New Google Favicon

Many people noticed a small change: Google has a new favicon. A favicon is a small image that is generally used to reflect the identity of a web site. You can find it in the address bar, in your browser's tabs, in the list of bookmarks or in some feed readers like Bloglines.

Google's favicon is hosted at google.com/favicon.ico and it's a 16x16 pixels image, a standard size for favicons. Google replaced the upper-case "G" in blue border, green and red borders with a lower-case purple "g" in a rounded corner rectangle.


The first time when I saw the new favicon at Google Image Search, I thought there was something wrong with my browser's cache or I typed an incorrect address. Google's new favicon is less cheerful and comforting, but it makes a lot of sense: the small g is a symbol for infinity (∞). A googol (10¹⁰⁰) is just a poor approximation for the huge amount of information that needs to be indexed, organized and made useful by Google.


{ Thanks for the tip, Louis, John and Aleksandr. }

Update: If you want the old favicon back, try this Greasemonkey script (requires Greasemonkey for Firefox, Opera or a userscript plug-in for other browsers).

Update 2: Search Engine Land has an official position from Google. "We recognized there was a need for a Google icon that would better work across multiple applications including web, mobile and client applications. We felt the small 'g' had many of the characteristics that best represent our brand: it's simple, playful, and unique. We will be looking to improve and enhance this icon as we move forward."

Update 3: Google says this is not the final favicon. "We tried in total more than 300 permutations [some of them are displayed below]. It was much harder than we thought at first. We wanted something distinctive and noticeable, so we aimed toward transparency or semi-transparency, so the image would have a more distinctive noticeable shape than just a block. We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn't date itself." If you have some suggestions for Google's favicon, send them here.


Update: The favicon was updated in January 2009.

Gmail Labs?

Google pre-announced a mysterious new feature for Gmail. "On Thursday, June 5th we're going to be launching a new Gmail feature that we like to think of as a next evolution of 20% time. It's a change in our development process and in the way users will be able to influence Gmail's design."

20% time is one of the many peculiar things about Google. "The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that's broken, you can use the time to fix it."

Google's engineers may work on many side-projects related to Gmail and this could be an opportunity for users to try them, send feedback or influence which features should be further developed and added to Gmail. It's not clear if that's the right interpretation for Google's intentionally-ambiguous text, but we'll find out next Thursday.

It might even match one of my predictions for this year: "Gmail will launch a Google Labs-like site with experimental features that could be added by those who are curious to see the next features before they are officially launched." Instead of releasing entirely new applications on Google Labs, it's more practical for Google to create mini-labs for each important service and expose experimental features that could be added or removed, like in Google Experimental Search.

Update (June 5th): TechCrunch covers Google's announcements. "At 6 pm PDT Gmail will launch Gmail labs under a Gmail tab - all users will have access to it. The first batch will have 13 features." Here are the features:

* a module for quick links (saved searches, important messages)
* superstars (additional star icons)
* pictures in Gmail chat
* fixed width font
* custom keyboard shortcuts
* mouse gestures
* random signature
* signature tweaks (places the signature before the quoted text)
* custom date format
* muzzle (hide the status of your contacts in Gmail chat)
* play Snake inside Gmail
* email addict (blocks the screen for 15 minutes)
* hide unread count

You'll be able to find them in a new tab from the Settings section. Probably the most useful features are: quick links, superstars and custom shortcuts. More about Gmail Labs in a future post.