Google Maps Highlights Top Contributors

Google Maps shows a list of the people that contributed with the most customized maps, reviews and edits related to a location. In some cases, you'll find helpful maps that show hidden parks, interesting museums or landmarks.


Google has also released a customized maps editor for Android. "With this application you can create, edit, share, and view personalized maps on your Android powered phone synchronized with the My Maps tab on Google Maps. Create a map on your desktop computer using Google Maps and then take it with you on the go and update it on location."

Picasa Web Search Tips

Picasa Web Albums has a search feature that can be restricted to your albums, to the public albums of your favorite users or to all the public albums hosted by Google. Here are some ways you can use Picasa Web's simple search engine:

1. Find random photos published by Picasa Web users: just click on the search button from the homepage, while leaving the search box empty.

2. One view for the photos uploaded by your favorite users. If you want to see the photos from the users you've added it to favorites, click on the search button and select "Favorites".

3. Navigate between the results. After selecting a result, you can move to the next result by clicking on the right arrow button or by using keyboard shortcuts: j or right arrow. To go to the previous result, type k or use the left arrow.

4. View the results in a slideshow. Click on the "Slideshow" option to view the results without manually navigating between them.

5. Adjust the size of the thumbnails from 72 pixels to 288 pixels width using the selection bar.


6. Download the results in Firefox. Picasa Web Albums provides a feed output for search results and you could use it to download the photos.

7. Restrict the results to a user. Open the album gallery of that user, enter your query and then select the name of the user from the line "My Photos | Favorites | Community photos | User's Gallery".

8. View the search results in a screen saver. Picasa 3 lets you create a screensaver that shows images from media RSS feeds. The feed generated for search results can be added to the screensaver.

9. Find photos from a certain location. Go to Google Maps, find the desired location, select "My Maps" and check "Photos from Picasa Web Albums" from the featured content section. The mapplet lets you enter a query and it displays the results on the map.


10. Use Google Image Search to search Picasa Web Albums photos. Just add site:ggpht.com to your query, for example: [christmas site:ggpht.com]. Google Image Search doesn't include all the photos hosted by Picasa Web, but it produces more relevant results.

Find Cartoons and Cliparts Using Google Image Search

Google Image Search has two new content restriction options: clip art and line drawings. Besides the two new options, you can restrict the results to faces, photos and illustrations for recent news articles.

"Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you," explains Google's blog.


You can find the restrictions in the drop-down that has the default option "any content". After ignoring the content of the images and only indexing the associated text and metadata, image search engine are transitioning to a new model that involves analyzing the images, detecting objects and recognizing patterns.

Google Shows Suggestions from Your Search History

When you create a Google account, Google enables an option that saves all your queries and the results you clicked on. The service is called Web History and it can be extended to all the web pages you visit if you install Google Toolbar.

Web History has many uses, but Google has barely scratched the surface by offering some basic recommendations and trends. Google decided to personalize the suggestions offered when you type a query on Google's homepage by adding searches from your history. Like in Firefox's search box, the historical queries are displayed at the top, but the major difference is that Firefox saves the searches on your computer, while Google saves them in your account.

In the screenshot below, you can see the suggestions provided by Google after typing [gm] in the search box: there are 5 suggestions from my search history (all related to Gmail) and 5 popular queries from Google Suggest.


Google doesn't provide a way to disable the suggestions from your search history, so your options are to log out, disable query suggestions from the preferences page or delete the web history.

Update: I don't see this feature in all my accounts, so it's not available to everyone.

Chrome Undone

No, this is not a new version of Google's homepage, it's just a summary of the most aggressive promotion for a Google product. Now that it's out of beta, Google Chrome can be added to any software bundle, can be a part of any distribution deal and any promotion.

If Sun offers the option to install an entire office suite when you update JRE, why shouldn't Google use a popular software like Google Earth to drive adoption to Chrome? When you try to download Google Earth from Windows XP or Windows Vista, Google shows this completely unrelated page:


Google clearly displays that it will also install Chrome and users have the option to exclude Google Chrome, but Google assumes that most people will just click on "Agree and download" without reading the content of the page. Before bundling Chrome with Google Earth, Google used a trick to install the toolbar:


Microsoft's desperate attempts to promote Silverlight made the company to show an annoying invitation to "enhance your experience on Microsoft.com with Microsoft Silverlight" whenever you visit microsoft.com. There are many ways to annoy your users, but does it really worth it?

{ via Blogoscoped }

Create Documents from Gmail Threads

What's the quickest way to create a new document in Google Docs directly from Gmail? If you enable "Create a document" in Gmail Labs and you activate keyboard shortcuts, you can press g then w to open a blank document.

The experimental feature adds a new option next to each Gmail conversation that lets you create a new document from it. Gmail merges the content of all the messages from the conversation and it removes the attachments. A similar effect could be obtained by selecting "Forward all" and sending the message to the email address automatically generated by Google Docs.

"No more copying and pasting the text from your email -- just open the message you wish to convert, click the "Create a document" link on the right side of the page, and voila, you have a brand new document which you can then modify and share," explains Gmail's blog.


Another feature from Gmail Labs that could be useful if you frequently use Google's online office suite is the Google Docs gadget. It's a simple way to access recently modified documents, to find documents and to place a link into a message using drag & drop.

Google Docs started as an alternative to collaborating on a document by sending attachments back and forth. "In my business of search marketing, I send lots of tabular data between myself and clients on a regular basis. In the past, we'd have to attach Excel worksheets or post the information in web page tables, adding overhead and inconvenience. We never had the latest document - and merging information was always a pain," says Scott Clark in a Google Docs testimonial. If Google wants to solve the problem of unnecessary attachments, why there's no way to invite people to collaborate on a document directly from Gmail?

{ Thanks, Niranjan. }

Google Tests Navigational Suggestions and More Enhanced Snippets

Search Engine Land reports about three new Google experiments that add navigational links to Google Suggest and enhance the snippets for reviews and structured pages.

For navigational queries, which usually have a single relevant answer, Google experiments with adding a link to the first search result at the top of the suggestions list. Google Chrome already implements this feature and it's likely that it will be added to Google's homepage as well. Other experiments include ads and results from specialized search engines, but they don't seem to be useful.


The other two experiments continue an already obvious trend of expanding and enhancing the snippets. This time, instead of automatically detecting information from the unstructured code, Google asked some review sites to include special tags for ratings, summaries and other metadata. Yahoo has a service called SearchMonkey that encourages web sites to surface structured data using microformats and embeddable RDF.


The third experiment solves the problem of finding a long web page in the search results that includes the answer to your query in a subsection. For example, Wikipedia articles are structured in sections and subsections, each one having a permalink that uses named anchors, but Google doesn't send you directly to the right subsection. This experiment includes a link that lets you "jump" to the part of the page that includes your answer.


You can already see some of these ideas in Google Chrome, Yahoo SearchMonkey, Google Mobile search and Live Search's results from Wikipedia.

How to Remove iGoogle's Chat Box

Update: This trick is no longer necessary since there's an option that lets you hide the chat box. To hide the chat box, click on the "Options" link next to the contacts list and select "Hide chat".

iGoogle added a Google Chat box in the sidebar, but many people find it annoying because they don't use the option and it slows down page loading. Google doesn't provide an option to hide the chat box, but someone found a workaround that disables it.


If you haven't set up mobile iGoogle, use the wizard from this page. Then go to the settings page, scroll down to the Export/Import section, click on the Export button and save an XML file that contains the settings for all the iGoogle tabs. Open the file in a text editor like Notepad, find the last line that contains <Section/> and remove it. After saving the file, go back to iGoogle's settings page and upload the XML file.

Google Accounts Page Redesigned

Google Account page has been redesigned to integrate the information from your public profile and to show the list of services you use in a non-intuitive compact 3-columns layout.


The account page is a simple way to access Google's services you've used at least once, to remove some services from your account (for example: Orkut, Gmail, Web History), to change your password, security question, personal information and the list of sites that access data from your account using Google's APIs.

Ideally, this page should list the most frequently used services, should show the last activity data that's only available for Gmail and should also include options to save your data or to move it to another Google account. I still don't understand why Google doesn't save the global preferences in your account and the interface language or the SafeSearch option need to specified every time you use a new computer or you clear your cookies.

{ Thanks, Surendra Kumar. }

The Search Box from YouTube's Embedded Player

You probably noticed that YouTube's embedded player started to include a search box when you pause a video and when you move the mouse at the top of a video.

While the implementation is probably too aggressive, the search box is a good way to find other similar videos on YouTube. The player shows 6 results at a time, but you can navigate using the two arrows and you can view other thumbnails from the video before selecting it. To go back to the list of search results, click on the Search button.


The search box sits there, at the top of the video, to show that there is so much more to explore and this video is just the starting point. There's a small YouTube inside each embedded player.