Google's Gay Rainbow

It's not the first June when Google changes the search results interface when you search for [gay] and other related terms. While in 2009 and 2010 Google added a colorful bar below the search box, this year there's a rainbow next to the search box.


June is the "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" and there are many pride parades all over the world. Last year, Google's blog included an article about gay parades and the Google employees who participated.

"Google supports its LGBT employees in many ways: raising its voice in matters of policy, taking a moment to remember the plight of transgender people around the world and going the extra mile to ensure that its employees are treated fairly."

{ Thanks, multilind. }

Google Docs Tests Offline Support, Powered by HTML5

Google Docs team promised to bring back offline support this summer, but some traces of the new offline interface are already available. "I logged into Docs today and saw this! It's not yet functional, but an exciting sign! The code is being pushed," says Owen, a reader of this blog.


Angelo "saw a black bar flash up on screen quickly when loading the DocList of [his] Google Apps account". After a few refreshes, he managed to see the bar that lets you switch to the offline mode. Unfortunately, Google Docs doesn't work offline, at least not yet.

In a recent Reddit thread, a member of the Google Docs team said that "you're going to see offline start to roll out later this summer. We used to have offline with Google Gears, but it became pretty clear that plugins weren't the right approach. We've been reimplementing offline using HTML5 standards like AppCache, File API, and IndexDB We're some of the first webapps that are really putting those standards to the test, so it's taken a while to iron out the kinks."

{ Thanks, Owen and Angelo. }

Google Could Add Face Recognition to Google Profiles

Florian Rohrweck found a lot of interesting things analyzing Google's code. For example, Google Profiles will add an option that will allow Google to recognize your face in other people's photos. Picasa Web's name tags can become global: a new section from your profile titled "photos of you" will list the photos from other people where you are tagged. Google provides an approval mechanism, so you can reject some of the photos. "When a tag is approved, it is linked to your profile, and the photo is added to the 'Photos of you' section."


Google Profiles will include a new tab for videos, a photo editing feature, you'll be able to group your friends in "circles", chat from Google Profiles and add gadgets. There's also a "camera sync" feature that could automatically upload the photos from the "camera" album of a mobile phone or tablet.


As expected, Google Profiles is the place where Google's social efforts are most visible. Buzz will be a back-end service for activity streams and not a standalone service. Google Profiles could eventually replace iGoogle, since it will add support for gadgets and it will include the most interesting items shared by the people you're following.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

Chromification of the Operating System

Three years ago, when Google launched Chrome many people wondered if it will be successful. Chrome became a very popular browser, with more than 160 million active users, but its most important achievement was accelerating the development of all the other browsers and shifting their priorities from adding UI features to removing clutter, making them faster and better suited for running Web apps. Internet Explorer embraced HTML5, Firefox started to update more often, Opera simplified its interface. Google started from the scratch and created a browser for today's Web apps.


For some, Chrome OS may seem pointless. Why buy a notebook that can only run a single program, when you can install Chrome on your existing computer? But why switch from Firefox to a browser that doesn't support advanced extensions? After all, Firefox is a lot more customizable than Chrome since any extension can dramatically alter the interface and integrate with the browser. It turns out that Firefox extensions can sometimes slow down the browser, some use a lot of resources, they're difficult to update and every new major release can break them. Chrome's extensions are less powerful, but they don't slow down the browser, they're easier to develop and to maintain and major new releases rarely break them.

Just like Chrome influenced all the other important browsers, Chrome OS will change the other operating systems. Sandboxing applications can make the operating system a lot more secure, saving your settings and files online allows you to use them from any other computer, Web applications are powerful enough to replace some of the native apps and they don't live on your computer, so they can be constantly updated. Even Windows intends to switch to "Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC" in the next major release, while still supporting "legacy" apps. It's obvious that most of the apps will eventually migrate to the Web and Chrome OS is better suited to support them because it doesn't have to worry about legacy apps and because it's designed just like a Google Web app: constantly updated, fast, clutter-free. "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed," said William Gibson. Chrome OS is ready... when you are.

{ image from the Chrome Comic Book, licensed by Google as Creative Commons }

Google Tests a New Interface

Another day, another Google experiment. This time, Google tests a new search button inspired by Bing and removes the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from the homepage, probably because it's no longer useful. Google Instant makes the search button unnecessary most of the time, so Google could remove it altogether. It's interesting that the new design emphasizes the search button instead of making it less prominent.


Google's experiment highlights the header of the search results pages and uses gray/red icons and labels in the vertical navigation menu. Another change is that the "cached" and "similar" links are placed in the Instant Preview box, so they're more difficult to find.



All the icons and images for this experiment are available in a sprite.

{ Thanks, Juuso, François and Websonic. }

Print Preview in Google Chrome 13

If you regularly print Web pages, Chrome wasn't the best browser for you because it lacked print preview. Chrome 13, now available in beta, addresses this issue and finally allows users to preview documents before printing them.

Chrome's implementation is special because it uses the built-in PDF plugin to convert the page you want to print into a PDF file. There's no special "print preview" option: when you click "print", Chrome opens a new tab that shows some of the options from the native print dialog and a preview pane.


Chrome generates a PDF file every time you click "print" and when you change printing settings and you can save the file by selecting "Print to PDF" from the "Destination" drop-down. Unfortunately, Chrome's PDF files are huge (the file generated for Google's homepage has almost 1 MB). Google managed to reduce the performance penalty of generating PDF files and now print preview is pretty fast, on par with Internet Explorer 9.

To open the native printing dialog, click "Advanced". You'll be able to change printer settings, add a new printer or print selected text. If you disable the built-in PDF plugin, Chrome will show an error message instead of the preview and you'll only be able to print a page using the native dialog. That's an important flaw that needs to be addressed before releasing the stable version.

Chrome's tabbed printing page doesn't integrate with Google Cloud Print yet, but this feature will be available in the future. Google plans to add many other missing features: ability to adjust headers, footers and margins, shrink/expand to fit page, integration with Google Docs, a search box for printers, location-aware printer selection, syncing print preview settings to the native dialog.

For now, print preview only works in Chrome 13 for Windows and Linux. If you don't want to wait until the first stable release that supports print preview, you can install Chrome 13 Beta. Another option is to install Chrome 14 Canary and run it side by side with the stable release.

Google's Lists of Related Searches

Google started to show a new universal search result with related queries. If you search for the name of a category, Google will list some of the most popular members of that category. For example, you can search for [German cars], [rock bands], [Indian food], [nuts], [clouds] and Google will show a list of items from that category. Google says that they are the top references for that query and it will also list three sources, without linking to the relevant pages.


The feature is powered by Google Squared and it's not very new. Most of the results were available if you selected "related searches" from the search options sidebar.


"Sometimes when you're searching, you're not just looking for one specific result, you may be looking for a list to start a series of searches. For example, if you search for [greek philosophers], many search results mention well known philosophers like Plato or Aristotle. Typically, searches like these are the beginning of a research task, where you follow up by searching to learn more about each item in the list, in this case each philosopher," explains Google.

Just like the related searches box, the "top references" box lets you try different queries without having to go back to the previous page. If you click one of the related searches, the box is moved at the top of the page and you can quickly preview the results for all the other items.

Google also started to show relevant lists for actors, movies, TV shows, music artists, writers, painters. For example, when you search for [Picasso], Google shows a list of famous Picasso paintings and small thumbnails. Searching for a movie or a TV shows brings a list of actors, searching for a singer shows a list of albums, while typing the name of a writer returns a list of popular books.



Google Squared, Google Q&A, "best guess" results and related searches are just the tip of the iceberg. Google uses its huge index of pages from the Web to extract information, find facts and correlations, create lists and hierarchies, understand the meaning of a query and generate complex answers. At the recent Inside Search event, Alan Eustace said that his title changed from "Senior VP of Search" to "Senior VP of Knowledge" because search is too limiting and Google's goals are much broader. They "go beyond the organization of information to understanding and facilitating the creation of knowledge".

Google Tests New Search Snippets UIs

Google continues to test various changes to the search interface. A recent experiment places URLs above the snippets, decreases text size for the snippets and moves the links to the cached pages and similar pages to the Instant Preview box.



There's also an experiment that changes the color scheme:


... and another experiment that shows the site's name next to the URL, but doesn't remove the URL:


{ Thanks, JD and Riccardo. }

My Maps Becomes My Places

Google Maps updated the "My Maps" section, which now includes the places you've starred and rated. Mapplets are no longer available and custom maps aren't popular enough to have their own section, so "My Maps" became "My Places", a list of locations you've visited, bookmarked, rated or saved to a custom map.



"Items are organized by date with your most recent activity at the top, and filters make it easy to sort and view only your maps, starred locations or rated places. My Places also simplifies your ability to manage the locations that make up your personalized maps experience. Using the drop-down arrow next to each location in your list, you can easily delete any of your saved maps, stars or Google Places ratings. These personalization changes will automatically be synchronized across all other Google properties including Google Places, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile," informs Google.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that the list of Google Latitude check-ins is added to My Places and that the combined list becomes an optional tab on your Google Profile.

Google Instant for Image Search

Google Instant is now available for image search results, but only as an experimental feature. After you enable "Instant on Images", Google will start to autocomplete your queries and show image results before you finish entering the query. It's a great way to try different queries and see the results almost instantly.


Unfortunately, there are some limitations that make this feature less useful. "Search by Image will not work if you opt into this experiment. Also, Instant on Images is available only if you already have Instant on Web. Finally, this experiment is enabled only for the Images search result page, not on the Google Images home page."

You can try this feature without joining Google's experiment: just append &esrch=ImagesInstant::PublicOptIn to an Image Search URL, like this or bookmark this page.

Google also added an experiment for Voice Search, which allows you to try the feature before it's available for you. Voice Search only works in Google Chrome 11+.

Google says that you can't select multiple experiments at the same time, but I've managed to enable both Voice Search and Instant on Images. For some reason, you won't be able to use Search by Image when you enable Voice Search, even if Instant on Images is disabled.

Google Adds Voice Search, Visual Search and Results Prerendering

Two of the most important Google mobile services: voice search and visual search will now be available from your computer.

Voice search, a feature that's built into Android, also works in Google Chrome and allows you to search using your voice. Chrome added support for the Speech Input API back in April and it's the only browser that implemented the API. Right now, Chrome's speech input feature is only available for English.

"We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, 'Can I speak for this?' — it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we've added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you're using Chrome, you'll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box. Simply click the microphone, and you can speak your search," explains Google. The feature is gradually rolled out, so you may not see it yet.


Google Goggles is a full-fledged visual search engine that's trapped in a mobile application. But why do you have to buy a smartphone to use Google Goggles when you could simply upload an image to Google and find related pages and images on the Web? "Search by Image" does more than TinEye, the "reverse image search engine" that lets you find an image on the Web.

"Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate 'best guess' text description of your image, as well as find other images that have the same content as your search image. Your search results page can show results for that text description as well as related images," mentions Google.

You can drag and drop an image to the search box, paste an image URL in the search box or click the camera icon and upload an image. Google generates a hybrid results page that shows both related images and Web search results for the equivalent text query.


Google also a developed two extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you right-click on an image and use it as a query. "With these extensions, you can initiate a search on Google using pictures on the web. You can discover photos of places, learn more about art pieces, identify landmarks, and more."

While voice search and visual search are useful, the most impressive search feature launched by Google today is Instant Pages. The new feature only works in Chrome 13+ (available in Canary/Dev Channel and soon in beta), but it will radically improve your search experience. Chrome prerenders the top search result if it's likely that you will select it, so you no longer have to wait for the page to load. You might remember a feature called "prefetching" that was first supported by Firefox. Prerendering is a lot more powerful than prefetching.

According to a Chrome developer, "prefetch is Firefox style prefetching of resources specified (just populating the cache). In Chrome, with prerender, we don't just download the URL specified, but render the whole page including running all the JavaScript and downloading and rendering all the embedded resources."

For most users, Instant Pages will look like magic. They'll search for [nytimes] or [amazon], click the first result and be surprised to see that the page loads instantly. Google says that this feature saves 2-5 seconds on a typical search.

But Chrome's prerendering is not limited to Google searches. Any Web developer can use it by inserting a link element with a special value for the "rel" attribute. "Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next -- for example, the 'next page' link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded," suggests Google.