All posts tagged ‘Google’

File Under: Browsers
Feb
9
2012

Chrome 17 Released, Will Preload Autocompleted URLs as You Type

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Google has just released Chrome version 17, which brings several minor enhancements to the company’s web browser — including a new web address preloading feature and improved protection against malicious downloads.

The new Chrome introduces a “preemptive rendering” feature that will automatically begin loading and rendering a page in the background while the user is typing the address in the omnibox (the combined address and search text entry field in Chrome’s navigation toolbar). The preloading will occur in cases when the top match generated by the omnibox’s autocompletion functionality is a site that the user visits frequently.

When the user hits the enter key and confirms the autocompletion result, the pre-rendered page will display almost instantly. The feature extends Chrome’s existing predictive page loading functionality to autocompletion results. Unlike Chrome’s instant search capability, however, the autocompletion preloading waits until the user hits the enter key before displaying the rendered page.

Google has also added some new security functionality to Chrome. Every time that the user downloads a file, the browser will compare it against a whitelist of known-good files and publishers. If the file isn’t in the whitelist, its URL will be transmitted to Google’s servers, which will perform an automatic analysis and attempt to guess if the file is malicious based on various factors like the trustworthiness of its source. If the file is deemed a potential risk, the user will receive a warning.

Google says that data collected by the browser for the malware detection feature is only used to flag malicious files and isn’t used for any other purpose. The company will retain the IP address of the user and other metadata for a period of two weeks, at which point all of the data except the URL of the file will be purged from Google’s databases.

Users who are concerned about the privacy implications of this functionality can prevent the browser from relaying this information to Google by disabling the phishing and malware protection features in the browser’s preferences. You can refer to the official Chromium blog for additional details about the malware detection feature.

Chrome 17 is available through the browser’s automatic updater and can also be downloaded from Google’s website. More information about the new release is available in the official Google Chrome blog.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: Web Standards
Jan
25
2012

Google Works on Internet Standards with TCP Proposals, SPDY Standardization

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As part of Google’s continuing quest to dole out web pages ever more quickly, the search giant has proposed a number of changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the ubiquitous Internet protocol used to reliably deliver HTTP and HTTPS data (and much more besides) over the ‘net.

Google’s focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledgement is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.

When a new connection is made, a computer may initially send three packets before acknowledgement is required. Google wants to increase this to 10. With 10 packets, a browser can typically deliver an entire HTTP request to a server before it has to stop and wait for a reply.

TCP connections require a certain amount of negotiation between client and server, requiring a round trip, before data can be sent. Google is proposing to modify TCP so that some data can be sent during that negotiation, so that the server will have it on hand already, and can start processing it straight away.

TCP waits a predetermined time (the RTO or retransmission timeout) for acknowledgments to arrive. If the RTO expires, unacknowledged packets are assumed lost and retransmitted. This ensures that if the data has been lost in transmission that the sender is never waiting for an acknowledgement that will never arrive. This timeout value varies according to the network conditions and RTT, with a default of three seconds. Google wants to reduce this default to 1 second, so that if data has been lost, neither end needs to wait so long before it has another go.

Finally, Google wants to use a new algorithm to adjust how TCP connections react to packet loss. Packet loss can indicate networks that are congested, and TCP reacts by reducing the rate at which data is sent when this congestion is detected. The company claims that the algorithms currently used to respond to this packet loss can exact too great a penalty, making connections slow down too much and for too long, and that its new algorithm is better.

In addition to these proposed changes, Google is also suggesting other modifications, especially to make TCP recover better on mobile networks.

Changing TCP is not to be taken lightly. The protocol is already suffering due to buffer bloat undermining its built-in handling of network congestion. While Google’s proposed changes are well intentioned and might improve network performance, they come with the risk that an overlooked problem or a bad interaction with other traffic could cause widespread damage to the internet.

The proposed changes to TCP to reduce latencies and start sending data sooner are a continuation of previous work Google has done to try to make web serving, in particular, faster. The company has previously proposed other modifications to protocols such as SSL to similarly accelerate data transmission.

More far-reaching than these SSL tweaks is Google’s proposed alternative to the HTTP protocol that underpins the web: SPDY.

Initially, SPDY was a proprietary Google protocol implemented only in Google’s Chrome browser. That’s changing, however. Amazon’s Silk browser includes SPDY support, and Firefox 11 will include preliminary SPDY support. Partially motivated by SPDY’s uptake, the IETF’s HTTPbis Working Group — the team of industry experts tasked with maintaining and developing the HTTP specification — is considering the development of a new specification, HTTP/2.0, with the goal of improving the performance of HTTP connections. The working group will solicit suggestions from the industry, and with two, soon to be three implementations already, SPDY is likely to be well placed among those suggestions.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

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File Under: search, Web Services
Jan
23
2012

Hack Swaps Google’s Search Plus Your World Results for the Wider Social Web

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Shortly after Google launched Search plus Your World earlier this month, critics accused the company of favoring its own nascent social network over the much richer results on others, like Twitter or Facebook. As Wired’s Steven Levy quipped, “there’s too much Plus and not enough of Our World, which has oodles of content on other social networks.”

Now developers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace have put together a demonstration of just how much relevancy Google sacrifices in order to push Google+. The demo, which uses only Google’s own results, shows, among other questionable results, how Google routinely ignores more relevant Twitter pages to show off seldom-used Google+ profiles. To see it in action, head on over to the new Focus on the User website.

If you decide you prefer the often more relevant results from the Focus on the User experiment there’s a bookmarklet available, cheekily entitled “don’t be evil.” Just drag the bookmarklet into your web browser’s bookmarks bar and then click it whenever you want to see more than just Google+ results in Google’s search results.

The developers behind Focus on the User do work for Google+ rivals, but that doesn’t change the results of the experiment which speak for themselves. The developers also point out that their tool relies entirely on Google’s own data to rank social search results. Here’s their description of how the don’t be evil tool works:

the tool identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest — whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+ — replace the previous results that could only be from Google+.

In other words the bookmarklet largely returns Google to its previous state, before the Search Plus Your World Update. If you’d like to know more about how the bookmarklet works or see some examples and situations in which the emphasis on Google+ social results actually degrades the quality of search results be sure to check out the video below.

Photo: Rene Tillmann/AP

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File Under: search
Jan
23
2012

Google Tweaks Search Results to Punish Ad-Heavy Websites

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Google has tweaked its search algorithm to punish websites with excessive advertising “above-the-fold,” that is, websites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements.

According to Google, “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.” To help users get to that content, Google may drop ad-heavy websites from its search results.

Google says that the change will only affect about one in 100 searches, and emphasizes that websites using what Google’s Distinguished Engineer and SEO guru Matt Cutts calls “ads above-the-fold to a normal degree” will not be affected.

Instead the change is designed to punish sites that “go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.” In other words, if a site is so packed with ads that people can’t find what they’re looking for then Google isn’t going to send them to that site anymore.

While the distinction seems clear at first glance, digging deeper reveals some potential confusion for webmasters — for example, what role does screen size play? On a netbook, for instance, Google’s own search results page is almost entirely taken over by advertisements, not the actual search results (i.e., the content).

Google on a netbook screen: Ads are in red, search results in green

At small screen resolutions, Google’s own search results page is one of the worst offenders when it comes to advertising clutter obscuring content. That seeming hypocrisy may leave some webmasters wondering what constitutes “a normal degree of ads” and how screen size affects what is defined as “normal.” Sticking simply with what Google has written about the change, copying Google’s search results page is probably not a good idea in this case.

Cutts does encourage webmasters view their websites at different screen resolutions, suggesting that screen size does play a role, but unfortunately he doesn’t offer any details about what that role is or how it affects the algorithm’s new layout ranking scheme.

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File Under: Web Services
Jan
20
2012

Google Abandons Anonymous Accounts With New Signup Form

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Google is experimenting with a new signup form that eliminates the ability to create anonymous accounts. The new form is part of an effort to expand the Google+ social network by automatically adding every new Google account to Google+. Because Google+ requires a name and gender the new signup form effectively eliminates the anonymous Google account.

The new account creation page can be found by following the links on Google’s homepage. As the Google Operating System blog points out, the older Google account page, which does not require signing up for Google+ or Gmail, is currently still accessible through Google Reader, Calendar and other Google services.

The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”

In addition to the Google+ integration, signing up for a Google account now means getting a profile page and a Gmail account; gone are the days when you could use an outside email address with your Google account. It is still possible to go in and delete the Google+, Google profile and Gmail portions of your new Google account after it’s been created, but given that few people ever change their default settings it’s safe to assume that most people won’t.

It should come as no surprise that Google is working hard to get more users signed up for Google+, after all, despite marginal momentum, Google+ is far behind Facebook when it comes to signing up new users.

Photo: Anonymous9000/Flickr/CC.

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File Under: Programming, servers, Web Basics
Jan
17
2012

Protest SOPA: Black Out Your Website the Google-Friendly Way

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On Wednesday Jan. 18, Reddit, Wikipedia and many other websites will black out their content in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN). Organizers of the SOPA Strike are asking interested sites to black out their content for 12 hours and display a message encouraging users to contact their congressional representatives and urge them to oppose the legislation.

Although it was rumored that Google might join in the protest, that does not appear to be the case. The search giant does, however, have some advice for anyone who would like to black out their site and ensure that doing so doesn’t harm their Google search rank or indexed content. [Update: It appears Google will be participating in some fashion. A Google spokesperson tells Ars Technica that "tomorrow [Google] will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page.” WordPress and Scribd will also be participating. You can read the full story on Ars Technica.]

Writing on Google+, Google’s Pierre Far offers some practical tips in a post entitled, “Website Outages and Blackouts the Right Way.” The advice mirrors Google’s previous best practices for planned downtime, but warrants a closer look from anyone thinking of taking their site offline to protest the SOPA/PIPA/OPEN legislation.

Far’s main advice is to make sure that any URLs participating in the blackout return a HTTP 503 header. The 503 header will tell Google’s crawlers that your site is temporarily unavailable. That way your protest and blacked out website won’t affect your Google ranking nor will any protest content be indexed as part of your site. If you use Google’s Webmaster tools you will see crawler errors, but that’s what you want — your site to be unavailable, causing an error.

Implementing a 503 header page isn’t too difficult, though the details will vary according to which technologies power your site. If you’re using WordPress there’s a SOPA Blackout plugin available that can handle the blackout for you. It’s also pretty easy to create a 503 redirect at the server level. If you use Apache ensure that you have the Rewrite module installed and then add something like the following code to your root .htaccess file:

    RewriteRule .* /path/to/file/myerror503page.php

That will redirect your entire website to the 503 error page. Now just make sure that your myerror503page.php page returns a 503 error. Assuming you’re using PHP, something like this will do the trick:

    header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
    header('Retry-After: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT');

For more details, be sure to read up on the HTTP 503 header and see the rest of Far’s Google+ post to learn how to handle robots.txt and a few things you should definitely not do (like change your robots.txt file to block Google for the day, which could mean Google will stay away for far more than just a day). Even if you aren’t planning to participate in the anti-SOPA blackout tomorrow, Far’s advice holds true any time you need to take some or all of your site offline — whether it’s routine server maintenance, rolling out an upgrade or as part of a political protest.

[Image by SOPAStrike.com]

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File Under: search
Jan
10
2012

Google Search Gets a Personalized ‘Plus’ Makeover

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Personalized Google Search (image courtesy of Google)

Google has announced a new personalized search the company calls “Search, plus Your World.” The update turns the classic Google search results page from an anonymous collection of webpages into something more personal, mining your Google+ network for results related to you. Rather than just scouring the web for webpages related to your search queries, Google will also now find conversations and images posted by your friends.

Call it the “plusification” of Google Search, but, unlike the way Google has forced Plus into many of its services, on the search page it’s easy to toggle it on and off — now you have Plus results, now you don’t.

To see the new customized search results just log in to your Google account and head over to the secure version of Google’s search page. If you’re not seeing the options shown in the screenshot above be patient. Google says it will be rolling out custom search to users over the next few days.

It’s entirely possible to continue using Google’s search page without ever using any of the personalization features. Indeed there are probably many queries in which results from your social network friends would be irrelevant. Thankfully Google has made it easy to toggle the Plus features on and off, just click the respective icon to show and hide Plus results.

For example, say you want to find information about SOPA, the much-maligned Stop Online Piracy Act. Search Google for SOPA and click the personalize icon. If anyone in any of your Google+ circles has posted something about SOPA, their posts will appear in the search results. If any of your contacts have posted SOPA-related images to Picasa, those will show up as well. If you decide you don’t care what your friends think of SOPA, just click on the globe icon and the Plus results are gone.

In addition to the info drawn from your Google Plus circles, Google now includes profiles in search results, making it easier to find people. It also helps narrow the results to the particular person you’re looking for — search for John Smith and Google will return your friend John Smith, skipping the millions of other John Smiths in the world.

If you’re not seeing the new Google Search personalization features just yet, check out the video below from Google which shows the new features in action.

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File Under: Browsers, search
Jan
4
2012

Google Deranks Chrome Download Page Due to Spam Links

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The Chrome download page has disappeared.

For the next 60 days Google searches for the words “browser,” “Chrome” or even “Chrome browser” will not include a link to the main Google Chrome download page. Google removed the Chrome download page from its search results after it discovered that one of its own sponsored post campaigns had violated its webmaster guidelines.

Because no one likes spammy links in Google search results — least of all Google — the company has penalized its own Chrome browser just like it would any other company using the same tactics. Searching Google for these terms will still bring up links that can eventually lead users to the Chrome download page, but there is no direct link (there are links to the Chrome beta download page in some results).

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan discovered the suspicious links in Google’s search results and pointed out that they seem to violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, which prohibit “buying or selling links that pass PageRank.” All of the pages in question clearly stated that they were sponsored posts (created with Google’s implicit blessing as part of a campaign from Unruly Media) which means, according the Google’s webmaster guidelines, all the links should have been using rel=”nofollow”. Most did use nofollow, but one did not.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, responded to Sullivan’s article saying that the webspam team had manually demoted the Chrome downloads page:

We did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos — not link to Google — and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

While Google’s response may seem extreme, it’s not the first time the company has punished its own. Google previously banned BeatThatQuote (one of its own companies) over almost the same issue last year. And of course it also deranked JC Penny and Forbes for similarly shady tactics.

Clearly Google doesn’t have a double standard when it comes to violating its own guidelines, but, as Sullivan points out, that the company paid Unruly Media to run the ad campaign in the first place is troubling. “Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage,” writes Sullivan, “the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.”

The “Panda Update” involved tweaks to the way Google’s algorithms rank search results which heavily penalized co-called “content farms.” Google defines content farms as “sites with shallow or low-quality content.” In other words, sites just like the ones Google was paying Unruly Media to create.

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File Under: Browsers
Dec
27
2011

Why Google Continues to Fund Firefox

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Just before the holiday weekend Mozilla announced that it had renewed its long-standing search revenue agreement with Google, which will reportedly net Mozilla $300 million a year (as part of a three-year contract). The renewed contract comprises the bulk of Mozilla’s funding and is unquestionably a good deal for Mozilla. What’s less immediately clear is why Google — which now has its own Chrome browser — would want to continue the deal.

Indeed, why fund the competition? M.G. Siegler speculates (based on AllThingsD’s report that there was a bidding war over Mozilla) that Google is willing to spend that kind of money just to keep Microsoft from starting a partnership with Mozilla.

That’s one theory. But it may well be that the truth is much more mundane. It may be that Mozilla is just one of a number of payouts that Google makes to help drive ad sales.

In fact, as Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler points out, Google pays out roughly 24 percent of its ad revenues to drive more traffic to its ads:

Not all traffic to Google ads is “organic” though. To help drive ad sales, Google pays for traffic to their ads. They paid out $2.21 billion, or 24% of their ad revenues in “Traffic Acquisition Costs”. That money goes to revenue shares with their AdSense partners and to “distribution partners” — presumably browser makers, PC OEMs, and mobile OEMs and operators.

As Dotzler goes on to point out Google pays out similar money to Opera and Apple, which both use Google as the default search engine in their respective browsers — again, driving eyeballs to Google ads. Dotzler’s point being that the Google-Mozilla deal is not a charitable arrangement, but a business deal built around driving eyeballs to Google ads. Firefox currently holds roughly 25 percent of the global browser market, which is certainly a healthy number of eyeballs..

Of course it’s possible that other factors may also influence Google’s decisions. Google Chrome developer Peter Kasting says that Google’s motivation for building Chrome is to “make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible.” That means, according to Kasting, that “it’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers.” In other words, funding Firefox helps to further the same goal that drove the company to build Chrome in the first place — advancing the web.

That would be somewhat easier to swallow if other parts of the Google machine didn’t build so many experiments that only work in Chrome.

Regardless of Google’s motivation for building Chrome, or for funding Mozilla, both moves have proved great news for users. And in the end the precise motivation behind the Google-Mozilla deal are something only tech writers really care about. Users care about speed and there’s no question that Chrome has helped spawned a renaissance among web browsers and helped put speed back on top of every browser makers’ to-do list (the drive to adopt HTML5 has also done wonders to improve the average user’s experience on the web).

For most users the Mozilla-Google deal just means that there will continue to be a number of browsers to choose from and a number of browsers to help keep pushing the web, and each other, forward.

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File Under: Social, Web Services
Dec
8
2011

Google Adds Google+ Info to Gmail Contacts

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Google+ Circles in Gmail

Google now includes Google+ profile information within contacts lists, both in Gmail and in the standalone Google Contacts manager. In addition to Google+ information about your contacts any Google+ circles you’ve set up will now be available inside the contacts manager.

If you’d like to see the new features in action, head over to the Google Contacts page (or click the contacts link in your Gmail account). Note that so far the integrated Google+ contacts don’t appear to be available for Google Apps users.

The move is part of Google’s slow, but steady progress toward its goal of adding Google+ features to all its myriad services.

The new integration with the contacts list means that any Google Profile data your contacts have entered will now show up below any information you’ve added. Alex Chitu, writing at Google Operating System, notes that you can combine the two sets of data — what you’ve entered and what your contacts have entered — by clicking the “more” link on a contact page and selecting the “[Show external data] inline” option.

Chitu also reports that the Google Profile data is “automatically added when you enter an email address associated with a profile.” If you don’t want the added social data you can delete the corresponding email address and it will be removed.

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