Google's Sign-in Promos

Google Australia shows some promotional messages for signing in using Google Accounts. The messages are displayed when you visit Google's homepage, when you search for something, when you use Google Image Search and Google Maps. If you don't click "sign in" or the "x" icon to dismiss the message, Google will continue to display it.

Search promo: "Oh, cool. I can take my Google stuff anywhere. Sign in to access your docs, photos, music and more across all your devices."

Maps promo: "Oh, cool. My directions are already on my phone. Sign in and take your Google Maps searches with you."

{ Thanks, Jérôme Flipo. }

moreless

Google Keep Tips

Here are some tips for Google Keep. Since it's a service designed for mobile devices, most of the tips are for the Android app.

Mobile

1. Convert an existing list to a to-do list by tapping "show checkboxes" in the Keep menu.

2. A simple way to add images to a new note: select one or more images in the gallery app or a file manager, use the share feature and select Keep.

3. Copy text from a web page to a new note. Select the text, use the share feature and choose Keep.

4. Save the title of a web page and the URL to a new note. Use the share option from your favorite browser.

5. Add a Keep widget with the latest notes. Resize the widget to show more notes.

6. Reorder notes: long press a note and drag it to a different position.

7. Use colors to organize notes. For example, blue notes are related to work.

8. Take multiple photos from a note. You can then upload the album to Google+ using the share feature.

9. Write short notes quickly: tap "add quick note", type the note and tap "Done".

10. Duplicate a note: open it, tap the share button and select Keep.

11. Tap the microphone to dictate your note and to save your voice recording. You can use Keep as a voice recording app.

12. Find notes with voice recordings: they have a small play icon next to the date.

13. Remove a recording by tapping "x" next to the audio player. You can also remove photos in the same way.

14. Dictate notes without saving audio files by tapping the microphone button from the keyboard.

15. Use Google Voice Search to dictate notes. Start with "note to self" and select Keep from the list of applications after dictating the note.

16. Change the default background color: tap "add quick note", type something, then tap the color palette icon and pick a color.

17. Use the minus operator to exclude keywords when you use the search feature. Use quotes for exact matches. Examples: [milk -buy], ["buy milk"].

Desktop

18. Read your notes online from any device at drive.google.com/keep.

19. Install the Chrome app to read your notes offline when you use your computer.

20. Get permalinks for your notes: open the Google Keep site in a desktop browser, switch to the grid view and click a note.

21. Download voice recordings: open Keep in a desktop browser, click a note, mouse over the voice recording and click "Download".

22. Keyboard shortcuts:

j/k - navigate to the next/previous note
n/p - same as j/k, but also useful for navigating between list items
c - compose a new note
/ - use the search feature
e - archive selected note
# - delete selected note
o - open selected note
Enter - edit selected note
Ctrl+g - toggle between list and grid view
Esc - finish editing a note.

moreless

Google's Search by Image and Special Effects

Google Image Search has a feature that lets you find images on the web by uploading the files or pasting their URLs. It's a clever feature, but it's a lot more clever than you imagined.

It's obvious that Google finds an image if exactly the same file is embedded by a web page or there's a link to that file. Google also finds images if you resize them, crop them or apply various photo effects.

Here's an image from a Wikipedia page, after resizing it and applying the pixelate effect from Picasa. Can Google find it?

Google can't find other sizes of the image, but if you look at the "Pages that include matching images" section, you'll find the image.

What if you convert the photo to black and white? Will Google's reverse image search engine be able to find it?

You'll get the same pages that include matching images:

Let's try something more difficult - apply multiple Picasa effects: soft focus, tint, filtered black-and-white and posterize. There's no way to recognize this image, right?

Wrong.

I used IrfanView to remove EXIF data and compress the image above a lot more. Here's what I got:

I edited the image in Paint and added some random shapes:

Here's the original photo:

To call this impressive is an understatement. It's a resilient algorithm that goes beyond matching pixels, colors, shapes - it understands the structure of the image, its essence.

{ The image from this post ("a red flower in the Philippines") has been licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by bingbing. Thanks, Brian Anderson. }

moreless

Google Queryless Search

There's a Google blog post from 2007 titled "searching without a query". At that time, Google provided recommendations based on your search history.

Google now has a patent for "parameterless search". It's still a search without a query, but it now relies on context and mobile devices. Here's an example:

For example, assume that a mobile computing device is moving with a user on a highway who is travelling at speed during rush hour on a workday (e.g., Monday-Friday). If the user submits a parameterless search query to the mobile computing device, the device can examine its current context (travelling on the highway during rush hour) and infer that the user would like to receive traffic information for the stretch of highway ahead. The mobile computing device can infer parameters for the search query (e.g., traffic conditions and highway number), identify results for the search query (e.g., expect to encounter stop-and-go traffic in two miles), and provide the results to the user (e.g., activate a speaker on the mobile device and audibly transmit the traffic conditions to the user).

The patent provides some other information about the context:

A current context for a mobile computing device can include a variety of information associated with the mobile computing device and/or a user of the mobile computing device, such as the time of day and date (e.g., 2:00 pm on May 29, 2010), upcoming and/or recent calendar appointments (e.g., meeting with John at 2:30 pm on May 29, 2010), a direction and rate of speed at which the device is travelling (e.g., northbound at 20 miles per hour), a current geographic location (e.g., on the corner of 10th Street and Marquette Avenue), recent device activity (e.g., emails sent to John regarding the 2:30 meeting), etc. (... ) [Other parameters:] environmental information (e.g., weather information), travel information (e.g., traffic information, driving directions, transportation schedule information, map information), geographic proximity information (e.g., nearby business information), recently updated information (e.g., real-time news updates, blog updates, email/texting conversation updates), and personal information (e.g., contact information for a user's acquaintances).

Google Now already combines information from various sources, including your location, your email account and your calendar, and shows traffic information and alternate routes when it's likely that you need them. It will get even smarter and show the things you need to know before you try to find them like a psychic that reads your mind and anticipates your intentions.

That's queryless search and it's one of the reasons why Google now combines information from various services. Google needs to understand language, your preferences and the context to find the right answer to almost any question.

Google's first April Fools' Day joke anticipated this back in 2000:

{ via SEO by the Sea }

moreless

A Gmail Bug Changes Your Sending Address

There's a very annoying bug in the mobile Gmail. You can find it in the mobile Gmail site for smartphones, the Gmail app for iOS and the iGoogle gadget for Gmail (all of them are actually the same app).

If you've added multiple sending email addresses to your account and you receive messages forwarded from other accounts, Gmail automatically picks the right "from" email address when you send a reply. The trouble is that the mobile Gmail web app has a bug that reverts to the main "from" address after 10-20 seconds or so. You start typing your messages and the "from" address changes. Even if you change it back, it will revert to the main address after a few seconds. This also happens when you compose a new message, not just when you send a reply.

Until Google fixes this issue, it's a good idea to check the "from" field before sending a message from a secondary address. After you change it, you have a few seconds seconds until it reverts to the main address, so send the message quickly. Gmail actually changes the "from" address every time it saves the message.

moreless

When You Open Gmail's Compose Box in a New Window

Sometimes little details matter. If you open Gmail's compose box in a new tab or a new window, the formatting options are visible by the default and you no longer have to click the formatting button.

How to open the compose box in a new tab or window? There are at least 7 ways:

Open in a new window
1. Shift+click the compose button
2. Shift+c (keyboard shortcuts need to be enabled)
3. Click the pop-out button from the compose box.

Open in a new tab
1. Ctrl+click the compose button
2. Ctrl+c (keyboard shortcuts need to be enabled)
3. d (keyboard shortcuts need to be enabled)
4. Ctrl+click the pop-out button from the compose box.

Replace Ctrl with Command if you use Mac OS.

moreless

What's The Right Answer?

Sometimes the same question can have multiple answers, even when you're looking for a simple fact. I've searched for [ny population] using Google and Bing and got two completely different answers. Google's answer is 8.245 million, while Bing's answer is 19,501,616.

It's obvious that Google replaced "ny" with "New York City", while Bing replaced it with "New York State". If you're searching for [new york], Google will show information about the city, while Bing's data refers to the state.

To disambiguate your query, you need to search for [ny city population] or [ny state population] and both search engines will return similar answers.

What if you search for [ronaldo age]? Here's what you get: 28 years (Google) and 36 years (Bing). Google mentions that the answer is for Cristiano Ronaldo, but Bing doesn't.

Both answers are OK because there are two football players known as Ronaldo: Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima (born 18 September 1976, retired Brazilian player) and Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro (born 5 February 1985, Portuguese football player - Real Madrid). Most of the top search results from both Bing and Google are about Cristiano Ronaldo.

To make things more confusing, Bing also provides information about Cristiano Ronaldo:

More examples:

To sum up, it's a good idea to disambiguate your query and to check the answers provided by search engines.

moreless

Restarting Opera

Speaking of feature creep, there's a browser that included so many features that I'd probably need an entire day to list them. An email client, a feed reader, a torrent client, an IRC client, widgets, extensions, mouse gestures, note manager, panels, content blocker, customizable toolbars, zoom bar, navigation bar, start bar, sessions and a lot more. It's called Opera and the first version was released back in 1996. Until a few years ago, Opera didn't support extensions and chose to include all the features you could have wanted and more.

I've always liked Opera because it worked well even on older hardware, it didn't use a lot of resources and it included many useful features. Unfortunately, Opera's desktop market share has always been very small and many important sites ignored Opera. Many Google services displayed warnings like "unsupported browser" or had features that didn't work in Opera.

Opera Mini became popular, especially for feature phones, and Opera's focus started to shift towards mobile devices. Now Opera tries to focus on smartphone users and that's the main reason why it gave up on its own rendering engine and chose WebKit/Blink/Chromium. The desktop browser became harder to maintain and it only had 50 million users, while Opera had 250 million mobile users.

Opera's desktop browser is now based on Chromium and lacks most of the features I've mentioned. Here's Opera's explanation:

When we released our first browser in 1996, most web users were people who weren't afraid to tinker, and who liked lots of options and configurability. Fast-forward 17 years, and the Web is everywhere. Speedy browsing and sites working properly is the most important thing to many, many people.

That leaves us with the riddle that every software developer faces at some point: how best to make a UI simple enough to be intuitive for a consumer who wants a solid, fast browser that just works, and yet is customizable and extensible so that power users can add the features they want?

The answer is to build a strong, extensible foundation on which to innovate. Opera 15 is a fresh start, to which we will continue to add features.

While I'll miss the old Opera, I understand that the desktop browser is no longer a priority for Opera and building a Chromium-based browser is much easier. It's also an opportunity to start with a barebone browser and only add the features that are necessary, not everything but the kitchen sink. Chrome's comic book from 2008 still makes sense today.

moreless

Pure Android

I'm sure that one of Google's OKRs is to increase the number of pure Android users. This has multiple benefits: users get the latest updates faster, Google promotes its own apps, users get to try Google's original flavor of Android, the latest version of Android gets more market share and developers are encouraged to use the latest APIs.

Here are some strategies used by Google to make pure Android (or almost-pure Android) more popular:

1. Nexus is now a family of affordable devices and Nexus 7 is the most popular Nexus device ever released. Google sells them online in a few countries and provides software updates.

2. Google Editions of the most popular Android devices: HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. Manufacturers provide software updates for the devices and include some of their software. Devices are still sold online via Google Play, but only in the US. Maybe other devices will follow.

3. Motorola will only release devices with stock Android. "Consumers love what the Android OS can do for them, and they want to have the most recent releases faster. From a software and UI perspective, our strategy is to embrace Android and to make it the best expression of Android and Google in the market. It will be the unadulterated version of Android, and I feel really good about our embracing Android and being the best Android experience," said Jim Wicks, Motorola's design chief.

4. A lot of stock Android apps are now in Google Play Store and many Google apps are preinstalled on devices from Samsung, HTC and more. You can now install Google's calendar app, the keyboard, Hangouts, Google Search with Voice Search and Google Now, Chrome, Google Maps, Google's music player, Gmail and much more. Some missing apps: the launcher, camera, gallery, clock, calculator, news & weather, contact manager, phone app and the messaging app.

Pure Android is not perfect and some Android flavors from Samsung, HTC and others offer support for more technologies, more features and better built-in apps. What they don't offer is a coherent experience: few developers implement their APIs and you end up with features that only work in a small number of apps, features that compete with each other (Google Voice Search vs S-Voice) and apps you can't remove.

Maybe OEMs should focus on the user experience and add their features and software on top of the pure Android. Improve Google's stock apps, develop a better camera app that takes advantage of your hardware, build a great music player and some beautiful widgets, but only include the apps that are strictly necessary. Featuritis helps create some nice demos, but you end up with software that's hard to maintain and hard to use, while slowing down devices and using more resources.

moreless

YouTube's Video Pages Will Load Faster

A few weeks ago, a reader noticed an interesting YouTube experiment that displayed a red progress bar when loading video pages. It was obvious that video pages were loaded dynamically using AJAX.

Gizmodo posted an article last week about this experiment. It turns out that YouTube will soon launch this new interface.

"Currently, when you click on a YouTube video, first the watch page loads (the webpage that the video sits on). Then the JavaScript that controls that page is downloaded, then the video player, and then the video itself starts downloading." In the new interface, everything is downloaded simultaneously. When you click a new video, YouTube only loads the new page and then the video. It's no longer necessary to download the video player and the JavaScript/CSS files.

Another change is that YouTube preloads the page and the first part of the video you're likely to watch next before you even click it, so that the video loads almost instantly. This works because the Flash player now uses adaptive streaming and downloads videos in slices. The first slice of the next video you're likely to watch is prefetched. This works well for playlists and search results (YouTube prefetches the first result), but also for video pages, where YouTube shows suggestions.

YouTube hopes to reduce the time between clicking a video and playing the video to less 200 milliseconds, which is what the human mind can perceive as a delay. That means instant video playing (if you ignore video ads).

moreless

Full-Screen Google Translate

If you use Google Translate to translate a web page, there's a simple way to get more real estate. To hide the navigation bar and the search box, just the click the arrow button next to: [View: Translation|Original]. It's below the red "sign in" button in the following screenshot:

Of course, you can also use Google Chrome, which has a built-in translation feature.

moreless