Google has been making lots of tweaks to its search lately. Search is why we all came to Google in the first place, but these days it's taking the product we knew and loved in a different direction. It's changing the way queries work, turning "+" into a social search instead of an "and," and it's taking away chronological features in favor of what's hot right now.
In response to user feedback about the changes, Google gave us a new feature this week called "verbatim search." In its blog post, the Google search team warns that verbatim mode will take away all kinds of helpful things they've built for us. But users wanted a way to search for exactly what they want, and Google has built it. Here's what it does and how to use it.
A leaked YouTube redesign caught by Business Review USA shows a starkly different layout that emphasizes social sharing. It features Google+ and Facebook sharing tabs on a prominent profile sidebar. The inclusion of Facebook is surprising, but YouTube is a popular destination, which offers a perfect opportunity to introduce Facebook friends to Google+.
YouTube has been testing this design with a small percentage of users for several weeks. YouTube's integration with Google+ actually began in October, when Google enabled users to connect their YouTube and Google+ accounts. This brought a "Posted to Google+" tab of videos to users' YouTube homepages. But the leaked redesign takes the integration further, turning the homepage into a news feed that tracks trending and popular videos. It also emphasizes user profiles, showing Google's intentions to unify users under one Google+ identity.
The world's biggest search engine company turned its music initiative up a notch today. Google Music now includes an MP3 store, in addition to the cloud-based music storage that launched into beta in May. At the company's event in Los Angeles today, they removed the "beta" label from Google Music and made it available to all U.S. users. For the cloud storage part they launched originally, they're keeping the "free" price tag firmly applied.
Rather than charging for storage, as Apple and Amazon do, Google is allowing users to store up to 20,000 tracks for free. So how will they make money? They've partnered with three of the four major music labels (Warner Music didn't sign on) and several independent ones to sell high-quality, 328 kbps MP3 files to users. Google will take a 30% revenue share on each track sold.
Google Music went live for U.S. users today, leaving the invite-only beta announced this summer. It's free, and it lets you host up to 20,000 of your songs and stream them to your devices. You can also "pin" songs from the player, which will cache them on your device for playing offline.
You can also now purchase music from the Android Market. It's available in high-quality, 320kbps MP3 format, and you get a 90-second preview before you buy in the store. But to drive more sharing and purchases, the service is integrated with Google+. Music that's shared to Google+ can be played back in its entirety by anyone in your circles.
The native Gmail app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users is back in the App Store. The app was first released on November 2, but it shipped with an unfortunate error that greeted new users with an incomprehensible error message. Shortly after releasing it, Google pulled the app from the store. The problem was caused by broken push notifications, and that bug has been fixed in today's release. The update also improves handling of images in HTML messages.
Unfortunately, users' more substantive concerns with the app have not been addressed. The Gmail team's blog post says that multiple account support, improved notifications and mobile-specific signatures are coming, along with "many more" features. But for now, little has changed about the app that many panned as insufficient for a native Gmail app.
Google Maps developers just launched a drawing library for the Google Maps API, so that developers who build on Google Maps can add simple tools for users to draw markers, lines and shapes on to maps. Shapes can also be made editable, even once they've been placed on the map.
Applications can use drawings for selecting regions of the map to search or highlight, as well as for annotations. This simple interface offers a surprising range of features for developers building applications upon Google Maps.
Today Hootsuite announced its new social partnership with Google+ Pages. HootSuite users can manage their Google+ circles, post public updates to select circles, search public posts and push out messaging to select circles. Much like tracking @ mentions on Twitter, HootSuite social media marketers can also see who +1s, shares and comments on Google+ posts. Users can also create, edit and remove Google+ circles through the HootSuite dashboard. This update is available to HootSuite Enterprise clients only, at least for now.
Google took further steps against Yelp today, adding features to the My Places tab on Google Maps. Businesses you've rated with Google Places are now highlighted on your maps, displaying your rating and showing other personalized recommendations based on places you've already shared. The highlights are available on the desktop and Google Maps for Android.
These new features push forward Google's efforts to be a one-stop-shop for mobile, location-based searches. From finding the restaurant to walking in the door, Google is building applications to compel smartphone users to use Google and only Google to find, shop and eat at local businesses.
Research firm Gartner has come out with its third quarter global mobile sales numbers and overall, the industry grew 5.6% from the same period last year. About 440.5 million cellphones were sold, with 115 million of those being of the smart variety, a 42% growth rate from Q3 2010 but only 7% growth from Q2 2011. The feature phone market is being buoyed by emerging markets while most of the smartphone growth was in Russia and China. Many other markets have stalled in smartphone growth.
Gartner says the slowdown of smartphone growth in markets such as the United States and Western Europe was due to consumers waiting for flagship devices to be released, such as the newest iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Rezound. Nokia is still No. 1 in the world in overall sales while another study shows that the best selling single devices in the U.S. are Apple's variety of iPhones.
At 11:00 p.m. Pacific on a Monday night, 7:55 a.m. Tuesday morning in Europe, Google posted a gem on its official blogs. "Greater choice for wireless access point owners," the post is called. It's a follow-up on a promise made in September to offer people with Wi-Fi networks a way to opt out of sharing their location data with Google.
If you want to opt out, Google says, you have to figure out how to add "_nomap." to the end of your SSID name. Can't figure out how to do that? Oh well (here's how). Google, and I quote, "found that a method based on wireless network names provides the right balance of simplicity as well as protection against abuse. Specifically, this approach helps protect against others opting out your access point without your permission." You hear that? Google wants to protect you from someone turning off your location sharing without your permission. It's for your protection, citizens.
