Google Tests a New Version of the Black Bar

While Google hasn't abandoned the navigation bar launched last year, both the old and the new interface are used today. If you load google.com in Chrome's incognito mode, the old interface shows up more often than the new UI. The simplified interface made navigation more complicated, even if it looks better than the black bar.

Google even tests a slightly updated version of the old bar that uses the services from the new UI, more spacing and a different color scheme.



Here's how you can try the latest Google experiment. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+, open google.com in a new tab, load:

* Chrome's JavaScript console (Ctrl+Shift+J)
* Firefox's Web Console (Ctrl+Shift+K)
* Safari's Web Inspector (how to do that?)
or
* IE's Developer Tools (press F12 and select the "console" tab)

and paste the following code:

document.cookie="PREF=ID=381502750b6e9119:U=aaee74aefea7315a:FF=0:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1328391998:LM=1328392000:S=yPtlCgLbEnezu5b4; path=/; domain=.google.com";window.location.reload();

Then press Enter and close the console. If you're not in the US and you're using a different Google domain, replace ".google.com" with your domain in the code (for example: ".google.co.uk" in the UK).

If you'd like to go back to the old interface and reset the Google PREF cookie, repeat the same steps, but use the following code:

document.cookie="PREF=; path=/; domain=.google.com";window.location.reload();

Google Instant, Disabled For Slow Computers

Google Instant is supposed to make searching faster, but you need a pretty good Internet connection, a modern browser and a decent computer. Google Instant is not available if you use IE6 or other outdated browsers and it's automatically disabled if you have a slow Internet connection.

Now Google also disables Instant if you have a slow computer. "If Instant gets automatically disabled, we continue to check your computer speed and will re-enable Instant if your performance improves," informs Google. If you don't like this change, you can disable it from the search preferences page. Just select "always show Instant results" in the "Google Instant predictions" section.


I've tested this feature on an old laptop and Google's implementation isn't great. Google Instant continues to be enabled for the initial query even if it's slow, then it's suddenly disabled when you visit Google Search again. Google doesn't show a message next to the search box to explain why Instant is disabled and not many people will visit the search preferences page, which both an explanation and a fix.


This is just one of the 17 updates from last month that improved Google Search.

Google+ and the Post-Web Google

I've noticed an increasing number of ads that no longer send people to the company's sites. Instead, the ads only include a link to the official Facebook page. Sites suddenly look outdated, no longer include the latest information and people stop visiting them.


There are still people that visit those outdated sites and many are coming from search engines like Google. Despite Google's efforts to have a comprehensive index, there's a growing subset of the Web it can't properly index and that's Facebook. Sure, Google indexes a lot of Facebook pages, but that's like trying to find your keys in a dark room. Google needs Facebook's map to index all the pages and find the connections between pages and between users, but Facebook is not willing to license this valuable data to the most important competitor. Google tried to make the web social and failed, so now the only option to stay relevant is to build an alternative to Facebook's walled garden and that's Google+.

+1s are the new links, authors have profiles, companies have social pages and this new universe will try to coexist with the old Web in Google's search results. Google tried to focus on the users and find ways to make the social Web more open, but now it has to focus on itself and do everything it can to stay alive and maybe even save the Web. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but that's impossible if it can't access, understand and rank that information.

Back in 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin used links to determine the importance of a Web page. Now links and pages are no longer that important and the old rule of trying to send people to other sites as quickly as possible is difficult to apply. Showing personalized results requires understanding users better, encouraging them to share more content and create connections. In many ways, Google+ is the anti-Google and that's why it's difficult to understand some of the new features.

The Self-Serving Google+ Results

Google has been often accused of promoting its own services in Google Search. Whether it was Google News, Image Search, Product Search or Video Search, the specialized search engine showed results from all over the web and not just from Google's own services. Image Search wasn't restricted to Picasa Web Albums, Video Search wasn't restricted to YouTube, Blog Search wasn't restricted to Blogger. Even for services like Google Dictionary and Google Finance that have their OneBox at the top of the Google search results, Google shows a list of other relevant services.

Google's special section that shows people and pages from Google+ doesn't look like a regular Google OneBox. It's placed in the right sidebar, where Google used to display ads. It shows up for general queries like [music], [sports], [math], that aren't typically associated with social search results. It only shows results from Google+, not from other social services like Twitter or Facebook. It's there even if you're not logged in using your Google account or you're not using Google+.

If Google+ wasn't a Google product, would it make sense to show a similar OneBox with profiles from social sites? Normally, Google would have created a profile search engine and showed a group of relevant results somewhere in the list of search results. Like this:


Google already indexes profiles from different sites and even shows special snippets with structured data. Why not create a special search engine for profiles like the one that lets you search recipes or the search engine for applications?

When Google released Knol, many people wondered if Google could boost the rankings for Knol articles or create a special OneBox with Knol results. "Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google's rankings," replied Matt Cutts and he was right. Now what if Google displayed a Knol OneBox at the top of the search results for queries that returned relevant Knol articles? Maybe Knol would've become more popular and it wouldn't have been discontinued.

Is it fair to promote results from a single service, especially when you own that service? Even if those results are comprehensive, relevant and useful, it's always a good idea to also show results from other services.

Some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace developed a site called Focus on the User that lets you replace the Google+ results with other social profiles from the web. From:


... to:



The results are better simply because you can check the accounts from other social services. Maybe an artist shares more information on Twitter or maybe the Facebook account is more important. "When you search for 'cooking' today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie's Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago," noticed the authors of the Focus on the User site. I still don't think that the social search box should be placed next to the results, but at least the tweak made it more useful.

"Focus on the user and all else will follow. Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line." (Google's philosophy)

{ via waxy.org. Thanks, Michel. }

Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols

Google usually ignores punctuation and mathematical symbols from a query because it doesn't index them. They rarely change the meaning of a query and Google's index would have to grow a lot bigger, without improving the results too much. Some punctuation marks and mathematical symbols are used to provide advanced features (for example: colon, quotes, minus sign, plus sign).

I've recently noticed that Google started to show results for queries like [.], [,], [:], [;], [#], [%], [@], [^], [)], [~], [|], ["], [<], [$]. When you search for [%], Google shows the results for [percent sign] and that happens irrespective of the interface language, so it's not a synonym generated by Google's algorithms.


Search for [:] and you'll get the results for [colon]. Most results are about the colon from the human anatomy and they're not relevant.

If Google Results Aren't Helpful, Ask on Google+

Sometimes Google's results aren't that useful and they don't answer your question. Maybe the query is imprecise or obscure, the results are outdated or you don't have the patience to check the first 100 results to find something helpful. Asking your Twitter followers or your Facebook friends could be a great idea. Google doesn't integrate with Twitter or Facebook, but it experiments with a new feature that shows a message below the list of results: "Want to ask your friends about [your query]? Ask on Google+".


Clicking the link opens a Google+ box that already includes a message: "Hi there! I have a question about [my query]..." Edit your message, click "Ask" and the first results could show up in a few seconds in Google's notification widget.


Maybe Google+ also will include a revamped version of Aardvark and you'll be able to send your question to the right people.

Blocked Sites, No Longer Available in Google Search?

Last year, Google released a feature that allowed you to block sites from appearing in your search results. After clicking a result and going back to the search results page, Google displayed a special link next to the result for blocking the entire domain.

The feature no longer seems to work: the "block" link is no longer displayed, the preferences page doesn't mention the feature and the blocked domains still appear in Google's results. The page that allows you to manage blocked sites is still available.

"When you're signed in to Google, you can block a specific website from appearing in your future search results. This is a helpful option when you encounter a site that you don't like and whose pages you want to remove from your future results. If you change your mind, you can unblock the site at any point," explains a help center page.


Update: Google's Matt Cutts says that this could be a temporary issue. "The right people are looking at what needs to happen to re-enable this, but it might take some time."

Google Search Shows More Results From Google+

Google's search results are personalized even if you don't log in to a Google account. Google uses your location and your previous searches to customize the results. When you log in to your account, Google has more information: your search/browsing history, your social connections, the pages you've bookmarked or +1'd. Everyone is different and Google has the opportunity to use information about you to disambiguate queries, to show more results from the sites you trust and pages you're already visited.

Google+ can change Google results more than any other Google service because social data is an important signal for personalizing results, Google owns the end-to-end experience and it's in Google's best interest to show that Google+ helps sites get better rankings. After all, the reason why many sites added Google+ buttons is that Google+ data is used by Google's search algorithms.

The latest initiative that integrates Google+ with Google Search is called "Search, plus Your World." It's an upgrade of the social search feature that integrates the rich content from Google+.

Google Search now has access to non-public posts and photos from Google+ and you'll be able to search all the posts and photos shared with you or from your circles. "You can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they've shared privately with you or publicly. You'll find links shared by your friends, such as activities, restaurants and other things they enjoyed on their trip," mentions Google. Personal results have a special icon next to the snippet, Google shows the number of personal results at the top of the page and you can also restrict the results to these pages.


Google Instant suggestions now include the people from your Google+ circles. "Now, typing just the first few letters of your friend's name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete. Selecting a predicted profile takes you to a results page for your friend, which includes information from their Google+ profile and relevant web results that may be related to them." Google shows similar suggestions for "prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors."


Another change is that Google includes a special box with Google+ pages related to your query. "Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn't possible before," informs Google. I think it's a mistake to show Google+ pages that are vaguely related to a general query like [music]. The box looks more like a thinly disguised ad than a genuinely useful feature (an ad both for Google+ and the celebrity pages).


To balance the increasing number of social features, Google also added two new buttons at the top of the search results pages that help you toggle between the personalized results and the non-personalized results. This works for an entire session and you can also remove personal results from the preferences page.


Right now, "Search, plus Your World" is gradually rolled out over the next few days, but it only be available when you use Google.com in English and you sign in.

While Google+ data can certainly improve search results, I feel like there's too much information that's not really useful and too much Google+ bias. When Google developed the OneBoxes for maps and stocks, it linked to its own services, but also to competing services. Today Google no longer tries to be fair. Showing the number of people that added the author of a news articles to their circles is not more useful than showing the PageRank of the page or the number of Twitter followers. Showing the latest Google+ posts below the homepage of a business is not more useful than showing the latest Twitter posts. Google profiles are not necessarily better than Facebook profiles and the number of +1's is not more useful than the number of likes. To make Google+ more powerful, to attract more celebrities and businesses, Google might end up making Google results less useful. It's a tricky balancing act to use Google search's popularity to increase Google+ adoption, while also improving Google results using Google+ data and there are many mistakes to be made along the way.

Google's Snowy Easter Egg

If you search for [let it snow] using Google, you'll have a hard time checking the search results. Google uses a JavaScript animation that adds some snowflakes and covers the entire page with snow.

Fortunately, Google added a "defrost" button that makes the search results reappear. You can also click anywhere on the page and move your mouse to "defrost" the page or draw something. Click the "+" button and you can share the Easter egg with other Google+ users.

{ Thanks, Venkat. }

Google Mobile Search Increases Text Size

Google Mobile Search increased the text size for search results and reduced the number of words from the snippets. While this change made search results more legible, it also reduced the number of results that are displayed before you start scrolling.

On an iPhone, Google only displays two results in their entirety, instead of three results, and the snippets are way too short.

Old UI:

New UI:

Google Search Pages Hide +1 Buttons

+1 buttons no longer clutter Google's search results pages. They're now displayed when you mouse over the results for most of the pages. If you have +1'd a page, the button will be displayed by default to highlight the result.

In other search-related news, the preferences page has a new interface with custom controls, while the advanced search page switched back to the old interface. Maybe someone read this post and decided to fix the drop-down lists.

When Recent Searches Change Your Google Results

Google uses your search history to personalize the results for your future queries. That's not a new feature, but it was only used to disambiguate queries and to change the order of the results.

Now you might also see a small message next to the snippet which explains that the result was picked because you've searched for a different keyword before. For example, if you search for [tablet] and then search for [asus] Google will include some tablet-related search results and even highlight a page about the Asus Transformer. Right now, this feature is only available in the US.

Sometimes this could be useful. Google connects the dots and tries to provide better results by using keywords from your previous searches. But that's not always a good idea because two consecutive queries aren't necessarily related. You could search for [html table] and [blackberry] and the second result for [blackberry] will be:

Google's algorithms aren't perfect and Google should provide an obvious way to hide the "enhanced" results. You can scroll to the bottom of the page, click "view customizations" and then click "without these improvements", you can also "disable customizations based on search activity" if you aren't logged in, but these options are cumbersome.

{ Thanks, Nick. }

Google's Graphing Calculator

Now you no longer need to use Wolfram Alpha to plot Math graphs. Google shows an interactive graph when you search for a Math function or a list of functions separated by commas. "You can zoom in and out and pan across the plane to explore the function in more detail. This feature covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions, and is available in modern browsers," explains Google.

For example, you can search for [sin(x)/x, 1/x^2] to see this beautiful SVG graph.

You can also search for [sin(x) from -pi to pi] or add extraneous words like "plot", "graph" to the query (example: [graph ln(x)]).

{ Thanks, Arpit. }

Cached Pages in Google Mobile Search

Maybe it's not so obvious, but the link to the cached version of a search result is still available when you're using Google Search on a mobile phone. Just like in the desktop interface, you need to click the Instant Preview icon (a magnifier) and you'll find the "cached" link.

For some reason, the links to the mobile formatted version and to the list of similar pages are no longer displayed. To go back to the old interface that displayed all these links next to the search results, bookmark http://www.google.com/m or replace "google.com/search" with "google.com/m/search" in the URL (just add the two characters in bold).

Restrict Google Results to Mobile Apps

Google's search engine for mobile apps is now available in the sidebar. Just click "More" in the left sidebar and select "applications" to restrict the results to Android and iOS applications. The results aren't only from Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market: you'll also find results from AppBrain, AndroidZoom, CNet and more. Unfortunately, you can't restrict the results to iOS apps or Android, find iPad apps or filter the apps by rating or price.

Here are the results for [games]. The search engine doesn't have a proper homepage, but you can bookmark this page.

The search engine for mobile apps was initially available in the mobile version of Google Search as an OneBox, and then as a search option. Earlier this year, Google added support for app-related rich snippets.

Table Snippets in Google Search

Google has improved the snippets for the pages that include big tables. They're just like the snippets for lists, but columns are clearly separated and snippets also include the table header.

Barry Schwartz says that "Google is trying to figure out the make up of the old fashion HTML tables to show the snippet in a table format". Google also finds the most relevant columns from the table and usually displays the first two rows.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Verbatim

Your query is just the starting point for Google's searches. Sometimes Google fixes misspellings, replaces some of the keywords with synonyms or other related keywords, disambiguates your query using your search history. These changes usually improve the quality of Google results because it's hard to come up with the perfect query and improving the query is the first thing you need to do to get better results.

Unfortunately, Google's adjustments aren't always helpful and this adds noise to the list of the search results. For example, I've noticed that Google matches many pages that mention "iPhone 4" when you search for [iPhone 4S] and that's a really big mistake. Having to use quotes every time you enter a query that includes "iPhone 4S" is annoying, but that's probably an issue that will be fixed when there are more pages that mention the name of Apple's latest phone.

Another way to improve Google's query adjustment algorithms is to use "Verbatim", a new feature from the search options sidebar. Just click "show more search tools" in the sidebar, select "Verbatim" and Google will no longer change your query.

"With the Verbatim tool, you can search using the exact keywords you typed," explains Google. Verbatim disables Google's spelling corrections and Google no longer replaces some of your keywords with synonyms (e.g.: television / TV), similar terms (e.g: buy flowers / send flowers), words with the same stem (e.g.: fixing / fix). Verbatim also disables search personalization.

Here are the results for [iPhone 4S fixing battery], after/before enabling Verbatim.


"In addition to verbatim search, which will be rolling out to all users over the next few days, we're also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger. In the meantime, if you want to search for a very specific term, be that [carosel] or the [etymology of sissors], give the verbatim tool a try," mentions Google.

{ Thanks, Venkat and Herin. }

Google's Info Panes

Google's search results are usually a great source of information, but Google's goal has never been to send users to other pages. If Google can provide an instant answer to a query, then the answer is usually displayed in an OneBox, at the top of the search results page. Here's a movie OneBox from 2007:


Google's OneBoxes have provided weather forecasts, simple facts, definitions, unit conversions, stock information, movie times, sports scores, maps, package tracking information, in addition to results from other specialized search engines. They're still useful, but Google can now provide a lot more information. You've probably noticed that OneBoxes are bigger and more complex these days:


Sometimes OneBoxes replace the top search results, as you can see if you try a query related to local businesses, like [pizza ny]:


The latest evolution of the OneBox is a huge section placed on the right side of the page. It doesn't have an official name yet, but I'll call it the info pane. For general local queries, it displays a static map. If you search for a local business, it now shows information about the business from Google Places.


Google also tests an info pane that shows information about people and companies: a search for [Twitter] shows the name of the CEO, the company's address and other information from Wikipedia. It's likely that the structured data is generated by Freebase, which is now owned by Google.



Google's info panes could include a lot of useful information: detailed answers, fact sheets, interactive widgets, music/video players, slideshows etc. It's a new way to display information and the space constraints of the OneBox have disappeared, now that the ads will be moved to the bottom of the page.

{ Thanks, Jérôme. }

Google's Location-Based Social Annotations

You've probably noticed that Google annotates search results with social data, especially from Google+ and Google +1. You'll sometimes see that a page was mentioned in a Blogger post or a Twitter message by one of your Google+ friends. For other results, Google lists the Google+ friends that +1'd the pages.


If a page has a lot of +1's, Google occasionally shows the number of +1's bellow the snippet. To make the annotation more relevant, Google now shows the number of +1's from your location. For example, "763 people in New York, NY, USA +1'd" Google's Webmaster Tools page.


I'm not sure that it's useful to know the number of +1's for the top results of a navigational query, but this could be useful when you're trying to find a popular restaurant or an Android game.

{ Thanks, Nick. }

Google's Barrel Roll Easter Egg

If you use Google to search for [do a barrel roll] in Chrome, Safari or Firefox, you'll notice that the search results page actually does that. It's a brilliant Easter Egg that will surprise a lot of Google users.

According to Wikipedia, "a barrel roll is an aerial maneuver in which an airplane makes a complete rotation on its longitudinal axis while following a helical path, approximately maintaining its original direction."

There are at least four other Google search Easter Eggs: ASCII art, anagram, recursion and tilt.

{ Thanks, Herin. Spotted by Jason Cross. }