Get your Google back

If you’ve moved to Windows 8 and are getting acquainted with it, you may be looking for a couple of your favorite Google products that you use every day. To help you get the best experience possible on Google and across the web, we’ve designed and built a new Google Search app and Chrome browser for Windows 8 and created a simple site to help you get your Google back.



 





The Google Search app comes with a clean and recognizable user interface. Our new voice search lets you naturally speak questions. The image search and image previews are built for swiping. And, as usual, you get immediate results as you type with Google Instant. The doodles you enjoy on special occasions will be right there on the homepage and even show up on the Google tile on your start screen.

The Chrome browser is the same Chrome you know and love, with some customizations to optimize for touchscreens, including larger buttons and the ability to keep Chrome open next to your other favorite apps. It delivers the fast, secure web experience you’ve come to expect from Chrome on all your devices.

To get both Google Search and Chrome installed on your Windows 8 machine, head to our site and learn how to get your familiar Google apps back.



Posted by Tamar Yehoshua, Product Management Director, Search

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“People also search for” -- now with explanations!

Search is a lot about discovery, and the Knowledge Graph, our map of real-world people, places and things, is designed to help you find new information easily. Have you ever flipped through the “People also search for” section of the Knowledge Graph panels and wondered -- just how are those two people connected anyway? People had fun with our Bacon Number calculator, which revealed some, often surprising, connections, and now we’re taking it one step further. Just mouse over or click on a thumbnail to see an explanation of how it’s connected to the subject of your search:

“People also search for” movies for Gone with the Wind

We’re starting by showing major co-starring roles between actors, movies, and TV shows as well as highlighting family connections amongst famous people in the Knowledge Graph. These connections won’t show up all the time, but when there is an interesting explanation available, you can now see it at a glance. Happy browsing!

Posted by Golan Pundak, Engineer

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Find your stuff faster in Gmail and Search

(Cross-posted on the Official Gmail Blog)

When you’re looking for something, you should be able to find what you need quickly and easily without needing to think about where it might be, whether it's in your email or out on the public web. That’s why this past August we opened a field trial allowing you to sign up to get information from Gmail right from the Google search box.

We’ve gotten very positive feedback from those of you testing it out -- such as this note: “The Gmail results feature is awesome! The fact that it's all integrated into one screen is huge.” Many testers have requested being able to find Drive files as well -- as one of you put it, “It would be awesome if I could search my google drive from google search as well :)”.

So starting today, you can sign up for a new and expanded field trial that makes it easier to find your stuff across Google, whether you’re searching on Google.com or searching in Gmail.

In Gmail, as you begin to type into the search box, you'll instantly start seeing relevant emails from Gmail as well as results from Google Drive, Google Calendar, and more:

Similarly, when you search on Google.com, your results will include relevant information and messages from Gmail (something familiar to those who joined the original field trial) and now -- new in this field trial -- also files, documents, spreadsheets and more from Google Drive:

To give this a try, please visit the updated field trial page and select Join the field trial. Please note that this trial is only accessible in English and for @gmail.com addresses (not available on Google Apps accounts). And keep the feedback coming!

Posted by Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer

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Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September

Our latest installment of search quality highlights is here with 65 changes to report for August and September. As you may recall from our last post, in cases where we don’t have a descriptive name, we are using a unique ID number. August and September were both busy months as we launched new features, expanded the Knowledge Graph globally in English, and worked towards building the search engine of the future.

Here’s the list for August:

• #82862. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
• #83197. [project “Autocomplete”] This launch introduced changes in the way we generate query predictions for Autocomplete.
• #83818. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the movie showtimes feature.
• #83819. [project “Answers”] We improved display of the MLB search feature.
• #83820. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the finance search feature.
• #83384. [project “Universal Search”] We made improvements to driving directions in Turkish.
• #83459. [project “Alternative Search Methods”] We added support for answers about new stock exchanges for voice queries.
• LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
• Maru. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch to improve the handling of adult video content in videos mode for queries that are not looking for adult content.
• #83135. [project “Query Understanding”] This change updated term-proximity scoring.
• #83659. [project “Answers”] We made improvements to display of the local time search feature.
• #83105. [project “Snippets”] We refreshed data used to generate sitelinks.
• Imadex. [project “Freshness”] This change updated handling of stale content and applies a more granular function based on document age.
• #83613. [project “Universal Search”] This change added the ability to show a more appropriately sized video thumbnail on mobile when the user clearly expresses intent for a video.
• #83443. [project “Knowledge Graph”] We added a lists and collections component to the Knowledge Graph.
• #83442. [project “Snippets”] This change improved a signal we use to determine how relevant a possible result title actually is for the page.
• #83012. [project “Knowledge Graph] The Knowledge Graph displays factual information and refinements related to many types of searches. This launch extended the Knowledge Graph to English-speaking locales beyond the U.S.
• #84063. [project “Answers”] We added better understanding of natural language searches for the calculator feature, focused on currencies and arithmetic.
• nearby. [project “User Context”] We improved the precision and coverage of our system to help you find more relevant local web results. Now we’re better able to identify web results that are local to the user, and rank them appropriately.
• essence. [project “Autocomplete”] This change introduced entity predictions in autocomplete. Now Google will predict not just the string of text you might be looking for, but the actual real-world thing. Clarifying text will appear in the drop-down box to help you disambiguate your search.
• #83821. [project “Answers”] We introduced better natural language parsing for display of the conversions search feature.
• #82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
• #82407. [project “Other Search Features”] For pages that we do not crawl because of robots.txt, we are usually unable to generate a snippet for users to preview what's on the page. This change added a replacement snippet that explains that there's no description available because of robots.txt.
• #83709. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change was a minor bug fix related to the way links are used in ranking.
• #82546. [project “Indexing”] We made back-end improvements to video indexing to improve the efficiency of our systems.
• Palace. [project “SafeSearch”] This change decreased the amount of adult content that will show up in Image Search mode when SafeSearch is set to strict.
• #84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the "Panda" high-quality sites algorithm. 
• #84083. [project “Answers”] This change improved the display of the movie showtimes search feature.
• gresshoppe. [project “Answers”] We updated the display of the flight search feature for searches without a specified destination.
• #83670. [project “Snippets”] We made improvements to surface fewer generic phrases like "comments on" and "logo" in search result titles.
• #83777. [project “Synonyms”] This change made improvements to rely on fewer "low-confidence" synonyms when the user's original query has good results.
• #83377. [project “User Context”] We made improvements to show more relevant local results.
• #83484. [project “Refinements”] This change helped users refine their searches to find information about the right person, particularly when there are many prominent people with the same name.
• #82872. [project “SafeSearch”] In "strict" SafeSearch mode we remove results if they are not very relevant. This change previously launched in English, and this change expanded it internationally.
• Knowledge Graph Carousel. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change expanded the Knowledge Graph carousel feature globally in English.
• Sea. [project “SafeSearch”] This change helped prevent adult content from appearing when SafeSearch is in "strict" mode.
• #84259. [project “Autocomplete”] This change tweaked the display of real-world entities in autocomplete to reduce repetitiveness. With this change, we don't show the entity name (displayed to the right of the dash) when it's fully contained in the query.
• TSSPC. [project “Spelling”] This change used spelling algorithms to improve the relevance of long-tail autocomplete predictions.
• #83689. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
• #84068. [project “Answers”] We improved the display of the currency conversion search feature.
• #84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.

Here’s the list for September:

• Dot. [project “Autocomplete”] We improved cursor-aware predictions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Suppose you're searching for "restaurants" and then decide you want "Italian restaurants." With cursor-aware predictions, once you put your cursor back to the beginning of the search box and start typing "I," the prediction system will make predictions for "Italian," not completions of "Irestaurants."
• #84288. [project “Autocomplete”] This change made improvements to show more fresh predictions in autocomplete for Korean.
• trafficmaps. [project “Universal Search”] With this change, we began showing a traffic map for queries like "traffic from A to B" or "traffic between A and B."
• #84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
• #84652. [project “Snippets”] We currently generate titles for PDFs (and other non-html docs) when converting the documents to HTML. These auto-generated titles are usually good, but this change made them better by looking at other signals.
• #83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.
• #83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.
• espd. [project “Autocomplete”] This change provided entities in autocomplete that are more likely to be relevant to the user's country. See blog post for background.
• #83391. [project “Answers”] This change internationalized and improved the precision of the symptoms search feature.
• #82876. [project “Autocomplete”] We updated autocomplete predictions when predicted queries share the same last word.
• #83304. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change updated signals that determine when to show summaries of topics in the right-hand panel.
• #84211. [project “Snippets”] This launch led to better snippet titles.
• #81360. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] With this launch, we began showing local URLs to users instead of general homepages where applicable (e.g. blogspot.ch instead of blogspot.com for users in Switzerland). That’s relevant, for example, for global companies where the product pages are the same, but the links for finding the nearest store are country-dependent.
• #81999. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] We revamped code for understanding which documents are relevant for particular regions and languages automatically (if not annotated by the webmaster).
• Cobra. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch algorithms to better detect adult content.
• #937372. [project “Other Search Features”] The translate search tool is available through the link "Translated foreign pages" in the sidebar of the search result page. In addition, when we guess that a non-English search query would have better results from English documents, we'll show a feature at the bottom of the search results page to suggest users try the translate search tool. This change improved the relevance of when we show the suggestion.
• #84460. [project “Snippets”] This change helped to better identify important phrases on a given webpage.
• #80435. [project “Autocomplete”] This change improves autocomplete predictions based on the user's Web History (for signed-in users).
• #83901. [project “Synonyms”] This change improved the use of synonyms for search terms to more often return results that are relevant to the user's intention.

And here are a few other changes we’ve blogged about since last time:

• An update to our search algorithms
• Voice Search arrives in 13 new languages
• Structured Data Testing Tool
• Insights into what the world is searching for -- the new Google Trends
• Travelers can now access Flight Search from their tablets

Posted by Pandu Nayak, Member of Technical Staff

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