Written on
May 22, 2013 in
news
Last year, Google Drive added an advanced image search feature powered by Goggles that recognizes objects and uses OCR technology to extract text. The same feature is now available in Google+: search for [sunflower], click “More”, restrict the results to “Photos” and select “Most recent”. You’ll find sunflower images from Google+ posts that don’t even include “sunflower”, not even in the image filename.
This also works for the images you’ve uploaded to Picasa Web Albums/Google+ Photos or the images uploaded by your circles.
{ via Android Police }
Read original post...
Written on
May 22, 2013 in
news
Google Trends has a new section that shows monthly popularity charts for topics like scientists, cars, movies, songs, people, animals, chemical elements and more. Charts are limited to the US for now and they show the most popular things, not the “movers and shakers”. Google uses the Knowledge Graph to restrict the charts to real-world things and “measures interest in a broader topic, so it might also count different searches with the same meaning”.
“Top Charts are lists of real-world people, places and things ranked by search interest. They show information similar to our Year-End Zeitgeist, but updated monthly and going back to 2004. To check them out, go to Google Trends and click ‘Top Charts’ on the left-hand side,” informs Google.
Google Trends shows information from Wikipedia, links to Google+ or other top search results, the number of months in chart and the previous month’s rank.
Google also added a Metro-inspired page that lets you visualize hot searches in full screen. Mouse over the top-left icon to show multiple searches at the same time and click the country name at the bottom of the page to switch to a different country.
{ via Google Blog }
Read original post...
Written on
May 22, 2013 in
news
Chrome for Android, improved search and fullscreen browsing
Today’s Chrome for Android stable update, now available on Google Play, makes searching on the go even simpler. You can now see your search queries in the omnibox instead of the long search URL, so you can easily refine them and view more results.
To make browsing the mobile web even easier, web pages also display in fullscreen on phones. As you scroll, the top toolbar disappears so you can immerse yourself in the web page content. When you scroll up, the toolbar returns so you can get on to the next thing.
Chrome for iPhone and iPad, with voice search (coming soon)
Over the coming days, we’re rolling out an update for iPhone and iPad as well. You can now speak your searches into the omnibox. Touch the microphone, say your search query aloud and see your results (in some cases spoken back to you), all without typing a single letter. Try these queries with the update (coming soon to the App Store):
- “How many miles from San Antonio to Dallas?”
- “What’s the weather in Rome?”
- “Who stars in The Internship?”
This update also enables faster reloading of web pages by using the cache more efficiently when the network is slow, which is especially useful when you’re on the go. Finally, other iOS apps can now give you the option to open links in Chrome and then return to the app with just one tap.
We look forward to your feedback on the latest versions of Chrome for Android and iOS.
Posted by Yusuf Ozuysal and Milan Broum, Minimalist & Vocal Software Engineers
Read original post...
Written on
May 21, 2013 in
news
YouTube experiments with some new search features. When you click a video from the list of YouTube search results, there’s a red progress bar displayed at the top of the page until the video page loads. YouTube loads pages using AJAX and uses HTML5 history.pushState to change the browser URL without reloading the page. Here’s…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 21, 2013 in
news
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…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 21, 2013 in
news
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…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 21, 2013 in
news
Last month’s Chrome Beta release contained optimizations so that web pages load 5% faster on average. We’ve included those optimizations in today’s Chrome Stable release so all users will enjoy a faster browsing experience. A 5% improvement may not seem like much by itself, but our estimates show that when you add up those saved…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 21, 2013 in
news
Google likes to discontinue products without waiting until it launches some proper replacements. Lately, Google closed products that were used by millions of people. There’s a race to destroy everything that was built by the old Google and build new products that are aligned with the most important features of the new Google: social and…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 20, 2013 in
news
AddressSanitizer (ASAN) is a tool for finding memory problems and has been used to find thousands of memory errors in Chromium over the last two years. These kinds of errors will typically lead to heap or data corruption and subsequent crashes in random, unrelated code, which make them quite challenging to find and fix without…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 20, 2013 in
news
There’s an interesting Google Settings page for phone numbers. By default, the page only includes a message that says: “No phone numbers associated with this setting.” A help center page explains that this feature will help your friends find your phone number. “Help people who have your phone number find you on Google services and…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 17, 2013 in
news
I’m trying to understand Google+ Hangouts. It’s supposed to replace products and features like Google Talk, Google Chat, Google+ Messenger and to become Google’s unified messaging service. Let’s start with the name. It includes “Google+”, so it looks like a Google+ feature. The product actually borrows the name of Google+’s group video chat feature. How…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 17, 2013 in
news
Google Accounts settings page has a new feature called “SMS for Hangouts“. You can “add your phone number to receive messages from Google+ Hangouts as SMS, when you are idle.” Google goes on to explain that “SMS is less secure and may be less reliable than web-based communication. All messages sent by SMS are sent…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 17, 2013 in
news
By now, you’ve probably received the invitation to try the new Google Maps. It’s not available without an invitation and it’s likely that it won’t replace the classic Google Maps very soon. The new interface is the most radical change to Google Maps since 2005, when Google’s online mapping service was launched. Here’s Google Maps…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 16, 2013 in
news
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…
Continue Reading »
Written on
May 16, 2013 in
news
Wouldn’t it be nice to deal with an email message without having to read it? Sure, you can read the subject line and archive the message, delete it or flag it as spam, but what happens when you receive notifications for online orders, flights, hotel reservations, reviews? Gmail introduced quick action buttons that are placed…
Continue Reading »
