Google Business Profiles?

The source code of the Google Profiles page includes a broken link that has a revealing anchor text: "business profiles". The link sends you to a page that doesn't exist: http://www.google.com/_/managepages, but this feature could add Google Profiles to Google Apps and allow users to create multiple profile pages.


Another interesting thing is that Google has a new subdomain: https://plusone.google.com, which redirects to Google Profiles. There's already a Web page about the +1 button, so it's not clear why Google has a new address for Google +1. Maybe profiles will be a feature of Google +1.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

How Google Docs Killed GDrive

"In The Plex", Steven Levy's recently launched book about Google, has an interesting story about GDrive, an online storage service developed by Google. People first found about GDrive from a leaked Google document, back in 2006. GDrive (or Platypus) turned out to be a service used by Google employees that offered many impressive features: syncing files, viewing files on the Web, shared spaces for collaborating on a document, offline access, local IO speeds. But Google wanted to launch GDrive for everyone.

At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, "I don't think we need GDrive anymore." Horowitz asked why not. "Files are so 1990," said Pichai. "I don't think we need files anymore."

Horowitz was stunned. "Not need files anymore?"

"Think about it," said Pichai. "You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there's never a file."

When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google's top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, "skeptical." [Linus] Upson had another characterization: "It was a withering assault." But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.

In 2009, Google Docs started to store PDF files and one year later you could store any type of file in Google Docs. The service still doesn't offer a way to sync files. Even if GDrive was never released, Google Docs inherits most of its features. The main difference is that you no longer have to worry about file formats because you can open and edit documents in Google Docs.

{ Thanks, Kristian. }

More Features in Google Maps for Mobile Browsers

One of the most underrated Google mobile Web apps is Google Maps. Most smartphones and tablets have a native app for Google Maps, so a mobile Web app doesn't seem necessary. Unfortunately, native apps aren't always updated frequently and there are many missing features. Google does a good job at updating Google Maps for Android, but Apple's Maps app for iOS rarely includes new Google Maps features.

That's probably one of the reasons why the Google Maps mobile site was updated to include most of the features from the desktop site. Another reason is that Google wants to offer "a consistent Google Maps experience wherever you use it."

The updated Google Maps mobile site has features like local business search, Google Places, driving directions, layers, My Maps, starred locations, search suggestions. If you can't find biking directions or information about businesses in the Maps app for the iPhone, you can go to maps.google.com in your mobile browser and use these features.


Just like the mobile YouTube site, "Google Maps for mobile browsers is platform independent - you will always get a consistent experience and the latest features without needing to install any updates, no matter what phone you use."

I've tried the updated mobile interface on an iPhone 3GS, a Nexus One and an iPad 2. While all the new features are great, the site is still too slow and unresponsive to be useful. Until Google solves performance issues and mobile browsers become more powerful, people will still use the native app.

Google's Black Navigation Bar

For some reason, the navigation bar displayed at the top of Google's "connected accounts" page is special. The bar has a black background and grey links. Hopefully, this is just a bug and not a redesigned navigation bar.


The "connected accounts" page lets you add accounts from services like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Yelp and use them to personalize search results. This way, you can include your accounts from other social sites without adding them to your Google Profile.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Image Search in SSL

Probably the most important missing feature in Google SSL Search was image search. Now this feature is available, but there's a drawback: the page that shows a bigger image preview doesn't use SSL.


Google's encrypted flavor supports most of the features of the regular Google site. The left side of the navigation bar is still missing, you can't use Google Instant and the Wonder Wheel, but hopefully these features will be added in the near future.

Google Chrome has recently implemented a feature called SSL False Start which "reduces the latency of a SSL handshake by 30%". SSL sites load slower and one of the reasons is that SSL handshakes are more CPU intensive, use more network round-trips and more packets.

Google eBooks Integrates with Google Dictionary, Google Translate and Google Search

Google's eBook Reader for the Web added a contextual menu that lets you define, translate and search for a selected word or text. "To select text in a Google eBook within the Web Reader, double-click or highlight it with your mouse and a pop-up menu opens with the following options: Define, Translate, Search Book, Search Google and Search Wikipedia," explains the Google Books blog.


Definitions are obtained from Google Dictionary, while translation is powered by Google Translate. If you click "Search Book", Google shows a list of all the instances in which the selected text appears in the book.




These features aren't available yet in the Google Books apps for Android and iPhone.

7 Google Features Only Available in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is at the forefront of the new technologies and Google services are the first to use them. Here are some examples of features only available in Google Chrome:

1. Native printing in Google Docs. You no longer have to download PDF files and use Adobe Reader or a similar PDF reader to print documents. Google implemented a W3C working draft from 2006.

2. Uploading folders in Google Docs. While you can install a Java applet in other browsers to upload folders, Chrome is the only browser that supports this feature natively.


3. Voice Input in Google Translate. The latest Chrome version supports the HTML Speech API, which provides speech recognition and input to web pages. The first Google service that supports this feature is Google Translate, but it's also tested for Google Web Search. Instead of typing your query or the text you want to translate, you can speak into your computer's microphone.

4 & 5. Desktop notifications in Gmail and Google Calendar. It's a really useful feature that replaces the annoying pop-up notification in Google Calendar and shows an unobtrusive notification when you receive a new message.


6. Open PDF attachments in Gmail using the built-in PDF reader, instead of Google Docs Viewer. It's not clear why Google doesn't detect Adobe Reader's plug-in to use a more full-featured PDF reader.

7. Drag and drop Gmail attachments to your desktop. Instead of clicking the "download" link, you can drag the file icon to your desktop.

Google Maps OneBox Outlines

Google's OneBox displayed when you search for the name of a country, a city or a zip code got smarter. Google added an outline around the location you want to find, so the map is even more useful. For example, try searching for [Bronx], [Detroit 48238], [Baku], [Paraguay map].

Chris, a reader of this blog, says that he used CityData before noticing the new Google feature. While CityData is only useful for the US, the Google Maps OneBox is displayed for almost any city in the world.


{ via Search Engine Land. Thanks, Chris. }

Gmail's New Ad System

I've previously reported about Gmail's experiments with image ads and personalized ads, but it seems that these tests are two pieces from a puzzle: a new ad-matching system for Gmail.

New York Times reports that the new algorithms try to find better ads. "Alex Gawley, Google's senior product manager overseeing Gmail, (...) said Gmail's revamped ad-matching system, now in limited tests, analyzes context as well as the content of an individual message. It looks at what he calls 'signals in your inbox,' like whether you open messages with particular keywords and don't open those with other keywords."

Gmail will also include static image ads. "For example, an e-mailed offer for a ski package showing a skier on the slopes could be accompanied by an ad on the right side of the screen, showing a competing offer, replete with another skier coming down another slope. Mr. Gawley said the image used in the ad would be static, not animated, and would be used only in cases where the e-mail message itself showed images."

Gmail's new ads will still be related to your messages, but Google will add other signals that will make the ads an extension of your inbox. Just like Google shows small images ads next to images search results and uses your preferences to personalize ads, Gmail's contextual ads will improve using more data.

As long as the ads are relevant, moderately useful and they aren't distracting, Google is still on the right track. It might take a while to get used to the image ads, but the ad displayed below the messages and the list of messages will be the most obnoxious. "Gmail presents a single text ad when you look at an inbox view and haven't selected a particular message," according to the New York Times.

Pivot Tables in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets added an advanced feature that's really useful for summarizing data: pivot tables. "In essence, a pivot table does just that -- it allows you to 'pivot' or rotate data, thus looking at it from different angles and seeing a variety of patterns which may not be immediately obvious," explains Google Docs blog.

A pivot table is a powerful reporting tool that lets you group, filter, sort, count data. Google has an example of spreadsheet that includes information about some students, but it's not easy to summarize the data without using a pivot table. For example, you can group the students from each class level by gender. Just select "Pivot table report" from the "Data" menu, choose the categories of data to include (gender and class level) and the values to summarize ("class level" summarized by "COUNTA").


"A pivot table report is a dynamic table that lets you interpret data in different ways without ever having to enter a formula. Pivot table reports are particularly useful when you want to narrow down a large data set or analyze relationships between data points," suggests Google's help center, which also includes a guide for using this feature.

A New Interface for Google News: No Clusters, No Clutter

Google News has a redesigned interface that tries to remove the visual clutter and make multimedia content more discoverable. All Google News clusters are collapsed by default, except for the top news story. Clusters include more links, a special section for images and videos, but you have to manually expand them.

"The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter. Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don't use and have a more streamlined experience," explains Google.


By default, Google uses the single column view, but you can switch to the two column view with the added benefit of going back to the old interface. Here's the new interface:


... and the classic interface:



The redesigned UI shows a single news article instead of a group of related articles. Although the cluster is still available, it's strange to see that Google hides one of the main features of Google News: grouping articles about the same topic. As Krishna Bharat, the founder of Google News, has recently said, the service "groups news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place".

Power users can try Google's keyboard shortcuts (j/k for navigating to the next/previous story, o/u for expanding/collapsing a story), but most users will rarely expand stories and only click the main news article.

More Google News Settings

Barry Schwartz spotted some new options that let you personalize Google News. If you go to the Google News settings page, you can tweak Google News to show fewer press releases, more blog posts or even hide all the blog posts and press releases. "The neat part of the control of how you see blog and press release results is that there is a lever. You can pick from None to Fewer to Normal to More. Everyone by default is set to normal," says Barry Schwartz.

You can also disable the automatic refresh of the Google News homepage. By default, Google reloads the page every 15 minutes.


I tried to hide all the blog posts and press releases, but this only worked for search results. Google News sections still included blog posts and press releases:

Google's Define Operator, No Longer Useful

Last month, Google added a new search options in the sidebar: dictionary. It's a new interface for Google Dictionary that combines definitions from a reputable dictionary with definitions from the Web, usage examples and other useful information.

At the same time, some users reported that Google's define: operator no longer works. The operator was useful to find definitions obtained from Web pages, so you could type [define:iffy] and find a list of definitions. Now the operator is no longer broken, but it only shows the definition from Google Dictionary and links to the dictionary page. You could type [define iffy] and get similar results.


Maybe Google should send users to the dictionary page when they use the define: operator. It's an advanced feature that's not used by many people, but it's very useful.

Here's how it looked:


{ Thanks, Henry. }

Playlists in YouTube's Drop Down Menu

YouTube's drop down menu at the top of the page now includes a list of all your playlists and makes it easier to access your favorite videos, your liked videos and the videos added to the "Watch later" playlist.


"You will now see a different set up when you click on your username in the upper right hand corner of any page. In addition to showing the same links to access your Account, My Videos, etc. you will be able to click on thumbnails to automatically load your playlists, Liked, Favorites, and Watch Later lists. The songs in your playlists will be accessible in the strip across the bottom of your screen -- so you can easily navigate to different videos in the playlist you are watching," explained a Google employee.

Another way to access your playlists is to expand the small bar displayed at the bottom of the page, click "Options" and select "Load a different playlist".

{ Thanks, Andrew. }