One of the prototype search results Google is currently testing shows a “Search options” link in the blue results bar. When you click it, a navigation bar expands to the left side, promising to limit results to pages created “anytime”, “past 24 hours”, “past week” and so on. There are also a couple of alternative result views to enable; “longer text”, “dates and places”, “images from the page”, and “publication date”. “Longer text” shows snippets beyond what Google normally displays in results. “Images from the page” includes little thumbnails, not unlike one of the views already available in the Google Experimental Labs. If you want to enable this experiment for you as well ( …

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Google announced their browser Google Chrome to be available on Tuesday, but their download page and tour was already partly available at gears.google.com/chrome/ just now, as Uval in the forum noticed. While the download itself didn’t work when I tried, I was able to extract some screenshots, from the frontpage but also the YouTube videos. And while the product tour videos themselves seemed to require a special group membership at YouTube, the video still previews are public and you can paste the video identifier into a URL like this one to see more high quality stills.

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Engadget has photos of what they say is going to be a mobile phone running Google-backed mobile system Android. The phone is T-Mobile-branded and produced by HTC (Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corporation, a member of the — again Google-backed — Open Handset Alliance, as is T-Mobile), and comes with a slidable keyboard.* [Via Reto.] *The last HTC/ T-Mobile phone I had I gave up on due to low usability, but then again, it had Windows Mobile running on it.

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After downloading and installing Google’s new Windows-based browser Chrome — Google already revealed some background info via their comic –, like many of you, I gave it a first test run. A browser is the kind of thing you’ll end up using all day long, if you do end up using it. You don’t want it to get in the way at all, and yet you wish it has all the features you really think you need. Smaller interface usability hurdles sum up throughout the day, so it’s especially important that a browser is well thought out down to the details. On first glance, Chrome feels very light-weight. The tabs a …

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Google-owned YouTube announced they now allow you to upload subtitles for your videos. These will display in the video if the user expands the menu at the bottom right of the player to enable the captions, as in this CNet video. The supported formats for captions are Subviewer and Subrip (*.sub/ *.srt). To upload such a definition, visit your video’s edit page (accessible via Account -> My Videos) and switch to the Captions entry on top. For each video, you can also upload captions in several languages. It’s an important feature, but YouTube’s tools are often not the most innovative; in this case, an additional web-based captions editor from Yo …

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Google search result advertisers who sell products through Google’s Checkout program get the special benefit of having a visible icon next to their ad (”Your AdWords ads will stand out”, as Google says). This could be an incentive for sellers to use Checkout, as the Checkout program has been struggling in the past (judging from e.g. Google’s extensions of free usage for sellers). Now, Google has been seen experimenting with an even more colorful version of the Checkout badge, which in this case is placed in a pet food ad and reads “$5 off!”. It’s getting kinda cheap. The pet food, …

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Google search result advertisers who sell products through Google’s Checkout program get the special benefit of having a visible icon next to their ad (”Your AdWords ads will stand out”, as Google says). This could be an incentive for sellers to use Checkout, as the Checkout program has been struggling in the past (judging from e.g. Google’s extensions of free usage for sellers). Now, Google has been seen experimenting with an even more colorful version of the Checkout badge, which in this case is placed in a pet food ad and reads “$5 off!”. It’s getting kinda cheap. The pet food, …

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SUP stands for Simple Update Protocol (officially, anyway, though it’s perhaps an acronym or backronym for “what’s up” aka “’sup”). It’s a JSON-based meta format for RSS/ Atom feeds useful for websites that deliver a large number of feeds, like a blogging platform, so that services subscribing to that site’s RSS feeds only need to download a single file to check for updates, and then download the other individual feeds as needed. SUP was invented by the ex-Google employees Paul Buchheit and Gary Burd of (recently redesigned) social feed aggregator Friendfeed. There is no official documentation at the moment outside of the

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Google’s YouTube has a video identification system available to find copyrighted content. Google says there are currently 300 content-owning partners available who can be alerted by the system and who then face the choice of blocking the video, promoting it*, or getting a share of the ad revenues from YouTube (money from which the one who uploaded the detected video will not see a share, according to the New York Times, though I guess they can display some of their own links and so on in places like the video description snippet). Interestingly enough, Google says content owners participating here ch …

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When you enter obama08.com into your address bar, you’ll end up on a Google search for [Barack Obama]. This isn’t any browser fallback for a non-existing domain or something… http://obama08.com actually has a temporary HTTP redirect towards that Google search URL. (Anyone could set this up, but I’m curious who did this and why — I can’t seem to find any good info in a Whois query or on the Wayback Machine.) [Thanks Andreas Schneider!]

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When Ron (of Totlol.com) searched Google.ca for iphone recently, he hit upon what looks like an experimental video onebox result. Instead of the usual thumbnailed videos displayed in list format, this box was showing two videos results side by side below the headline “Video results for iphone”. Both in this search as well as in a search for love, all videos part of that onebox were from Google-owned YouTube. In 2006, briefly before the YouTube acquisition another type of video onebox was showing, displaying 3 thumbnails with th …

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Google’s YouTube has a video identification system available to find copyrighted content. Google says there are currently 300 content-owning partners available who can be alerted by the system and who then face the choice of blocking the video, promoting it*, or getting a share of the ad revenues from YouTube (money from which the one who uploaded the detected video will not see a share, according to the New York Times, though I guess they can display some of their own links and so on in places like the video description snippet). Interestingly enough, Google says content owners participating here ch …

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Google just announced they will start to roll out Google Suggest as a default feature for the Google.com homepage over the next week. For instance, when you enter “presid” with Suggest, below the search box choices like “presidential polls, “presidential election” and more will pop up, to be selected and then searched for using e.g. the arrow and return keys. Already, besides the Google Labs experiment which started in 2004, auto-complete features are available on the homepage of Google China*. As I’ve never been a regular user of Goo …

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I asked a couple of people to draw the Google homepage with their eyes closed during the whole drawing process. Here are the results: Brinke Guthrie’s minimalist approach. Pascal of the German GoogleWatchBlog created this one. He says that “…schland” ended up on the table. Google’s Matt Cutts created this one with eyes closed…

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Many web forms are broken, usability-wise. Knowing these problems can make you avoid them when you design your own web forms, so here are some recurring usability pitfalls. 1. The risky reset button. In most instances, the form reset button is not needed, though it can almost always do harm if users accidentally click it — because it will empty the form without any confirmation box (in popular browsers and popular form implementations, anyway). Take a look at this brilliantly bad-designed German form; it’s meant to calculate the subway route from one place to another: Note this form is already a redesign of their first form, which was worse. But do you know what the bottom right button reads (a button in …

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