Chrome Web Store Adds Support Tab

Chrome Web Store has a slightly different interface for apps and extensions. The overview and details tabs have been merged and there's a new support tab that lets you share your feedback without writing a review. You can ask questions, send suggestions and report bugs. The support feature already existed, but it didn't have its own tab.

If the support feature is not enabled, you'll see this message: "If you are experiencing any problems with this extension or have questions or suggestions for the developer, please check out the developer's support site."

OMG Chrome found some other changes. "The horizontal strip of ‘Related Apps‘ and ‘More from this developer‘ no longer appear beneath listings. In the Reviews section the entry form has been shunted from left of the page to the right."



{ Thanks, Stefan. }

New Footer in Mobile Google Search

Google's mobile search results pages have a new footer. Pagination elements are now centered and there's a Google logo at the bottom of the page.

Here's how it looked before:

When I first noticed the big logo at the bottom of the page, I assumed it was a bug. The logo doesn't link to the homepage and that's strange. What do you think: is it a bug or a feature?



{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Google Highlights Mobile-Friendly Results

Google announced that it will roll out the new mobile-friendly label in the coming weeks, but I've already noticed the new feature. The label is placed somewhere between the search result URL and the snippet.

Search results from the first pages of results are usually optimized for mobile devices, but there are also pages better suited for desktop. After the first 2-3 pages of results, you'll find more and more results that don't have the mobile-friendly label.

Google's footer links to a page that offers more information about mobile-friendly pages. "This message shows under search results when Google thinks the site works well on a phone (mobile-friendly). The site works well because it doesn't make you zoom to see parts of the page, or it doesn't use features like Flash that you don't usually have on your device," informs Google.

How to Tell if Google Considers your Website as Mobile Friendly

You can no longer afford to not have a mobile-friendly website that isn’t readable or usable on a mobile phone. That’s because Google is now clearly marking websites (screenshot) in mobile search results that it considers mobile friendly and if that tag isn’t getting displayed around your content, your website may see a drop in mobile traffic.

Responsive design is definitely the way to go but will that be enough. How do you confirm if your web pages are considered mobile friendly by Google? There are quite a few options.

One, you can do a site:domain.com search in Google on any mobile phone to check if that tag is displayed around the most popular web pages of your website. This is the quickest way to check mobile-friendliness of multiple pages without using any of the tools.

Google also offers an online tool to help you understand if it considers your website as mobile friendly. You’ll have to run it against all the pages of your site.

Sometimes a website may be responsive and readable on a mobile device but it may not be usable. For instance, the links may have been placed too close to each other making it difficult to tap (like on this page) or the videos may have been embedded using Flash that doesn’t play on mobile devices. These factors may also prevent Google from marking your website as mobile friendly.

You can use your Google webmaster account to know if your site suffers from any of these usability issues. Open Webmaster Tools, choose Search Traffic and select Mobile Usability. Here you’ll see all the pages on your site that are indexed by Google and need your attention.

Alternatively, you can use the PageSpeed tool to detect usability issues as well without logging into Webmaster Central. Put the URL in the input box and check the User Experience report under Mobile. If you see anything in Red, it needs to be fixed. You can also explore other online tools to test your website on a much wider range of mobile phones.

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The story, How to Tell if Google Considers your Website as Mobile Friendly , was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/11/2014 under SEO, Web Design, Internet.

Google Maps Smart Search

One of the coolest Google Maps features is the integration with Google's Knowledge Graph. Besides providing useful information about different places, Knowledge Graph makes the search feature smarter.



You can search for [Canada capital], [Tom Cruise birthplace], [Amazon river where does it start], [largest city in India] and many other queries that return a location in Google Search.

It's much easier than using Google Search to find a place and then switching to Google Maps and searching for it.

Get Daily Email Reports of your Google Drive Activity

The Google Drive website includes an Activity Stream to help you monitor changes to the various files and folders contained in your Drive. Whether you upload a file, move a file from one folder to another or change the sharing permissions, your actions will get logged. This is especially useful for users who have shared files in their Drive that can be edited by external users.

The Activity Stream is however not available inside mobile apps and you’d have to log into the Google Drive website website daily to see what files and folders have changed recently.

Know What’s Changed in your Google Drive

There’s however a simple workaround. Instead of checking the activity stream manually, you can configure a Google Sheet and it’ll send you a daily email report (screenshot) of all the files in your Drive that have been created or modified in the past 24 hours. And it just takes 30 seconds to set up the monitoring.

1. Click here to make a copy of the Drive Monitor in your Google Drive.


2. Put your email address in the cell E1 highlighted in Yellow. This is where the daily email reports will arrive.


3. From the file menu, choose Spreadsheet settings and choose your default Time zone. The modification time in the report will use this time zone.


4. Go to the Google Drive Report menu in the sheet (see screenshot below) and choose Authorize. Allow the script access to your Drive – it needs to do this to know what has changed.


5. Go to the Report menu again and choose Schedule reports. The script is now running in the background and it will email you the Drive report every 24 hours. You’ll get the first report immediately.

Related: Who can see my Google Drive files?

That’s it. Close the Google Sheet and it will monitor the file changes in the background, running once every 24 hours. If you would like to stop the daily email notifications, open the same sheet and choose Uninstall from the menu. Internally, a little Google Script is doing all the magic!

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The story, Get Daily Email Reports of your Google Drive Activity , was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/11/2014 under Google Drive, Internet.

Weather in Google Maps

Google Maps used to have a cool weather layer that displayed temperatures and weather conditions around the globe. This feature is no longer available, but Google Maps now shows weather information and local time when searching for cities, just like in Google's Knowledge Graph cards. For example: London, Mountain View.

To switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees, click the icon that illustrates weather condition and click °C or °F in the weather card from Google Search. You can always click the icon to find temperatures, wind and rainfall forecasts for the next 7 days.

Google Knowledge Graph Links to Social Profiles

Here's another sign that Google+'s importance is diminishing: Google's Knowledge Graph cards now include links to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and sites like YouTube and Instagram. Google also adds links to Google+, but always at the end of the list.

Knowledge Graph cards still include the most recent Google+ post and don't show updates from Twitter or Facebook.



{ via Search Engine Land }

Mobile-Friendly Label for Google Search Results

Google tested various ways to highlight if search results are optimized for mobile devices. Some of the experiments displayed icons next to mobile-friendly results, other experiments placed icons next to the results that aren't optimized for mobile devices.



Google announced that it will add in the coming weeks a "mobile-friendly" label next to the mobile search results that are optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone. Google will only add this label if the pages don't use plugins like Flash, if text is readable without zooming, content is properly adjusted so that users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom and links are placed far enough apart so you can tap them.

There's a page that lets you test if a site is mobile-friendly. Google also has some articles that help you create a mobile site.



I think that adding a small icon is a better idea than using the label "mobile-friendly" next to search results. It uses less space and it's easier to find mobile-optimized results.

Google's Coin Flipper and Dice Roller

Google tries to add more and more quick answers and interactive widgets to Google Search and its mobile apps. They're useful on the desktop, but they're even more useful on a smartphone or smartwatch. Now you can ask Google to "flip a coin", "roll a die" or "roll dice" by typing these queries or using voice input. From what I noticed, this only works in the US.



Google shows a realistic animation when searching for "flip a coin" and then it shows the result: "heads" or "tail".

Google no longer uses animations when searching for "roll a die" or "roll dice" (singular die or dice, plural dice).

Google Keep Adds Note Sharing

Google Keep has a new interface powered by Material Design. Google also added some new features: sharing notes, real-time collaboration and search filters.

Just like in the old Google Notebook, you can share notes with other people and allow them to read your notes and edit them. Notes update automatically when other people edit them and there's no way to revert the changes. You can't share a note in read-only mode.

"Searching for your notes is simpler now too. You can filter notes by color and other attributes such as whether they're shared, have a reminder, are lists, or have an image or audio," explains Google.

Google started to roll out the new version of the Google Keep app for Android, but the new features are also available in the desktop web app and the Chrome app.

Time Zone Converter in Google Search

I'm not sure if this is a new Google feature, but it's pretty useful. You could always ask Google "what's the time in Mountain View?", "what's the time in Australia?" or "time in GMT". Now you can also convert time zones. For example, you can convert "2PM GMT to EST" or "10 PM in Mountain View in Vienna time".

If you search for "10 PM in Mountain View in Australia time", Google shows the time in Canberra and mentions that Australia has 13 time zones, while linking to the search results for "time in Australia".

{ via Matt Cutts and Search Engine Roundtable }

YouTube Music Key, Free for Play Music Subscribers

When YouTube announced the Music Key subscription service, I wondered if Google Play Music subscribers will be able to use it for free. It made sense to assume this, since YouTube Music Key bundled Google Play Music All Access. It turns out that Google Play Music subscribers will get access to YouTube Music Key for free.



"Starting next week, as a Google Play Music subscriber, you'll get free and complete access to the YouTube Music Key beta, a new service from YouTube where you can watch ad-free music videos, and keep the music playing in the background or when you're offline. The Google Play Music app will also include ad-free music videos alongside select tracks," informed Google.



This means that Play Music subscribers will be able to use Music Key starting today. It's worth pointing out that Music Key will only be available in the US, UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Finland and Portugal.

Music Key and Play Music All Access are complementary services. Music Key uses Play Music data to show recommendations and metadata, Play Music's catalog is enhanced by adding YouTube's huge music library. Play Music's subscription service offers more value, while Google manages to use YouTube's strengths to make Play Music more popular.

Particles Visualization in Google Play Music

Google Play Music's desktop web app has a cool visualization you can enable when playing a song. Mouse over the small album art thumbnail at the bottom of the window and click "Particles" to enable the visualization. You can disable the visualization by pressing Esc or clicking anywhere inside the animation pane. To enable it again, just click the album art thumbnail.

If you don't like the particles visualizer, you can always mouse over the album art thumbnail and pick the album art visualizer, which is more subtle. Google Play Music remembers your last pick.

{ via Android Police }

YouTube Music Key

YouTube is the most important online music library and Google wants to make it easier to use. Until now, YouTube was optimized for playing videos, not for playing music. This was especially obvious when you used YouTube's mobile apps, which didn't offer features like playing videos in the background or caching videos.



YouTube wants to change all this. "Starting today, you'll see a new home just for music on your YouTube app for Android, iOS and on YouTube.com that shows your favorite music videos, recommended music playlists based on what you're into and playlists of trending music across YouTube," informs the YouTube blog. "In the coming days, you'll be able to see an artist's discography on YouTube, and play a full album with both their official music videos and high-quality songs our music partners added to YouTube."

The most important announcement is YouTube Music Key, a subscription service that lets you play YouTube music videos without ads, in the background and offline when using your mobile device. For a limited time, it costs $7.99/month (discounted from $9.99/month) and it also includes Google Play Music All Access. YouTube Music Key is invitation-only and you can try it 6 months for free. Apparently, YouTube will send email invitations to their "biggest music fans first." Billboard.com reports that the service will be launched on November 17 in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Spain, Italy, Finland and Portugal.



It's not clear if Google Play Music subscribers have to pay extra for YouTube Music Key, but I don't think they should. YouTube Music Key looks like a great opportunity for Google to enhance the Play Music catalog with all the remixes, covers and indie music uploaded to YouTube.

{ Thanks, Theo. }