Google experiments with a lot of interesting new features, but not all of them are publicly available. A post from Google's blog inadvertently revealed some experiments, by showing a list of iterations for the "search options" feature released this week.
The initial concepts for the "search options" panel included a lot of interesting enhancements:
* grouping search results by topic * grouping search results by people * showing page previews for search results * showing only pages that you've seen or pages you haven't seen before
Google has previously tested an interface that grouped search results in predefined categories like reference or reviews, but it's not clear if "group by topic" works in a similar way or it's a different approach. To search pages you've seen before, there's Google Web History, but it's very slow and the ranking algorithm needs a lot of improvement.
Wolfram|Alpha launched yesterday and it's an useful complement to a general-purpose search engine like Google. Wolfram|Alpha doesn't search the web, it uses data from authoritative databases and an engine powered by Mathematica to obtain the results.
"Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity," explains the "about" page.
You can enter simple things like numbers, dates, words, HTML color codes, chemical formulas and you'll get a lot of interesting information. The service shows intuitive visualizations and comparisons to better understand the information.
For regular users, having a silent application that constantly updates the browser is a good thing. There's no annoying interface that interrupts you to ask your permission before updating the application and you no longer have to manually check for updates. Unfortunately, Google Chrome's automatic updater is not a great feature if you have limited bandwidth or in an enterprise environment, since you can't customize it.
Now you can use the Group Policy Editor from Windows or add some Registry keys to customize Google Update. Google Update for Enterprise explains how you can import an administrative template in the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) and change the auto-update check period or even disable the auto-updater.
You can configure separate policies for different Google applications, allow only manual updates and even prevent the applications from installing on your computer.
If your operating doesn't include a policy editor (Windows XP Home, Windows Vista Home), edit the Registry directly. Just create the following key:
AutoUpdateCheckPeriodMinutes - auto-update check interval (for example: 1440 to check for updates once a day) DisableAutoUpdateChecksCheckboxValue - 1, if you want to disable the auto-updater; 0, if you want to enable it.
"We work hard to keep our users safe and secure when using our applications, and we believe that making sure users have the latest software available using automatic updates is a key component of that. However, we realize that there are situations where automatic updates may not be desirable so we wanted to provide the ability to control updates when necessary," says David Dorwin, from the Google Update Team.
One year after testing a new interface for Google News, the Mountain View-based Internet giant Google launched the redesign. It's more cheerful and visually-rich than the previous design, section pages include more videos and photos, while most of the clutter has been removed.
Google News homepage
Sci-Tech section of Google News
The project that allowed people involved in a news story to post comments has been abandoned, but you can still read the last comments. It didn't scale, it was difficult to automate and the number of comments was too small to matter.
So you've finally decided to change your webmail service and migrate to Gmail, but you don't want to lose your old messages and the address book. Gmail offers a mail fetcher feature that works with all mail services that support POP, including Hotmail, but you can't use it for regular Yahoo Mail accounts.
As previously anticipated, Google released a tool that lets you import contacts and mail from popular services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL Mail and from ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Earthlink. If you don't see a tab titled "Accounts and import" in Gmail's settings, you need to wait until the new features are enabled in your account.
"It's much easier to make the transition now that you can bring along all your old email and contacts. You can even have your messages forwarded from your old account for 30 days, giving you time to take Gmail for a test drive while you make up your mind," suggests Google's blog.
The service is powered by TrueSwitch, which offers similar migration wizards for Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Depending on the number of messages that are imported, the migration may take up to 2 days.
Last time when I wrote about Google Chrome extensions, they were nothing more than repackaged user scripts. Since March, the extension system has been improved by adding new APIs and options to create custom UIs.
If you use a recent version of Chromium or a Google Chrome dev build, you can already install two useful extensions. But first you should find a Chrome shortcut on your desktop, right-click, select "Properties" and append a flag to the target field: --enable-extensions. Restart the browser to use the new option.
The sample extensions are actually enhanced bookmarklets that show the number of unread messages in your Gmail inbox and an option to subscribe to feeds in Google Reader.
For those that want to write similar extensions, there's a tutorial that will walk you through creating a very simple extension.
In other news, Linux and Mac users can try some early builds of Chromium. "The software, available for download from the Chromium Web site, is incomplete and definitely buggy, as one would expect for a developer version that reflects all the latest changes programmers are making with the project," says Stephen Shankland from CNet, who tested the Mac version.
Google Contacts, which is now available at google.com/contacts, has some new fields: website, birthday, date (anniversary), related person (spouse, domestic partners, assistant) and even custom fields. Just click on the "add" button to see some of the other fields that can be used.
For some reason, I can see the changes in the standalone version of Google Contacts, but not yet in Gmail. The most obvious missing feature is the option to create events for birthdays in Google Calendar, but it will probably be added soon.
After years without significant updates, Google's contact manager has been constantly updated in the past year (better contact search, the option to merge duplicate entries, an API, sync options), but there's a lot of room for improvement. What's on your wishlist?
Google first implemented a basic task management service as a Gmail Labs feature, then it developed an iPhone version and an iGoogle gadget. Now you can manage your tasks from Google Calendar. There are two ways to view your tasks in Google Calendar: in the right sidebar, where you can also manage your tasks, and as a built-in calendar.
* Tasks that have due dates will automatically appear on your calendar in the All Day event section. * To create a task with a due date in Calendar, click on an empty space in Month view or in the All Day section and select the Task option.
* To attach a due date to an existing task, click the right arrow next to the task in question in the Task list. Then, click on the calendar icon to select a date. * To modify a task's date, simply drag the task to a new date (as you would with a calendar event). * To mark a task as complete from within Calendar, click on the checkbox next to the task.
Unfortunately, you can't use "quick add" to create tasks, the tasks calendar can't be synchronized with other applications and you still can't receive email or SMS notifications for tasks.
Google's Searchology event was a great opportunity to show that Google's search engine not only indexes and ranks web pages, it also categorizes the content available on the web, it extracts information that can be visualized in new and interesting ways.
The first feature launched today is "search options", a new sidebar that can be expanded right on the search results page and that offers a lot of interesting features. You can restrict the results to videos, forums, reviews or recent pages. While you could already use services like Google Groups, Google Video or Google News to obtain similar results, this feature lets you easily switch between the various types of pages and combine different restrictions.
One of the most impressive option is the restriction to reviews, which shows special snippets obtained using sentiment analysis. You'll be able to find directly from the snippets if the author liked a certain product or service, the main advantages and disadvantages and other opinionated excerpts.
The "search options" sidebar also includes the "wonder wheel", a great visualization feature that lets you improve your query by trying different suggestions successively. For example, I could start by searching for "DVD" and then selecting related searches like "HD DVD", "HD DVD vs Blu-ray", "Blu-ray", while previewing the results and still being able to go to the previous search results.
After enhancing the snippets for discussion boards, scientific papers using metadata extracted automatically, Google looked into using structured data already included in some web pages to surface useful information in the search results. Much like Yahoo Searchmonkey, Google uses RDFa markup and microformats to extract information from sites that show reviews and information about people. You'll only see the enhanced snippets for large sites like CNet, Yelp and LinkedIn, but Google promises to expand the list.
The last search-related announcement was a new service that will be released in Google Labs this month: Google Squared, a dashboard of facts generated automatically. You can search for general things like "small dogs", "vegetables", "US presidents" and Google generates a list of objects that fit into your category, a set of attributes and their values. It looks like a comparison page from Wikipedia, but it's generated automatically.
Google will host a press event called Searchology on Tuesday, two years after launching universal search. According to Google, the event will "offer an insider's perspective on Search including recent search innovations. Speakers will include VP of Search Engineering, Udi Manber, and VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer." Even if you didn't get an invitation, you'll be able to see the presentations through a webcast.
Who: Google Inc. What: Live webcast of Google's upcoming Searchology press event to be held at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. When: Tuesday, May 12th, 10:00am – 11:30am PDT
Google didn't mention anything about product launches, but I suspect that the search engine will include some new features that have been tested in the past months. Google wants to expose some advanced search options that allow you to refine the results without opening a new page. The options are available in a sidebar that's collapsed by default, but it can be expanded by clicking on "Show options".
You'll be able to restrict the results to forums, videos, reviews and recent pages. There's an option that lets you customize the snippets by making them longer or by showing thumbnails, much like Cuil. Google wants to make the process of refining queries more fun and exploratory by adding a "wonder wheel" of suggestions.
You might remember the strange incident from January that made Google's search results pages almost unusable for 30 minutes by flagging all the search results as malware. The incident is now Google's favorite example to show that its search engine is not a monopoly and competition is one click away: Yahoo's search volume has doubled before Google fixed the error.
A study from 2008 showed that 55% of the US Internet users have more than one regularly used search engine.
A paper published last week titled "Why Silent Updates Boost Security" showed that Google Chrome is the browser that has the most effective updating mechanism. Google Chrome's updater works automatically, it requires no user interaction and it can't be disabled from the interface. The report shows that 97% of the Chrome users had the latest version of the browser 21 days after its release, compared to 85% for Firefox and 53% for Safari.
"Google Chrome checks for updates every five hours. It is using the recently open sourced Google update component code-named Omaha, which keeps polling for updates even when Google Chrome is not running. (...) Once a new update is found to be available on the server, the client automatically downloads and installs it in the background without prompting the user. The new version of Google Chrome gets applied at the next restart of the browser. At the time of this writing, in April 2009, the user was not even prompted to restart the browser after a new update was ready. Given that the whole update process happens without any user interruption, Google Chrome is said to have a "silent update" mechanism. As of April 2009, the user could not disable update checks."
Other browsers don't include auto-updating mechanisms (Opera) or they have updating features that require user's consent (Firefox). Internet Explorer wasn't included in the report because its user-agent omits the minor version number and the results were compiled from Google's traffic logs.
Roger Halbheer, who works for Microsoft, has a more balanced view. "Silently installing components without even giving me the option to choose is not acceptable today for me – but I want to have the option to do it if I want."
Google Updater, the software that automatically updates Google applications like Chrome, Google Earth Plugin or Google Gears, needs to be more transparent and more flexible. Users need to be informed more clearly that the software updates silently and they need to have an option that disables the updater or makes the polling less frequent. What happens if the latest version of Google Chrome constantly crashes on your computer? You could install an older version, but Chrome will automatically update to the most recent version.
