Google Filters Suggestions Associated with Copyright Infringement

Google started to filter search suggestions that include terms associated with copyright infringement like "torrent", "bittorrent", "rapidshare", "megaupload". It's a slippery slope and Google's suggestions will be less useful since they'll no longer include many popular searches.

Last month, Google explained that this is one of the changes intended to address copyright infringement. "We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we'll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose."

Blacklisting keywords like "torrent" is a terrible way to prevent copyright infringement since users can always type queries without Google's help. The main consequence is that Google will appear to be broken and users will no longer trust the suggestions because they're censored. Last year, Google started to become politically correct by removing the suggestions for queries like [why are muslim]. There will always be complaints about the suggestions, but starting to arbitrarily blacklist keywords opens a can of worms and makes it easy to remove other controversial suggestions. As Mashable says, "this is a subtle form of censorship, and at first glance it seems trivial. However, even though the censorship is slight, it still indicates Google's willingness to change its search protocols to satisfy the needs of a certain business group, in this case members of the entertainment industry."

Google doesn't blacklist "pirate bay", "isohunt", "mediafire", "cracks", "serial numbers", "keygen" and there's a simple trick to bypass the existing filters: start your queries using the blacklisted keywords (for example: [torrent ubuntu 10.10]).

Gmail Tests Image Ads

Greg Sterling spotted image ads in Gmail and this seems to be a controversial Gmail experiment. A Google spokesperson said that Google "recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content." Greg confirmed that the image ads aren't displayed next text-only messages and they sometimes appear next to HTML messages that include a lot of images, especially newsletters.



Gmail's image ads are contextually targeted, but it's unlikely that users will tolerate them well. After all, one of Gmail's selling points was that it only used relevant text ads. Here's Google's answer from 2005 to the question "What makes Gmail different?": "There are other differences in the way Gmail provides access to your email. For example, Gmail automatically groups an email and the replies to it as a conversation. That means you always see a message in its proper context. And there are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, just relevant text ads and links to related pages". Google's explanation continues: "[Gmail ads] are small and unobtrusive. They don't fill half your screen and we don't make you read them just to get to your inbox. Ads are never inserted into the body text of either incoming or outgoing Gmail messages and you won't see any pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail."

It's interesting to see that a Gmail page about privacy explains that "showing relevant advertising offers more value to users than displaying random pop-ups or untargeted banner ads". The key words are "random" and "untargeted".

{ Thanks, Greg. }

Google Image Search Indexes SVG Files

Last year, Google announced that it started to index SVG files, but the results were only returned by the web search engine. "SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We're big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world's information, so indexing SVG is a natural step. We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML," explained Google at that time.

Now you can find SVG files in Google Image Search by restricting the results to this filetype in the advanced search page or by using the filetype operator. Here's an example: [molecule filetype:svg]. If you restrict the results to Wikipedia, Google returns 57,300 SVG files.



Most browsers can render SVG markup, but there are at least two important exceptions: Internet Explorer (IE9 will add support for SVG) and Android's built-in browser.

Gmail Desktop Notifications

If you use Google Chrome, you can enable a new Gmail feature that shows desktop notifications for new messages. Go to "Settings", and enable chat notifications and mail notifications to see a small bubble when you get a new message. If you get a lot of messages, it's a good idea to only enable notifications for important messages.


The nice thing is that the notifications are displayed even when you're visiting a different site or the Chrome window is minimized. Gmail's blog mentions an important use case: "you've probably missed an important chat message because you weren't looking at your Gmail window when it came in".

Unfortunately, you'll no longer see the notifications if you close Gmail or Google Chrome, so this isn't a perfect replacement for Gmail Notifier. This issue could be solved by background web apps, a new Chrome feature that allows installed web apps to run in the background.

Right now, desktop notifications are only available in Google Chrome, but this feature has been implemented in WebKit and there's a W3C draft for web notifications. Google Calendar has a similar feature as part of the "Gentle reminders" experiment.

{ Thanks, Sterling, Karol, Niranjan and Ran. }

Chrome's New Sad Tab Page

The latest Chromium builds include a new sad tab page that replaces the famous "aw, snap!" message with "he's dead, Jim!". The message continues: "Something caused this page to be killed , either because the operating system ran out of memory, or for some other reason. To continue, press Reload or go to another page." To see the page, just type about:kill in the address bar after opening a new tab.

"He's dead, Jim!" is a catchphrase used by Leonard H. McCoy, a character from Star Trek. "The line has entered popular culture as a general metaphor, with uses as diverse as descriptions of an unresponsive electronic circuit, an example of how to add an audio file to function as an alert sound in a computer system, and an illustrative quote regarding how to know if one's opponent has been destroyed in an action hero game."


Here's the old sad tab page:


{ Thanks, Chen. }

YouTube Comment Threading

YouTube has a new option that lets you group comments and their replies. It's called "sort by thread" and it's only available if you click "see all" next to the number of comments. The option is useful if you read a reply to a comment, but you can't find the initial comment. Here's an example.

Sterling, a reader who noticed this feature, says that "the comments on YouTube are a mess, so confusing, but it looks like YouTube is testing threaded comments on the site. I wish this feature was in the watchpage, but it only shows up in the All comments page."


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Dynamic Gmail Favicon

Favicons could show some useful information, not just a static image. If you'd like to see the number of unread messages next to Gmail's red envelope, enable "Unread message icon" in Gmail Labs. The feature only works in Chrome and Firefox, but it's not very reliable.

"When you're visiting sites other than Gmail, it's easy to find out how many unread messages are in your inbox by glancing at the title of your Gmail tab or window. However, if you have a ton of tabs open, or if you use Chrome's Pin Tab feature that hides everything except the tab's icon, it can be tricky to figure out without switching tabs," mentions Gmail's blog.

The counter is supposed to show the number of unread messages from the inbox, but it doesn't always work properly.


If you'd like even more features, Lifehacker suggests to use Minimalist Gmail, a Chrome extension that not only adds an unread counter to Gmail's favicons, but it also lets you customize the navigation bar and remove extraneous features like the "invite a friend" box or the cluttered footer.


{ Thanks, Greg. }

Google Voice Number Porting

Google Voice has a lot of features that help you manage multiple phone numbers more like your email accounts. The main problem is that you need a new phone number to use most of the advanced features and this is not convenient.

Now you can port an existing mobile phone number to Google Voice for a small fee: $20. The process is rather complicated and may incur additional charges, but it's important to keep in mind that Google is not a wireless carrier (at least not yet) and you'll still have to get a non-Google phone number.

Number porting is a feature in which your existing mobile number will become your Google Voice number and you can take advantage of the full set of the Google Voice features, like one number to ring all of your phones, online voicemail, and more. Number Porting also costs a one-time fee of $20, payable via Google Checkout. Note that you will still need carrier service (Sprint, T-Mobile, Cricket, etc.) to receive calls on your mobile phone.

At the moment, you can make free calls in the US and Canada if you use Gmail Chat, but it's likely that this feature will also be available in Google Voice's mobile apps for Android and iPhone.

{ Thanks, CJ. }

Gmail Cloud Print

Google has enabled Cloud Print in Chrome's Dev Channel builds for Windows, but the only option available was to print a test page. Now you can use Google Cloud Print from Gmail's mobile web app for Android and iPhone. The integration lets you print attachments without having to use a full-fledged computer. Since there's no printer with native support for Google Cloud Print, you still need a computer running Google Chrome.

Cloud Print is enabled by default in Chrome Dev Channel and it can be manually enabled in the other builds by typing about:flags in the address bar, clicking "Enable" next to "Cloud Print Proxy" and restarting the browser. To be able to use it, you first need to go to Options >> Under the hood >> Google Cloud Print and log in with a Google account.




Update: According to Google, this feature is also available in Google Docs. "This feature will be rolling out for English speaking users in the US and will work on most phones that support HTML5, such as devices running Android 2.1+ and iOS 3+."