Official Web Master Blog

What's the message displayed by Gmail when there's no message in your inbox? If you answered "No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader", you are right. It was Google's subtle way to promote Google Reader.


Before Google Reader was released, Gmail's "inbox zero" message used to be: "No new mail! There's always Google News if you're looking for something to read."

Now that Google focuses on developing Google+, a modern version of Google Reader, Gmail's new message is: "No new mail! See what people are talking about on Google+." The links sends Gmail users to the "what's hot" section of Google+ which "highlights selected content thought to be exemplary, interesting, and appropriate: showing you serendipitous and diverse information".


From Google News to Google Reader and now Google+, Gmail illustrates three different ways to read news. Google News ranks and clusters articles from the web, Google Reader allows you to read news from your favorite sites, while Google+ lets you read the articles shared by the people you follow. From news that are important to everyone to news that are important to the people you trust.

I've noticed an increasing number of ads that no longer send people to the company's sites. Instead, the ads only include a link to the official Facebook page. Sites suddenly look outdated, no longer include the latest information and people stop visiting them.


There are still people that visit those outdated sites and many are coming from search engines like Google. Despite Google's efforts to have a comprehensive index, there's a growing subset of the Web it can't properly index and that's Facebook. Sure, Google indexes a lot of Facebook pages, but that's like trying to find your keys in a dark room. Google needs Facebook's map to index all the pages and find the connections between pages and between users, but Facebook is not willing to license this valuable data to the most important competitor. Google tried to make the web social and failed, so now the only option to stay relevant is to build an alternative to Facebook's walled garden and that's Google+.

+1s are the new links, authors have profiles, companies have social pages and this new universe will try to coexist with the old Web in Google's search results. Google tried to focus on the users and find ways to make the social Web more open, but now it has to focus on itself and do everything it can to stay alive and maybe even save the Web. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but that's impossible if it can't access, understand and rank that information.

Back in 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin used links to determine the importance of a Web page. Now links and pages are no longer that important and the old rule of trying to send people to other sites as quickly as possible is difficult to apply. Showing personalized results requires understanding users better, encouraging them to share more content and create connections. In many ways, Google+ is the anti-Google and that's why it's difficult to understand some of the new features.

Google's search results are personalized even if you don't log in to a Google account. Google uses your location and your previous searches to customize the results. When you log in to your account, Google has more information: your search/browsing history, your social connections, the pages you've bookmarked or +1'd. Everyone is different and Google has the opportunity to use information about you to disambiguate queries, to show more results from the sites you trust and pages you're already visited.

Google+ can change Google results more than any other Google service because social data is an important signal for personalizing results, Google owns the end-to-end experience and it's in Google's best interest to show that Google+ helps sites get better rankings. After all, the reason why many sites added Google+ buttons is that Google+ data is used by Google's search algorithms.

The latest initiative that integrates Google+ with Google Search is called "Search, plus Your World." It's an upgrade of the social search feature that integrates the rich content from Google+.

Google Search now has access to non-public posts and photos from Google+ and you'll be able to search all the posts and photos shared with you or from your circles. "You can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they've shared privately with you or publicly. You'll find links shared by your friends, such as activities, restaurants and other things they enjoyed on their trip," mentions Google. Personal results have a special icon next to the snippet, Google shows the number of personal results at the top of the page and you can also restrict the results to these pages.


Google Instant suggestions now include the people from your Google+ circles. "Now, typing just the first few letters of your friend's name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete. Selecting a predicted profile takes you to a results page for your friend, which includes information from their Google+ profile and relevant web results that may be related to them." Google shows similar suggestions for "prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors."


Another change is that Google includes a special box with Google+ pages related to your query. "Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn't possible before," informs Google. I think it's a mistake to show Google+ pages that are vaguely related to a general query like [music]. The box looks more like a thinly disguised ad than a genuinely useful feature (an ad both for Google+ and the celebrity pages).


To balance the increasing number of social features, Google also added two new buttons at the top of the search results pages that help you toggle between the personalized results and the non-personalized results. This works for an entire session and you can also remove personal results from the preferences page.


Right now, "Search, plus Your World" is gradually rolled out over the next few days, but it only be available when you use Google.com in English and you sign in.

While Google+ data can certainly improve search results, I feel like there's too much information that's not really useful and too much Google+ bias. When Google developed the OneBoxes for maps and stocks, it linked to its own services, but also to competing services. Today Google no longer tries to be fair. Showing the number of people that added the author of a news articles to their circles is not more useful than showing the PageRank of the page or the number of Twitter followers. Showing the latest Google+ posts below the homepage of a business is not more useful than showing the latest Twitter posts. Google profiles are not necessarily better than Facebook profiles and the number of +1's is not more useful than the number of likes. To make Google+ more powerful, to attract more celebrities and businesses, Google might end up making Google results less useful. It's a tricky balancing act to use Google search's popularity to increase Google+ adoption, while also improving Google results using Google+ data and there are many mistakes to be made along the way.

Google+ is rolling out a feature called Find My Face, which helps other people tag you in their photos. Find My Face uses the face recognition data from Picasa Web Albums to make suggestions. The feature is disabled by the default and you can enable it from the settings page. Google says that it will share this data with the people you know, which probably means the people from your circles.

"Around the holidays, many of us get together with friends and family, and if you're like me, you take lots of photos! Tagging those photos can be a lot of work. So today we're launching Find My Face, an easier way to tag photos of yourself and your friends. By turning on Find My Face, Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos. Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject, and you can turn the feature on or off in Google+ settings. Find My Face will be rolling out over the next few days," informs Google.


Unlike Facebook, Google won't enable this feature by default. "We recognize that Google has to be extra careful when it comes to these [privacy] issues. Face recognition we will bring out once we have acceptable privacy models in place," said a Google employee back in March. VentureBeat concludes that "by making a simple opt-in procedure, Google will let the 'privacy-schmivacy' set enjoy the benefits of the new tech while sidestepping any accusations of dirty dealing from those who take privacy a bit more seriously".

{ Thanks, Venkat. }

Schemer is an invite-only Google service for sharing and discovering things to do. "A scheme is any activity that can be done in the world, whether it's ordering a favorite dish at a restaurant or snorkeling in the Caribbean with sharks," explains Google.

Much like 43 Things, Schemer lets you define goals and mark the things you've already accomplished. You can inspire other people, find people who have the same goals and join the conversation. To make it easier to find a scheme, you can add tags and locations. Google also partnered with Bravo, Food Network, Rolling Stone, IGN and Entertainment Weekly, so you can get ideas from experts, not just from your friends.


"Whether it's exploring a new city, checking out a friend's movie recommendation, or just finding new activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make the most of your day," mentions Schemer's team. The service is integrated with Google+ and you need to join Google+ to be able to use it. "Schemer uses your profile picture and name from your Google+ account to identify you as a schemer user. This means that when you post a scheme, write a comment, post a reply, or indicate either you want to do or have done a scheme, your profile picture and name will be attached to those activities."

Schemer is actually a Google+ app and it's likely that you'll be able to use it inside Google+ in the future. Google also promises to launch a mobile app for Schemer so you can find schemes related to your location.

Now that Google+ no longer requires invitation, Schemer could make Google+ more popular. There's a great viral video, an interesting design and a site that doesn't look like a regular Google service. A scheme is "a secret or devious plan" (American Heritage Dictionary) and a schemer is a person who is involved in making these secret plans, so Google uses a mustache logo, a mesmerizing animated homepage, the Hitchcock font and catchy messages like "You're looking diabolical!" or "Invite your partners in crime".



Note: this post includes another invitation link. The first 20 people who can find it will get access to Schemer, but each one can invite other 20 people.

Update: you can find more invitations using Google Search and Twitter Search.

{ Thanks, Venkat. }

Gmail's contact manger started to include information from Google Profiles. You can also find your Google+ circles in the sidebar, below the list of groups.


By default, the data obtained from Google Profiles is displayed below the information you've entered, but you can combine them: go to a contact page, click the "More" dropdown and select "[Show external data] inline".

It's interesting to notice that the Google Profiles data is automatically added when you enter an email address associated with a profile. To remove this information, just delete the corresponding email address.

The latest features are also available at google.com/contacts, which has recently switched to the new Google Contacts interface, but you can find them in the old Gmail interface, as well.

{ Thanks, Scott, Filipe, Venkat, Yavuz, Shimmy, Zachary and Matt. }

When you mouse over a Google image search result, you'll see a +1 button that lets you recommend the image to the people that follow in Google+.


At some point, Google removed the social features from the image search engine and now only relies on the +1 button to provide social recommendations. The nice thing is that Google annotates image results with the relevant people that +1'd the images.


The social layer is no longer a separate section, but it's less comprehensive: the previous version included "pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr". The "results from your social circle" were probably less relevant since Google generated the social circles from your Gmail contacts, Google Talk buddies, the people you follow in Google Buzz and Twitter. It's likely that the social circles were just an approximation of the circles you can create in Google+ and Google will phase out this feature.

You've probably noticed that Google annotates search results with social data, especially from Google+ and Google +1. You'll sometimes see that a page was mentioned in a Blogger post or a Twitter message by one of your Google+ friends. For other results, Google lists the Google+ friends that +1'd the pages.


If a page has a lot of +1's, Google occasionally shows the number of +1's bellow the snippet. To make the annotation more relevant, Google now shows the number of +1's from your location. For example, "763 people in New York, NY, USA +1'd" Google's Webmaster Tools page.


I'm not sure that it's useful to know the number of +1's for the top results of a navigational query, but this could be useful when you're trying to find a popular restaurant or an Android game.

{ Thanks, Nick. }

A lot of people expect a redesigned Google Reader and the good news is that they won't be disappointed: a new interface will be available next week. Google Reader is not dead, but the new interface couldn't be released faster because the sharing feature had to be integrated with Google+.

My favorite feature of Google Buzz was that it automatically imported all the shared items from Google Reader and allowed your followers to discuss them. Now that Google Buzz will be discontinued, this feature will be available in Google+. Unfortunately, Google Reader will no longer have a standalone sharing feature, a separate list of followers and people you follow, a feed and a page for shared items. This is great if you are a Google+ user, since it simplifies sharing and makes Google Reader more consistent. If you don't want to use Google+, you'll still be able to share posts by email or using the "send to" feature, but these workarounds aren't very useful for sharing a large number of posts.


The takeaway is that Google+ is not a distinct social service you can easily ignore, it's a service that will be used for sharing photo albums, documents, videos, for posting blog comments and it will be very difficult to use Google without joining Google+ since, at some point, Google+ will be... Google itself.

"Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader. We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you," mentions Google's Alan Green. That's the reason why you'll be able to export your shared items, your starred and liked items, your list of friends from Reader's settings page.

Google Reader's sharing feature has always been difficult to use and the integration with Google+ will finally give Reader the opportunity to shine and show why it's still a useful service. I'm sure that a lot of users will complain that they can't use the old sharing feature, just like many YouTube users complained when Google migrated YouTube to Google Accounts. There's a lot of value in having separate services with their own accounts, sharing features and friends lists, but switching to unified accounts, unified profiles, consistent sharing features makes Google's services more useful because they work together, they combine their strengths and become easier to use.

This is really weird. The "photos" link from Google's navigation bar no longer sends you to Picasa Web Albums if you're logged in. Google decided to send users to the Photos section from Google+ which shows photos from your circles, photos from your Android phone, photos you've been tagged in and your list of Picasa Web albums.





You can still go to Picasa Web Albums, but you have to bookmark the old URL or manually type it in the address bar. Google+ Photos lacks many of the features from Picasa Web Albums: Picnik integration, batch editing, entering an album description, ordering prints, creating album maps, moving photos to a different album and more. The interface is more user friendly, but it's not yet a full-fledged photo sharing app.

{ Thanks, Herin. }