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Google can now answer questions about nutrition, but it's strange to see that this feature only works if you use voice search in Android, iOS or Chrome. "You will be able to quickly and easily find extensive nutrition information for over 1,000 fruits, vegetables, meats and meals in search. From the basics of potatoes and carrots to more complex dishes like burritos and chow mein, you can simply ask, 'How much protein is in a banana?' or 'How many calories are in an avocado?' and get your answer right away," informs Google.

It works for general questions like 'how many calories are in carrots' or for queries like 'carrots calories'.


By default, Google shows the number of calories in a medium carrot, but you can pick a different serving size: 1 slice, 100 grams, 1 cup grated and more. For now, you can't enter a custom serving size.


You can also disambiguate your query. If you search "tuna calories", you can select from bluefin, skipjack and yellowfin. Unfortunately, the list is incomplete and you can't select canned tuna.


Google shows a knowledge graph card with information from Wikipedia and nutrition facts, so you can quickly find the amount of saturated fat, cholesterol, protein or vitamins and minerals without clicking a search result.


And it's not all about calories. You can also ask: 'how much protein is in an egg?', 'how much cholesterol is in chicken?', 'how much saturated fat is in butter?', 'how much sugar is in Coca Cola?', 'magnesium in an apple', 'vitamin C in parsley'.


The feature only works in English and it's gradually rolling out, so it may not work for you. Try it in Android's Google Search app, Google's app for iOS or in Chrome (click the microphone icon from the search box).

Google Search's tablet interface highlights some of the top search results if they're from video sites like YouTube or Dailymotion. Google shows much bigger thumbnails, so the search results really stand out. Unfortunately, Google no longer includes a snippet.

It's likely that this UI is used for queries that return a lot of video results. Some examples that worked for me in the tablet interface: [internship trailer], [u2 one corbijn video].



It's interesting to notice that Google adds a +1 button next to the video results when the top result is highlighted. The +1 button has been recently removed from the tablet interface, so these results are treated differently.

I've previously posted about Google's experimental app launcher that replaces the black navigation bar. It's the perfect fit for the Chrome integration with Google search, which also removes the search box from Google SERPs.

Google tests a new version of the app launcher in Chrome: it's huge and you can click "more" to see other Google services. I've managed to get the new interface using this URL in Chrome.



If you think "huge" is an exaggeration, take a look at this screenshot and compare it with the screenshots from this post:



{ Thanks, Silviu. }

Reminders are a new feature in the latest version of the Google Search app for Android. You can create reminders using voice search and Google Now will show notifications.

Now you can also create reminders from the desktop Google Search when you search for events. Use queries like [when is bonnaroo 2013?], [when is the first day of summer?], [halloween day] and Google shows a link that says: "Remind me on Google Now".


Click the link and "Google Now will remind you 1 week before." For now, notifications are only available if you use the Google Search app for Android, which also lets you manage reminders (delete reminders and set new ones).


{ via Search Engine Roundtable }

Google removed yet another advanced search tool: cross-language search. It was available in the "Search tools" menu as "translated foreign pages" and it allowed you to find pages written in other languages.


Google automatically suggested a few languages for your query, but you could manually add other languages. Your query was translated into all these languages, Google performed multiple searches for the translations, compiled a list of results and translated titles and snippets into your language.

Here's a screenshot from 2009, when Google Search added this feature:


"If you're traveling and want to find hotels, restaurants, activities or reviews written from a local perspective, or if you're just curious to find what's being written about a company, product or topic in another language, give Translated search in the Search Options panel a try," suggested Google at that time.

The feature was first available in 2007 as part of Google Translate, but the initial version supported a single destination language. "Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type 'wine tasting events in Bordeaux' into the search box on the 'Search results' tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English," informed Google.

It's sad to see this feature disappear because it was very powerful and difficult to replace. It integrated Google Translate and Google Search, so Google performed multiple translations and searches just to shows you 10 cross-language search results.

Why was it removed? "The translate foreign pages feature is no longer offered. Removing features always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. You can still translate entire pages in Chrome. Streamlining enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people's lives," explained Google. Most likely, not many people used this feature.

I assume that most "search tools" features are rarely used and the same thing is true for other features for power users: advanced search, operators. They're not obvious, they're difficult to use and few people need them. As Google focuses more on answering questions, I expect to see fewer and fewer advanced search features and that's disappointing.

I found a great paragraph in a Google page about Gmail actions:

"Google Search is evolving from surfacing search results to answering questions. With Voice Search and Natural language queries, users can speak or type questions they have and see highly structured information cards in Search."

That changes how people interact with Google Search, how Google Search pages look, how queries are processed and what people expect from Google. When Google will be able to answer complex questions, to summarize long pages, use inferences to find new information and truly understand human language, you'll no longer need a browser for most searches. A Google search button can be embedded in any smart device from watches, fridges to smart glasses and cars.

In a recent video, Matt Cutts tries to predict the future of Google search: "It ought to be able to go out and take multiple sources of information and figure out how to combine those together and fuse or synthesize that information. And it should really be able to handle difficult syntax. So moving up the chain towards not just data or knowledge, but analysis, towards wisdom."

Amit Singhal announced at Google I/O that this is "the end of search as we know it". The future of search goes beyond search results and it has more to do with answering questions, conversations and anticipating user's intentions.

Google has 3 products with similar goals: Knowledge Graph, Voice Search and Google Now. They go hand in hand to deliver the future of search today.

Voice Search has been available on the desktop if you're using Chrome, but now it's much better: it has been upgraded to the conversational voice search released last year for Android and iOS. Just click the microphone icon from the Google search box, ask questions and you'll get a spoken answer. Soon you'll be to just say "OK Google" to trigger voice search.


Google Search for Android added some new Google Now cards: reminders, last train home (Japan only), real time public transit updates and recommendations for books, games and music albums. Google Now can understand things like "remind me to call Susan tomorrow at 10", "when I go to Rome, remind me to buy a new suit" or "remind me to meet Dan when I get to work". You can create both time-based reminders and location-based reminders.


Voice Search is getting more sophisticated, the Knowledge Graph has more facts and connections between concepts, while Google Now gets smarter and tries to anticipate your searches.

{ via Inside Search blog }

When you search for an address using Google, you'll usually see a Google Maps result with a static map and links for directions. If your address is very specific and includes a street number, Google will also show a Street View thumbnail that lets you quickly access Google's panoramic street-level imagery.

For example, a search for [1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View] shows the Street View image, but a search for [Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View] doesn't. Sometimes you need to include the zip code: [1 infinite loop cupertino ca 95014] works, but [1 infinite loop cupertino ca] doesn't.


{ Thanks, Jérôme. }

When HTC named its latest flagship phone HTC One, I wasn't sure if it was a great idea. It's hard to find information about HTC One when there are so many pages about HTC One X, HTC One S, HTC One V and a few other phones with similar names.

Almost 3 months after HTC announced its phone, I tried 3 basic queries using Google and Bing: [htc one], [htc one review] and [htc one price]. I've switched to the US English interface and made sure that the results aren't influenced by personalization. All the screenshots show the first Bing results on the left side and the first Google results on the right side. For some of the screenshots, I scrolled down past the ads.

The results for [htc one]:


Bing's top organic result is the HTC One X homepage and the HTC One homepage is not even in the top 50 results. All Google results from the first page are about HTC One and the first result is the right one.

The results for [htc one review]:


The top 3 Bing results are HTC One X reviews, while all Google results from the first page are about HTC One.

The results for [htc one price]:


The first Bing result is about HTC One V and the third one is about One X, One S and One V. Google's results are relevant.

It's not clear if Google does a better job because it favours recent results or because it realizes that HTC One is a different entity. When searching for [htc one], the first Google result about One X is at #38.

The suggestions that are diplayed when you type a Google search query are useful most of the time. Google tries to finish your query and suggests some popular queries that start with the keywords you've typed.

Sometimes Google also shows suggestions from web pages and many of them are pretty long and verbose. They look artificial because it's unlikely that many users typed them. Google compiles a list of popular n-grams from web pages and includes them in the list of Google Instant suggestions. You'll find page titles, excerpts from Wikipedia articles and press releases, but also incomplete suggestions that don't make any sense.

It's easy to spot these artificial suggestions: type a long query until Google no longer shows suggestions, type more keywords and Google will suddenly show long suggestions.

Here are some of them:









In the last example I've searched for ["the * why it's inaccurate"] and started to type a new word after "the", when I saw these absurdly detailed suggestions. If you search for [why would it be inaccurate], Google shows a single suggestion: [why would it be inaccurate to speak of an nacl molecule]. You need to type [why would it be inaccurate to call t] to see this suggestion: [why would it be inaccurate to call the pituitary gland the master gland of the body]. This long phrase can't be found in any web page, but it shows up because Google merges various word sequences.

Google has a very cool feature that restricts search results to pages that include tables. The snippets are table rows and you can import the tables to Fusion Tables.

"Google Tables allows you to search across public Fusion Tables and millions of web pages with data presented in a table. Once you find the right table, you can import the data to Fusion Tables for filtering, visualizations, collaboration, downloads, and access with the Fusion Tables API," informs Google.



There's a search box for this feature when you create a Fusion Table file, but Google Table Search is also useful as a standalone feature. It's interesting that there are a lot of Wikipedia pages that show up in the search results and a search for [the] returns about 39 million results (vs 25 billion web search results).

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

The latest Google Search update removed a very useful feature: quick view. The link was displayed next to PDF files and Microsoft Office files and allowed you to open them in the Google Drive Viewer.


Here's how Google described Quick View: "Annoyed by pop ups requesting you to download a specific software or plugin to visualize a document? Google Docs allows you to view any document directly from the search results without requiring any plugins. Just search for a document, for example [white paper on cloud computing] and then click on 'Quick View' to see the document in Google Docs."


If you don't want to download the file, you can click the green arrow and select "cached", but this shows a text-only version of the document that doesn't preserve formatting.

Please note that the feature has nothing to do with the "quick view" for mobile phones.

Google now shows a green arrow icon next to search results URLs. Click the arrow and you'll get a drop-down menu with up to three options: cached, similar and share. Google tested a different interface for the drop-down menu a few weeks ago.

Until now, Google only displayed the "share" link next to the results, while "cached" and "similar" were buried in the Instant Preview box. Instant Preview is no longer available.


Bing has a similar feature and Google probably decided to test it and see if it works well. Before accusing Google of copying a Bing feature, it's a good idea to check Bing's interface and see that it looks a lot like Google Search.


Here's a Bing vs Google screenshot for [ny times]:

Back in 2009, Google added a sidebar with advanced search options like wonder wheel, timeline, sites with images, recent results and related searches (intially called "search suggestions"). Many of these features are no longer available, but there are some new features that have been added since then: verbatim, dictionary, visited pages.


Google has recently removed the related searches feature because few people used it. Don't confuse this feature with the regular related searches that are displayed below the search results. "We weren't seeing enough usage of this filter to maintain it in the toolbar, but we do display related searches at the bottom of the page when they seem relevant enough," explains Google.

Here's a screenshot from 2009 (licensed as Creative Commons by Search Engine Land):


"Related searches" allowed you to quickly check the results for similar queries. "If you're ever unsure about the precise terms you should use for your search, start out with a broader term then use the related searches tool to discover alternative search terms," explained Google. It was also used by SEOs to generated lists of related keywords.

The Google blog post from 2009 included the following video which shows a lot of features that are no longer available (review search, sentiment analysis snippets, longer snippets, wonder wheel, timeline, dictionary auto-linking, SearchWiki):

It looks like Google Now won't be limited to Android, iOS and Chrome, it will also be added to Google's homepage. Some code from a page that's tested by Google offers more information about this feature.

"Get started with Google Now. Just the right information at just the right time." That's how Google introduces the new feature. "Google Now uses your Home location to show relevant information like weather, traffic conditions, and nearby places," explains Google. You can edit the home location, work location and the current location. Another feature lets you track your favorite stocks.



It's not clear how Google Now for desktop will look, but this screenshot reveals a possible implementation (it's from a Chrome extension developed by Google):


Here's the Google Search app interface for Android tablets (Nexus 10 gallery):


As I mentioned here, Google Now could replace some of iGoogle's functionality. Here's an early version of iGoogle from 2006:


{ Thanks, F. }

I've mentioned in the previous post that Google launched a feature called Quick View that's designed to load search results faster on mobile devices. Right now, the feature only works for Wikipedia results and you'll only see it if you use google.com in English.



It's interesting to see how this feature works, especially when you consider Google's claim that pages load in less than 0.1 seconds. Like a magician, Google uses tricks to make people think that pages load faster than they really do.

All the Wikipedia results with a blue "Quick View" button have special sections in Google's source code that include the first part of the articles. When you tap the "Quick View" result, the article appears to load instantly, but you only see the first paragraphs, which are included in Google's code, just like snippets. Google loads in the background the rest of the article: it's a simplified version of the mobile Wikipedia article from the Google Cache. An example of page that includes the second part of a Wikipedia article: http://websearch-experiments.googleusercontent.com/B/08/d88ede51537960e3_926bb07ecb8a2bc1.htm.

Here's what happens if Google can't load the rest of the article: you get the error message "Error loading the entire article. Try again".


But is Quick View really fast? I've loaded the Wikipedia article about lettuce in the desktop Chrome and changed the user-agent to Galaxy Nexus/Android 4.0.2. Here are the load times obtained from Chrome's developer tools (I've only included the results for the main HTML file, the images are loaded from Wikipedia's site even when you use Quick View).

- Quick View: 120 ms


- Regular Wikipedia article: 522 ms


I've tested many other articles and Quick View pages consistently loaded in 100-130 milliseconds, while the original Wikipedia articles loaded about 4 times slower. It's a significant difference, especially if you use a slow mobile Internet connection with high latency.

Another improvement is that Google's search results pages already include the necessary CSS and JavaScript code for Wikipedia, while Wikipedia loads additional files: one CSS file and 7 JavaScript files.


Here's the total loading time for the page and its resources:

- QuickView: 30 requests, 143 KB transferred, 986ms total loading time

- Wikipedia: 36 requests, 296 KB transferred, 1.68 s total loading time