Google's toolbelt, the sidebar displayed on the search results pages when you click on "show options", has been updated with new features. There's a new option that lets you restrict results to blogs and an option to see web pages indexed by Google in the past hour (the date range can be customized by changing Google's URLs).

If you don't want to see shopping sites in the list of search results, click on "fewer shopping sites" and Google will remove the results from sites like Amazon, BestBuy, eBay. Google also offers the option to see "more shopping sites" in an interface optimized for price comparison.


If you're logged in to your Google Account and the web history service is enabled, you can restrict the results to the web pages you've already visited. By default, Google Web History only tracks the search results you visit, but you can extend it to your entire browsing history.


Google's toolbelt starts to become crowded and it's not easily discoverable, but it's a better place for refining results than the advanced search page because you can combine filters and see the results instantly.

Google Wave is about to open to new users. Starting today, Google will send 100,000 invites to some of those who were eager to use an early version of the service. Google's blog lists three categories of users that will receive invites: Google Wave Sandbox users, those who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google Wave and some Google Apps users. When you receive an invitation to Google Wave, you'll be able to invite other people so you can use Google Wave together.

"Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project," writes CNet.

Like Gmail's early version released in April 2004, Google Wave lacks many basic features: you can't remove someone from a wave, you can't configure permissions or write drafts. The interface is not very polished and some of the options are difficult to find, but it's important to keep in mind that Google Wave is just one of the ways to implement an open protocol. Gmail revolutionized email with an interface inspired by discussion boards: messages are grouped in conversations and it's easy to handle a large amount of messages. Google Wave wants to revolutionize real-time communication by extending a protocol mostly used for instant messaging, XMPP.

Combining email, instant messaging and wikis seems like a recipe for confusion, but Google Wave pioneers a new generation of web applications, where everything is instantaneous. As Google explains, each wave is a hosted conversation and users can edit the conversation in real-time.

Google Docs API tests a new feature that lets you perform OCR (optical character recognition) on an image. There's a live demo that illustrates this feature: you can upload a high-resolution JPG, GIF, or PNG image that has less than 10 MB and Google Docs extracts the text and converts it into a new document. Google mentions that "the operation can currently take up to 40 seconds" and a small test showed that the service is not yet reliable: it's slow and it frequently returns errors.


The results are far from perfect and you'll find many errors, but the service is free and it's constantly improving. Here's the result of the OCR for this scanned document:


There aren't many free OCR services available, so an OCR service provided by Google would be very popular. ABBYY FineReader Online is one of the best online OCR services, but the free version is limited to 10 pages a day.

Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software called OCRopus, but it's not clear if the online service provided by Google Docs uses OCRopus.

Google started to show an OneBox at the bottom of the search results for the queries listed in Google Hot Trends. The OneBox mentions that a certain query is "#N of 100 most popular searches in the past hour", even though Google Hot Trends doesn't aggregate the most popular searches, which are pretty boring and don't change very often. As Google's blog explains, "Hot Trends lists the fastest rising searches on the web at any given hour".


Google uses the fact that a query is suddenly popular in various ways: for example, to include recent web pages in the list of top results or to show results from Google News and Google Blog Search. Unfortunately, Google Hot Trends doesn't do a good job at explaining why a certain query is popular, so Google should add more real-time news sources like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.

If you have a lot of labels in Gmail, it's difficult to see all of them without scrolling down. In July, Gmail added an option to hide some of your labels, so that the most important labels are always visible. Unfortunately, if you receive a message that's automatically labeled using a filter and the label is hidden, you'll miss the message.

A new feature from Gmail Labs solves this problem: enable Hide read labels and "the visible labels in the navigation bar will be hidden under the 'more' menu when they don't contain any unread conversations".

Since the feature only hides visible labels, you can go to the label management page and click on "show all" next to your labels. If all your labels are visible and Hide read labels is enabled, Gmail will only show the labels that include unread messages.


Google Reader has a similar feature: if you click on the arrow next to your subscriptions and select "show updated", you'll only see the folders and the feeds with unread items.

{ via Gmail's blog }

Google has a partner program for Street View. "Do you manage a unique property (pedestrian mall, amusement park, university campus, etc.) that users would like to visit in Street View? Through our Partner Program, you can now request Google to collect imagery of your location. Once the images are added to Street View, people all over the world will be able to virtually explore your property."

For now, the program is limited to properties that are interesting to Google's users. Some of the examples included in the FAQ: "zoos, parks, universities, amusement parks, outdoor marketplaces, stadiums, monuments, tourist destinations, and race tracks".

Here's a Street View tricycle at the Palace of Versailles:



... and another Street View trike at Stonehenge:


{ via Brian Ussery }

Google has released an API for Google Sites that lets you create or edit pages, upload or download attachments, monitor the activity of a site programmatically. The API could be use to create a new interface for Google Sites, to upload files from other sources or to migrate your data.

Google's Data Liberation team built a Java application for importing and exporting Google Sites. The application lets you export the pages from a site and all their attachments to a folder.

"The folder structure of an exported site is meant to mimic the Sites UI as closely as possible. Thus if exporting to a directory "rootdirectory," a top-level page normally located at webspace/pagename, would be in a file named index.html, located in rootdirectory/pagename. A subpage of that page, normally located at webspace/pagename/subpage, would be in a file named index.html in rootdirectory/pagename/subpage. Attachments are downloaded to the same directory as the index.html page to which they belong," mentions the user guide.

You should only enter the domain name if you use Google Apps. "Webspace" is the name of your site: http://sites.google.com/site/sitename/.


Unfortunately, you can't use this tool to import HTML files to an existing site. The importing option is only useful for the sites exported using the same application.

Google has recently released a plugin for Internet Explorer that renders web pages using Google Chrome. The plugin, called Google Chrome Frame, is open-source and the code is publicly available.

By looking at the code, it's obvious that the plugin is not limited to Internet Explorer. There's also a NPAPI plugin, which should work in browsers that support NPAPI: Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers. Here's a comment from one of the Chrome Frame files:

"ChromeFrameNPAPI: Implementation of the NPAPI plugin, which is responsible for hosting a chrome frame, i.e. an iframe like widget which hosts the the chrome window. This object delegates to Chrome.exe (via the Chrome IPC-based automation mechanism) for the actual rendering".

A post from the Chromium blog explained the purpose of Google's plugin: "With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions."

Instead of asking users to download a different browser, Google and other companies that develop complex web applications can ask users to install Google Chrome Frame. This way, Google Chrome runs invisibly inside another browser.

When you perform a search in Google Maps and click on "more info" next to a search result, Google opens a new page that aggregates useful information about places and local businesses. Until now, Google showed an expanded bubble directly on the map.

The new Google Maps pages have user-friendly URLs like http://maps.google.com/places/fr/paris-city and they include a lot data: photos and videos from Panoramio and YouTube, user-generated maps, reviews, related web pages, information from Wikipedia, Street View imagery.




"We think Place Pages will make searching much easier (and hopefully more fun!) for our users, but we're also excited about what it means for business owners. By default, users looking for local businesses can easily view ratings for your business, reviews, related maps, find nearby transit options showing them how to get to you, and take a look at your business with a Street View preview - and it's all on one page," says Google LatLong blog.

While new Place Pages look nice, they have a big drawback: when you click on "more info" next to a search result, Google Maps opens a new page and you lose the context, so it's difficult to compare the results. To go back to the list of results, you need to use your browser's back button.

Last year, Google launched a feature called SearchWiki that allows users to customize search results. If you are logged in, you can remove search results, promote them at the top of the search results page and enter comments. While the feature is useful to personalize the results for frequent queries, the "wiki" component was only an afterthought.

Check the SearchWiki page for "google" and you'll realize that the 27511 notes recorded by Google aren't very useful. Comments aren't helpful, even though Google tries to rank them by usefulness.


A similar feature is now available in Google Toolbar. Google Sidewiki lets you enter comments about any web page and shows some of the best comments in a sidebar. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments.


Google notifies you if there are comments about the current page, so you need to send your browsing history to use the feature.


Sorting the comments by date wouldn't be a great idea, because spam and silly comments like "lol" or "cool site" would be prevalent. That's why, Google developed a ranking algorithm that takes into account many signals: user votes, author's authority, text analysis. Danny Sullivan says that "Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports".


Learning some information about a site, finding if a certain company is reputable or reading a comment that corrects some errors from an article - all are use cases for Sidewiki, but it remains to be seen if Google manages to rank comments properly.

As with Knol, Google encourages experts to post comments in Sidewiki: "What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web?" Unfortunately, experts don't have an incentive to post comments and isn't always easy to distinguish experts from opinionated users.

Larry Page once said that Google wasn't supposed to be a search engine. "We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."