Videos Uploaded to Google Video Will Be Removed Next Month

Google sent the following message to everyone who uploaded videos to Google Video:

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we're removing the remaining hosted content. We've always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We've added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don't want to download your content, you don't need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven't done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. (...)

If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.

Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Thank you for being a Google Video user.

It's really disappointing to see that Google doesn't provide an option to migrate your videos to YouTube. In fact, this option should've been available two years ago, when Google Video became a search engine. There are about 2.8 million videos hosted by Google Video and it's hard to believe that all of them will be manually uploaded to YouTube.

Google Video is an archive of high-quality videos: there are many documentaries, interviews, lectures and it's sad to see them disappear. Even if Google Answers was discontinued in 2006, the archived content is still useful.




{ Thanks, Richard and Kevin. }

Google Quick Scroll Integrates with Instant Previews

If you use Quick Scroll for Chrome or Google Toolbar, Google highlights the sections of the page that are the most relevant to your query. That means you can click on a search result and quickly find the best matches.

Google Quick Scroll now integrates with Instant Previews, so you can click on a highlight from Google's screenshot to be magically taken to that part of the page. It's a lot faster to find what you're looking for, especially if you have to scroll to the bottom of the page.



Google's previews are now available for Microsoft Office documents and presentations. There's also support for Flash, so you'll no longer see a puzzle piece image instead of a Flash object.

{ via Google Blog }

Better Google News in Opera Mini

Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers, but not many websites optimize their interface for Opera Mini. Most Google services have two mobile interfaces: a basic WAP interface and a more advanced interface for smartphones. Opera Mini always displays the basic interface because the browser is actually a thin client that can't handle web apps properly. Fortunately, there's an exception to this rule: Google News shows the smartphone interface in Opera Mini.


"While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we've also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser. So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone," informs Google.

Google's blog post ignores that Opera Mini is also available for iOS, Android, Symbian and other mobile operating systems, so it's not just a browser for feature phones. Opera Mini is really useful while roaming, for slow Internet connections and for data capped mobile contracts. Hopefully, Google News won't be the only Google service optimized for Opera Mini and Google services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums will fully support Opera's desktop browser.

Google Translate, Now With Voice Input

Google Chrome 11 added support for HTML speech input API. "With this API, developers can give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice to text. When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer's microphone. The recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for you."

Google Translate is the first Google service that uses this feature. If you use Google Chrome 11 Beta, Google Chrome 12 Dev/Canary or a recent Chromium build and visit Google Translate, you can click the voice input icon. Right now, this feature only works for English, so you need to select "English" from the list of input languages.


Unfortunately, the results aren't great. I tried to translate "beautiful sunshine" into French, but the speech-to-text engine didn't work properly and Google had to translate "wake up beautiful sunshine girl".


{ Thanks, Kalin. }

Google Highlights Recent Image Search Results

Google started to index images a lot faster and it now even highlights recent results by showing a small label like "1 day ago" or "22 hours ago" below the image. You can't yet restrict the results to recent images, but I'm sure that this feature will be available in the near future.

Here's an example of a query that returns many recent results. It's easy to notice that not all the results are from news sites, so the images aren't from Google News.

Google's Big Blue Bar

"Come here often? Make Google your homepage" is the new promotional message that tries to convince Internet Explorer users to set Google as their homepage. After all, it's easier to convince people to change the homepage than to install Google Toolbar or Google Chrome.

Google no longer shows the message below the search buttons: it now displays a big blue bar at the top of the page. If you click "no thanks" or the "x" icon, Google will no longer display the message.


Sometimes Google also shows a Chrome ad and it's really difficult to sign in or go to iGoogle without clicking on one of the ads.


Why target Internet Explorer users? IE is the only important browser that doesn't use Google as the default search engine and doesn't even include Google in the list of search engines.

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Google Calendar's Favicon Changes Every Day

When Google Calendar changed the favicon, many people wondered why it only shows 31. "Does it mean that starting today, every day will be the 31st ? Serously, favicon should be changed everyday to match the date," suggested a Google Calendar user.

Google listened to the feedback and the favicon will now change every day. "When you look at the Google Calendar icon at the top of your browser window, it will no longer always display 31 but will instead change to reflect the current day of the month. Today's date is now always a short glance away."


Google Calendar is the first Google service that has a dynamic favicon, but you can change Gmail's favicon to show the number of unread messages.

Opera Turbo Uses WebP to Compress Images

Opera is probably the best browser for slow Internet connections, especially if you enable Opera Turbo, a proxy that compresses web pages. Opera 11.10 improved this feature significantly by replacing highly compressed JPEGs with WebP images.

"The most noticeable difference is probably WebP. An open standard image format that was released with some fanfare by Google last year. We thought it was about time to replace the 20 year old JPEG format with something more modern. Overall, WebP produces images with less artifacts and crisper details, even though the image takes less space," says Opera's Audun Mathias Øygard.

Here's an image from BBC's site in Opera 11.01 (JPEG) and Opera 11.10 (WebP):

Opera's tests showed that there's an important speed improvement: "about 22% less data transferred compared between old and new Opera Turbo". For example, BBC's science page uses 724.1 KB, instead of 1111 KB, in the old version of Opera Turbo.

There are two browsers that support WebP: Chrome and Opera 11.10, but Opera's team found a great way to use it. It's important to mention that WebP is based on WebM/VP8, a video format open sourced by Google.

{ via FavBrowser }

Google Docs Adds Pagination and Native Printing

After two months of testing, Google Docs added a very useful feature: pagination. Google Docs adds "visual page breaks while you're editing your documents, so now you can see how many pages of that report you've actually finished. Headers now show up at the top of each page instead of just at the top of your doc, manual page breaks actually move text onto a new page and footnotes appear at the bottom of the pages themselves."


If you use Google Chrome, you'll see an important change when printing a document: it's no longer converted to PDF. "We've worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard so we can support a feature called native printing. (...) With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen," explains Google. Until now, Google converted the document to PDF and you had to download the file and print it using Adobe Reader or a similar PDF viewer.

Google Docs looks more and more like an advanced word processor. You no longer have to use workarounds for basic features like pagination and printing.

A Google a Day

Google launched a site that shows a puzzle which can be solved using Google Search. "A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle," informs Google's blog. Some may say it's just a way to increase Google's market share in the US, now that Bing is increasingly popular. Microsoft also used games to attract more users, so it's not a new idea. Unlike Microsoft's Club Bing, there's no monetary incentive to solve Google's puzzles.


"A Google a Day" was created by Daniel Russell, a Googler who has a great blog about web search. "For the past several years I've been trying to put together some kind of game that would engage people in a playful way to learn how to search. After many trials, we FINALLY got one version of the Search Game out into the world! AGoogleADay.com is a simple game that poses a daily search puzzle for you to solve. The game starts today (Monday April 11, 2011) and will run for the next four weeks with each day's puzzle getting harder from Monday through Friday. The secret agenda here is to get people to play around with search and to learn all they can do. I've felt for a while like Goggle gives people intergalactic hyperdrive starship capabilities, but most people only explore the shallows by paddling around with their shuttlecraft," notes Daniel.

The most interesting thing about Google's new site is that it uses an index called Deja Google which leaves out recent web pages. "To keep the game interesting for everyone, we created Deja Google – a wormhole inspired time machine that searches the Internet as it existed before the game began. Because nobody wants someone's recent blog post about finding an answer spoiling their fun."

Until Deja Google becomes a standalone service, you can use agoogleaday.com to remove recent pages from the results and to search Google's index from April 5. You can also bookmark this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?esrch=Agad::Public&nord=1.

Google's Inconsistent Menus

The trouble with using two menus instead of one is that you never know which menu is the one you need. That's probably the reason why Chrome's team opted for a unified menu.

Here's the menu displayed when you click your name in Gmail:


... and here's the options menu, this time in Google Search:


Notice that "account settings" and "privacy" are added to both menus, depending on the service you use. It's likely that the first menu is used for account-related features and the second menu is used for features related to the service you're currently using, but that's still confusing.