Google Recipe Search
Google Japan started to offer a recipe search feature last year. Now this feature is available in the US and for everyone who uses Google without country redirects.
“Recipe View lets you narrow your search results to show only recipes, and helps you choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures. To get to Recipe View, click on the Recipes link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes like [chocolate chip cookies], or more open-ended topics—like [strawberry] to find recipes that feature strawberries, or even a holiday or event, like [cinco de mayo],” explains Google.
Google finds recipes by detecting the pages that use markup like microdata, RDFa, and microformats for recipes. You’ve probably noticed that Google shows rich snippets for some recipe pages and sometimes includes thumbnails, total cooking time, the number of calories and user ratings.
The same structured data can now be used for filtering search results. For example, you can select certain ingredients, add restrictions for cooking time and the number of calories.
Recipe Search is one of the most obscure specialized search engines offered by Google and it’s quite surprising to see it in the vertical navigation menu next to Book Search, Blog Search or Image Search. Google could create similar search engines for event search, people search and reviews search.
Google’s landing page offers more information about this feature and suggests to “select Recipes in the left-hand panel on the search results page”. Unfortunately, the option is not yet available for everyone.
Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office
After three months of beta testing, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is available for everyone. The rebranded version of DocVerse, a software developed by the homonymous company acquired by Google last year, integrates with Google Docs and provides a bridge for Microsoft Office users who want to use online collaboration features without upgrading to Office 2010.
“Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office brings collaborative multi-person editing to the familiar Microsoft Office experience. You can share, backup, and simultaneously edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents with coworkers,” explains Google. The software works with Microsoft Office 2003, Office 2007 and Office 2010.
By default, the plugin automatically saves online and syncs all the files you edit in Microsoft Office, but you can change this setting.
I created a new document in Word 2010, but Google saved it as a read-only Word file in Google Docs. Apparently, the document can only be edited using Microsoft Office and not using Google’s online word processor. Since you can’t even open existing files from Google Docs, this software seems to be too limited. It’s useful if you and all your collaborators only use Microsoft Office and Google’s plugin
YouTube HTTPS
After Google enabled by default encrypted connections to Picasa Web Albums, it started to become obvious that all Google services will soon switch to HTTPS. Probably the most unlikely candidate for this change is YouTube, Google’s biggest bandwidth hog, but the unexpected happened: go to a random video and you’ll notice that all the resources use HTTPS.
YouTube API’s blog has recently announced HTTPS support for embedded videos. “We’re planning a gradual expansion of HTTPS across other aspects of the site. The first place you may see HTTPS YouTube URLs is in our various embed codes, all of which currently support HTTPS in addition to the standard HTTP. Anyone can try HTTPS with YouTube embeds today—simply change the protocol portion of the URL from http to https.” You can also enable “use HTTPS” when you generate the embedding code.
The performance doesn’t seem to be affected and, if everything goes well, YouTube will probably switch to HTTPS in the coming months.
Multiple File Uploader in Picasa Web’s
Picasa Web Albums has finally improved the uploading feature. You can now select multiple images from a folder and upload all of them. After uploading images, you can add captions and delete the images you don’t like. It’s a long overdue improvement that’s especially important if you don’t use Picasa.
Another change is that you can now upload videos without installing Picasa.
Picasa Web’s new uploader uses HTML5 APIs, so it’s not available in Internet Explorer, where you still have to install an ActiveX control.
{ Thanks, Přemysl Brýl. }
Visualizing Android Activations
This video from Google lets you visualize the evolution of Android activations from October 2008 to January 2011. HTC Dream/G1, the first Android device, was launched in the US and the UK in October 2008 and it became available in other countries in 2009, but it wasn’t until the launch of Motorola Droid in November 2009 that Android became popular.
Android Central says that this is “a staggering reminder of just how far Android has come in a relatively short amount of time”. Eric Schmidt has recently mentioned that the average number of daily Android activations is now 350,000, up from 300,000 in December, 200,000 in August and 60,000 in April 2010.
Google Video’s Strange Disclaimer
Google Video’s homepage shows a strange message below the list of query suggestions: “In accordance with local laws and regulations, some results were removed from this list.” The message is displayed for every query you enter, so it’s unlikely that some of the suggestions are removed.
Update: Google says that “the appearance of the message on every search was in fact a bug and has since been corrected.”
Hidden gridlines in Google Spreadsheets
The following feature is now available for domains with ‘enable pre-release features’ checkbox enabled in the Administrator Control Panel:
The highly requested feature to hide gridlines in spreadsheets is now available
When editing a spreadsheet, under the ‘View’ menu, click on ‘Hide gridlines’ for each sheet, leaving only the borders that have been put there.
Now Use Google To Search Profile
Google has a new specialized search engine for searching Google Profiles. It has a better interface than the regular Google Profiles search feature, it’s integrated with Google Search and it shows additional links from people’s profiles.
This feature is not yet enabled in the interface, but you can search Google Profiles by adding &tbs=prfl:1 to a Google Search URL. Here’s an example.
Google could use the data from user profiles to provide advanced search features like restricting profiles to people who lived in Chicago, attended Long Island University and are interested in sports.
{ spotted by François Beaufort }
Store More Photos and Videos in Picasa Web Albums
You’ve probably noticed that Picasa Web‘s storage counter shows that you have more free space than a couple of days ago. It turns out that this is not a bug.
“We recently made a change whereby any pictures 800 pixels and under don’t count towards used PWA storage. The new GB numbers you’re seeing are the result of quota recalculations that were made,” informs a Google employee.
The new feature encourages users to upload smaller images. If you use Picasa to upload your photos, there’s a setting that lets you pick the dimensions of the photos that are uploaded. The “small” option is recommended “for publishing images on blogs and webpages”. Blogger users who resize their photos before uploading them will no longer have to buy extra storage if they’re prolific.
Another important change is that “all videos under 15 minutes also don’t count towards used PWA storage”. That means you can now upload short videos to Picasa Web Albums without worrying about the file size.
Finding more high-quality sites in search
Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.
It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.
So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.
To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer
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