Google's new search results page redesign highlights search options on the left side, in living color.

Starting Wednesday, Google users will see something very different on search results pages as the world’s leading Internet search company trots out one of its most significant redesigns in years.

Google search result pages will get a lot more colorful as Google formally introduces a redesign it has been testing for several years. It’s not a huge surprise since Google has been actively testing the design with users for several months, and testing for this particular revision dates back even further, said John Wiley, senior user experience designer for Google.

With the new look, Google is emphasizing the menu of search options that had previously been hidden on the left-side rail of the search results pages. First unveiled in May 2009, search options required a searcher to click on a “show options” link at the top of the page. Now they will be permanently affixed to the left rail, and Google will surface different search options based on whether they are relevant to the query, Wiley said.

For example, a search for “red shoes” would produce the usual set of results, but on the left rail, Google will surface a link to Google’s shopping search pages. In the same vein, a search for “NFL draft” would surface news and real-time updates on that rail. Users can access the full list of search options by clicking on “more” but will see a changing list of highlighted options on the left rail for different queries.

And those options themselves will be quite visible: Google is using strong colors to highlight those options, in what Wiley called “a modern crisp clean look.” Even Google’s logo is getting in on the act, with a subtle overhaul that brightens the colors and drops the shadowing cast by the letters.

Google's new logo, which eliminates the shadows behind the letters and uses brighter colors.

“This was one of our larger visual experiments we’ve ever run at Google,” Wiley said. The company tested different designs in the wild, with members of the public in Google’s testing labs, and its usual “dog-fooding” process among employees, and assembled enough data on preferences to put together the final product.

Google has been criticized for this data-driven approach to design in the past, perhaps most prominently by former employee Douglas Bowman, who in departing the company last year wrote “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

While not responding directly to Bowman’s concerns in light of the new design, Wiley pointed out that individual designers at Google have to use their intuition to figure out which kinds of visual experiments to test before subjecting those tests to data analysis. “I think that we are very lucky at Google to have the resources to be able to run the kinds of experiments that give us great data,” he said.

Google is also changing the way search tools and search refinements appear on the left hand side of its search results page. A search for “rolling stones” will trigger a list of results under the header “something different,” which in this case would bring up other classic rock bands such as Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin.

The changes will appear on a rolling basis to most users over the course of Wednesday, Wiley said, but could take longer for some users of Google search in languages other than English.

Source: CNET News

Google CEO Eric Schmid

Google is being targeted by lawsuits and governments around the world with potential privacy invasions, so perhaps it wasn’t the best choice of words when Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Mobile World Congress in a keynote address a few days ago: “We can literally know everything if we want to.”

Schmidt was there to talk about the future of mobile, and he said everything you would expect him to — nothing particularly revealing. But several minutes into his address, he talked about the pervasiveness of social networking information, microblogging, and self-publishing on the Internet. And he had this to say:

This notion of publishing and microblogging and so forth, information that you think is generally interesting is an explosion that will drive networks futher into everything we do in every way. Think of it as an opportunity to instrument the world. These networks are now so pervasive that we can literally know everything if we want to. What people are doing, what people care about, information that’s monitored, we can literally know it if we want to, and if people want us to know it.

Schmidt was absolutely right in what he had to say. The amount of information available about people is mind-boggling, particularly when people use social networking sites to post information about themselves. Just consider the site Please Rob Me. It scans Twitter streams for people who say they are not at home, and then publishes that information on the site. Why does the site do it? To let people know just how dangerous it is to publicly post information about themselves that is best left private.

Google has the capability to scan not just Twitter streams, but information from all social networks, and combine that with your search history, and information about you on the Internet. So Schmidt was not guilty of overkill when he spoke to the Mobile World Conference.

He’s clearly aware about the privacy issues this raises — note how he said “we can literally know it if we want to, and if people want us to know it. (Emphasis is mine.) It’s good to see that he added that final caveat. I don’t think Google quite yet understands just how dangerous many people think its power to invade people’s privacy is. But eventually, prodded by governments, I think they’ll get it.

Source: ComputerWorld Blog

Goojje

It all sounds a little too weird and disturbing at the same time but it looks like a certain Chinese site is ready to replace Google Search altogether. Goojje is the name of the new search engine
and it might become the alternative China needs should Google withdraw from the market.

A certain stereotype says about the Chinese that they can copy pretty much any product. That’s certainly based on the large number of replicas and knock offs coming from China, a country that happens to be producing lots of the original products which it copies later on.

But Google’s search engine should be a lot more difficult to replicate, wouldn’t you agree? Or at least that would be the case if Goojje would be going for world domination in the search market. But Goojje seems to be a quick solution to the search needs of a country like China.

Google threatened to pull out of the market after having discovered that it was the target of cyber attacks originating from China. The Chinese government denied such allegations but Google stood its ground refusing to censor search results anymore. Furthermore the company postponed Android plans for China although Android smartphone manufacturers targeting the Chinese market are still proceeding according to plans.

And that’s how Goojje appeared. The explanation for the chosen word is that the final syllable of the word, “jje” sounds very familiar to the Mandarin pronunciation for Google which ends in “jiejie.” And Goojje search is delivering search results according to Chinese regulations which is why one would think that the service has been conceived in order to replace Google’s presence in China.

Google hasn’t commented on the situation yet but it will be interesting to see what happens next in the Chinese online search business. In the mean time Goojje has a message for Google on its home page:

Sister was very happy when brother gave up the thought of leaving and stayed for sister.

In Chinese Goojje sounds like “sister” while the pronunciation of Google sounds like “big brother.”

Read: Goojje Search Engine Launches in China [Goojje to Replace Google Search in China?] » TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities

Source: nexus404

IE logo

Google has clearly had enough with Internet Explorer 6.

As of March 1, Google will no longer support IE6 on its Google Docs and Google Sites services, it announced Friday. IE users will have to upgrade to at least version 7 if they want to use those products, as “many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers,” the company said in a blog post.

A flaw in IE6 was exploited in the recent cyberattacks against Google and other U.S. companies, and Microsoft scrambled to patch the flaw in a rare out-of-cycle patch release earlier this month. Use of the browser–considered much weaker than more recent versions of IE within the security community–has been dropping with the release of Internet Explorer 8 but it is still being used by 13.5 percent of Web surfers, according to statistics from StatCounter.

Google set the baseline for other browsers at Firefox 3.0 or higher, Chrome 4.0 or higher, and Safari 3.0 or higher. “…you may find that from March 1, key functionality within these products–as well as new Docs and Sites features–won’t work properly in older browsers,” Google said.

Google

Google’s logged 87.8 billion searches in December 2009, or 66.8 percent of the more than 131 billion searches conducted worldwide. Google hopes to grow its search and ad dominance by focusing on a convergence of mobile search, advertising and applications, including location-based technologies with a heavy dose of social networking. Smartphones as Google’s Nexus One, paired with mobile search, applications and advertising seem like a fine way for Google to extend its search dominance from the desktop to the PC. Google will pit its mobile technologies those of Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple in 2010.

Google’s strategy to “double down” on its core search business helped the company clean up as the top search property with 87.8 billion searches in December 2009, or 66.8 percent of the more than 131 billion searches conducted worldwide.

That’s good for a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year, according to figures released Jan. 22 by researcher comScore. These world-leading totals helped Google rake in a fourth-quarter 2009 profit of $1.97 billion and sales of $4.95 billion.

Google hopes to improve on these numbers through focusing on a convergence of mobile search, advertising and applications, including location-based technologies with a heavy dose of social networking.

Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management at Google, attributed Google’s successful Q4 to the company’s doubling down on its efforts in search, AdWords search advertising and display advertising.

“Search did particularly well in 2009 and I think that may be the best example of what we feel we can do when we double down and focus,” Rosenberg said on the company’s Q4 earnings call Jan. 21. He cited Google’s 550 search quality enhancements; a bigger and faster index; universal search expansion; and Google’s new music search service.

However, Google’s crowning search achievement arrived Dec. 7 in the form of real-time. Google indexes tweets from Twitter and public status updates from Facebook, as well as info from MySpace, news publications and blogs only seconds after the content is published online.

Rosenberg noted that two minutes after a force 4.1 earthquake struck California two weeks ago, Google’s real-time search algorithms surfaced local Twitter tweets and news reports. The idea is that retrieving this type of content will keep users coming to Google.

It’s difficult to gauge the financial impact of these real-time results, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on the call real-time search was “very successful.”

Source: eWeek

Google purchase of AdMob gets closer antitrust review

Google’s purchase of mobile advertising provider AdMob for $750 million has drawn closer regulatory scrutiny as U.S. antitrust officials have asked Google for more information on the deal, Google said in a blog post Wednesday.

Google has been talking to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the deal and the agency gave Google a “second request” for information this week, Paul Feng, a Google product manager, said in the post. Google announced the acquisition plans last month, saying AdMob’s focus on in-application and mobile display ads would dovetail with Google’s strength in mobile search ads.

Google purchase of AdMob gets closer antitrust review

The FTC has asked Google for more information about its proposed buyout of mobile advertising provider AdMob

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Google’s purchase of mobile advertising provider AdMob for $750 million has drawn closer regulatory scrutiny as U.S. antitrust officials have asked Google for more information on the deal, Google said in a blog post Wednesday.

Google has been talking to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the deal and the agency gave Google a “second request” for information this week, Paul Feng, a Google product manager, said in the post. Google announced the acquisition plans last month, saying AdMob’s focus on in-application and mobile display ads would dovetail with Google’s strength in mobile search ads.

[ Stay up on tech news and reviews from your smartphone at infoworldmobile.com. | Get the best iPhone apps for pros with our business iPhone apps finder. | See which smartphone is right for you in our mobile "deathmatch" calculator. ]

Google, like search rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, has worked to gain footholds in the mobile market as a large potential source of future revenue.

But the FTC review shows that Google’s dominant search market position has brought it more attention from regulators. “We know that closer scrutiny has been one consequence of Google’s success,” Feng said in the blog post.

Google does not see any regulatory issues with the AdMob deal “because the rapidly growing mobile advertising space is highly competitive with more than a dozen mobile ad networks,” he said. Still, the review means that the AdMob deal will not close right away, he said.

Source: infoworld

Living Stories allows to filter the news around a topic in various ways

Together with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google is introducing an experimental way of presenting news online. Using certain advantages of online publishing Living Stories organises information according to how stories are developing.

It suggests Google is entering a phase in which it is actively engaging with news organisations – by developing tools for them, for example. “We’re looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organisations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features,” write software engineer Neha Singh and senior business project manager Josh Cohen on the Google blog.

The Living Story feature – which works in a similar fashion to topic pages – groups content around a keywords such as “climate change” or “the war in Afghanistan”.

Binding it together using a story summary, the experiment prioritises content according to how important it is and displays it in different ways. Each topic comes with a visual timeline and a list of important events, and the option of filtering topics – in “the war in Afghanistan”, for example, the reader can focus on “the troop debate” or “the Afghanistan elections”.

In addition, Living Stories offers useful waysof getting to information: the reader can filter the content by “events”, “opinion”, “graphic” or “quotes”.

But most interesting is that Living Stories remembers what users have read and keeps track of what they clicked on. It then highlights the changes and updates since their last visit to get rid of redundant information.

“The page is personalised to user reading patterns. When users leave the Living Story and come back to it later, the newest updates and events are presented at the top. If a user read a particular update on a previous visit, it is collapsed the next time the user returns,” explains Google’s Oliver Rickman.

Living Stories and Fastflip, an attempt to recreate aspects of print online, show that in addition to search Google is entering the news market from a second angle. The search engine is starting to develop technology to display news – while denying plans to get involved with content.

“Google is not involved with reporting or editing. That is done entirely by the staffs of the Times and the Post. Google provides the technology platform for Living Stories, the Times and Post’s journalists write and edit the stories, and we collaborated to make the user interface fit with these news organisations’ editorial vision,” says Rickman.

This might not save news organisations, but helping with the development of news packaging is definitely an option, and Living Stories an experiment worth keeping an eye on.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Google Adsense Check

Today, at the Content Revenue Strategies conference in New York City, we announced that a small group of publishers will begin testing a new AdSense interface in limited beta.  Inspired by the feedback we’ve heard directly from you, the new interface includes features designed around your top three requests:

Provide insights to help you make more informed decisions about your sites.

The new AdSense interface includes more detailed performance reports and enables you to view daily stats in graphical formats. It also will provide you with additional metrics such as the amount you’ve earned from various ad, targeting and bid types. Here’s a glimpse at what the new reports currently look like in our beta:

A new AdSense interface: now in beta

Offer you more control over the ads that appear on your sites.

We’re also continuing to make improvements to the Ad Review Center. Upcoming enhancements will give you more options to manage the ads that appear on your site, as well as a cleaner interface that makes it easier to find and review them within the Ad Review Center.

Help you manage your account more efficiently.

We’ve streamlined the AdSense interface to simplify common tasks, such as making a change to several ad units simultaneously. Additionally, to help you get the most out of AdSense, we’ve added more relevant help on every page, a message inbox for tips from our team, and alerts with important account related notices.

In order to collect feedback on these enhancements from publishers in multiple countries, we’re rolling out the beta test of the new interface today in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.  Although we aren’t able to extend invitations to additional publishers yet, we’re planning to roll this test out to thousands of publishers over the coming weeks. We’ll be sending email notifications to the beta test participants to let them know.

Thanks again for all of your feedback so far, and we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re able to offer the new interface more widely.

Source: Google AdSense Blog

The Real Live Search – Bing API experiment

Wouldn’t it be cool if search engines were as fast as you could type and actually showed you results as-you-type? As I found out this evening with jQuery in one hand and JSON in another, not only is it possible but turns out to be just as cool as I imagined.

Inspired by the realtime-ness of Google Wave, I wanted to build a prototype search engine that did away with a search button and page loads. Instead, search queries are sent character-by-character to the lightning fast Bing AJAX APIs which returned JSON results easily processed and formatted by Javascript on the page. The UI experience is driven solely by the browser.

The result is a truly “live” search experience which I’ve cunningly dubbed “The Real Live Search” as tribute to the former Microsoft search engine. I invite everyone to give it a quick whirl, but please bear in mind it’s only a couple hour’s work and may bite if prodded the wrong way.

Source: I started Something

Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. I don’t have Internet Explorer 6 installed on my computer, so I can’t verify this first hand, but illogical it seems not and a simple Twitter search shows multiple people confirming the news. Heck, some are even downright ecstatic over the news.

The online video behemoth is pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome (twice on the same page even, unsurprisingly), Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives.

With the impending move, YouTube follows in the footsteps of that other Web 2.0 poster child, Digg, which recently hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. Digg’s User Experience Architect Mark Trammell at the time wrote that the site is strongly considering removing essential features like digging and commenting for IE6 users. He explained that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.

YouTube so far hasn’t officially communicated about the desire to drop support for IE6, but it’s conceivable that like Digg it would rather have its developers spend time optimizing the service for newer, better browsers than wasting man hours on the oft-despised Microsoft browser. We recently reported that Internet Explorer is losing market share to Firefox and Safari at a rapid pace.

Source: TechCrunch