "giving searchers increased control over their search results improves the overall user experience". Google currently personalizes the list of search results using information from a user's search history, but this experiment lets you create your own list of annotated results and share it with the world.

In a recent post from Google Blog, Amit Singhal said something very interesting:

No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

Update. Justin Hileman has more screenshots that show some other features: you can search everyone's edits and there's a list of search edits for each user. "This whole thing looks like an experiment into crowdsourced search results," concludes Justin.

Update 2. The page where you should see your search edits: http://www.google.com/reviews/w.

Google Demoes Video Search with Speech Recognition

Google released a demo for a speech-to-text technology that allows you to search inside a video's content. You can add an iGoogle gadget that is restricted to a small number of political videos from YouTube. Since the gadget is actually an iframe, you can also go to the original page.

"Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find," explains Google.


EveryZing uses speech-to-text technology to search for audio and video across the web. The site has a separate section for YouTube videos, but the coverage is unimpressive.

Find the Email Addresses from a Page with Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar has a useful feature called AutoLink which detects the content from a page that follows some predefined patterns and adds links to pages that offer more information. AutoLink detects US addresses, UPS tracking numbers, International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) and Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) and links to relevant pages from sites like Google Maps, Amazon or CarFax. Despite its name, AutoLink adds the links only after you click on the Google Toolbar button and also shows the links in a drop-down menu.

The latest version of the Google Toolbar for IE (Google Toolbar 5) adds two new patterns: email addresses and URLs. If you click on AutoLink, Google Toolbar will transform into links all the email addresses and the web addresses from a page. You can click on the button again to highlight the content that has been detected, but a better idea is to see all the results in a drop-down.


According to the privacy policy, "AutoLink works by sending Google page text (such as addresses or ISBN numbers) for which AutoLink information is available." I noticed that Google Toolbar sends the address of the page to Google's servers, probably for detecting physical addresses, since everything else can be performed locally.

In 2005, when AutoLink became a part of Google Toolbar 3, many people complained that Google changes the content of web pages, but they ignored that users need to click on a button to add the links. It's also worthwhile to mention that you can change the services that are linked using this feature and that Google doesn't make money from referrals.

Google Suggest Preparing for Global Launch?

Google France's homepage tests a query suggestion feature based on Google Suggest. The feature seems to be enabled only for the homepage and there's a setting that lets you disable it. In March, other people noticed Google Suggest enabled by default at Google.com.


Launched in 2004 as part of Google Labs, Google Suggest is available in many interfaces and in some international Google sites:
* Google Labs
* Google Experimental Search
* Google Toolbar for IE and Firefox
* Firefox 2+ search box
* Google's homepage for iPhone
* Google China, Google Korea, Google Russia, Google India
* YouTube

You can even use the suggestions in your applications thanks to the unofficial JSON API:
http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&client=suggest&json=t&jsonp=CALLBACK_FUNCTION&q=QUERY

Similar suggestion features are already available at Yahoo and Ask.com. Yahoo's suggestion feature called Search Assistant is more advanced as it displays popular queries that contain your keywords, not just queries that start with your text.

Gmail Superstars

One of the 13 features added to Gmail Labs in May is Superstars, an extension of Gmail's starring system. Instead of using a single star to flag all the messages, you can choose between 12 icons.


After enabling Superstars in Gmail Labs and clicking on "Save changes", go to the settings and select the icons you want to use. The exclamation mark is useful to flag important messages, quotes could show that a message needs a reply, while the info icon could be used for messages that contain valuable information.


To star messages faster, enable keyboard shortcuts in the settings. "The superstars will rotate when you press the 's' keyboard shortcut or when you click successively," explains Google. "Rotating through the superstars only works when you click (or hit 's') successively. If you pause for a second, then the next click will turn off the superstar. It's designed this way so that if you never click successively, then you'll just get the original on/off toggle behavior."

If you want to find the messages that have a certain kind of star, use one of the following queries:
has:yellow-star (or l:^ss_sy)
has:blue-star (or l:^ss_sb)
has:red-star (or l:^ss_sr)
has:orange-star (or l:^ss_so)
has:green-star (or l:^ss_sg)
has:purple-star (or l:^ss_sp)
has:red-bang (or l:^ss_cr)
has:yellow-bang (or l:^ss_cy)
has:blue-info (or l:^ss_cb)
has:orange-guillemet (or l:^ss_co)
has:green-check (or l:^ss_cg)
has:purple-question (or l:^ss_cp)

You can enable the Quick Links labs feature to save some of these queries so that they are always accessible with a single click. Just search for has:blue-star or any other value and click on "Add Quick Link".