More Funny Directions in Google Maps

Google Maps no longer recommends to swim across the Atlantic Ocean if you want to go from the United States to Europe. Google found a better way: "sail across the Pacific Ocean".

Google's directions from New York to Paris are quite straightforward: go to Seattle, then swim across Pacific to Hawaii, swim again to Asia where you are directed to drive through Asia and Europe to reach France. After only 519 hours you're supposed to reach the destination.

{ Thanks, Anon. }

Too Many Google Results From a Single Site

I don't know about you, but there's a feature that ruined many of my Google search results pages. It's not that Google can't return relevant results, the problem is that Google tries to be clever and detects keywords that are associated with a site. If it finds one, Google will return a lot of results from that site. In fact, sometimes you'll have a hard time finding results from other domains.

Ever since its launch, Google promoted diversity and used host crowding to show "up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name". Sometimes Google displayed a link that restricted the results to that domain or subdomain, but users had to click it. Matt Cutts wrote in 2007 that "we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen".

Then Google introduced sitelinks and started to show more pages from a domain. Two years ago, a Google blog post announced that "for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site". Since that announcement, host crowding was a thing of the past and Google started to include more and more results from a single domain.

I complained about this back in 2010 and mentioned that this feature could become annoying, but now it's much worse. Sometimes you can find queries that return mostly results from a domain. For example, when you search for [apple itunes] Google assumes that you want results from apple.com and starts to return a lot of irellevant pages. Sure, you can still find results from other domains, but 31 of the top 50 results are from apple.com.

If you search for [yahoo mail], Google returns a lot of uninteresting results from Yahoo's international sites, instead of including news articles, blog posts, reviews, tutorials.

Search for [berkeley college] and 26 of the top 50 results are from berkeley.edu. That's just too much. Having to constantly add to the query "-site:dominantresult.com" is annoying, not to mention that most Google users don't even know about search operators and shouldn't have to use them.

And this annoyance is not limited to navigational queries. What if you're not in India, search for [sony led] and Google's top 7 results are from Sony India? That's what happened when I disabled Google Instant and set Google to show 50 results per page.

Showing too many results from a domain is a bad idea because a search engine should offer information from multiple sources, while results should be relevant and comprehensive. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but Google forgot to make the information accessible.

Query	Domain	Number of results in top 50
imdb ratings	imdb.com	49
imdb ratings are broken	imdb.com	46
google play	google.com	31
playstation	playstation.com	28
wordpress	wordpress.org	28
samsung led display	samsung.com	27

Google Improves Results for Natural Language Queries

Now that Google's voice search technology has improved and it's used by more and more people, the search engine has to be smart enough to understand natural language queries, which are often verbose.

As you can see from these screenshots, Google can find instant answers for complicated queries like [225 cm + 134 mm plus two times 45 cm minus one and a half meter] or [127 euros times 3 - 15 percent in hungarian money]. You don't even have to know the name of the currency you want to convert and Wolfram Alpha won't help you.

{ via Inside Search Blog }

More Google Results From the Same Author

Google found an interesting way to use the authorship data it has obtained. As you probably noticed, many search results from news sites and blogs include the name of the author and link to the corresponding Google Profile. There's also a link that lets you restrict the results to the pages written by an author: "more by [author name]".

Now Google adds 3 search results from the same author after you visit a page, spend some time reading it (more than 2 minutes?) and then go back to the search results. Google doesn't know if you actually liked the page, but it assumes that you found it useful because you haven't gone back to the search results page after a few seconds.

Here's a screenshot that shows a regular Google search result enhanced with authorship data:

... and this is what happens after visiting the page, reading the article and going back to Google's SERP.

"If a user visits an article by an author and it seems like they'd be interested in finding more articles by this author, when they click the 'Back' button to return to the results page, we'll show more results by that author," explains Google.

The results added by Google aren't always useful and sometimes they aren't even related to your query. For example, the 3 links from this screenshot send you to a search results page from Ars Technica, a page that includes some other articles from the same author and the Google+ profile page.

{ via Search Engine Land }

Select Text With Similar Formatting in Google Docs

Google Docs added a cool new feature that lets you select all the text with similar formatting, so you can quickly make some changes. It's like "find and replace" for formatting.

For example, you can right-click a word from a text that uses the "Heading 1" style, click "select all matching text" and change the style to "Heading 2". Unlike Microsoft Word, Google Docs doesn't select the text that has additional formatting applied over a style.

"Clicking Select all matching text will look for parts of your document that match your selection's text style — its font, font weight, size, color, and whether it's been bolded, italicized, or underlined, or struck-through. It will not take into account paragraph styles, such as line spacing or alignment," explains Google.

Now it's time for Google to add "paste and match", which lets you paste some text without having to worry about formatting. Now you need to use the "paint format" button.

{ via Google Drive Blog }

Street View for Mobile Browsers

Sometimes web apps are better than native apps because they can be constantly updated and users always have the latest version. Google still hasn't released a native Google Maps app for iOS, but it has improved the mobile web app by adding support for street view. Now the Google Maps web app has all the features from Apple's old maps, even if the performance is inferior.

"With access to Street View on your phone, you can use panoramic, street-level imagery to explore and navigate the places around you, even on the go," informs Google. Obviously, Street View for mobile browsers uses SVG and HTML5, not Flash.

If you've updated an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to iOS 6, open maps.google.com in Safari, tap the arrow icon and then "add to home screen". Now you can open Google Maps from the home screen, search for local business, get directions, switch to the satellite view or open your personalized maps. Google has constantly improved the maps service in the past 7 years, so Apple has a lot to catch up.

The Google Maps web app is not new, but it will be used a lot more, now that Google Maps links no longer send users to the built-in maps app and open in the browser.

Skip the CAPTCHA When Creating a Gmail Account

Adding a phone number to a Google account is not always required, but even if you can get away without adding one, Google will periodically ask you to verify your account when you log in. It's just a security feature that discourages spammers from creating a lot of Gmail accounts, but it's still annoying.

"In an effort to protect our users from abuse, we sometimes ask users to verify their identity before they're able to create or sign into accounts. Requiring proof of identification via phone is an effective way to keep spammers from abusing our systems," informs Google.

Now when you create a Gmail account, there's a new option that lets you skip the CAPTCHA: "skip this verification (phone verification may be required)".

After enabling this option, Google asked me to verify the account by sending a text message or making an automated call.

Just because you don't skip the CAPTCHA doesn't mean that Google won't ask for your phone number. I've tested this and Google asked me to verify an account even after solving the CAPTCHA.

It's interesting to notice that Google's wording is "phone verification may be required", which means that it's not always required. A few years ago, phone verification was limited to a small number of countries, but now it's widespread.

Google still asks you to create a Gmail account when you sign up from Google.com, Google Image Search, Google Translate, Gmail, Google Play and Google+, but you can create a Google account using a non-Gmail email address from other Google services like Google Maps, Google Calendar or Google Drive.

{ Thanks, Herin. }