Google Now for Almost All Desktop Chrome Users

Back in January, Google Now was available as an experiment feature in Chrome Canary. Then it was added to the other Chrome channels, but you had to manually enable it. Now this feature is rolling out to almost all Chrome users: Windows, Mac OS and Chrome OS are supported, while the support for other Linux distributions is coming later.

"Starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks, Google Now users in all languages will be able to get these notifications in all channels of Chrome. To enable this feature, simply sign in to Chrome with the same Google Account you're using for Google Now on Android or iOS," informs Google. "If you use Google Now on your mobile device, you can see certain Now cards on your desktop computer if you're signed into Chrome, including weather, sports scores, commute traffic, and event reminders cards. Some of these cards may be based on the location of your mobile device," mentions the help center article.

"If you'd rather avoid the wait, the option can be enabled immediately by visiting chrome://flags in your browser and toggling Google Now notifications to enabled," suggests The Verge. You can paste this:

chrome://flags/#enable-google-now

in the address bar, press Enter, select "Enabled" in the drop-down next to "Google Now" and click "Relaunch now" at the bottom of the window to restart the browser.

{ via +Chrome }

Rounded Google+ Notification Badge

After making profile pictures from the navigation bar round, Google+ tweaked the badge number displayed next to the bell icon. The counter is now in a red circle like in iOS, instead of a red square.

Here's a similar screenshot from July 2013:

As you can see there are many subtle changes: there's a "+" next to the name, the bell icon has a different color, the "share" button is smaller, the profile picture is circular, borders and the arrow icon are missing.

{ via Moritz }

Google's Voice Command for Playing Music

Google's voice search feature still has a long way to go. If you say "play music" or "play some music" in the Google Search app for Android, Google starts the Play Music app and opens the "I'm Feeling Lucky" radio, which is based on your listening history. I think it makes more sense to continue playing your music and use the current queue instead of creating a new playlist.

Google still doesn't support basic voice actions like "next song", "skip", "pause" or "stop the music". If you say "next song", Google only shows the search results and a list of songs from Next, an American R&B musical group.

You can say "play Alicia Keys" and Google will shuffle Alicia's songs:

You can also say "play blues" and Google will start the Blues radio. If you say "play hip hop", Google Play Music will show a list of search results for "hip hop".

That's what happens if Play Music is the default app that handles music voice actions. You can change it by saying "play Coldplay" or something similar, quickly tapping the icon next to the app's name, picking one of the music apps and tapping the selected app (I could choose between Google Play, Google Play Music, TuneIn Radio and Poweramp, but your list will be different, depending on the apps you've installed). The next time when you use a music-related voice action, the app you've picked will handle it. Most apps will show a list of search results or start playing music.

{ via +Google }

Konami Easter Egg in Google Voice Search

There's a cool Easter Egg in Google Voice Search: if you say "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", Google will answer: "Cheat mode unlocked, unlimited free Google searches". This is the Konami cheat code originally used for Nintendo games.

You can try this Easter Egg in the Google Search app for Android and iOS and in the Google Search site if you use Chrome for desktop.

The Konami code was also used as an Easter Egg in Google Reader, Google Docs (create a new document and press "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", then type ba and press Enter), Play Games and even for the Chromebook Pixel.

{ via Search Engine Land and Pierre Far }

Language and Region Filters for Google Alerts

Google Alerts now lets you pick the language and region when creating an alert. For example, you can create an alert for "Chrome", but restrict it to French news articles from France. You don't have to set the region, the default setting is "any region".

The new filters are great for delivering more precise results, since you can restrict the results to a language, a country or both. You no longer have to use workarounds and switch to a different domain to get alerts in a different language. Please note that the text from the Google Alerts message will be in the language you've picked.

Google Chromecast Goes Global

Chromecast quickly became the best selling electronics product at amazon.com. Now it's at #2 and it has 13,788 reviews. Somehow, everyone had to buy one. It was cheap, it was a Google product and it promised to solve a big problem: connecting your mobile devices to your TV.

The number of apps has continually increased, there's a public API that can be used by developers and now the hardware is no longer available only in the US. "Chromecast is available in an additional 11 countries — Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the U.K," announced Google a few days ago. Google worked with local content providers, so you'll find many new apps that support Chromecast: BBC iPlayer in the U.K., France TV Pluzz and SFR TV in France, Watchever in Germany and more.

Chromecast achieved what Google TV couldn't do. Hardware was cheap and easy to use, content providers felt welcome, software was updated frequently. Google TV tried to solve too many problems at once, hardware wasn't great, software was rarely updated, content providers blocked the browser and didn't develop apps, few people bought Google TV devices. Chromecast did a few things very well and broke the cycle.

"Chromecast complements our Google TV efforts as a low-cost, easy device for consumers to watch online content on their TV without a new TV, new remotes or interfaces. Our partners still offer Google TV-enabled HDTVs and boxes that have the core functionality of Chromecast plus a rich, interactive Android experience," says Google.

Google's Truncated Titles

The Google Search experiment that increased titles and removed underlines from links was quickly added to the regular search interface last week. Now it's no longer an experiment.

While I don't miss underlines, making titles bigger removes a few words from long titles and that's not a good thing. Here are some search results for [google maps api]:

* "Google Street View hack turns your city into a post-apocalypt..." (full title: "Google Street View hack turns your city into a post-apocalyptic jungle")

* "Google puts a limit on free Google Maps API: over 25,000 da..." (full title: "Google puts a limit on free Google Maps API: over 25,000 daily and you pay")

As you can see from these examples, only a few words are removed, but the truncated titles are difficult to understand.

Here's a side-by-side comparison between the new layout and the old one:

From what I know, Google has never displayed a few characters from a word in search results titles. Now it has to do this.

Scanning a list of search results has turned into a game: "guess the title". "Department of Computer S..."? It must be "science". "Combinatorial optimization problems in wireless switch de..."? Hard to say.