The Chrome download page has disappeared.

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.

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.

The Google Chrome user interface has always followed a model of minimalism. The Chrome developers have sought to cut the cruft as much as possible to slim down the parts of the browser window that don’t show content. They could soon take it to the next level by excising the traditional navigation toolbar.

A new experimental user interface option that has landed in early pre-release builds of Chrome 13 offers a first look at what they have in mind. The browser navigation toolbar can be completely hidden, leaving only the tab bar, menu button, and content area. The forward and back buttons are moved into the tab bar, placing them in the top-left corner of the window.

To access the URL textbox, the user has to click a browser tab. This will cause a floating navigation bar interface with a URL textbox and refresh button to drop down from the tab. The floating bar will remain on the screen as long as the textbox is active, but it will slide back up and disappear after a few seconds when the textbox doesn’t have focus and the cursor is out of range.

Chrome 13: They shrunk my URL bar

We tested this feature ourselves using the Canary build channel on Windows. The feature isn’t yet supported on Mac OS X. It’s obviously still very experimental and isn’t configured out of the box. To test the new hidden navigation bar, you have to enable the feature from the about:flags panel and then toggle it from the tab context menu.

This new streamlined navigation bar obviously poses some phishing risks, because it doesn’t make the domain and SSL status of the current site easily visible to users. It’s important to remember, however, that it’s still at an early stage of development is only being made available as an option rather than a default.

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

See Also:

• Install Google Chrome Frame Without Admin Privileges
• Google Adds Malware Protection to Chrome 12

The Google Chrome team has pushed out a new beta release of the Chrome web browser, which adds support for the nascent Speech Input API. Yes, now you can talk to the web, it just might not exactly understand what you’re saying.

If you’d like to try it out, subscribe to the Chrome beta channel and then head over to Google’s voice-controlled demo app.

The Speech Input API is designed to give developers a way to write web apps that allow full speech recognition — the transcription from speech-to-text occurs on a speech server after your voice is recorded.

Chrome 11 beta is currently the only browser that supports the brand new Speech Input API and in my testing the results were mixed. So long as you raise your voice the app generally gets things right, though “Webmonkey” was interpreted as, ahem, “wet monkey.”

It’s worth noting that I did my testing using a built-in mic on my MacBook Pro, which is perhaps not the best sound source, especially since others seem to have had better luck. But, like most software that uses voice input, clearly the transcription in Google’s sample app is far from perfect.

However, as the Speech Input API gains more support it will open an entirely new set of possibilities for web apps, enabling everything from online speech-to-text services, realtime video transcriptions, voice chat logs or song lyric generators. Voice input could be particularly helpful on mobile devices and would go a long way toward making web-based apps as compelling as native apps. Voice input also opens up a whole new range of possibilities in creating a more accessible web — fill in forms via speech, browse by voice and so on. Not all of these features are specifically addressed in the new API or Google’s demo, but it’s not hard to imagine creative developers finding a way to make them possible.

Unfortunately, based on this early, very experimental example of the Speech Input API it’s going to be a while before you’re talking your way around the web.

See Also:

• Chrome 10 Brings More Speed, Sandboxed Flash
• Web Notifications API Hints at a Brave New Real-Time Web
• HTML5 File API Brings Drag-and-Drop File Uploads to the Web

Blocking a domain with Google's new Chrome add-on

If you’d like to blacklist some domains from your search results, and you’re using the Google Chrome web browser (or Chromium), you can download the new add-on from the Chrome Web Store. Once the add-on is installed, you’ll see a new option to “block this domain” beneath each search result. To edit your list of blocked sites, just click the red hand icon in the toolbar.

The add-on is part of Google’s plan to cut down on content farm spam. Google defines content farms as “sites with shallow or low-quality content.” Often the content is written for no other reason than to show up in Google’s search results and pull in traffic. However, because content farms often have some pages of valuable content, classifying them as outright spam might not be accurate either. And of course what constitutes a “content farm” is open to debate.

In a thread about the new add-on over at Hacker News, Google’s principal engineer, Matt Cutts writes “people feel comfortable with Google removing blatant spam: hidden text, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects, etc. People tend to feel less comfortable if they feel like Google is making an editorial decision.”

The new Chrome add-on turns that editorial decision over to you. Don’t want to ever see another eHow or Yahoo Answers link in your search results? Just block the domains and you’re done.

That said, the add-on is far from ideal. It only works in Chrome (or Chromium) and instead of truly removing the results, it merely hides them. That means that if the first page of results for your search contain only one result from a domain that isn’t in your blocklist, you’ll only see one result on the initial page. There is no reflowing of results. To get more than that one result, you’ll have to click through to the next page.

Ultimately the ability to block sites from Google’s search results is useful enough that it seems destined to end up on the server side — perhaps as a Google Labs experiment. Cutts says that Google started with the add-on because it was quick, but the company is working toward a server-side solution.

Cutts also says that Google is collecting the sites you block and may use them to influence search results in the future. As it stands, there’s nothing to stop a company from blocking its competitors’ sites, which is obviously a problem. Cutts makes it clear that Google is only looking at the sites people block, not actually using that information to re-rank sites.

Still, if there are sites you’d love to block from your Google search results, there’s now a way to do it — provided you use Google Chrome.

See Also:

• Chrome Add-on Kills Tracking Cookies
• Chrome 9: Faster 3-D Graphics, Instant Search and an App Store
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]