Google Adds Voice Search, Visual Search and Results Prerendering

Two of the most important Google mobile services: voice search and visual search will now be available from your computer.

Voice search, a feature that's built into Android, also works in Google Chrome and allows you to search using your voice. Chrome added support for the Speech Input API back in April and it's the only browser that implemented the API. Right now, Chrome's speech input feature is only available for English.

"We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, 'Can I speak for this?' — it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we've added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you're using Chrome, you'll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box. Simply click the microphone, and you can speak your search," explains Google. The feature is gradually rolled out, so you may not see it yet.


Google Goggles is a full-fledged visual search engine that's trapped in a mobile application. But why do you have to buy a smartphone to use Google Goggles when you could simply upload an image to Google and find related pages and images on the Web? "Search by Image" does more than TinEye, the "reverse image search engine" that lets you find an image on the Web.

"Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate 'best guess' text description of your image, as well as find other images that have the same content as your search image. Your search results page can show results for that text description as well as related images," mentions Google.

You can drag and drop an image to the search box, paste an image URL in the search box or click the camera icon and upload an image. Google generates a hybrid results page that shows both related images and Web search results for the equivalent text query.


Google also a developed two extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you right-click on an image and use it as a query. "With these extensions, you can initiate a search on Google using pictures on the web. You can discover photos of places, learn more about art pieces, identify landmarks, and more."

While voice search and visual search are useful, the most impressive search feature launched by Google today is Instant Pages. The new feature only works in Chrome 13+ (available in Canary/Dev Channel and soon in beta), but it will radically improve your search experience. Chrome prerenders the top search result if it's likely that you will select it, so you no longer have to wait for the page to load. You might remember a feature called "prefetching" that was first supported by Firefox. Prerendering is a lot more powerful than prefetching.

According to a Chrome developer, "prefetch is Firefox style prefetching of resources specified (just populating the cache). In Chrome, with prerender, we don't just download the URL specified, but render the whole page including running all the JavaScript and downloading and rendering all the embedded resources."

For most users, Instant Pages will look like magic. They'll search for [nytimes] or [amazon], click the first result and be surprised to see that the page loads instantly. Google says that this feature saves 2-5 seconds on a typical search.

But Chrome's prerendering is not limited to Google searches. Any Web developer can use it by inserting a link element with a special value for the "rel" attribute. "Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next -- for example, the 'next page' link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded," suggests Google.

YouTube's Pages for Blogs, Now Available

The YouTube feature I mentioned a few days ago is publicly available: YouTube automatically generates pages that list the most recent videos embedded in a blog.

"By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we've built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites," explains YouTube's blog.

You can find pages for blogs like Engadget, Boing Boing, Google OS and the nice thing is that the URL is easy to guess. Unfortunately, the pages don't have feeds and you can't follow them.

For now, you'll find links to these pages next to some videos in a section called "as seen on". Instead of linking to a popular page that embeds the video, YouTube now links to a page with the most recent YouTube videos from the site.

Google Experiments with Removing URLs from Search Results Listings

Google tests a new feature that replaces the URL with the site's name in search results snippets. David, who noticed this change, says that he searched for [madvertise] and "most of the results looked normal, with the website title, snippet and URL. However, two search results displayed the website name instead of the URL. In the attached screenshot, the 6th and 7th results show 'LinkedIn' and 'Facebook' respectively, in the place where the URL should be."


Google has always tried to make search results listings more useful, but replacing the address with the site's name doesn't add value and draws unnecessary attention to the results from a list of hand-picked popular sites.

{ Thanks, David. }

Chrome Shifts Into a New Gear

Chrome 12 is now available in the stable channel and all the Chrome users can try the new features.

1. App search in the address bar.


2. Clear Flash cookies (or Local Shared Objects) using the "Clear browsing data" dialog, instead of visiting a webpage.


3. Chrome Sync no longer uses a modal dialog and it's now properly integrated with the tabbed settings page.


4. Safe Browsing borrowed a feature from Internet Explorer 8: checking downloaded files for malware. Right now, this feature only works for Windows executables and shows a small message in the download bar.



5. No more Gears in Google Chrome. You'll no longer be able to use any app that relies on Gears to provide features like offline storage or web workers. The only Google service that still used Gears was Gmail.

6. Hardware accelerated 3D CSS (or 3D transforms). Chrome's blog suggests to try "Shaun the Sheep", an experiment that uses WebM video and 3D CSS to create an immersive app.


7. Chrome for Mac asks for confirmation when using Cmd+Q to quit the application. "When you press Cmd+Q, it brings up the floaty panel telling you to hold the key combo. When you do, it quits after 1.5 seconds." That sounds annoying.


8. Print and Save buttons in the PDF viewer.


9. A better interface for adding start pages.

Checkboxes are Back in Google Docs

Google Docs tried to get rid of checkboxes in the new UI, but users complained and the feature is now back by popular demand.

"This is actually a hybrid of checkboxes and the more recent selection model. So you can use checkboxes, but you can also still use Ctrl or Cmd to select multiple items. Another one I like a lot, is to use Shift to select many consecutive items at once (click on the checkbox of the first file, scroll down and hold down Shift when you click on a checkbox further down the list, this will select everything in between)."


Checkboxes may seem unnecessary, especially considering that people rarely select multiple files, but they're a familiar interface element that's easy to use. Not many people know that holding down Ctrl lets you select multiple files, even though it's a standard feature in most operating systems.

{ Thanks, Cougar. }

Better Embedding Code for Google +1 Buttons

Google wants to see a +1 button on each Web page, but many people hate embedding widgets and buttons because they clutter pages and add hundreds of milliseconds to the page loading time.

Google is obsessed with speed and performance, but it didn't do a good job at optimizing the code for embedding +1 buttons. As Aaron Peters explains, Google's code blocks page loading if you place it inside the <head> tag, so it's better to place it before you close the <body> tag. An even better idea is to load the Google +1 script in a non-blocking way, just like Google did with Google Analytics, AdSense and Google Related Links.

Aaron also noticed that the JavaScript code is not minified, browsers can only cache the JavaScript file for 6 minutes and there's a mistake in the code from this page: "http" should be replaced with "https" to avoid an unnecessary redirect.

Here's a better embedding code suggested by Aaron:

<!-- Place this tag just before your close body tag -->
<script>
(function(d, t) {
var g = d.createElement(t),
s = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];
g.async = true;
g.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
s.parentNode.insertBefore(g, s);
})(document, 'script');
</script>

<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<g:plusone></g:plusone>

Apparently, the code doesn't work in Blogger by default. There's a workaround, but you shouldn't use it if you aren't familiar with HTML and editing Blogger's template. Basically you can replace <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/> with the code generated by Blogger ("view source" is your friend), then delete: <meta content='blogger' name='generator'/>.

As Google explains, "most browsers will load the code in parallel with other scripts on the page, thus reducing the web page load time".

Google Discontinues Its First Specialized Search Engines

They're no longer popular, but they're the first specialized search engines offered by Google, long before Image Search, Google News or Blog Search. Some people might remember Google Linux, Google BSD, Google Mac, Google Microsoft, the search engines that offered results related to operating systems. Google also created custom search engines for universities and a special search engine for the US Government. All of these search engines are now gone. A Google employee confirmed the news:

We are no longer offering specialized search services at google.com/linux, google.com/microsoft, google.com/bsd, google.com/mac, google.com/about and google.com/unclesam. These services were established many years ago to offer search across a limited index of the web, which in the past was a better way to find this information. For example, google.com/linux was designed to help people find information from message boards and blogs about the Linux operating system. Today, search quality has advanced tremendously, and based on our analysis we’ve found that in most cases you're better off looking for this kind of specialized information using the regular Google search box, for example by typing [linux fedora upgrade]. We understand that some users were surprised by this change, so we apologize for not communicating more clearly in advance of redirecting these services to google.com. For more advanced search tips to restrict your search to particular sites and kinds of information, we recommend taking a look at our Help Center.

You can still find Google Linux, Google BSD, Google Microsoft and Google Mac in the Web Archive. Here's a Google Advanced Search page from 2000 that linked to the "topic-specific" search engines and a newsletter from Larry and Sergey that announced Google Government Search in June 1999:

This month you probably noticed that we had our "Uncle Sam" search off of our home page (It's the next best thing to the CIA) that is now housed on the "more Google" page under the title of "special searches." This search covers all the .mil and .gov domains. So if you are looking for something published by the government, this is the best place to start.

Back in 1998, Google's first homepage linked to Stanford Search and Linux Search.



Google has recently updated many of its corporate pages: from the About Google page to the list of products and the Web Search support site.


{ Thanks, Herin. }