Google has a new name for the "web" tab from search results pages. It's now called "all", which better reflects that Google no longer shows only web pages, but also quick answers, facts, images, videos, news, maps, apps, books and more. That's the whole idea behind Universal Search, which was launched back in 2007.

Google's Knowledge Graph cards include a lot of information from Wikipedia. Google usually shows a snippet from a Wikipedia article and links to the article. I was surprised to notice that cards for countries and big cities from all over the world no longer quote Wikipedia and now include detailed information from travel guides.

Here's an example for [France]: "France, in Western Europe, encompasses medieval and port cities, tranquil villages, mountains and Mediterranean beaches. Paris, its capital, is known worldwide for its couture fashion houses, classical art museums including the Louvre and monuments like the Eiffel Tower. The country is also renowned for its sophisticated cuisine and its wines. Lascaux's ancient cave drawings, Lyon's Roman theater and the immense Palace of Versailles are testaments to its long history."


The snippet from the corresponding Wikipedia article is less poetic: "France, officially the French Republic, is a sovereign state comprising territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European part of France, called Metropolitan France, extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. France spans 640,679 square kilometres (247,368 sq mi) and has a total population of 67 million. It is a unitary semi-presidential republic with the capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre."

Google's timer card added a new feature: stopwatch. You can search for [stopwatch] or search for [timer] and switch to the stopwatch tab. Click start/stop, reset or use the full screen option for an immersive experience. You can't add laps and the "stop" button should probably be renamed "pause".


To start the timer, search Google for [timer 10 minutes], [countdown 5 minutes], [set timer for 30 seconds], [start a timer for 1 hour and 45 minutes], [set a timer for half an hour], [start a timer until 13:00], [start a timer until midnight] and more.


It's worth pointing out that you can use both features simultaneously.

{ Thanks, Jonah Langlieb. }

When searching Google for [news], the first page shows 9 results and 4 of them send users to Google News. The news site owned by Google is the top search result, but there are also 3 duplicate results that have some additional parameters:

https://news.google.com/?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=bufferdb898&utm_medium=twitter

https://news.google.com/?utm_content=buffer73b38&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

https://news.google.com/?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer67782&utm_medium=twitter


This is obviously a bug and it's strange to see that Google didn't ignore Google Analytics parameters.

Here's a quick way to find the latest news stories when using a mobile device. Just search Google for [news] and you'll get a card that shows the top stories. Tap the arrow icons or swipe left/right to switch to other Google News sections like world news, business, technology, entertainment, sports, science or health.

It looks like Google updated the search interface for tablets and switched to the mobile UI. The previous tablet interface was an interesting combination between the desktop and mobile UIs.

Here's a screenshot from Safari for iPad:


And here's a screenshot from Nexus 7:


It's strange to see that Google still shows the "mobile-friendly" label, even though it's not that important for tablets. It's also weird that Google abbreviates long URLs, while there's enough space to display the entire URLs. Google switched to the mobile UI and forgot to optimize it for tablets.

Google's search engine hasn't always been very smart. In its early years, Google only tried to find the pages that matched the words from your query and ranked them. It's hard to answer a question without understanding it, but that's what Google did.

Google constantly improved its algorithms, added personalization options, started to match synonyms and expand abbreviations, but Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird were the greatest leaps that put machine learning to work and made Google smarter. Google started to understand the meaning behind a question, to disambiguate words and to find answers, not just pages that include the words from the query.

Bloomberg reports that Google uses even more artificial intelligence to answer questions and rank results. RankBrain is a new AI system that has been used for the past few months to improve search results. "If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn't familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries."

15% of the queries Google gets every day are new and RankBrain helps Google understand them. Here's an example of complicated query: "What's the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?" RankBrain finds words and phrases that have a similar meaning and highlights them (for example: predators). "In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query."


Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, says that "machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing". Machine learning has already helped Google improve image search, automatic translation, speech recognition and deep learning is already showing some promising results: smarter photo search with object recognition.

"In tandem with other researchers at Google, Andrew Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain. This movement seeks to meld computer science with neuroscience — something that never quite happened in the world of artificial intelligence," reports Wired. "Deep Learning is a first step in this new direction. Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like."

When you're searching Google for a song that has multiple cover versions, Google shows a new section below the video: "other recordings of this song". For example, if you're searching for [Felix Jaehn Ain't Nobody], Google shows the original version of the song from 1983 (Rufus and Chaka Khan) and a recent cover version from 2013 (Jasmine Thompson), which was remixed by Felix Jaehn, a German DJ.


You can click the other recordings to find more about them and watch their videos.

Google Mobile Search has a new interface for related searches. Google usually shows up to 8 related searches at the bottom of the search results pages, but now the list looks different: there's a table with white rows and small arrows next to each related query.


Click a related search and you can see the search results for that query and even more related searches. You can start with a generic query like [nightingale] and create a more specific query by only clicking on related searches. For example, you can find searches like [sound of a nightingale singing], [Yanni nightingale live] or [how do you become a nightingale in Skyrim?].

Google's mobile homepage looks different. The tabs for web search and image search are now blue and you can finally use the app launcher. Just click the grid icon to see the same app launcher from the desktop site. Many shortcuts will open the corresponding mobile apps instead of the mobile sites.


For now, the app launcher is only available from the Google homepage and from Google Image Search's homepage.


Google has recently changed the color of the tabs from red to blue for both the desktop site and the mobile site. There's now a bigger Google logo at the top of the page and the header uses more space.

Google has recently changed the search button from the desktop site. It's now much smaller, just like the search button from the mobile UI.


You don't have to click the search button: it's much faster to press Enter, since you're already using the keyboard.

Here's a recent screenshot that shows the bigger button:

Google lets you switch between its specialized search engines and check image results, video results, news articles, books, Google Maps results and more. The active tab was red, but now it switched to blue.

Here's a screenshot that shows the blue tab:


... and a screenshot that shows the old red tab:


Back in June, I posted about a Google Mobile Search experiment that tested an oversized header and the active tab's color was blue.

Google's goal used to be sending users as quickly as possible to the best sites that answered their questions. Smartphone's popularity changed this and Google started to show detailed answers that used information from other sites. On-the-go users don't have much time to check multiple search results and find their answers, many sites aren't optimized for mobile, mobile data is still expensive and users have to deal with slow Internet connections.

Brandon Giesing noticed an interesting question from Google Opinion Rewards: "Imagine you're Googling on your phone. Compared to tapping on a regular search result, would tapping on a result that expanded to reveal content below where you tapped would be... much worse/worse/similar/better/much better?" It looks like Google considers adding a feature that loads the content of a search result inline, probably from Google Cache.


{ Thanks, Brandon. }

In 2013 Google added a cool feature that allowed you to find your photos directly from Google Search. You could search for [my photos], [my photos of beaches], [my photos from New York], [my photos from 2011] and many other similar queries.

At that time, Google displayed small thumbnails for some of the search results. It looks like Google has updated the photos card and now shows a lot more photos, bigger thumbnails and it also includes some information about the photos (date, location). For some of my queries, Google displayed more than 100 results.


Google shows the search results from Google+ Photos and individual links send you to the Google+ Photos pages, but the link below the search results is for Google Photos. For some searches, Google Photos returns fewer results, since it doesn't include images from Blogger and photo spheres.

If you're not signed in, but you search Google for information from other Google products, you'll now see a special card that suggests to sign in. For example, if you search for [my packages], Google shows this message: "Looking for your orders? Sign in to see your package orders from Gmail."


When you search for [my photos], you'll get a similar message: "Looking for your photos? Sign in to see photos from your account."


Other queries that trigger the "sign in" card: [my events], [my agenda], [my calendar], [my mail], [my files], [my drive], [my documents], [my spreadsheet], [my presentations], [my bills], [my reservations], [my hotel reservations], [my restaurant reservations], [track my package], [my flights], [my tickets].

Last week, Google's movie cards added snippets from critic reviews. You can find quotes from sites like Variety, Rolling Stone, New York Times and click the links to read the full reviews.


This new Knowledge Graph feature uses schema.org structured markup from websites. "With the recent launch of critic reviews in the Knowledge Graph, we've leveraged this technology to once again provide publishers with an opportunity to increase the discoverability and consumption of their reviews using markup. This feature, available across mobile, tablet, and desktop, organizes publishers’ reviews into a prominent card at the top of the page," informs Google. Here's the help center article for webmasters.

You can search Google for [minions reviews], [reviews for ex machina] or ask Google: "did Fantastic Four get bad reviews?" and you'll see a list of reviews. Critic reviews are also displayed in the regular cards for movies and Google plans to expand this feature to books and TV shows.

Sometimes you're trying to download a desktop software and you're searching Google for things like [chrome download], [latest java], [install itunes], [get skype]. The top result is usually the official download page, but there are various other download sites. Some of them might offer outdated versions, others might install their own software and even download adware or malware.

Google now shows a special card for software downloads. There's a big logo, the name of the organization that develops the application, the download URL and a link: "go to download".


The new card might seem redundant, but some users will find it reassuring. It also works for operating systems.


Just in case you're thinking that Google always picks the URL from the top search result, I found an example which shows that's not the case. When searching for [download audacity], Google's card links to SourceForge instead of Audacity's official site and that's not a good idea.

Google has a new feature for local search cards. When you search for restaurants, stores, museums and other places, you can now see the busiest times of the day or week. The new "popular times" section shows when it's a good time to go to a certain place and when it's best to avoid it because it's too crowded.


"Now, you can avoid the wait and see the busiest times of the week at millions of places and businesses around the world directly from Google Search. For example, just search for "Blue Bottle Williamsburg", tap on the title and see how busy it gets throughout the day," informs Google.


For now, it seems that this feature is only available in the mobile interface. Google says that the data is based on historical visits, so I assume it uses Location History and other location services for mobile devices. Google Maps has a similar feature that shows typical traffic.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a new Google experiment, but I've noticed a different mobile search interface that uses more space for the header. There's a Google logo, a search box and a list of specialized search engines below the search box. It's based on the experimental interface I've mentioned in a previous post.


If you enable the search tools and restrict results to a certain date range, the new header uses even more screen real estate.



For some reason, this experimental interface is only used when searching from Google's homepage. Chrome's search box sent me to the compact UI.

Google Cache pages have an updated header and now allow you to check the source code of the cached page. Google uses a different background color and more spacing.

The message is the same. Here's an example: "This is Google's cache of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Jun 17, 2015 19:01:59 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime."

Google lets you switch between:

* the "full version", which is displayed by default
* the "text-only version", which doesn't load images, scripts and other resources
* the page source - a new feature that shows the source code of the HTML page.

Full version:


Text-only version:


Source code:


Google adds the following URL parameter to show the HTML code: vwsrc=1. Example: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dxrXMu4BMrYJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test&hl=en&gl=us&strip=0&vwsrc=1.

Here's a screenshot of the old Google Cache. It's a screenshot from 2013, back when Google still highlighted search terms.