This week in search 1/28/2011

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.

With freezing conditions on the East Coast this season, many people are thinking about weather. One of our favorite Google tricks is to simply type [weather] and get the forecast, personalized for your location, immediately at the top. With Google Instant, this trick gets even better because you only need to type [w]—we’ll do the rest. This week we rolled out a couple new weather search features to help you plan your next ski trip or figure out when to sneak outside between blizzards.

Live results for snow conditions
As ski season hits high gear, we’ve partnered with OnTheSnow.com and SkiReport.com to provide you up-to-date snow condition information right on the search results page. Just search for your favorite ski resort and you’ll see the current snow depth, latest snow falls, terrain conditions and the overall availability of the resort. The results also include links to more detailed information such as photos, weather forecasts and reviews.

The new weather live results appear in snippets for onthesnow.com and skireport.com

Example searches: [squaw valley], [wisp ski]

Interactive, precise weather results for mobile
Sometimes when you’re planning your day, you only need a couple hours of sunshine for a jog or a hike through the park. The seven-day forecast is great, but what you really want to know is if it will be sunny exactly when you’re thinking of heading outside. So earlier this week we introduced a new search result for weather on iPhone and Android-powered devices. The new format enables you to interact with the results and see the forecast for any specific time over a 12-hour period.

The new weather results are available on google.com in English. Simply search for the weather

That’s all for this week. Check the forecast and hopefully soon you can stop reading tech blogs and head outside!

This week in search 1/14/2011

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.

We’re back in action after a lovely holiday season, and this week we’ve made a few changes to help you find music videos and refine your searches. We also announced World IPv6 Day, which will help ensure Google can continue giving you fast, relevant search results for generations to come.

Better results for music videos
People often come to Google to find music videos, and this week we improved our results so now when you’re searching for your favorite band or album, you’ll find popular clips organized in a new way. For example, search for [michael jackson] and you’ll find some of the King of Pop’s most famous videos, including clear text indicating the length of the video, the album and the year it was published. The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return repetitive links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you’re looking for. Try searching for [green day], [maroon 5] or [beyonce] (for one of the best videos of all time!).


Google’s left-hand panel in Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew
This week we expanded Google’s panel of search tools to Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew, enabling people who read right-to-left languages to access a dynamic set of search tools. Now Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew speaking users can refine their searches by content type (Images, Videos, News) or date, and easily access special views like the Wonder Wheel and Timeline. We can’t call it the “left-hand panel” of search tools, because the panel is actually on the right!


World IPv6 Day
The Internet is bursting at the seams with limited address space, and IPv6 is the best solution to the problem. We have offered search over IPv6 since early 2008, but today only 0.2% of Internet users have native IPv6 connectivity. So on Wednesday, we came together with the Internet Society and other major websites to announce World IPv6 Day, the first global trial for the next generation Internet protocol. On June 8, 2011, Google and other companies will enable IPv6 on their services (including Google Search) for IPv6 for 24 hours. The trial will help motivate companies across the industry to prepare for the transition and ensure Google and the web as we know it can continue to thrive.

This week in search 12/17/10

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.

One of the things we think about often are new and better ways to interact with the search engine—whether it’s refining results on the fly, speaking your search terms, or typing your search into the address bar. This week, we’ve improved several ways in which you interact with Google, including a more precise way to zoom back in time in Realtime, Instant search results (and webpages) in Chrome, new warning labels to catch your eye on the results page and information delivered to you in audio format in Translate.

Instant on Chrome
Google Instant continues to expand to new languages, domains and devices. This week, you can use Google Instant right in your Chrome Omnibox with our latest beta release. Instant on Chrome takes the power of Instant to the next level, letting you get not only instant search results, but also instant web pages. If Google is your default search engine and Instant is enabled on Chrome, your browser will immediately begin loading either a webpage or search results as you type. Now that’s fast.

“Top updates” and other improvements to Realtime
Just over a year ago we introduced Realtime Search, which for the first time brought the search results page to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content. Realtime Search has been steadily improving, and this week we added a new “Top updates” section on the right-hand side of the Realtime results page, making it easy to see some of the most interesting tweets related for your search. We’ve also updated the user interface for the replay feature, making it easier to go back in time with very precise time intervals that appear as you hover your cursor over the timeline. Finally, for those who are watching closely, we’ve also renamed the “Updates” mode in the left-hand panel on our main search results page to “Realtime” to make our feature names more consistent.

Top updates now appear on the right-hand side of the Realtime results page

Hacked sites notifications
We've added new notifications to the results page to warn you when sites may have been compromised, spammed or defaced. We use a variety of automated tools to detect common signs of hacking as quickly as possible, and if we detect any of these we add a new notice right beneath the result title line, “This site may be compromised.” In addition to protecting users, these notices will also help webmasters more quickly discover when someone is abusing their sites. You can learn more in our Help Center article and our webmaster blog post. Here’s what it looks like:

No, Matt’s site hasn’t been hacked—for illustrative purposes only!

Improvements to Google Translate
We develop automatic translation tools because we want to help people find information, no matter what language they speak. This week we made three distinct improvements to Translate. First, we added the ability to see alternative translations, which can help you understand the true intended meaning of the phrase, and provide another kind of feedback for us to improve our translation systems. We also added virtual keyboards, because it can be extremely difficult to type some of the 57 languages supported by Google Translate on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Finally, we added speech synthesis for three more languages and dramatically improved another 17, so you can not only see text translations, but actually hear them spoken aloud.

With alternative translations, you can click to see different possible translations for the same word.

This week in searches
After our special edition of the Google Beat last week for our annual Zeitgeist, we’re back with the final Google Beat of the year. Check out the video to find out which celebrities, football stadiums and Senate bills were popular this week.

During the next couple weeks many of us on the search team will be taking a much needed break after a very busy year. While we’ll certainly spend some of our time off daydreaming about how we can make search more interactive in 2011, we plan to enjoy our time interacting with friends and family around the dinner table, the fireplace, the ski slope—or wherever the holiday season takes us.

Until next year, happy holidays!

This week in search 12/10/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week was another busy one at Google. In addition to announcing Chrome OS devices, the Nexus S and Google eBooks, on the search team we’ve been wrapping up some projects before the holidays. This week we’ve been thinking globally, with our 2010 Google Zeitgeist cataloging the events and searches that defined the year in each of more than 50 countries. We’ve also been working to expand our products to new domains, languages, content types and even reading levels.

Zeitgeist 2010, the spirit of the times
The 2010 Google Zeitgeist is global, with lists of top searches for more than 50 countries. We’ve gathered the most popular and fastest rising queries from the year to capture the spirit of 2010. This year we’ve added interactive HTML5 data visualizations for the top searches and events from around the world, and for the first time, we created a Zeitgeist Year in Review Video to relive the moments that shaped 2010.


Google Instant for mobile now available around the world
We want to bring Instant everywhere: to every device, every domain, every language and every Google search box. This week we previewed Google Instant on Chrome, and released a beta version of Google Instant on mobile in more than 28 languages and 40 countries worldwide. If you have an Android 2.2+ and iOS4 device, just go to google.com in your mobile browser and you will be redirected to your local domain. Tap the Google Instant link beneath the search box to turn it on.


Search results at every reading level
We work every day to make information available to everyone on the web. This week we made it easier for to you pinpoint exactly the information you need with a new advanced search feature that categorizes results by reading level. For example, if you’re writing a college paper on [herbivores] you can refine to see only advanced material, or if you’re a grade school teacher preparing for a class on [herbivores] you can refine to see only basic material. To try it out, click “advanced search” to the right of the search box and click in the new reading level section. You can filter to see only results that are basic, intermediate or advanced, and annotate results with reading levels. If you choose to annotate results, on the results page you’ll see a graphical distribution of the pages classified in different categories for your search.


Image indexing improvements
We're constantly working to improve our crawling and indexing systems to help people find the most recent information on the web, whether it’s a blog, a video or an image. The biggest change this year was Caffeine, which made search results 50% fresher on average. More recently, we made some changes to increase the rate at which we update images in our index. These improvements will help people find fresher images in both web and image search.

This week in search 12/3/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

It’s the time of year when many of us begin our holiday shopping in earnest. Whether you’re more into “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday,” many of us increasingly turn to the Internet and search engines to find the best prices, product reviews, gift guides and recommendations. This week, we made a number of improvements that should help make it easier than ever to find gifts for friends and family (or yourself!) from reputable merchants, whether you’re out on your phone looking for a store, searching at home for an online merchant, or looking for a friend to get a recommendation.

Place Search on mobile
In October, we introduced Place Search, which helps you find local information by organizing websites around real world places. As you’ve probably experienced, local information is particularly useful when you’re out and about and have only your phone to rely on. That’s why we’ve worked to quickly bring Place Search to your mobile phone. Now when you search for [museums new york city] on your phone, you’ll see the web result for Metropolitan Museum of Art along with comments and reviews about the place—all nicely organized in one cluster of information. If you want to call the museum or get directions, both are just one button click away.


More protection from disreputable merchants
Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that a particular online merchant had deliberately abused customers in an attempt to increase his ranking on Google and other search engines. We immediately convened a team to look carefully at the issue. Our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem, but nonetheless we developed an algorithmic solution and have already implemented it. The change currently impacts hundreds of merchants detected to provide an extremely poor user experience. You shouldn’t notice any significant differences in your search results, except now you’re even less likely to find these undesirable sites. You can learn more about this change and the thinking behind it in our blog post from Wednesday.

Social sitelinks
Usually when you search for a social site like Twitter or MySpace, you’re looking for information from your friends and social network, like their tweets and profile pages. This week we added new social sitelinks to search results, giving you more direct access to content from your friends. A social sitelink includes your friend’s name and profile photo, and it links to her content on a particular website. Social sitelinks are based on the same technology as Google Social Search; we use your social circle to identify relevant websites and user pages.

To see social sitelinks in action, try a search for [twitter] or [youtube]. If you’re not seeing social sitelinks, try creating a Google profile and adding links in your profile to other online social sites you belong to so we can build your social circle.


NBA Live Results
We’ve offered sports scores in search results for a long time, but recently we’ve been working with partners to make sure you can always find the latest information. Last month hockey fans started finding live results from the NHL.com, and this week we’ve added basketball. With the season already underway, we worked with NBA.com to provide real-time game scores, schedules and standings information as part of NBA.com search results on Google. These results also include links for quick access to game previews, ongoing live updates, and game recaps to make sure you don’t miss out on the latest NBA action.


Example searches: [nba], [cavaliers]

The Google Beat
We’re back this week with another edition of the Google Beat. Check out this week’s video to see what people were searching for this Thanksgiving, on Cyber Monday and beyond.

This week in search 11/19/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

On the web, a “place” can mean many different things. At Google, we think about regional domains (such as .uk for the United Kingdom) as places, but we also think about websites, the different parts of our interface and real world locations like restaurants and stores. This week’s changes span all these different kinds of places, making it easier for you to find information no matter where you are—Vietnam, Hungary, holiday shopping at your local mall or browsing the Google results page. Keep reading for the latest.

Google Instant on 18 new domains
In keeping with the spirit of Instant, we’ve been working to quickly bring results-as-you-type to people around the globe. This week we expanded to 18 new domains across Europe and Asia, almost doubling our total. Our new Google Instant domains include Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Vietnam. Now, whether you speak Catalan, Romanian or Tagalog, you’ll get search results before you’ve even finished typing.


Local product availability in search
Most of the time, when people shop, they actually buy their products from physical stores rather than online websites. This week, we made it easier for people to find local stores that sell the products they are looking by adding information about product availability to google.com. Simply search for a product and click the “nearby stores” label to see what stores carry it and whether it is in stock. We’ve partnered with more than 70 retail brands, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Macy’s, and Office Depot. Through these partnerships, you can see where to buy 4 billion items and can also restrict your searches to only products that are in stock nearby. (If you’re a retailer who’s interested in taking part in this free program, you can learn more on the Google Retail Blog.)


Other searches to try: [hp printer], [circulon frying pan], [ipod touch]

More relevant results from the same website
When you get back from the store and hop online to do some searching, you’re visiting a different kind of place—a website. Sometimes it turns out that one website is extremely likely to have the information you’re looking for, like when you’ve typed a website name as part of your search, or you’re looking for information from an official government office. To help you find this information more quickly, a few months ago we made a change to show more results from a particular domain when we’re confident that those results are likely to be most useful to you. This week we expanded the feature to include more queries and to show additional results (up to four) from the same website.


That’s all for this week. Search on, wherever life takes you.

This week in search 11/12/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We’re always excited by the diversity of the search features and enhancements that we make in any given week. Each week we try to release a diverse set of search feature and enhancement to help you find what you’re looking for, faster. From getting sports information instantly, to making it even easier for you to find the right webpage, this week’s round up includes a slew of new changes.

NHL Live Result
Many of you are sports fans, and we’re always delighted to make improvements that help you find those scores, stats and recaps. We partnered with our friends at NHL.com to provide rich information in the snippets of the NHL.com results. These include real-time scores, schedules and team standings. They also include links for quick access to game previews, live streams, recaps and video highlights of completed games making it super-easy to keep up to date on the latest NHL action.

Example searches: [nhl], [rangers]


Help for those who need it
In times of crisis, it's especially important to find the crucial information you're looking for—and find it fast. After receiving positive feedback for poison control and suicide prevention special search features in the U.S., this week we launched one or more emergency search features in 13 countries: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. For certain queries, the feature displays the phone number to call for poison emergencies, suicide prevention or general emergency services.

Instant Previews
This week we were excited to take the speed of Google Instant even further with the launch of Instant Previews in almost all languages and domains. Instant Previews is a new, interactive feature that helps you select the right results by showing you a preview of each page and highlighting the most relevant sections for your query. You can activate the feature with a single click on the magnifying glass next to the result title. The tool is fast and interactive, with the average preview appearing in under a tenth of a second.

Learn more about Instant Previews here.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s updates. You can check out some of the top searches of the week on our latest edition of Google Beat—stay tuned for more!

This week in search 11/05/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

As the leaves turn here in Mountain View, we’re reminded again about the importance of time. On the search team, we work every day to save you precious seconds so you can spend that time doing the things that really matter. This week, we’ve brought Google Instant to mobile, helping you more quickly find the results you’re looking for. We also brought you up-to-the-minute election results, so you could be the first to find out if your candidate got the job, and improved snippets for shopping sites, so you can quickly pick, say, the right stopwatch or alarm clock to buy. Speaking of alarm clocks, read on to the end of the post for an important tip...

Google Instant for mobile
Yesterday, we released a beta version of Google Instant for mobile, currently for Android 2.2+ and iOS4 devices in the U.S. To try it out, go to google.com in your phone’s browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box. Like the desktop version of Instant, when you type on your mobile device you’ll see predictions of what you might be searching for, and results for the top prediction appear automatically. Here’s a demo:



Live midterm election results in search
During this week's midterm elections in the U.S., people came to Google to get up-to-the-minute results. To speed things up we flipped on a simple way to find election results when you search terms like [elections] or [midterm election results]. It includes the latest results for U.S. House and Senate races and, where appropriate, your state Governor and Senate races. You can also choose to see the results for any specific states with queries like [new york election results]. Many people were curious about the results for California—a search for [ca election results 2010] and related terms was the #2 hottest query on Tuesday.


Rich snippets for shopping sites
In time for the holiday season, we now support rich snippets for shopping sites! Rich snippets are search results that have been enhanced using structured data from webpages. When you’re looking for something to buy, you’ll start seeing a new search result format with product price, availability and reviews. Here’s an example from a search for an [office lava lamp]:


This feature is currently available in the U.S., but we’ll be rolling it out in new countries soon. For more details, read our post on the Webmaster Central blog.

This week in searches
With the end of daylight savings time (which happens this weekend in the U.S.), in many parts of the world people were thinking about time this week. Between the U.S. elections, Halloween and, of course, the World Series, there was plenty to schedule. We all know the Giants won the title, but who won the search trends battle? Watch this week’s Google Beat to find out.

Thanks for sharing a few minutes to learn more about the latest in search. Oh, and don’t forget to set your clocks back an hour this Sunday!

This week in search 10/29/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week we’ve overhauled local search and made other tweaks to help you find the places, products and people you’re looking for. As you plan for the World Series and Halloween, we want to help you find the perfect sports bar, costume store and chocolate bar. Here are latest updates from this week:

Google Place Search
This week we introduced Place Search, a new kind of search result that organizes the world’s information around places. Whether you’re looking for a park, a great restaurant or a local plumber, you’ll find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can make comparisons and right the best sites. You should already be seeing place results automatically for many local searches. If you don’t see Place Search results at first, you can always click Places in the left-hand panel of the results page.


New product search refinements
People often come to Google to do product research, so in the past couple weeks we’ve expanded Google Product Search to France and Japan. Our goal is to help you find the product information and sites you’re looking for as quickly as possible, so in May we made it easier to find relevant brands for popular product searches. Now we’re providing additional refinements for popular stores and product types. For example, search for [chocolate] and now you’ll find links for related searches for brands (Godiva, Lindt, etc.) and types (dark, hot, etc.). These refinements are unpaid and ranked algorithmically to show the most relevant searches you may be interested in.


Other example searches: [running shoes], [blenders], [binoculars]

Real-time results in Social Search
This week we’ve added real-time to Social Search, so you’ll find the freshest tweets and other updates from your friends right on Google. Here in the Bay Area, everyone has been excited about watching the Giants in this year’s World Series. With our improvements to Social Search, now when you search for information about the game on Google you can see right on the results page if your friends are watching. Just look for the heading “Results from people in your social circle” to check it out.


Social Search is currently available in the U.S. For more information about Social Search, check out our blog post and help center article.

This week in searches—Halloween edition
Still don’t have a costume? You’re not alone—searches for “costume ideas” continue to spike on Google. Check out this week’s special Halloween edition of the Google Beat to find out what costumes, candy and scary movies people are searching for this year.

Happy Halloween!

This week in search 10/22/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

One of our core philosophies has always been launch and iterate. We’ll bring you a useful new feature or product, and then use both data and your feedback to continuously make it better. This week, we’re excited to announce three enhancements to some of the Google tools that have been around a while. So the next time you’re searching for the latest news, traveling abroad or looking for daily updates on a topic of interest—we’ve got you covered. Here are this week’s updates:

Realtime counter in search results
Since Realtime Search launched in December of last year, we’ve steadily updated the feature making it more comprehensive and easier to use. This week we added a Realtime counter underneath the News section of your search results. Now, when people on your favorite social networks are commenting on a particular topic you’ve searched for, you can easily see how many updates have been shared, all in real-time. This makes it easy to see when a news story is popular on the social web. Click the link to see the full Realtime Search results page.


Local flavor of Autocomplete, now international
It’s been more than a year since we launched localized versions of Google Autocomplete (formerly Google Suggest) that offer relevant search predictions tailored for different regions (we’re at 155 domains and growing!) More recently, we took these tailored predictions to a new level in the U.S. by targeting to specific metro areas like San Francisco and Chicago. This week, we extended these hyper-local predictions around the globe to every country that has Autocomplete. This means that the list of predictions beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than ever.

For example, when you’re in Barcelona, Spain and you start typing [rest] there’s a good chance you’re actually looking for restaurants in Barcelona:


However, if you’re in Madrid, you’ll probably want to check the restaurants there:


Better support for news-lovers in Google Alerts
It might be hard to believe, but Google Alerts have been providing email updates on your topic or query of interest since all the way back in 2003. Over the course of the past few years, we've spent a lot of time improving the way Google Alerts works to handle very specific queries (like a business or hobby), and while we've still got a lot of work to do, we've made steady improvements in the quantity, freshness and relevance of the content that we send you.

However, we’ve found many people are specifying general topics like “finance,” “entertainment” or even simply “news.” Up until this week, Google Alerts would return a long list of content from across the web about these very broad topics. This worked, but we realized it’s probably much more helpful to send you the corresponding section from Google News, since it seems like you’re looking for a digest of the big topics of the day. So we’re now including News sections in Alerts if you enter one of the following terms like: news, world news, business, entertainment, finance, health, science, sports or technology. This allows you to have your favorite part of Google News delivered to your inbox every morning.

The week in searches
In addition to all of these enhancements, are you curious to know what Google searches shot off the charts this week? The Google Beat gives you an inside look into the pulse of U.S. searches. In this week’s edition, we cover everything from BCS Football to Snooki.

We hope you find these updates useful!