Friday, November 20, 2009
Google to Test New, More Colorful (and Permanent) Sidebar
Google is rolling out a design prototype to some users which will have a permanent new pane to the left hand side. Within that pane, as the screenshot by Search Engine Land (with more coverage) shows, there will be sections such as “Everything”, “Images”, or “Video”, as well as related search queries and more fine-tuning options. Clicking “Images” switches to what Google internally calls the images “mode”, meaning the results will now consist of images. “By default, Google guesses at the modes it thinks are most relevant to your search,” Danny Sullivan explains. The top bar of the prototype still contains navigation links like images and video, too, causing a bit of redundancy.
I also got hold of a sprites image that looks like it’s used for this prototype (a sprite image is referenced by a stylesheet, and quicker to transmit because it only needs to be downloaded once, and can then be cropped as needed for different icons on the client side). Have a look, you can see the new Google results page logo and some of the pane icons, among other things:
If Google doesn’t switch its place, this image is hosted at
google.com/images/srpr/nav_logo3w.png
Here’s another one (going by the number 5; a number 4 is available too):
If this is ever rolled out for everyone – right now, around 1 - 3% are going to see it, Search Engine Land says – it’s going to be a pretty major design step. Right now, the left hand pane still needs to be manually expanded, which probably means many people ignore it. I guess the question for the new harder-to-ignore pane will be whether it’ll start to get in your way or not. For many queries, we may just be looking for the best website out there, or a quick bit of textual information; for other queries, we may well like to have richer results. Right now, Google already automatically sometimes shows richer results and sometimes more text based ones – the “universal search” approach, though Google’s Marissa Mayer finds it can cause unexpected “Jazz" style result design that slows searchers down. I guess for the new constant sidebar there’s both the chance that it causes more organization, or more clutter. If any of you stumbles upon this prototype, please let me know via email of the contents of the Google.com cookie named PREF so we can reproduce the test and have a try ourselves!
[Thanks Ionut! Image CC-licensed by Search Engine Land.]
A Preview of Google Chrome OS
Google has released Chromium OS*, the open source precursor to their Chrome OS (which Google says will be “ready for users” in a year). Google in a blog post explains that the Chrome operating system will be all about web apps, not traditional apps, so the “entire experience” takes place within the browser. Additional focus in Chrome OS will be on speed, as well as security; “Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code,” Google promises. They also mention that they “benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit”, some of the layers of Chrome OS.
Below video is giving an overview of the Chrome OS user interface:
Expanding the app menu, linking to web apps such as Gmail, Hotmail or Google Calendar.
Some windows remain always on top.
[Thanks Fabio, Ricardo, Inferno, everyone! Screenshots from Google’s Chromium site via Chathurga.]
*I was not able to reach that site at the moment.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
On the Fight Over Control of the Web
Tim O’Reilly argues that we’re heading for a web war – an ugly fighting over the control of the web, which goes against the web as an interoperable platform:
[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.
But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it’s had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.
A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it’s also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that “data is the Intel Inside” of the next generation of computer applications.
Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free – but only to their own business partners. (...)
Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (...) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications (...)
[W]e’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.
Admittedly, some of the dominant platforms Tim points out are built on top of sort of democratic crowd wisdom; Google’s result rankings are powered by the specifics of how people around the world prefer to link to one another; Wikipedia is made up of our collective typing; on eBay, we’re selling stuff to each other. In all of these the middle man still has control, but it may not be a classic monopoly – this time around, playing nicely seems to increase your chance of long term survival. Google, for instance, has been playing very nice recently, with lots of open source initiatives, tools to make things more transparent, focus on data export and so on; Wikipedia on the other hand is giving away all content under flexible licensing terms, previously GNU and now Creative Commons.
Or is this just a more subtle way to introduce the platform monopoly of the future? What happens when an API is cancelled, our user accounts get banned, our content gets deleted or not accepted in the first place, or the platform provider decides to ban certain countries from its content, or decides to censor some of its content in some countries? Will we have enough useful competition to switch to, or are we locked in because it just so happens that only one or two players have the resources to create the kind of backends needed for tools working on this immensely fast changing and wide web? Will there only be a few dominating companies, each with a massive user base, and whatever independent developers throw on the web, these companies can copy into their existing tools – because that’s where people already are, crushing competition not because their individual copies are better, but because they’re the host of a few immensely popular and cool tools which manage to carry their other offerings?
[Via Waxy.]
Google Results Show a Page’s Place Within the Site Hierarchy
Some websites have a hierarchical navigation path; for instance, the eBay URL collectibles.shop.ebay.com/Comics-/63/i.html?_pcats=1 is put in Home > Buy > Collectibles > Comics > Search results. Now, Google sometimes helps searchers by displaying such navigation hierarchy info in the green place that used to carry the page URL. The site’s domain is still shown, so above eBay example turns into the following Google line:
collectibles.shop.ebay.com > Buy > Collectibles
...and you can also click on the parts like “Collectibles” to be taken straight to that section.*
Note this doesn’t work for any URL or site. Also, sometimes intermediate hierarchical positions will be collapsed using a “...” to save space.
*If you can’t see these “breadcrumbs” yet, this may still be rolled out for you.
[Thanks Hebbet via the Google blog, and Jim!]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Explore Similar Images with Google Image Swirl
Google has released an interactive similar images explorer. The app is called Google Image Swirl, and it’s using the wonder wheel Flash visualization you might know from web search results.
Here’s how it works: you enter a query, like “lion”. After a bit of loading, and if your keyword is supported (not all queries are), you’ll be presented with some visual base categories Google could find:
Opening a category by clicking on it will start the star exploration, with your image in center, surrounded by similar images. Clicking on a surrounding image will put it in focus, and new surrounding images are loaded dynamically:
Once you reached a final image with no more new neighbors, a click on it will take you to the original source site it’s crawled from:
In all of this, even due to its scripted Flash nature, the back button will take you to your last focus image. The app is fast, accessible, scaling pretty well to many keywords (not all – Google mentions there’s 200,000 at the moment), and on first glance it looks useful, too.
Already though, Google has a “Find similar images” link below pics in Google Images. It looks less glorious but feels similarly fast to use. The difference with Image Swirl seems to be that Swirl always takes into account your original keyword, meaning that new images will not only look similar, but also always shows e.g. a lion, if that’s what you entered. The similar images explorer currently available in Google Images on the other hand gets rid of your keyword and start a free-style visual exploration... i.e. the more clicks away from your original image, the less likely you’ll still be looking at lions. Both approaches have their merits, and it would be nice to see an additional pattern matching app which allows you to visually browse using a set of base shapes, which then become more and more refined, so that you could intuitively drill down towards your target pic.
[Thanks Manoj Nahar and WebSonic.nl!]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Google’s Gizmo5 Acquisition Official Now
TechCrunch had reported it recently and now it’s made official: Google has acquired Skype competitor Gizmo5. “[W]e’ve acquired Gizmo5, a company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers,” the Google Voice blog writes. “Gizmo5’s engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being”.
TechCrunch wrote, “Google Voice is a great VoIP and phone identity service, but they have no endpoint for calls. Gizmo5, which by the way already integrates with Google Voice, is a soft phone end point for Google phone users. In other words, you will be able to make and receive calls to your Google Voice phone number from your computer.”
[Thanks James Xuan!]
Following Google Wave Docs
“Too much noise” was one of the complaints held against Google Wave. Now Google is starting to introduce concepts of following and unfollowing Wave documents. Now, you need to click Follow to make a public wave remain in your inbox with its updates; previously, that was the default behavior. Muting on the other hand, which was available before, is now consequently renamed to unfollowing. You will still be auto-following Wave docs to which others have added you, though.
Furthermore, Google says they’re also thinking about expanding Wave so that that the following of people may become an option. Doing so would open up yet another use case for Wave which was still missing, namely the one of “opt-in” group-messaging tools like Friendfeed and Blogger.
[Thanks WebSonic!]
Google SPDY Protocol Aims to Make Web Pages Load Faster
Google has released experimental work of a protocol that tries to speed up the web. It’s called SPDY, prononunced “speedy”. They write:
[SPDY is] an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a specification of the protocol, we have developed a SPDY-enabled Google Chrome browser and open-source web server. In lab tests, we have compared the performance of these applications over HTTP and SPDY, and have observed up to 64% reductions in page load times in SPDY. We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code, and test results, to make SPDY the next-generation application protocol for a faster web.
[Thanks BizAbh!]
Consumer Watchdog Criticizes Today’s Conference at Google HQ
Warning that a Democratic Senate Campaign Committee Fundraiser scheduled to be held at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, on Friday created an appearance of a conflict of interest, Consumer Watchdog called on the seven Senators scheduled to appear not to attend.
“Public policy matters should be decided in a hearing room with sunlight and transparency not in a $5,000-per-seat-minimum venue on the Googleplex Campus,” (...)
“Senators should discuss public policy issues in open forums accessible to anyone who is interested. The public must not be locked out of a policy discussion that is taking place behind closed doors of a donor-funded forum because average Americans cannot afford the price of admission,” the letter said. “This is a private hearing, bought and paid for only by those with a vested interest in the outcome.”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) plans to host a “National Innovation Conference” featuring Joel Benenson, pollster to President Obama, at Google’s headquarters on Friday, Nov. 13. Senators Jeff Bingaman, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Tom Carper, Mark Warner, Jeff Merkley, and Mark Begich are scheduled to attend. “Hosts” are being asked to contribute $30,400; “sponsors” would give $10,000 and “guests” pay “$5,000.” (...)
“Holding this fundraising event on Google’s campus supposedly to discuss technological innovation gives the company and other Silicon Valley high-rollers a private audience with Senators that will define the terms of the policy debate in a vacuum ... This fundraising forum raises the specter of pay-to-play politics when so many issues of concern to Google and the rest of the Silicon Valley technology community are on the table.”
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Google Movies Update
Google Movies has received an update and now shows more information in regards to movies, theater locations, and movie showtimes, Google at their blog announced. How well does it work for your city?
Google Public Data Onebox Expands
Google has added a new data source to their Public Data onebox: World Bank data. One data point you can query now is the relative number of internet users for a given country. Try searches like the following to see it in action:
- internet users in china
- internet users in germany
- internet users in usa
Other types of searches, like co2 emissions of ..., are listed at Google’s blog.
As opposed to organic search result answers, which are sort of publicly web-voted on to decide on authority, oneboxes are sometimes more hand-picked, with Google’s employees more directly being the judge on what’s deemed right.
Google China Music Player Gets Makeover
Google launched a redesign of their Chinese music player (partnered with Top100.cn), which pops up in a new window when you perform a search at the Music base site. The new player puts more focus on search (results will be loaded in the old window), relocates some buttons, and also links to a music list sharing functionality using a Microsoft or Yahoo account, among others.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Locking SafeSearch
Google has added a “Lock SafeSearch” feature, available via their search preferences page. It’s meant for concerned adults who don’t want kids to switch away from the SafeSearch filtering (SafeSearch prevents certain adult content from entering web or image results). Once you enable the lock, Google-colored balls as pictured above will appear stamped on the page, meant to be seen by adults from further away – not even logging out will get rid of them. Once cookies are deleted though the lock is gone (and it’s always possibe to switch to another search engine, like Microsoft Bing).
A technical side effect to all this is that now, logging out is not always a clean separation anymore – e.g. if another person signs in to their own account after you’ve activated the lock and signed out, they will still find your email address on their preferences page (it will read e.g. “SafeSearch is currently locked. If you are philipp.lenssen@gmail.com, you can unlock or verify this preference.”)
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Go! vs Go
Francis McCabe writes:
I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have been papers published on this and I have a book.
I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to change my language!
More specifically, Francis’ language is called “Go!” (with an exclamation mark), and his book is self-published at Lulu. I get the feeling no one should be able to “reserve” a normal word for their product/ invention/ programming language and then block others from using it in the future – what are your thoughts?
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