Breadcrumbs in Google Mobile Search

Google's mobile search site replaced URLs for search results with breadcrumbs that reflect the structure of the URL. "To help mobile searchers understand your website better when we show it in the mobile search results, today we're updating the algorithms that display URLs in the search results to better reflect the names of websites, using the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format," informs Google.



For example, instead of URLs like http://ift.tt/1CNrSe5, you'll see something like this: Google > about > company > history.

Google added support for schema.org structured data for websites, so webmasters can include the site's name and the URL structure as breadcrumbs. You can include multiple site names, but they have to be unique and closely related to the domain name.



Breadcrumbs are already used in desktop SERPs. When they were released, you could click each link to navigate the site's hierarchy, but this feature is no longer available. Google also shows the site's name next to the URL and you can click it to find more information about the site.

Mobile SERPs will add a similar feature and the most important change is that Google will replace the domain name with the site's name. Regular users don't understand web addresses and that's why they use search engines to navigate to sites they visit often like Facebook or Amazon.



Mobile breadcrumbs will gradually roll out worldwide, but site names will only be displayed in the US. I assume that Google will use domain names outside the US, at least for now.



In my opinion, the war against URLs is a bad idea. More and more browser partially hide URLs, Google replaces search results URLs with breadcrumbs and even tests removing them. URLs may be meaningless for many people, but they're unique and they give some information about the site's identity. It's hard to come up with unique site names, especially when you consider that there are many companies, products and sites that have the same name.

Export Classic Custom Maps

The old My Maps is no longer available, even if you use the classic Google Maps interface. Your custom maps were upgraded to the new My Maps, which has more advanced features.



You can still download the original KML files for your custom maps until June 1st, just in case they weren't properly converted. To export a map, go to My Maps, click "open a map", pick the map you want to export and click "Download classic My Maps data" in the settings menu. If this feature is not available, the the map was created using the new My Maps. There's also an option to "export to KML", which downloads the current map.

"If you aren't happy with the way that your maps upgraded, you can download the original, pre-upgrade version of your maps as KML files from within the new My Maps. These files will be available only until June 1st, 2015. After June 1st, the pre-upgrade version of the KML files will be removed," informs Google.

Google Removes Search Filters for Visited Pages

One by one, Google's advanced search features disappear. Google's search tools menu used to include a lot of filters and now there are only 2 filters.



Google has quietly removed the features that allowed you to restrict results to visited pages and pages you haven't visited yet. "Visited pages" and "not yet visited" are no longer included in the search tools menu.



Here's a screenshot from 2013: 9 search tools.

A screenshot from 2014: 4 search tools.

And here's the same menu today: only 2 search tools left, at least for now.

I'm sure that Google will soon remove "reading level" and "verbatim", since they're probably used by a small percentage of Google users.

Find Your Android Phone Using Google Search

Android Device Manager is now available in Google Search for desktop. If you search for [find my phone] or [find my tablet] and you're logged in to your Google account, you can see a map that shows the most recent location of your Android phone or tablet. If you have more than one Android device, there's a dropdown that lets you select other phones and tablets connected to your account. Click the map to open Android Device Manager.

The location is not displayed instantly, so you may see the message: "locating your phone" for a few seconds. Obviously, your phone or tablet needs to have a working Internet connection, location needs to be enabled and the setting: "remotely locate this device" has to be enabled in Google Settings / Security.



If your Android device is nearby, you can also click "ring" to quickly find it. "Your phone will ring at full volume for 5 minutes. Press its power button to stop the ringing."



{ via +Google }

Google Handwriting App for Android

Google has a new Android app that lets you input text using handwriting. "Google Handwriting Input allows you to handwrite text on your phone or tablet in 82 languages. It supports printed and cursive writing, with or without a stylus. Google Handwriting Input also supports hundreds of emojis, so you can express yourself in any Android app."



After you select your favorite languages from the settings, Google downloads the language packs. The English files are preloaded, so there's nothing to download.

Google Handwriting Input works like a regular Android keyboard, so you can use it any Android app that lets you input text. Google automatically converts your handwriting to a text and shows some other suggestions. If you try to write a word that's too long, you can type the first part of the word and then continue entering the rest of the word, as Google's app is smart enough to merge them.

Google's app claims to support even terrible handwriting, but that's not always the case. Sometimes a poorly written letter can make the app return incorrect results, especially for less common words.



Google Handwriting Input requires Android 4.0.3 or later and works for both phones and tablets.

Always Block Google from your Search Results Pages

If you are using Google Custom Search or another site search service on your website, make sure that the search results pages – like the one available here – are not accessible to Googlebot. This is necessary else spam domains can create serious problems for your website for no fault of yours.

Few days ago, I got an automatically generated email from Google Webmaster Tools saying that Googlebot is having trouble indexing my website labnol.org as it found a large number of new URLs. The message said:

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site’s URL structure… As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

This was a worrying signal because it meant that tons of new pages have been added to the website without my knowledge. I logged into Webmaster Tools and, as expected, there were thousands of pages that were in the crawling queue of Google.

Here’s what happened.

Some spam domains had suddenly started linking to the search page of my website using search queries in Chinese language that obviously returned no search results. Each search link is technically considered a separate web page – as they they have unique addresses – and hence the Googlebot was trying to crawl them all thinking they are different pages.

Because thousands of such fake links were generated in a short span of time, Googlebot assumed that these many pages have been suddenly added to the site and hence a warning message was flagged.

There are two solutions to the problem.

I can either get Google to not crawl links found on spam domains, something which is obviously not possible, or I can prevent the Googlebot from indexing these non-existent search pages on my website. The latter is possible so I fired up my VIM editor, opened the robots.txt file and added this line at the top. You’ll find this file in the root folder of your website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Block Search pages from Google with robots.txt

The directive essentially prevents Googlebot, and any other search engine bot, from indexing links that have the “s” parameter the URL query string. If your site uses “q” or “search” or something else for the search variable, you may have to replace “s” with that variable.

The other option is to add the NOINDEX meta tag but that won’t have been an effective solution as Google would still have to crawl the page before deciding not to index it. Also, this is a WordPress specific issue because the Blogger robots.txt already blocks search engines from crawling the results pages.

Related: CSS for Google Custom Search

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The story, Always Block Google from your Search Results Pages , was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 15/04/2015 under SEO, WordPress, Internet.

YouTube Tests New Video Player for Desktop

YouTube tests a new video player with a transparent control bar that hides when you're not using it, just like mobile video players.

The experimental player has new icons and redesigned menus. Toggles for autoplay and annotations look better, while dropdowns for speed and quality look like mobile menus. Both seem to be inspired by iOS.

{ Thanks, Angelo Giuffrida and Sterling Alvarez. }

Shared With Me, Removed From Google Play Music

Google Play Music had a special playlist called "Shared with me", but it's no longer available. The playlist included all the songs shared with you by Google+ users.

Here's how Google described this feature: "Share a free play of the songs and albums you've purchased on Google Play with your friends on Google+. They can share their purchases with you too. Forget the name of that song shared with you last week? No problem, you can find all of the music shared with you in your 'Shared with me' auto playlist."



The auto playlists section from the sidebar only has 4 auto playlists: "queue", "thumbs up", "last added" and "free and purchased".

{ Thanks, Boris Larson. }

Incredible Art Made Entirely In Google Drawings

Google Drawings is a simple Microsoft Paint like diagramming application that is commonly used for creating flowcharts and diagrams inside documents and presentations on Google Drive. It offers a few elementary tools before you dismiss Drawings as not worthy of any serious work, take a look at Joshua Pomeroy’s art and you’ll be amazed.

Creating Art in Google Drawings

Joshua is a Michigan-based visual artist and he uses this basic Google Drawings app to create some very impressive and detailed vector portraits. You can browse through his work on Google Plus and all these images are created entirely inside Google Drawings.

If you are curious to know such incredible art was made, Joshua has uploaded a series of video tutorials on YouTube where he explains how he goes about creating these digital paintings from photographs inside Google Drive.

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The story, Incredible Art Made Entirely In Google Drawings , was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 07/04/2015 under Google Drive, Internet.

A More Efficient Method for Embedding YouTube Videos

When you embed any YouTube video on your website using standard IFRAME tags, you’ll be surprised to know how much extra weight that YouTube video will add to your page. The web page has to download ~0.5 MB of extra resources (CSS, JavaScript and images) for rendering the YouTube video player and the files will download even if the visitor on your website has chosen not to watch the embedded YouTube video.

The embedded video is making your page heavy and the visitor’s browser will also need to make multiple HTTP requests to render the video player. This increases the overall loading time of your page and thus affects the page speed score. The other drawback with the default YouTube embed code is that it isn’t responsive. If people view your website on a mobile phone, the video player would not resize itself accordingly.

Load YouTube Video Player On-Demand

Google Plus uses a clever workaround to reduce the time it takes to initially load the YouTube video player and we can incorporate a similar approach approach for our websites as well.

Instead of embedding the full Youtube video player, Google+ displays just the thumbnail images of a YouTube video and a “play” icon is placed over the video so that it looks like a video player. The following video is embedded using the same technique:

When the user hits the play button, the video thumbnail is replaced with the standard YouTube video player with autoplay set to 1 so it plays the video instantly. The extra player-specific resources are thus loaded only when the user has decided to play the embedded video and not otherwise.

The regular embed code for YouTube looks something like this. You specify the height of the player (in pixels), the width and the unique ID of the YouTube video.

<iframe width="320" height="180" 
     src="http://ift.tt/1DYkA9j;
</iframe>

Embed YouTube Videos Responsively without Increasing Load Time

The on-demand embed code for YouTube is slightly different since we are now embedding the video responsively and also because the IFRAME embed code is added only then user clicks the play button.

Copy-paste the following snippet anywhere in your web page where you would like the video to appear. Remember to replace VIDEOID with the actual ID of the YouTube video. The CSS and JavaScript codes are added to the template separately. Also, there’s no need to add the height and width parameter since the video will automatically occupy the width of the parent while the height is auto-calculated.

<div class="youtube-container">
   <div class="youtube-player" data-id="VIDEOID"></div>
</div>

You can copy-paste multiple blocks on the same page incase you need to embed multiple videos on the same page. The code will stay the same except that you need to change the VIDEOID for each of the blocks.

The JavaScript

The JavaScript function will scan your pages for embedded YouTube videos. If found, it will add the corresponding thumbnail image and also add the onclick event listener that will do the actual magic – replace the image with the actual YouTube video in autoplay mode.

<script>
(function() {
    var v = document.getElementsByClassName("youtube-player");
    for (var n = 0; n < v.length; n++) {
        var p = document.createElement("div");
        p.innerHTML = labnolThumb(v[n].dataset.id);
        p.onclick = labnolIframe;
        v[n].appendChild(p);
    }
})();

function labnolThumb(id) {
    return '<img class="youtube-thumb" src="//i.ytimg.com/vi/' + id + '/hqdefault.jpg"><div class="play-button"></div>';
}

function labnolIframe() {
    var iframe = document.createElement("iframe");
    iframe.setAttribute("src", "//www.youtube.com/embed/" + this.parentNode.dataset.id + "?autoplay=1&autohide=2&border=0&wmode=opaque&enablejsapi=1&controls=0&showinfo=0");
    iframe.setAttribute("frameborder", "0");
    iframe.setAttribute("id", "youtube-iframe");
    this.parentNode.replaceChild(iframe, this);
}
</script>

The CSS

Open the CSS file of your website and paste the following snippet. If you don’t have a separate CSS file, you can also place it before the closing head tag of your web template.

<style>
.youtube-container { display: block; margin: 20px auto; width: 100%; max-width: 600px; }
.youtube-player { display: block; width: 100%; /* assuming that the video has a 16:9 ratio */ padding-bottom: 56.25%; overflow: hidden; position: relative; width: 100%; height: 100%; cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; }
img.youtube-thumb { bottom: 0; display: block; left: 0; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 100%; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; height: auto }
div.play-button { height: 72px; width: 72px; left: 50%; top: 50%; margin-left: -36px; margin-top: -36px; position: absolute; background: url("http://ift.tt/1CPNq9I;) no-repeat; }
#youtube-iframe { width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; }
</style>

This method will reduce the size of your webpages by 300-400 KB while making your site mobile friendly. You may refer to the annotated code to understanding how on-demand embedding works.

Also see: Embed Google Maps Responsively

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The story, A More Efficient Method for Embedding YouTube Videos , was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 06/04/2015 under Embed, YouTube, Internet.

Google Now Card for Google+ Stories

Google Now shows a new card for Google+ Stories. Google automatically generates stories using the images you upload to Google+ Photos. "Your best photos are automatically chosen and arranged in a fun timeline to show the highlights of your trip or event," explains Google.

Until now, users only received Google+ notifications.



{ Thanks, Angelo Giuffrida. }

Google's Colorful Help Centers

Google's help centers have switched to Material Design. Help centers use different colors, much like the mobile apps. Gmail's help center uses a red background for navigation elements and it's annoying because it distracts you from the article.

Chrome's help center uses blue and it's interesting to notice that the sidebar stands out more than the article. There are many other services that have blue help centers: Search, Calendar, AdWords, AdSense, AdWords, Maps.

Here's the homepage for Google Drive's help center. The transition between Google's help centers is jarring because they look so different now. Colors should be used sparingly and shouldn't distract from the main content.

Google Contacts Preview and Gmail

If you switched to the new Google Contacts interface and select Contacts from the Gmail dropdown, you'll no longer see the old Google Contacts. Google will open the Contacts preview in a new tab and not inside Gmail, which doesn't use Material Design yet.

You can switch back to the old Contacts by clicking "Leave the Contacts preview" in the "More" menu. Another option is to use this permalink for the old Google Contacts: http://ift.tt/tkIhcJ or this keyboard shortcut: press g then c in Gmail (assuming that keyboard shortcuts are enabled).

Using Google Photos in Google Drive for Desktop

As previously announced, Google Drive has a new section for Google Photos and the new feature is gradually rolled out. Here's how it looks in Google Drive for desktop.



You should see a message which informs you that the new feature is enabled: "New! Access your Google Photos from Drive".

There's a Google Photos section in the sidebar. Click the new menu items and Google suggests to add the folder to My Drive to make it easier to organize your photos.

Click "Create folder" and Google Drive shows a strange message: "You have given Google Keep access to your files in Google Drive. Creating the Google Photos folder in My Drive will give the app access to your photos and videos from Google Photos, as well (including photos and videos from your mobile device if you've turned on AutoBackup)."

Google adds a Google Photos folder to My Drive, which is supposed to include all your albums as subfolders. For some reason, Google Drive only shows a few recent photos and this message: "Stay tuned! Your older photos are coming soon."

Google Spam

After reinventing Gmail with Google Inbox, Google is about to release a new invite-only service that will change the way you manage your mail. It's called Google Spam and it shows the most popular spam messages sent to Gmail users. That's right, Google Spam will go beyond your inbox and show what you've been missing all this time: the spam messages received by other people.

To protect user privacy, Google Spam will only show messages received by at least 10,000 Gmail users. You'll be able to star your favorite spam messages, label them, forward them to your friends and even find their true meaning.



Gmail will highlight important spam messages, so the next time you receive messages from "the office of the US Ambassador to Nigeria", "Mr. Lee Kun-hee of Samsung Group chief and the Hyundai chaebol" or from Gmail Security Maintenance, you'll know if they're featured in Google Spam.