Hide sites from anywhere in the world

In March, we introduced the option for you to block sites from your search results that you might not find useful. Sometimes you’ll click on a result, find that it’s not what you wanted, and head right back to the search results page. It could be that the result wasn’t quite right for your query, but other times you may be generally dissatisfied with a particular site appearing in your search results. Starting today, you can now block sites on most Google domains.

 

If you’re searching on google.fr and come back to the results page after viewing Matt’s blog, you’ll see an option to block this site. 

You can manage your list of blocked sites from the dashboard, which can be found in your Search Settings. You’ll see when you blocked a site and the reason that you did so, and you can unblock sites if you choose.

The German version of the Blocked Sites dashboard

We’re happy to be helping users all over the world to take control of their search experience and personalize their results in this manner. We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites. In the future, we may experiment with data from non-US users’ blocked sites. As always, we look forward to your suggestions on how to continue improving your search experience.

Posted by Johannes Henkel, Search Quality Engineer

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An early look at our Flight Search feature

Just over five months ago, we welcomed ITA Software to the Google family. Since then, our engineering teams have been working closely together to build new travel tools that provide faster, more flexible, and more useful results to online travel searches. We wanted to give you an early look at some of what we’ve been able to accomplish so far.

Starting today, when you search for flight information on Google, for example “flights from Chicago to Denver,” you will see a “Flights” link in the left-hand panel. This link leads to our new Flight Search feature, and is offered in addition to the flight schedules which have been available since May. You can also access the Flight Search feature directly at google.com/flights.

With this first step in flight search that combines ITA’s expertise with Google’s technology, you will be able to:

• Get super-fast results. Speed is critical to all the things we love on the web, and travel planning should be no exception. Making changes to dates, destinations, and filters should be as fast as we hope you’ve come to expect from Google. 

• See a simple list of the most relevant flights. Flight Search shows you an easy-to-scan list to help you get to your destination quickly and inexpensively. 

• Figure out when to travel. Quickly see which travel dates are least expensive by dragging the date selector forward or backward, or check out the bar chart to compare lots of dates at once. 

• Consider your destination options. Flight Search helps you explore possible destinations, letting you filter them by airline, flight time and price. For example, you can use the map and filters to see where you can go from San Francisco within 3 hours for less than $300. 

Flights are chosen primarily based on cost and total travel time, while covering a variety of departure times and airlines. We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.

The selection of flight results is not influenced by any paid relationships. Airlines control how their flights are marketed, so as with other flight search providers, our booking links point to airline websites only. We're working to create additional opportunities for our other partners in the travel industry to participate as well.

This is just an early look: the takeoff, not the final destination! You may notice that at the moment we include a limited number of U.S. cities and show results for round-trip economy-class flights only. We’re working hard to improve this feature and look forward to sharing more updates.

Don’t worry if you don’t see the Flight Search feature -- we’re rolling it out over the course of the day. To learn more, check out this video:

 

Posted by Kourosh Gharachorloo, Engineering Director

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Streamlining iGoogle with a new look

Today, iGoogle jumped on the design refresh bandwagon and rolled out a sleek and simple new interface. We hope these changes will enhance your experience when navigating through iGoogle.

In addition to the visible design changes like new colors and spacing, we’ve made some changes to functionality to showcase the content that really matters to you: we’ve hidden buttons and navigation links until they're actually needed. Now you can collapse the left panel to give yourself room for more gadgets, or pop it back out when you want to chat with a friend.

For those of you using Google Chrome, you can now search simply by speaking out loud, right from your iGoogle homepage. Just click the microphone icon to get started.

We hope you enjoy the first in a series of updates to iGoogle that are on their way in the coming months. If you have any feedback on the new design, please let us know by filling out this form or joining us in the Web Search Forum.  

Posted by Conrad Lo, Product Manager

Kicking off football season with NFL live results in search

Just as the NFL season kicks off and you have your fantasy football league ready to go, you’ll be able to get useful information such as the latest scores, schedules, standings and stats for football-related queries in your search results. Last week, we started showing MLB results in partnership with ESPN and we’re now expanding sports live results to include the NFL. In addition to information on the football league, teams and players, you’ll also have direct links to previews, live streams, updates and game recaps. We hope to add more and more sports information on google.com, so stay tuned.

Posted by Itay Maman, Software Engineer

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New snippets for list pages

Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give you a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to your query. This week we started rolling out snippet improvements for pages that contain lists; results for these pages will now reflect the structure of the page, rather than just showing two lines of text.

If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we’ll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format. The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page (for example, “30+ items” in the screenshot below).



This change to snippets will be rolling out globally over the next few days. Over time we’ll keep making more snippet improvements to better reflect the content of our search results, making it easier for you to find the most relevant results.

Posted by Raj Krishnan, Product Manager

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Another look under the hood of search

(cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Over the past few years, we’ve released a series of blog posts to share the methodology and process behind our search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes. Just last month, Ben Gomes, Matt Cutts and I participated in a Churchill Club event where we discussed how search works and where we believe it’s headed in the future.

Beyond our talk and various blog posts, we wanted to give people an even deeper look inside search, so we put together a short video that gives you a sense of the work that goes into the changes and improvements we make to Google almost every day. While an improvement to the algorithm may start with a creative idea, it always goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing. Simply put: if the data from our experiments doesn’t show that we’re helping users, we won’t launch the change.

In the world of search, we’re always striving to deliver the answers you’re looking for. After all, we know you have a choice of a search engine every time you open a browser. As the Internet becomes bigger, richer and more interactive it means that we have to work that much harder to ensure we’re unearthing and displaying the best results for you.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

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Microdata + Sports Stats = Happy Fans

Editor’s Note: Today's guest author is Chris Jason from the Digital Media team at ESPN. With baseball season in full swing, Chris is writing a guest post to announce an improvement to baseball related searches with the help of data from ESPN. Like our search team here, Chris’s team is passionate about helping people find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily, whether they’re watching on TV or searching online for the latest sports news and scores. For more about ESPN, check out their Front Row blog, and stay tuned as we work to add more data from sports providers to improve your sports related searches.



For those of you who don't spend your day writing code, let me get the nerdy backdrop out of the way: microdata is a way to describe something – for example a person, event, place, etc. – through special use of structured HTML5 tags and properties in a Web page. This information can be used by computer applications – like a search engine or Web browser – to create a richer experience for users. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, no worries. I promise this will make sense by the end.



At ESPN we’re always looking for ways to reach and serve sports fans in better ways, and we know they aren’t always on ESPN.com or watching our television programming. As a manager in Digital Media my job is to use technology to reach, excite, and surprise those fans. For example, we have teams like our Stats and Information Group, who collect and produce as much accurate, timely sports information as they possibly can, and we’re always looking for ways to connect with people who otherwise might not see the great information we uncover.



ESPN Digital Media has been experimenting with microdata for a while and discussing internally the idea of creating a set of sports microdata. So, we worked with Google to create a series of sports-related microdata that include athletes, teams, leagues, and games. The idea is to apply meaning to the code in our content using microdata, in order to create a richer experience for users when ESPN webpages are displayed in Google’s search results. While this is a work in progress, we’re working with Google to standardize the format so that others can make use of this technology going forward.





Now, when you use Google to search for baseball-related information – such as teams, players, and scores – the results display high-level athlete information, stats, game scores, and links to key content on ESPN.com, including game previews and recaps, video highlights, photos, schedule, and roster information. You will also be able to interact more easily with some of ESPN's key products like GameCast, scoreboards and player pages.



Going forward our team is planning to create microdata-enhanced results for other sports like football, basketball, hockey, and soccer.



To all you sports fans out there using Google, we hope you’ll find that we've made it easier to access the sports information you're looking for and that you enjoy the new experience.



Posted by Chris Jason, Senior Manager of Product Development, ESPN Digital Media

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