This week in search 12/4/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week, we're pleased to bring you a number of great enhancements to the way you search. From the announcement of our new minimalist fade-in homepage to the new magazine layout of images in Universal Search, this week was filled with many highly visible changes. There are also more subtle changes like automatic spelling correction and our extended version of personalized search, both of which will enhance the speed and relevance of your web experience. Finally, there were a number of international changes that affect our users worldwide.

New Google homepage
On Wednesday, we announced our new minimalist homepage. Now, when you visit Google.com, only the logo, search box, and buttons are visible. After moving your mouse, the rest of the links and content "fade in". Read more about how we arrived at this design, including the thinking and experiments behind it.

Magazine layout for images in Universal Search
This week we also launched a new layout for images. When we're confident that we have great image results to deliver, we'll now show you a larger image and additional smaller images alongside. This new layout helps us to display more pictures than before, so you have more options to quickly choose from. As always, click on an image to see it full size on the original webpage.

Example searches: [ocelots], [prom hairstyles], [ewok] or [caduceus]


Automatic spelling correction
Starting this week, when we have high confidence that your query was misspelled, we go a step further than asking "Did you mean..." by automatically showing results for the corrected query, saving you a click. In case we did misinterpret the query, there will be a link at the top of the results to undo the auto-correction. So, the next time I'm visiting South Florida and accidentally search for [maimi restaurants], it's reassuring to know I'll quickly go straight to the results for what I really meant: Miami restaurants.

Extended Personalized Search
Starting this week, we are extending Personalized Search worldwide to users who are signed out of their Google accounts, and in more than 40 languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be better able to provide the most relevant results using 180 days of Google search activity from your browser. For example, since I always search for "ADA" and often click on results about the programming language, Google might show you those results before the American Dental Association results.

Site performance data in Webmaster Tools
It can be difficult for webmasters to figure out how fast their site loads and whether it's visible to users. So we've changed that. Now you can go to Google Webmaster Tools and get a glimpse of how quickly your site's pages on your site load. There are also recommendations on how to improve your site's performance based on our Page Speed plugin.

Finding and reading content written in other languages
Starting this week, it's even easier to search the global web by adding a translated search tool to the Search Options panel, so you can see results from other languages for your query. We'll automatically determine the best languages to translate your query in, then search and translate the results into your language. For example, if you're looking for a restaurant in Antwerp and would like to find local restaurant guides, use the Translated Search tool to search for [restaurant reviews antwerp].

Search Options now in even more languages
Following up on an earlier announcement, the Search Options panel is now available in 17 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Filipino, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Greek. In total, the Search Options panel is accessible in 40 languages — which covers over 98% of all search traffic.

Region tags next to results
When it consists of a country code such as ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan, the suffix of a domain name (known as top-level domains, or TLDs) can provide a valuable clue about the location of a website. However, for certain top-level domains like ".com", ".info", and ".org", it's not always as easy to figure out. This week, we added region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results, when that supplied country or region is outside the user's Google domain (such as google.ca). By providing more transparency about regional information, we hope to make it even easier for international visitors to identify which results are relevant to their query.

We hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's to come!

Update: Corrected name of plugin.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

This week in search 11/27/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This Thanksgiving week, and just in time for the holiday season, we give thanks to you, our users, with two new search features.

Holiday Interfaces
Last Friday, we started showing off our seasonal spirit with holiday-themed result pages. For the weeks surrounding various holidays in late November and December, results for seasonal queries will be adorned with decorative dividers. Try searching eid-ul-adha sometime in the next week, and your results will be separated from right-hand ads by a chain of crescent moons. In a few weeks, a search for [hanukkah lights] or [christmas trees] will also result in delightful holiday-themed pages. Put a cuddly knit sweater on your browser when you search!

Mobile Movie Results
For those of you who who plan to head to the movies this week, we've launched a mobile version of Google Search results for movies, making it even easier to find the latest holiday blockbuster playing in your area. From the web browser on your iPhone, Palm WebOS, or Android-powered device, simply search for [movies], and then tap on the "More movies" link. From there, you can either browse a list of movies or select the "Theaters" button to view a list of the ones near you.

With the added functionality to play trailers right on your phone, access movie ratings, find the closest theatre, and view upcoming showtimes, this new search feature is sure to make entertainment options on the go much easier. Here's a 1.25-minute video about it:



Hope you enjoy these new features. Stay tuned for more next week!

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

This week in search 11/20/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week brought a number of new features to the fore.

Google Translate
The biggest and most visible release this week was our update to Google Translate. New changes to the interface help you translate instantly and see translations as you type. We have also introduced both input and output transliteration: for selected languages, our tool will show you letter by letter how a word or phrase appears in a different language as you type. We have also added text-to-speech, so you can figure out how to pronounce new words as you learn them.

Rich Snippets in Japanese
On the topic of international launches, at our Searchology event in May we announced the launch of Rich Snippets, which webmasters can use to help Google show more useful information from the page. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, Rich Snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range. Starting this week, this feature is available in Japanese.

Flu shot finder now on results pages
Following in the footsteps of last week's launch, we have now added our flu shot finder to the search results page.

Example searches: flu shot, h1n1 shot, flu vaccine

Site hierarchies in search results
Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you're headed. Tuesday we began rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display offers valuable context and new navigation options. For example, on the eHow.com result below, you can see that this page is in the Martial Art Techniques section.

Example searches: venn diagram, how to punch harder, hodgkins lymphoma, keurig

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

This week in search 11/13/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

 This week brought a variety of changes, including a flu shot finder to keep you healthy during this year's flu season. And since you'll be healthy, you can enjoy updates to our movie showtimes feature and go out and have fun.

Flu shot finder
We launched a flu shot finder with the goal of helping people find where they can get their fall flu shots. At the moment we have data for shot locations in 20 states. We'll be increasing our coverage to all 50 states. We're just getting started with this project, so stay tuned for improvements.

You can find flu shots at www.google.com/flushot.

The ability to lock SafeSearch
We launched a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is on and locked:

That way, if you're taking care of kids, you'll be able to verify that SafeSearch is on from clear across the room! Just look for the colorful balls in the upper right corner.

You can lock your SafeSearch by visiting our Search Settings page in the Settings menu in the upper right corner of www.google.com and clicking "Lock SafeSearch".

Updated movies showtimes
We launched an update to the movies showtimes feature, which now includes movie posters to enrich our movie results. When you click on the result, you'll get a more comprehensive summary of the movie as well as the ability to view theater locations on a map and sort by genre.

Example searches: movies, where the wild things are, 2012

Adding World Bank data to search
We have added World Bank data to search. This makes finding global facts like life expectancy, electricity use and birth rates a lot faster and easier. The Public Data feature also lets you make comparisons across countries. Here's what the feature looks like when it appears in your search results:
Example searches: the worlds life expectancy, electricity use germany

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for next week!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

This week in search 11/6/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week we brought out some new search tools for the phone and for the web. We also enhanced our universal search with a better interface for product results.

Multiple pictures of products in Universal Search
We've added multiple images to product results in Universal Search. On broader queries, this helps you get a sense of the range of products available to you for the query. Here's what it looks like:

Example searches: digital cameras, pin nailer, glider, bouncy house, outdoor dining set

Search Options panel now has page previews and is live in more languages
We have added a new tool to the Search Options panel called page previews, currently available in English, Japanese and Korean. Page previews allow you to see additional text as well as an image preview of the page. This is a new way to summarize web pages that show up in the search results list. In the interest of keeping the Search Options panel interface simple, we've combined page previews with the earlier tool for longer snippets — both serve a very similar purpose and, we feel, work well together. Here you can see a screenshot of the new feature at work:

The Search Options panel is also now available in 11 new languages: Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Turkish.

Google search by voice for Nokia S60 phones in English and Mandarin Chinese
On Monday we announced that Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones in English and Mandarin Chinese. The new version of Google Mobile App places a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to search using your voice or by typing. You can search for anything — from "movie times" to "fish 'n chips" to "masala dosa." And Google Mobile App shows search results in the application, so you don't have to wait for a web browser to launch to get an answer. This feature is available in both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Sesame Street doodle
In honor of Sesame Street's 40th anniversary on November 10th, the Google homepage has had a daily sequence of doodles created in partnership with Sesame Street around the favorite characters on the show — starting, of course, with Big Bird.

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for next week!

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

This week in search 10/30/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

The week leading up to Halloween has brought a flood of new treats for you.

Music Search
On Wednesday, we rolled out our new music search feature, fully integrated into Google's web search. Now, when you search for a band, singer, song name, or album title, Google will recognize it and return a special music result on the top of the page. These new special music results do exactly what you want - they let you listen to the full song. To provide this feature, we have partnered with Lala and MySpace (formerly iLike) to bring you full-song streaming. That's not all, however. The real "wow" in this new music feature is that you can type in phrases of lyrics, we recognize the song - and bring you the song for full play. You can listen, verify it's the one you were looking for, and then continue on to buy the song on iMeem, iLike, Lala, Pandora, or Rhapsody.

Example searches (singers): Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Jack Johnson, Michael Jackson
Example searches (band): Coldplay, TV on the Radio, The Killers, MGMT, The Rolling Stones

Example searches (song): Sample in a Jar, Waiting for the World to Change, When Doves Cry, All I Want for Christmas is You, Walking on Sunshine
Example searches (album): Dark Side of the Moon, Achtung Baby, Aqualung, Evil Urges
Example searches (lyrics): gonna be a good night tonight, can feel the hand of fate, lucky we're in love in every way, take away this ball and chain

Social Search
On Monday, we introduced Social Search on Google Labs and Google Experimental. Social Search finds relevant content that your social circle has published and returns that content with your web search results. What defines your social circle? To use Social Search, you need to be logged in to your Google Account and opted in to the Social Search experiment. We then analyze your Gmail contacts (if you have a Gmail account) and the connections on your social networks (if you have a Google Profile and have listed public social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed). What kind of results do we find? Our Social Search results include blogs, photo albums, web pages, and reviews. This way, you not only seeing the most relevant content on the web globally, but you also see the content most relevant and personal to you.

To try Google Social Search, go to Google Experimental and click the "Join the experiment" button pertaining to social search. Then try searching on Google for something your friends may have written about. Example searches like 'restaurant' or 'vacation' tend to occur in people's personal writings. Social Search results always occur at the bottom of the page, so scroll to the end of the page to see these results. You can also trigger Social Search results explicitly by opening the Search Options panel and clicking on 'Social'. This will cause all of your results to be from your social circle.

Similar Images on Image Search
In addition to our new features on core web search this week, we introduced a new and revolutionary way to refine image searches to our main image search functionality this week. The feature is called "Similar Images". We've had it for a while as a separate site, but it has proved so useful and interesting that we decided to make it part of our core image search. The idea here is to find an image that you like and then click the "Find similar images" link below it. This may seem simple, but think about all the complicated things you can express. For example, if I wanted a picture of a single turtle swimming, and I wanted the turtle to be headed to the left rather than the right, it would be almost impossible to express as a keyword search. Now with "Similar Images" features, I can simply do an image search for turtles, then find an image that meets my requirements, like the seventh image on that results page, and by clicking the "Find similar images" underneath it, I get a page composed of solo turtles actively swimming.

Example search: jack-o-lanterns, then click on "Find similar images" under the fifth image to get jack-o-lanterns lit from within in night-time settings
Example search: birthday hat, then click on "Find similar images" under the second image to get multi-colored birthday hats
Example search: peacock, then select "Find similar images" on the third image to get white peacocks with their feathers displayed

Personalized Search on Mobile
This week we also introduced personalized search for the mobile phone. Personalized search has been available on our website for some time. Now, when you are logged in on your phone, you get the same personalized search results on your mobile phone as well.

Google Suggest now global
Internationally, we also rolled out Google Suggest on our search results pages. Now, the helpful suggestions that you see when you begin typing on our homepage and results page are available on 156 country domains and in 52 more languages.

And to wish you a Happy Halloween, trick-or-treat us by visiting the homepage (www.google.com) today and clicking on the Google logo.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

This week in search 10/24/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Twitter
On Wednesday, we announced our newly-formed partnership with Twitter. This will help Google users find more up-to-the-minute, real-time data in the search results. We will be including tweets in our search results and bringing them to you when they are most relevant, and we will also be building a real-time search that includes Twitter and other providers. This week's announcement is just the beginning of our collaboration; stay tuned for upcoming products and features that focus on real-time search.

Social Search demo
At the Web 2.0 conference this week, we demonstrated a new product called Social Search. Due to the ever-increasing popularity of social networks, we've been thinking about how your social network could influence and improve your search results. Social Search does just that by surfacing content in your search results that is written by your friends or people you follow. That way, you get the best resources from the web overall, plus the best results (blogs, reviews, travelogues) that are relevant to you, since they were written by people you know. Social Search will be launching soon on Google Experimental and Google Labs.

Recommendations in Google Reader
This week, we also launched recommendations in Google Reader. This may seem far from search, but it is actually built using technology pioneered in search. The personalized ranking piece uses some of the same techniques as personalized search. The "Popular items" piece builds on our "What's Popular" gadget from iGoogle. We're very proud of both of these features, as we think they represent an interesting application of search that will help users more easily find content that they want to read.

New look-and-feel on maps
We have updated the way that maps render on Google Maps, and it is our biggest change in almost 5 years. The changes are subtle but significant. The blog post with the announcement has some very interesting before and after examples. The impetus of this change is to improve usability and readability and literally help people find where they are going faster — our goal both on the web with search, and in the physical world with maps.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

This week in search 10/16/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week, we made a few improvements to help webmasters better understand how their pages interact with Google search. Here's an overview:

Fetch as Googlebot
As a webmaster, have you ever wondered what Google "sees" when we visit your site? Our understanding of your web page affects which searches your page is returned for and its relevance rank. New this week, we're providing a tool as part of our Webmaster Tools Lab that lets you to see what Googlebot sees in the hope that this will help site owners better understand why we think your pages are relevant, and to what. We think this can help webmasters design pages that are easier for Googlebot to understand, and more importantly, easier for users to understand.

Malware details
You may occasionally see on Google a notice that says "This site may harm your computer." We place this warning in search result snippets when we see signals that a particular web page may be spreading malware. Webmasters occasionally will see this warning on one of their pages that wasn't intended to be malicious. This is because sometimes your site could be distributing malware — and you might not even know it or be able to easily find it. Malware details is designed to help webmasters track down what on their site is triggering this label and clear the problem — thus, making their page (and the web) safer for users.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

This week in search 10/9/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week we made many small improvements to the functionality and usability of our search results. Here's an overview:

Quick, in-browser viewing of Google Docs
We've incorporated the "Gview" tool from Google Docs on search results. Instead of the old "View as HTML" view, PDFs on search results now have a "Quick View" link that shows you Gview's image-rendered version, which preserves tables and graphics from the document. This means you can view PDF documents quickly and easily right in your browser.
Example search: [1099] (note the "Quick view" links on the first two results)

An improved interface for local information in web search
We changed our interface for local business information when it occurs in search results. It's now much more readable (larger fonts) and friendlier to use (easier to click on just what you want).

Example search: [pizza palo alto]

Here are before and after shots for the search [bakeries san francisco]:

Click on either image for a larger version

Access to multiple providers in weather results
We also changed the interface for our weather results when they occur in web search. Now you'll see an array of different weather providers to choose from, including The Weather Channel, Weatherunderground and AccuWeather, if you want more detailed weather information. This way, you get the weather information you need, in the layout you prefer, from the service you choose.
Example search: [washington dc weather]

And here are before and after shots for the search [weather] (when done from the Googleplex, since the location is auto-detected):

Click on either image for a larger version

Public service information for searches related to poison control
While it's relatively infrequent, people do occasionally turn to Google during medical emergencies. Our goal in these cases is to get our users the help they need as quickly as possible. As of this week, searches related to [poison control] trigger a special result with the phone number for the poison control hotline.

Example searches: [poison control], [first aid bleach poisoning]

Search options panel for mobile
This week on mobile search, we added a Search Options panel so now you can get all of the same slice-and-dice functionality you have from your desktop when you search the web on your phone. Try doing a search from your phone and you will see an "Options" link on the righthand side above the results. Click on it and you see the same panel that you are accustomed to on search from your desktop.

Crawling AJAX
We also made an exciting announcement this week about making AJAX crawlable. Web applications are becoming increasingly popular, but much of what is contained with a web application is usually inaccessible to our crawlers and thus can't be found in our search. Our team has been busy working on techniques for how to crawl AJAX. This announcement just represents the start, as it's currently in the prototype phase, but it does demonstrate that we are constantly working on how to improve search — our features, ranking, and, in this case, our comprehensiveness. We're always very excited to include new content in our search to make our results even better.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

This week in search 10/2/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

At Google, we're completely committed to the needs of our users. This is one reason we make constant changes to the user experience — so you have a better search experience. Some of the changes are larger features like our Search Options; some are small visual refinements, like our larger search box. Starting today, we'll post a story each Friday that showcases some of the user experience updates we've made to our search in the past week, complete with example searches, and how and where to see the improvements. This way, loyal search aficionados can see and experiment with all of updates in one easy-to-access place.

Hot Trends highlighted on results page
Have you ever wondered how many people query [tsunami] or [samoa] right after they read about it in the news, or are you the only one looking? For years, Google Trends has let you search an aggregation of what other people are searching for. Now we're taking that concept to the results page and showcasing fast-rising terms with a graph at the bottom of the page. To see it, try one of these searches and scroll to the bottom:

Example search: [olympic bid]
The queries here are rather fleeting by nature — one minute they're hot; the next, cold. (Apologies if [olympic bid] no longer shows this off.) The easiest way to be sure to see this feature is try one of the searches from our Hot Trends page. You'll see the hot trend featured at the bottom of the search results page, highlighted with a graph.

New tools in Search Options
We've just added a host of new tools in our Search Options panel. To view the Search Options, do a search, find "Web" in the top blue bar, and click on the "+ Search Options" link to the right of it. A navigation bar on the left side of the screen will appear. We launched Search Options back in May, but this week we're adding a set of new and exciting features. Among them:

Better way to shop and research products
Have you ever found that your search sometimes feels too commercial when you're just starting to think of buying? Or maybe you've experienced the opposite, where you can't find an online store to buy something despite your best attempts. We've just introduced a way for you to control the number of stores you see in your results.

Example search: [flip camera] 

Click on the link in Search Options that says "Fewer shopping sites" and you'll see mostly reviews and technical specifications. When you're ready to buy, click on the link in Search Options that says "More shopping sites." You'll see mostly stores listed, and the results even note the prices and specific products right on that page.

Learning from history
If you use personalized search and web history, it's now easier for you to see which of the search results you have visited already and which you haven't.

Example search: [youtube] 

With the Search Options panel open and while you're signed in to Google (look for your user name in the upper righthand corner), click on the "Visited Pages" tool. Your results will then show only pages you've visited that contain the term 'YouTube.' Now, click on the tool "Not yet visited" where you will see only pages you haven't yet seen that contain 'YouTube.'

Keeping up with time
The Search Options panel has always helped users search over time, but now there are two new features that help you do this even more flexibly: "Past hour" and "Specific date range."

Example search: [obama] 

Click on the "Past hour" link and you'll see all the recent news and web pages published in the past hour on [obama].

Example search: [michael jordan] 

Now click on "Specific date range" and try the period surrounding Jordan's last championship (5/1/98 through 7/31/98), and you'll see all the press from the Chicago Bulls' win and various articles covering him that summer.

Personalized Suggest now on Mobile
Finally, here's a fun tidbit that bridges web search on the desktop to web search on mobile. New this week, Google Suggest (the suggested queries that appear below the search box as you type) on your mobile phone is personalized, based on searches from your desktop. This feature only applies when you are signed in to your Google account, and only for searches done while you are signed in. We think this small feature is significant because it enables you to easily migrate your search tasks from the desktop to your phone. It's also one of the first instances in which your desktop search usage can improve your mobile search experience, and vice versa.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience