Google Blog Search No Longer Indexes Feeds

Vanessa Fox reports that Google's blog search engine changed the way it indexes blog posts. Until now, Google Blog Search only indexed feeds, so the results weren't very good for sites that offered partial feeds. The site started to offer a more comprehensive search by indexing the entire content of the page, including comments, navigation links and blogrolls.

"We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page. We've had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds. The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds. The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog's posts," explains Jeremy Hylton. He says that the algorithm will be improved to exclude "the content that isn't really part of the post" to make the results more useful.

Here's an example of a comment from a Google OS post indexed by Google Blog Search:


Tip: if you want to find recent blog posts, don't sort the results by date. Just select "last 12 hours" or "last day" from the sidebar. This way, you'll get relevant results and you'll minimize the number of splogs (spam blogs) in the list of search results.

On Google Chrome's Future Support for Extensions

When Google Chrome was launched, many people wondered why there's no support for Google Toolbar or for extensions that are available for Firefox. After fixing the glaring bugs reported by users, improving bookmark management, adding autocomplete and starting to work on Mac and Linux versions, the next step is to open the browser to developers.

Google published a document that details how extensions will work in Google Chrome. "Chromium can't be everything to all people. People use web browsers in a variety of environments and for a wide variety of jobs. Personal tastes and needs vary widely from one user to the next. The feature needs of one person often conflict directly with those of another. Further, one of the design goals of Chromium is to have a minimal light-weight user interface, which itself conflicts with adding lots of features."

The extension development should be similar to developing web pages, the browser should include support for silent autoupdate, extensions should not be able to crash the browser process and they should be run in sandboxed processes. An interesting side-effect would be that you won't have to restart the browser after installing an extension, like in Firefox.

Google lists some extensions that should work in Chrome: bookmarking tools like a toolbar for Delicious, content filtering extensions like Adblock (sic!), download managers like DownThemAll and other popular extensions that are available for Firefox.

"We should start by building the infrastructure for an extension system that can support different types of extensibility. The system should be able to support an open-ended list of APIs over time, such as toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or adblock-like functionality). Some APIs will require privileges that must be granted, such as access to the history database or access to mail.google.com."

In the end, we should see an extension gallery hosted by Google that will initially include a list of popular Firefox extensions. Chrome won't support XUL, so the extensions aren't going to be ported automatically. The latest Chromium buils already include an initial Greasemonkey implementation, so there's one less extension to build.

{ via Webware }

Find Similar Images Using Live Search

Microsoft's image search engine added another feature that uses image analysis: for each result, you can find similar images. The related images have nothing to do with are connected to the original query, so Live Search restricts the results to images similar to your selection.

"With Live Search, you can now use images, rather than additional keyword queries, to refine a search and discover more content," explains Live Search's blog.


The next obvious step would be to upload an image and find other similar images on the web. TinEye finds different versions of an image, but the scope of the results should be more encompassing.

More Ways to Hide Google SearchWiki

In a recent interview with Cedric Dupont, product manager for Google SearchWiki, we found that Google doesn't intend to provide an option to disable SearchWiki. "While users don't have the option of turning off SearchWiki, they do have the option not to use the feature. By turning off the feature entirely, people will never get used to the new offering or see how it might be useful to them. We encourage people to try it out."

Fortunately, there are some ways to hide SearchWiki's visual clutter:

1. Sign out from your Google account. The feature is only available to authenticated users since it's a way to customize search results.

2. Use a Greasemonkey script that hides the icons added by SearchWiki.

3. To disable SearchWiki for the current session, add "&hl=all" to the URL of a search results page. Unfortunately, the change is not permanent. Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=test&hl=all.

4. If you enable any Google Experimental feature except "SearchWiki with sound", you'll no longer see Google SearchWiki. Probably the most useful experiment you can enable is "Keyboard shortcuts", which adds shortcuts to Google search. Joining an experiment changes your Google cookie, so the experiment is enabled in the current browser and only until you delete Google's cookie.


SearchWiki aficionados can enable "SearchWiki with sound" to hear a sound effect when a search result is removed. "Do you enjoy having the power to remove results from your search results pages? Now you can do so in style by having a sound effect play along with the animation whenever you remove a result. Recorded by our co-founder Sergey Brin himself, this sound effect is sure to please!"

Update: You can now disable SearchWiki from Google's preferences page.

Easy Access to Online Storage Services

Gladinet is a free Windows application that makes it easy to view and manipulate files stored in online services like Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Skydrive and Amazon S3. Instead of using the web interface in a browser, Gladinet mounts a network drive and lets you access the files from remote servers in Windows Explorer.

That means you can click on a document stored in Google Docs and it will open in the word processor installed on your computer, for example in Microsoft Word. After you edit the document and save it, Gladinet will upload the new version to Google Docs. Unfortunately, the software doesn't use the latest features of the Google Docs API, so it simply deletes the old version before uploading the document.



The integration with Picasa Web is better: you can view thumbnails for your pictures, the files can be edited in Photoshop or any other photo editor and the new versions are instantly uploaded. A local file manager provides a better interface for uploading or deleting a large number of files.


Gladinet offers another feature that lets you share folders with other computers. The main goal is to access all your files from a single interface, no matter where the files are stored. And if you don't have an office suite, Gladinet adds an option to open documents from your computer in web apps like Google Docs or ThinkFree.

Note: make sure you trust the service before entering the credentials of your Google account or your Windows Live ID.


{ Thanks, Anon }

Tax and Shipping Information in Google Product Search

Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) added an option to restrict the results to sellers that offer free shipping. If you enter your location, the service also shows tax and shipping information for some of the products.


A recent post from the Google Base blog informed sellers that they can submit tax and shipping information. "We'll soon be displaying this information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information, so we strongly encourage all merchants to start submitting it."

In case you are wondering, Google Base is a low-profile service that lets you upload structured data. Google uses the data about products in Google Product Search and the real estate listings as a refinement option in Google Maps and the main search results, but I find it surprising that Google doesn't use the data in expanded snippets.

Google Maps Has a New Interface

Google Maps borrowed the navigation controls from Google Earth and made the transition to Street View smoother. Just click on the small yellow man to see the street view imagery for the current location or drag the icon to the correct location.


Google Maps shows small previews when you drag the icon so you can adjust the position. Street View opens in full-screen and the mini-window displayed at the bottom of the map can be maximized when you want to change the location.


Google Maps will probably add a new tab for the Google Earth plug-in, so this change will make the navigation consistent.


Here's a screenshot from June that shows the old interface: