This week in search 2/11/11

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 features like Instant, the dynamic left-hand panel of tools, voice search and Google Goggles, search is becoming more interactive all the time. You don’t just type and query and hit enter: you can speak your search query, and whether typing or speaking, you can search in a kind of conversation, with the results and search tools updating dynamically based on just a few characters. This week’s changes all continue to make Google more interactive and responsive to your intentions, whether you’re looking for a vector graphic file for a presentation, getting Google Instant results or looking for a fun distraction in the middle of the workday.

Instant satellite and terrain maps on Google results
We love the satellite and terrain views you can get in Google Earth and Maps, but shouldn’t you be able to get those views right away on the results page without having to click through to Maps and then click the “satellite” or “terrain” option? Well now, when you’re looking for these specialized map views, you’ll get them instantly on your main results page. For example, if you search for [honolulu satellite map], you’ll see the city’s lush green interior and deep blue ocean right in your search results. Click the map to jump directly to a larger view.


Example searches: [satellite map of moscow], [yosemite terrain map]

New ways to find Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) files
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are files that describe how to draw the basic elements needed to create an image: elements like lines, circles, polygons and more complex shapes. Unlike the images typically returned by most search engines (for example, JPG, GIF and PNG), SVGs can be stretched to any size without the quality of the image suffering. This makes them ideally suited for things like clip art, maps, logos, flags and scientific diagrams. In December, we announced we were starting to return SVGs in our results; more recently, we made it possible to refine your search to exclusively return SVGs. Click “Images” in the left-hand panel, then "Advanced Search” and then select the SVG filetype. If you want to impress your friends, you can also add “filetype:svg” to any normal search, such as [graph theory filetype:svg]:


Example searches: [world map filetype:svg], [flag filetype:svg]

Chrome Instant ready for prime time
If you haven’t yet tried Instant on Chrome, now is a great time to check it out. Instant on Chrome arrived in the stable build last Thursday, which means it’s ready for prime time. Chrome brings the Instant experience to a whole new level—not just search results, but also webpages begin loading as soon as you start typing. To try it out, download the latest release and enable Instant in the “Basics” tab of Chrome’s options.


Celebrating Jules Verne’s birthday by diving into the depths
We’ve been having fun with some unique and interactive doodles lately, and this week was no exception. On Monday visitors to Google were invited to navigate the Nautilus and dive down into the depths. Pull the lever or tilt your computer (side note: who knew my laptop had an accelerometer?) and the Nautilus will follow. If you missed the doodle, you can still play with the underlying graphic in full view and HD!


It turns out you can do a lot of wild things on Google...you can talk to it and, sometimes, you can play games right on our homepage—but at the end of the day, the most important thing you can do is find the best answer to your question.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

This week in search 2/4/2011

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.

This week it got just a bit faster to find the right things to buy and the right places to go, with a little help from Google—and your friends. Simply type a few characters and get Google Instant results in the “Shopping” view, and find recommendations from your friends with Hotpot in search results.

Instant results in the “Shopping” view
Now you can shop faster than ever and get the speed of Google Instant when comparing prices, looking for nearby stores and learning about products you want to buy. For example, if you’re searching for a cast iron skillet, we’ll start showing you relevant pans as you type [cast iro...]. Click “Shopping” in the left-hand panel and try searching for [sweater wrap shawl], [android phone] or anything else.

Now results will appear as you type in the “Shopping” view and in Google Product Search

Hotpot recommendations in search results
Earlier this week we added Hotpot recommendations to regular search results on Google. So now, if you’re looking for restaurants in San Francisco, you can simply search Google for [restaurants sf]. If a friend has rated a particular place, you might see her opinion right beneath the listing. We also expanded Hotpot to 38 new languages so people can share their favorite places around the world.

Hotpot recommendations from your friends now appear right in your usual search results

Whether you’re cooking at home or dining out, we hope this week’s updates help you find what you’re looking for just a little bit faster.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

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!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

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.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

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!

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Director of Product Management

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.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management

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.

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Director of Product Management

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.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

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!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Search Product Management

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!

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

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!

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Director of Product Management

This week in search 10/16/10

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.

Search is always evolving, and we’re excited to share the latest this week—from Google Autocomplete to our fun homepage doodles—as well as a glimpse at what the U.S. is searching for. Here’s this week’s round up of updates:

A birthday surprise
Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday. When you include your date of birth on your Google profile, you may notice a special treat on the Google homepage on your birthday (be sure to sign in). Click on the doodle for another birthday surprise!

Renaming Google Suggest
We first launched Google Suggest in 2004 in Labs to help people enter their searches faster. Suggest has been a very popular feature, and some people have been asking what happened to it. Never fear, it hasn’t gone anywhere—we just renamed it to “Google Autocomplete.” As part of our launch of Google Instant, we thought "Autocomplete" fit better with the new functionality—automatic queries and automatic results.

Google Instant in new countries across Asia
We’ve been rapidly expanding Google Instant around the globe. Last week we launched Instant in Australia, India, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. Now that it’s been a few weeks since our initial release, we’ve been finding that people are really learning how to get the most out of Instant. For example, in just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. This is a very demanding launch for our infrastructure and we’re expanding around the globe as soon as we can.

Eurostat data in search
We’ve also rolled out some improvements our public data search features. We’ve been working closely with Eurostat to surface some really useful and interesting data about unemployment rates, government debt, minimum wage and broadband penetration across Europe. Try searching for [arbeitslosenstatistik deutschland], [smic france] or [deuda publica españa] to see examples of this data visualisation in action. The data is available across 34 languages. We’ve also internationalized data from the World Bank. You can learn more on our European policy blog.

The week in searches
Curious to know what Google Searches skyrocketed in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where you’ll find an inside look into what people are clicking on Google. This week, we cover everything from Columbus Day to Brett Favre and the buzz around “Cigar Guy.”

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

This week in search 10/8/10

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.

While we’re always working on making search more precise, comprehensiveness and interactive, you can also count on us to bring you enhancements in speed and language. This week, our updates include releases that will help you get the information you’re looking for fast—and in many different languages.

Flu facts in search
Just in time for flu season, we’re again collaborating with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association to help you easily find nearby locations to get the flu vaccine. When searching for flu-related terms, information will appear at the top of your search results, including tips from flu.gov and a flu vaccine finder box with an expanding map that displays locations where you can receive vaccine. You can also visit www.google.com/flushot for the flu vaccine finder. While we’re all hoping for a relatively tame flu season, preparation is always necessary. We hope this enhancement will make it easier.


Example searches: [flu] and [flu shot]

Google Alerts for video now in 40 languages
Google Alerts has been helping English speakers discover new videos related to their interests for years. Last week, we added support for video alerts in 39 additional languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. This means that all of you around the world can now monitor the web for new videos, as well as for news, blogs, web results and real-time updates. Visit www.google.com/alerts and try it out.

A new addition to Google Translate
It is with great linguistic pleasure that we’ve added Latin to as an alpha language in Google Translate. Although considered a “dead language” by many, Latin is still studied by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide and is the predecessor to many modern tongues. If you are looking for something to translate, check out our post announcing the feature (written entirely in Latin!). While this may not be popular for translating YouTube captions or emails, we hope it will help unlock the many ancient documents that are written in Latin.

The week in searches
Want to know what was hot on Google Search in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where we give you the scoop on what got people clicking on Google. This week, we cover the Rick Sanchez/Jon Stewart comments as well as the buzz around the Ryder Cup golf competition.

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.

Posted by Ben Ling, Director of Search Properties

This week in search 9/17/10

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.

From the latest blockbuster films to your favorite TV shows, we recently launched some useful enhancements when you're searching for media. And if you're looking to remember where to go on your next vacation, we've also got you covered.

Here are some of our recent updates:

Director and cast links in movie search results
Have you ever searched for a movie and then wondered who directed or starred in it? This week, we made this process one step faster. Now, you'll see information about the director and starring cast of movies in search results, along with other information like ratings and links to relevant content. The result also gives you the opportunity to click through to a site to get more info about a person with just one click.

This feature is currently available in English and Japanese. Over time, we'll roll this change out in more languages.

New results for TV episodes
As more TV networks begin publishing their shows on sites like fox.com, we’ve noticed that people often turn to Google to find their favorites, whether old episodes of Lost or the latest episode of Glee. Today we’re making it easier than ever to find your favorite television shows by episode or season right on google.com. With our new feature, when you search for a television show, you’ll sometimes see a new section in the search results page called “Episodes for” with videos of the three newest programs we can find. We hope these changes make it easier to find your favorite television shows online, whether to catch up on last night’s episode or to kill some time with an old favorite season.

Example search: [glee] or [family guy]

Stars extended to places in local results
In March we introduced stars in search so that you could mark results and rediscover them later. This week we extended the feature to local results, so now you can star places and get to them later—through a search, on Google Maps or on your phone. For example, if you're planning a trip to Tucson, you might want to go to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum—so you would star the result from your desktop computer. When you arrive in Arizona, you can access the starred item again from the Local tab of google.com using your phone browser or in the Google Maps for mobile application. Since you're signed in with the same account on your desktop computer and phone, the starred items sync automatically. Phone number, address and directions information are just a few clicks away.

Example search: [tucson museum]





This week in search... queries
What are people searching for on Google? We recently introduced a series of videos about U.S. search trends. Check out this week's the Google Beat, for the latest glimpse into the pulse of Google searches.

We hope you find these new updates and enhancements useful. Stay tuned for more next week!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Search Product Management

This week in search 8/27/10

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.

Searches come in many flavors, but it's our job to determine what type of search you're doing once you've clicked your way out of the search box. Whether you're looking for a blog or a business, our goal is to get you the most relevant type of result back to you—fast. Ultimately, it's that combination of relevance and speed that we think will give you the best experience. Here are some of our newest search enhancements:

Improved Blog Search
With the proliferation of specialized blogs all across the web, you'll often find great content on blogs—whether you're planning a trip to Florida, looking to bring home a new golden retriever or learning how to make a delicious Italian dinner. Recently, our blog search team made it much easier to find full blogs about your query, rather than single posts on the topic. This is especially useful if you're looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query. Try it with one of your search queries by clicking "Blogs," then "Homepages," in the left-hand panel of your search results.

Example searches: [tesla car], [google], [android]

A new home for Realtime Search
When we think about relevancy, often what you're looking for may have just happened. It's been more than nine months since we first announced our real-time search features, and this week we gave it a new home at www.google.com/realtime as well as some great new tools to you refine and understand your results. You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news that's happening right near you or in the area of your choice. We also added conversations view, so you can follow a discussion more easily by browsing a full timeline of tweets and seeing how the conversation evolved. And in Google Alerts, you can now create an alert specifically for "updates" to get an email the moment a topic of interest shows up on Twitter or other short-form services.

Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.

Example search: [egg recall]

More local results in maps and clickable markers
We made some changes to local results in web search that will help you learn more about the results and save you time by saving you clicks. Starting this week, when you search for places we'll show you all of the results that match your query on the map. Results after the first seven will be shown with small circle markers. This can be very useful in identifying the density of stores and helping you find the right neighborhood to visit. For example, when you search for [fabric stores nyc], you can now easily identify the Garment District:

When you see a result on the map that you like, you can now click directly on the marker (the pin or the circle) and go to Google Maps with that place selected and the "Info" window open. The other results will still be there if you want to explore more places.

Example searches: [fabric stores nyc], [coffee in seattle], [resort near ko samui, thailand]

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

This week in search 7/25/10

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 we seek to expand the most comprehensive search experience on the web, we've made a number of recent enhancements to your search results. Ultimately, what you're looking for isn't limited to text websites; you may be looking for a tweet, a video or a place—and we want to make sure you can find all of it. This week, we've made it easier to find definitions and images.

Dictionary search feature enhancements
When it comes to dictionary-related searches, both content and precision are vital. Recently, we expanded our dictionary search feature to all global English users, giving you quick and easy access to even more useful dictionary information. We added implicit triggering, which means you can simply search for [flummox] and find the definition, you don't have to search for [define flummox] or [what is flummox]. We've also improved the definition result snippet to show more details such as parts of speech and pronunciation. Stay tuned for more enhancements here, including an expanded mobile experience.

Example search: [stupendous]


Our biggest redesign yet for Google Images
Our focus on comprehensiveness extends itself to our other search properties, including Google Images. Over time, Google Images has become a very popular source of visual information. For many of you, Google Images has become a great tool for inspiration, learning, and even shopping. And, today, we've indexed more than 10 billion images -- so you can imagine the depth.

With this in mind, we have introduced a new design for Google Images. You'll now see a dense, tiled layout that makes it easy to view many images—up to 1,000—on a single scrollable page. In addition, we made the thumbnail previews on the results page larger, so all you have to do is hover over an image to get an even larger view. You'll also find more information about the image, and other image-specific features in the thumbnail preview. Once you click an image, you'll be taken to a new landing page that displays a large image directly over the website that hosts the image—so you can instantly learn more about the source and context.

Example search: [sunflowers] or [new york]

We hope you enjoyed this week's changes making your web experience even more comprehensive. Stay tuned for more search enhancements next week.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

This week in search 6/27/10

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.

Speed is a common theme at Google—the notion of speed is baked into all of our products, from Google Chrome to web search. Often, we also simply develop features that help deliver answers fast. Whether by displaying the exact content you're looking for at the top of your search results page or by optimizing the way you search, many of these speed enhancements save you keystrokes—and time.

This week, we released two new features:

Sunrise and Sunset Search feature
Whether you're looking to find the best time for a morning jog or trying to plan that perfect moment for a wedding proposal, knowing exactly when the sun rises or sets can always be helpful. This week, we were happy to launch a Sunrise and Sunset feature for search. It gives the precise times of sunsets and sunrises for any location around the world. Unlike the weather, sunrises and sunsets are quite predictable, and as a result, we don't use a data source. Instead, we calculate sunrise and sunset times based on latitude, longitude and the current time. This calculation has been of interest to astronomers and mathematicians for millennia, so they’ve had time to get it just right. And for most locations, it’s accurate to within a single minute.


Example searches: [sunrise port jefferson ny] or [sunset cancun]

Google Search by Voice expanded to more languages
Google Search by Voice enables people to search the web faster than ever before—getting you answers with fewer keystrokes. This service was originally launched in English, and was offered in the U.S., U.K., India, Australia and New Zealand. We later introduced Japanese and Mandarin to expand the number of possible users. Just a week ago, we launched the service in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Given that local dialects are a factor in the performance of speech recognition, we first launched our service in the four countries most closely associated with these languages: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. This week we followed with Korean and the launch in Taiwan of Traditional Mandarin.



To get started with Google Search by Voice, visit the Google mobile page in your country's domain (for example, in France go to m.google.fr) and download the application for your phone’s operating system in your locale. You'll find this available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones. Ultimately, our goal is to bring Google Search by voice to speakers of all languages, so stay tuned for more announcements here.

We'll see you back here next week for more new announcements.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

This week in search 6/11/10

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 goals is to deliver the web content you're looking for as fast as possible. From under-the-hood indexing improvements and small feature enhancements that make search more relevant and intuitive, to directly delivering content to your inbox in your native tongue, all these enhancements are focused on getting you the results you're looking for—fast. Back in December, I wrote here about our efforts in speed, or what we call time-to-result. This week, I'm pleased to revisit this topic and share three new releases from our search teams that showcase the fruits of this focus:

World Cup scores and schedules
This week marked the start of an exciting time for football fans the world over. As many of those fans scour the web for scores and information on the tournament, we want to help organize and present those results as quick and simply as possible. So when you complete a search related to the World Cup, you’ll see live scores, latest results and match schedules at the top of your search results. You’ll also find TV broadcast information and quick links for game recaps, live updates, standings and team profiles. The feature works on all Google search domains in 44 languages, including Afrikaans, Amharic, Swahili and Zulu.


Example searches: [world cup], [world cup spain] and [world cup group g]

Google Alerts in 40 languages
Google Alerts, which we launched in 2003, automatically searches the web to find new information about topics you're interested in and deliver it directly to your inbox. This week, we extended Google Alerts availability to 40 languages, expanding the reach of this helpful product. Google Alerts now supports Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. So, for example, if you want to keep up to date with your favorite World Cup footballer, create an alert for his name and new results will be delivered to your inbox. This feature is helpful to English speakers too—try translating your query into other languages to find out what's being talked about around the world.

To get started, visit the alerts page in your country's domain (for example, here's Arabic in Egypt: www.google.com.eg/alerts).

Caffeine indexing system
This week, we announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. This new indexing system provides fresher results for web searches (nearly 50 percent fresher than our previous system) and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. We built Caffeine to help us meet the evolving expectations of our users, especially as content across the web becomes more global and is published in real time. Caffeine is the definition of speed for us, and we were excited to make this announcement and continue to bring you the best possible content—faster than ever before.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more enhancements next week.

Posted by Jack Menzel, Product Management Director, Search