Android Apps Ported to Chrome OS

When I first heard that Chrome OS will be able to run Android apps, I assumed that Chrome OS will include Android's runtime and it will be able to launch any Android app. That's not the case, Android apps are manually ported to Chrome, so that's why Google's first set of apps only includes Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words and Vine.

Bringing more powerful apps to Chrome OS is a great idea. Making it easier to port existing mobile apps to Chrome encourages developers to go beyond web apps and write native apps that work offline, include hardware integration and work outside of the browser. While cross-platform web apps are still useful, the new Chrome apps can bring some missing features that people expect to find in native apps. "These combine the best of websites and native applications — they're available offline, are always up to date, and they can communicate with devices like USB drives & Bluetooth speakers," explains Google.



"These first apps are the result of a project called the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta), which we announced earlier this summer at Google I/O. Over the coming months, we'll be working with a select group of Android developers to add more of your favorite apps so you'll have a more seamless experience across your Android phone and Chromebook," informs Google. You can tell Google what Android apps you'd like to be ported to Chrome.



For now, the first 4 apps can only be installed in Chrome OS, but I'm sure that Google will add support for Chrome in the near future.

Google's Object Recognition Technology

Google continues to improve its image recognition technology. A Google team placed first in the classification and detection tasks of the ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge, the largest academic challenge in computer vision.



"Superior performance in the detection challenge requires pushing beyond annotating an image with a 'bag of labels' - a model must be able to describe a complex scene by accurately locating and identifying many objects in it," explains Google. Here's are some examples of object detection:

"This effort was accomplished by using the DistBelief infrastructure, which makes it possible to train neural networks in a distributed manner and rapidly iterate. At the core of the approach is a radically redesigned convolutional network architecture," mentions Google. The goal is to train large models for deep neural networks.



Last year, Google used the DistBelief infrastructure to improve some models used by the winning team at ImageNet and implemented the algorithms in Google+ Photos Search and later in Google Drive's search engine. Google automatically annotates images and it allows you to search for things like "car" or "laptop" and find images that include them.



Google promises to use the latest achievements to improve "Google products such as photo search, image search, YouTube, self-driving cars, and any place where it is useful to understand what is in an image as well as where things are".

New Security Section in Google Accounts Settings

The Security tab from Google's accounts settings page has a new section that lets you quickly update your security settings. Google suggests to "secure your account and

get better protection for your account."



You can edit your recovery phone and email, check your recent activity, disable access for less secure apps and remove account permissions. All of these features were already available, but this page groups them and displays them using a simplified interface.

{ Thanks, Florian Kiersch. }

Google Tests Search History Export

Google tests a feature that will let you export your Web History data. For now, the experimental feature creates a ZIP archive that splits your search history in several JSON files.

Most likely, this feature will be added to Google Takeout when it's released.



{ Thanks, Florian Kiersch. }

"In the News" Google Search Card

Google added a new search card for news-related searches. It's display in the right sidebar and it doesn't replace the list of Google News results. For example, when searching for [Jill Duggar], Google shows a thumbnail, a short summary ("Jill Duggar and her new husband, Derick Dillard, are expecting their first child"), a link to a news article and a list of related searches.

The new card seems to be displayed for some people in the news, but only if they don't have their own Knowledge Graph cards with information from sites like Wikipedia. It's probably just an experiment, since it's rarely displayed.



{ via Search Engine Land }

Inline Facts Next to Google Search Results

Google now shows a list of facts next to some Wikipedia results. Knowledge Graph data extracted from Wikipedia is now placed below the snippets.



For example, when searching for [duchy of Amalfi], Google shows some information about Amalfi, a town in the province of Salerno and the former capital of the Duchy of Amalfi.

When searching for [king of Rome], Google shows the name of the last king and the year when the monarchy ended.

Some of the facts aren't very useful or are taken out of context. For example, Google shows "President: Dwight D. Eisenhower" next to the Wikipedia result for Richard Nixon, without mentioning that Nixon was vice president during the Eisenhower administration.

Google Knowledge Graph Shows Forms of Government

Do you want to learn more about the forms of government from various countries? Search Google for "government of [country]" and Google will show if the country is a constitutional monarchy, constitutional republic, federal republic, unitary state, parliamentary republic, non-partisan democracy, military dictatorship.



Here's an example for [government of tuvalu]

Click one of the forms of government and Google will display more information. For example, Tuvalu, a small island in the Pacific Ocean, is a nonpartisan democracy, which means that Tuvalu has no political parties. It's also a constitutional monarchy.

Germany is a federal republic, which means it's a federation of states with a republican form of government.

Switzerland is also a federal republic, but it's the only country in the world that's a direct democracy and has a directorial system. "Switzerland is the closest state in the world to a direct democracy. For any change in the constitution, a referendum is mandatory (mandatory referendum); for any change in a law, a referendum can be requested (optional referendum)," explains Wikipedia. Switzerland is also a directorial republic, "a country ruled by a college of several people who jointly exercise the powers of a head of state or a head of government".

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Account Settings Lite

Google's account settings page has a simplified version for old browsers. You can find it at: http://ift.tt/1w26D6z. The page shows some links that let you edit your profile, change your password, change password recovery options, manage account information, change email addresses and manage connected accounts.

Google shows this message: "Upgrade to a common and recent browser to modify Security, Language, Data Tools, and Account history settings." If you use an old browser, you'll also see: "It appears as if you're using an old or uncommon browser that doesn't support common standards. To access all of your Google account settings, upgrade to the latest version of any of the following browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari". Google provides download links.

I've loaded http://ift.tt/IS2uVn in Chrome 5 and Google redirected to the lite version.



{ Thanks, Luiz Pimenta. }

Gmail, Powered by Google

For some reason, Gmail shows a new message at the bottom of the page: "powered by Google". This was already used by the Google Apps version of Gmail, so it's not clear if the new attribution is placed by mistake in the standard Gmail.

"Powered by Google" makes sense in Google Apps, which offers white-label versions of Google's consumer services, but it feels out of place in a regular Google service.



{ Thanks, PhistucK. }

Windows Free

Little by little, Microsoft's operating system becomes free. Android's dominance forced Microsoft to make Windows Phone free. Chromebooks' popularity forced Microsoft to remove the Windows license for low-cost computers.

Windows is now a burden for hardware manufacturers: its license is a significant part of the computer's price and Windows 8 doesn't drive sales. Desktop operating systems are becoming less important, computers use less power and offload processing to the cloud.



A desktop operating system built around a browser and a mobile operating system built around openness made Google the obvious choice for Microsoft's OEMs. Two timely solutions that allowed companies like Samsung, Asus, HTC to come up with products people wanted to buy. Hardware companies usually don't write great software, so Google wrote some of the software and freed them from Windows. And now the popularity of the Windows-free products powered by Google made Windows free.

YouTube's Experiment for Related Searches

YouTube tests a new search interface that includes results for related searches. For example, when searching for [ibm ad], YouTube shows a few results for my query, then 3 lists of search results for [ibm smarter planet], [ibm ad india], [intel ad] and some other results for my query. YouTube uses the same carousel view that's also used for channels and homepage.

You can click the arrows to see more results:

Here's a video that shows an example:

How to enable this experimental feature? If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:



1. open youtube.com in a new tab



2. load your browser's developer console:



* Chrome or Opera 15+ - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac



* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac



* Internet Explorer 8+ - press F12 and select the "Console" tab



* Safari 6+ - if you haven't enabled the Develop menu, open Preferences from the Safari menu, go to the Advanced tab and check "Show Develop menu in menu bar". Close Preferences and then press Command-Option-C to show the console.



* Opera 12 - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console".



3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:



document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=d03DP7Ew5z0; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();



4. press Enter and close the console.



To disable the experiment, use the same instructions, but replace the code from step 3 with this one:



document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();



{ via Rubén }

HTTPS-Only YouTube

I'm not sure if this is really new, but I remember that YouTube only redirected logged-in users to the HTTPS site. Now YouTube redirects everyone to the HTTPS site. I visited YouTube's homepage, a random YouTube channel and a video in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and YouTube quickly redirected to the corresponding SSL URL.

The mobile YouTube site still uses HTTP by default, but you can manually change the URL to https://m.youtube.com.

Google Removes Private Search Option

Speaking of advanced search features, here's a screenshot from April 2013 that shows Google's search filter menu. Only 4 out of the 9 features are still available: "visited pages", "not yet visited pages", "reading level" and "verbatim". The dictionary feature has been replaced with an improved dictionary card, while the other features have been removed.

Here are the features that are still available:

The latest feature that has been removed allowed you to restrict the results to "private" pages. The "personal"/"private" filter only included "content that was shared with you on Google+ or Gmail", as Google explains. You can hide personal results using the button next to the options dropdown, but you can no longer display only personal results.



{ via Search Engine Roundtable }

Google Updates Site Search Box

The experimental Google site search box spotted last week is now a regular Google feature. Google announced that the improved search box within search results is more prominent and brings autocomplete, as well as integration with the site's search features.

If the site adds some markup, Google could send users to the site's internal search page. Apparently, Amazon implemented this feature or Google used Amazon's site to test it. This page explains how to add the schema.org markup: "This markup should reference the URL pattern for your site's search queries in the target property of SearchAction. The URL pattern must point to the same domain that hosts the content being searched. It must also include a variable name in braces that is a placeholder for the user's search query."



Not all the sites have their own search engine, so Google suggests to create one using Google Custom Search. It will still use Google Search, but you can customize the search engine, change ranking, search multiple sites and even monetize it.



I don't think it's a good idea to send users to the site's internal search page, at least not as a default option. Bing already does this and it's probably useful for sites like Amazon, eBay or YouTube, which provide powerful tools for refining results. For most sites, Google's search feature is better. Now the search box will no longer provide consistent functionality: for some sites, Google will send users to their own search pages, while for other sites, Google will show its own results.



Actually, there's a way to tell if Google sends you to a different site when clicking the search box: the message inside the search box is "search site.com" instead of "results from site.com" and the list of suggestions includes an option to show "results for [query]", which sends you to a Google search results page.

Redesigned YouTube Buttons

YouTube's experimental layout with simpler buttons is rolling out to everyone. The like and dislike buttons have merged with the number of likes and dislikes, YouTube no longer uses tabs, "add to" opens a drop-down menu and there's a "more" menu for features like "report", "transcript" and "statistics".

Google Docs Tooltip Shows Page Number

When you scroll a document in Google Docs, Google now shows a tooltip that includes the number of the page you're currently reading or editing and the total number of pages. It looks like this: "2 of 3". The tooltip is also displayed when you mouse over the scrollbar.

You can also check the number of pages using print preview or the word count feature. Another option is to insert page number and page count using the features from the Insert menu.



{ Thanks, Daniel Fletcher. }