Google Video, Back in Google's Main Navigation

Google Video replaced Product Search in Google's main navigation, now that Google's comparison shopping site started to become popular.

Google Video first replaced Froogle on the homepage in 2006, two months before Google acquired YouTube.




A year later, Froogle replaced Google Video on the homepage and it was rebranded as Google Product Search.


And now Google Video is back on Google's main navigation, while Froogle is available in the "more" drop-down.

Custom Gmail Themes

Until Gmail adds an option to create your own themes, you can edit the colors from Gmail's default theme. Go to the Themes section from Gmail's settings, click on "Choose your own colors" and select your favorite colors for Gmail's background, links, text messages, navigation links and more.


Your colors are saved when you finish editing the theme and the changes are added to Gmail after you press "Save". If you don't like your theme, you can always choose one of the 31 pre-defined thems or click on "Reset" to go back to the default theme.

"Companies that use Google Apps won't see the options for themes yet, but we're working on getting themes to you too," mentions Gmail's blog.

Google Pack Comes with Shortcuts for Google Web Apps

Google Pack added a new option to install desktop shortcuts for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. The applications open in Google Chrome, in the chromeless app view. If you click on the Gmail shortcut, you have to option to register Gmail as the default mail client. Google Chrome already includes Gears, so Gmail and Google work offline if you enable the option.



Although Google calls the tool "Google Apps", the shortcuts don't work with Google Apps accounts. As a simple workaround, you can create application shortcuts using Google Chrome and use the icons installed by Google Pack.

{ via Google Docs Blog }

Download Books from Google Book Search

Google Book Search lets you download books, but only if they're in public domain, like Hamlet. All the other books are available as a limited preview or as a snippet view in Google Book Search.

You could download the image corresponding to each page of a book or you could automatize the process using a download manager. Another option is to use Google Book Downloader, a third-party Windows tool that downloads the pages from Google Book Search using several proxies and merges the images in a PDF file. Google Book Downloader will only retrieve the pages that are available online, so you won't be able to download entire books in most cases. The application requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and it's not very clear if it breaks the terms of use for Google Book Search.

1000 Machines Find the Results for a Google Query

How many servers process a Google query and serve the top search results? Google Fellow Jeff Dean says that more than a thousand machines are necessary to obtain the search results in less than 200 milliseconds.

"Their performance gains are also impressive, now serving pages in under 200ms. Jeff credited the vast majority of that to their switch to holding indexes completely in memory a few years back. While that now means that a thousand machines need to handle each query rather than just a couple dozen, Jeff said it is worth it to make searchers see search results nearly instantaneously."

More Local Search Results in Google Maps

Google Maps shows more local search results: instead of showing only the first 10 results, you can explore the most relevant 1000 local businesses in a single view.

"Ever wish you could see more than just ten local search results at once? Us too. So we've added a search layer for local search results that activates when there are more relevant results than we can show on one page. Instead of just plotting the first page of business results on our map, we plot more of them as small circles. You can click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top ten results will still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map," mentions Google Lat-Long Blog.


In other news, Google Maps is for the first time more popular in the US than MapQuest. According to comScore, Google Maps had 42.3 million unique US visitors in January, while AOL's MapQuest had only 41.5 million uniques.

"Google has for several years been investing very heavily in Maps (and Earth), as well as distributing Google Maps across the internet via its API. The features and capabilities developed for Google Maps are more extensive and widely known than those of its competitors. (...) Google steadily built out a large number of features that consumers and the market have found compelling. More importantly, Google has regarded Maps as a strategic product, arguably its most successful after core search," suggests Greg Sterling.

Ironically, when Google Local was launched in 2004, Google used MapQuest as a provider for maps.

How to Disable Google Suggest

Google Suggest, the feature that autocompletes your searches with popular suggestions, has been enabled on google.com last year. The feature is enabled by default and, like all the other Google Search preferences, its state is saved in a cookie. That means the settings can be changed only for the browser you're currently using and they're active as long as the Google cookie is not deleted.

The feature can be disabled in the "preferences" page, from the "query suggestions" section.


If your browser automatically deletes cookies when you close it, you'll probably find an option to add exceptions. For example, Firefox's settings page has a button titled "Exceptions" in the Privacy/Cookies section. Type "google.com" and press "Allow" to prevent Firefox from deleting Google's cookie.


Cookies aren't always reliable and sometimes a small change corrupts them. If you use an ad-blocking plug-in like AdBlock Plus for Firefox, add a new filter with the following format:

http://clients*.google.com/complete/search?*

A filter that will disable Google Suggest in Google Video and YouTube has the following format:

http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?*

Here's a more general filter that should work for all international domains:

http://*.google.*/complete/search?*

Changing the preferences for each browser you use is not very convenient. Some people like to use a portable version of their browser on a USB key (Opera, Firefox or even Chrome), others use software that synchronizes their settings (Moziila Weave is an example).

Another solution is to bookmark or add as a homepage a modified version of Google's homepage that doesn't use Google Suggest. Here's the link:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 - no more Google Suggest

The "complete" parameter controls the status of Google Suggest. If you like the suggest feature and you want to see it in Google's search results pages, not just on the homepage, bookmark this URL:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1 - Google Suggest on all Google pages