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.
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.
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!
Update (11/1) Thanks to everyone who voted. Here are the final results of the “Who’s the greatest Dracula” poll:
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Everywhere you look, vampires seem to be all the rage. But before the broody youngsters of “Twilight” and the Southern nightwalkers of “True Blood” took center stage, there was one Count who ruled the bloodsucking roost: Dracula.
In honor of the world’s most famous monster (and everyone’s go-to Halloween costume), we’re pleased to bring you Bram Stoker’s Dracula, courtesy of our friends at Crackle. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman in one of his most memorable roles, it’s the story of darkness’s cursed prince searching for his suicidal bride in 18th-century England. With Academy Award-winning costumes, killer performances from Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, and a healthy dose of horror, this flick has something for film buffs of varying tastes.
Before you watch, there are a few things we need to note. First, this film is rated R for violence and brief nudity. This means that you’ll need to verify that you’re 18 years of age or older by either signing into your existing YouTube account or creating a new one. Second, this video is limited to audiences in the U.S. (apologies to our international users). And, third, the film will only be available on YouTube through November 9.
How do you think Gary Oldman ranks in the pantheon of Count Dracula actors? Cast your vote in the poll in the upper right hand corner.
As a blog author, you’ve probably spent more than a little time getting exactly the right “look” for your blog. A blog is an outlet for creative expression, and how your blog looks says as much about you as what is written on it. And we at Blogger are committed to giving you the tools to make a great-looking blog.
The Blog*Spot navigation bar (“navbar”) is one area where we realized that there was some room for improvement. Our four traditional color scheme choices — Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver — are somewhat limited, especially if your blog’s background color is lime green or hot pink.
That’s why we have added two new color schemes — “Transparent Light” and “Transparent Dark.” These new color schemes take advantage of the ability of modern browsers to render transparency (a technique known to web designers as “alpha blending”). This allows the navbar background to blend together with your blog’s background color and pattern. The “Transparent Light” color scheme has a semi-transparent white background, producing subtle pastel colors, while the background of “Transparent Dark” is a semi-transparent black that produces a shaded look.
In addition, we’ve simplified and slimmed down the look of all the navbars, so that they will be more likely to harmonize with the aesthetics of your blog.
To enable the Transparent Light or the Transparent Dark navbar, go to Layout | Page Elements, then click Edit next to the navbar widget:
We had a lot of fun adding this feature and hope you like it too. Try it out!
It’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month, the perfect time to shed some light on a few Google Chrome alerts that are designed to help protect your browsing experience on the web.
You may have run into one of Google Chrome’s red alert messages when trying to visit a site and wondered why the browser did not immediately bring up the page you requested. These are messages triggered bythe phishing and malware protection feature that’s enabled by default in the Options menu.Here’s an example:
Whenever you see this warning, Google Chrome has detected that the site you’re trying to visit may contain malware. Malware is code that attempts to steal your personal information or download harmful software onto your computer.
Besides the malware warning, Google Chrome also checks the security certificates of sites that claim to be properly encrypted (such as bank sites or shopping sites), but that mayalso ask you for your personal or financial information under false pretenses. If a site’s certificate is suspicious, you may see one of the following messages:
“This is probably not the site you are looking for!” This message comes up when the URL listed in the site’s certificate doesn’t match the site’s actual URL, which means that the site you’re trying to visit may be pretending to be another site.
“The site’s security certificate is not trusted!” Since anyone can create a certificate, Google Chrome checks to see whether a site’s certificate came from a trusted organization. This message means that the certificate wasn’t issued by a recognized third-party organization.
“The site’s security certificate has expired!” or “The server’s security certificate is not yet valid!” If you see one of these messages, that means the site’s certificate is not up-to-date. Therefore, Google Chrome can’t verify that the site is secure.
“The server’s security certificate is revoked!” The third-party organization that issued the site’s certificate has marked the certificate as invalid. Again, Google Chrome can’t verify that the site is secure.
It’s a good idea to heed these messages you see, even if the site you’re trying to visit is owned by someone you know and trust. Hackers can take advantage of security holes on a site without the site owner’s knowledge. So even though you’ve visited your friend’s blog without any problem in the past, the warnings can still show up one day if someone exploits a vulnerability on the site. (And if you’re seeing this message for a site you own, we’re here to help! Just follow these instructions in the Webmaster Help Center. Also, check out this blog post we’ve written about detecting and removing malware.)
When it comes to holidays, Halloween is one of our favorites. You get candy corn, creepy crawlies, ghosts and goblins, blustery weather and the goopy joys of pumpkin carving all crammed into one glorious fall fun-fest. It’s also the one holiday where you can dress up as whatever you want — your favorite celebrity, your favorite animal or even, like one Googler last year, your favorite gadget.
As usual, we’re in the process of devising brilliant last-minute costumes, and we got curious about what others around the globe have been searching for in preparation for Halloween.
And many people seem to be planning a tribute to the late pop star Michael Jackson — searches for [michael jackson costume] started spiking in June of this year and have increased steadily since then:
Since Halloween is most popular in the U.S., we focused on queries there — but we did investigate searches in Canada and the U.K. for good measure. In Canada, people are overwhelmingly searching for costumes for two — variations on [couples costumes] dominate the top 10. Both in Canada and across the pond, searchers are looking for costumes based on Lewis Carroll’s classic story Alice in Wonderland, with [mad hatter costume] in the top 10 in the U.K. and [alice in wonderland] in Canada.
Since [vampire costume] was one of the top 10 searches this year, we figured we’d check in with the various vampire TV shows and movies to see which is, um, making a killing in the costume race. The query [twilight costume] has the most search volume, with [true blood costume] not far behind. (Pointy teeth and body glitter — done!)
We also did some digging to see if people were taking inspiration from the movie Where the Wild Things Are and wearing a [max costume] this year. Based on the fastest-rising related terms [footie pajamas], [footed pajamas] and [max costume pattern], it seems like at least a few folks are choosing to make [max wolf suit] costumes at home:
At Google, we’ve been gearing up for tomorrow’s real deal with festivities on our Mountain View campus, complete with Halloween crafts for visiting kids and a haunted house. Googlers are also pulling out all the stops for the costume contest:
We hope you have a happy Googleween!
Posted by Jordan Newman and Emily Wood, Editors, Google Blog team
It’s Friday, time for some fun! Advanced API analytics fun
Here is a captivating way to look at your Google Analytics data in a Treemap visualization. You can visualize your own data with our live demo. (Note: IE currently not supported for visualization part.)
click to enlarge
And, here is a video explaining how to look at the Treemap visualization and how to use it.
The goal of this example was to teach people how to use the Google Analytics API on App Engine in Java, as well as to demonstrate how to use both OAuth and AuthSub along with the App Engine’s various services. The code looked great, but the output was a boring HTML table. So we used some open source tools to transform the table into a pretty tree map visualization, which is also useful in noticing interesting metrics.
All the code has been open sourced on Google Project hosting. Also, here’s an article describing how this application works making it easy for developers to use this example as a starting point for new data visualizations and other Google Data projects.
For the data retrieval part, we used the App Engine Java SDK and the Google Analytics Data Export API Java Client Library to retrieve data from Google Analytics. The example code implements both unsigned AuthSub and registered OAuth authorization methods allowing developers to get up and running quickly in their dev environment and later switch to a secure authorization method in production environments. The application also uses the Model-View-Controller pattern, making it flexible and allowing developers to extend the code for new applications (e.g. adding support for other Google Data APIs).
And lastly, for the visualization part, we used the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library to create the Treemap. This JavaScript library is maintained by the Stanford Visualization Group and excels at creating brand new visualizations from a data set (in this case a boring HTML table). To handle all of the interactions, including rollover, tooltips and slider controls, we used JQuery. Here is the JavaScript source for the visualization part of the sample.
Enjoy!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team
p.s. If you have created any cool new visualizations using the Google Analytics Data Export API,email us so we can highlight them as well.
Google Sites lets you easily create, update and collaborate on your own site – no technical know-how required. And now you can easily add photos from your Picasa Web Albums to your sites, instead of having to manually upload photos from your computer. Whether you’re using Google Sites to keep friends and family updated on your life or to manage a team or project, adding photos can give your site a lift.
The ‘Insert’ menu in Google Sites now includes an option to insert an existing Picasa Web Albums photo or to upload new photos.
Small businesses often think that television advertising is too expensive and cumbersome for them to use. They assume that they need a fancy, expensive commercial to use in their TV campaign. But Google TV Ads changes all of that — we make it easy and affordable for you to make a TV ad, plan a campaign and reach your customers through the power of television. We launched the TV for All contest two months ago to prove just that.
More than 200 companies submitted commercials for the opportunity to win $25,000 worth of free national advertising on cable channels such as CNBC, Hallmark and Bloomberg using Google TV Ads. Today, we’re happy to announce the three winners of the TV for All contest based on votes from the YouTube community.
Amazing Gates, Owners.com and ZAGG.com received the largest number of votes among the 10 finalists. Each of these businesses will receive $25,000 in free national advertising through Google TV Ads advertising.
Check out the three winners and all entries at www.youtube.com/tvforallcontest. For more information on Google TV Ads and how it can help your small business succeed, visit our website at google.com/tvads.
Posted by Deeksha Hebbar, Associate Marketing Manager, Google TV Ads
One of the things our publishers have always asked for are ways to make it even easer to configure their blogs to work with FeedBurner and AdSense for Feeds. We’re happy to announce that Blogger users, with just a few clicks, are able to do both at the same time.
Yes, this year for Halloween, AdSense for feeds is putting on a Blogger costume and allowing all Blogger publishers to easily monetize your RSS and Atom feeds directly from the Blogger interface, in the same way you set up AdSense on your blog beforehand.
To set this up, go to Blogger and select the blog you wish to monetize on your Blogger Dashboard, and select “Monetize.” This will give you some basic options for configuring ads, and if you already have connected your Blogger feed to FeedBurner, will confirm that the proper feed is being configured. AdSense for feeds will automatically pick the right ad sizes for your users, content, and end medium.
After setup, you will be able to view your AdSense reports (including feed revenue) directly from the Blogger Dashboard, as well as from your AdSense account. Additional feed management options for your feed and feed analytics will be available from http://feedburner.google.com.
Posted by Steve Olechowski on behalf of the AdSense for feeds and Blogger teams
Google uses numerous sources to find new webpages, from links we find on the web to submitted URLs. We aim to discover new pages quickly so that users can find new content in Google search results soon after they go live. We recently launched a feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds for the discovery of new webpages.
RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. They allow readers to check for new content from publishers. Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub to identify updated items.
In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it’s important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.
Written by Raymond Lo, Guhan Viswanathan, and Dave Weissman, Crawl and Indexing Team
