Image: THOR/Flickr

Google’s site-blocking tool was originally aimed at “content farm spam,” but Google hasn’t done much with it of late, and it even stopped working for a while, despite being available via a link from your profile.

Now the service is officially gone, replaced by a Chrome add-on that does nearly the same thing. Unfortunately that means the ability to ban sites from Google’s search results is now limited to those using Google’s Chrome web browser. For more on the Chrome add-on see our earlier review.

The bad news about the Chrome extension is that it’s client-side filtering, not server-side. That means that if Google returns results from domains you’ve blocked those results are simply hidden (sometimes there’s even a brief flash of the blocked results).

That means you’ll end up with fewer search results than you would with the server-side solution, which filtered out your blocked domains before the results were sent. For example, if there are ten results on the first page and three are from domains you’ve blocked, using the add-on method you’ll only see seven results, whereas the server-side method would have fetched the next three results to show a total of ten.

If you used the account-based version of the blocking tool, you can head over to your account and grab the list of sites you had blocked. Just add those sites to the Chrome extension and you’ll be back up and running in no time, with not an Experts-Exchange, Quora or W3Schools link to be seen (or whatever you consider search results spam).

Home Page Photo: Carlos Luna / Flickr

Chrome’s malware warning page. Image: Google.

Hopefully you’ll never need it, but if your site does get hacked Google has set up a new site dedicated to helping websites that have been hacked.

The “Help for Hacked Sites” section of Google’s Webmaster Tools offers up articles and videos to help you not only recover from compromising hacks, but take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Part of what makes hacked sites difficult to deal with is that oftentimes developers don’t even notice that they’ve been compromised. “Hacks are often invisible to users,” says Google in its new help section. “For example, unbeknownst to the site owner, the hacker may have infected their site with harmful code which in turn can record keystrokes on visitors’ computers, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions”

Google has an 8-step program for unhacking your site, which include basics like identifying the vulnerability that was used to compromise your site, as well as how to request a review so Google will remove the dreaded “this site has been compromised” message from its search results.

For more info and all the details on what to do if you’ve been hacked, check out the new Help for Hacked Sites section of Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Your calendar, now part of your search results. Image: Google

If you’d like to participate, head on over to the signup page and add your account.

Once that’s done, just log in to your Google account. You’ll then be able to search Gmail, your Google Drive documents and now your Google Calendar appointments directly from the Google search page (or from within Gmail).

The Google Calendar integration doesn’t just add appointments, it also features support for natural language queries. For example, type “what is on my calendar today” and you’ll see the day’s agenda. More specific queries work as well; to find out when you’re meeting someone, just type “when am I meeting” and the person’s name.

Note that the personalized search trial is still only available to U.S. users with @gmail.com addresses (Google Apps accounts are out of luck for now). If you opt in and decide you hate it, you can always go back to the sign up page and turn universal search off.

Google+ Sign-In on Fitbit.com. Image: Google.

Google has announced a new feature for Google+ — third-party websites and applications can now offer sign ins through Google+.

The new Google+ Sign-Ins are essentially Facebook Connect for Google+, allowing you to not only sign-in to sites that support it, but also bring your Google+ profile data with you around the web.

The new Google+ Sign-In service will make it easier to share content from third-party sites (and within mobile apps). Exactly who will see the items you share on Google+ depends on the level of access you grant to an app, but in general you can share data with specific people on Google+, certain circles, or no one.

Here’s Google’s description of the actual sign-in process:

If you sign in to Gmail, YouTube or any other Google service, you can now use your existing credentials to sign in to apps outside of Google. Just review the Google+ permissions screen (outlining the data you’re sharing with the app, and the people who can see your activity), and you’re all set.

Google+ Sign-Ins aren’t just for web apps either — Google is pushing them for mobile apps as well. Starting today, when you sign in to a website with Google, you can install its mobile app on your Android device with a single click.

Google is also claiming that, because you can choose who to share things with, that it will mean less “social spam.” The Google+ Developer Blog even calls out Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing by name, saying “Google+ doesn’t let apps spray ‘frictionless’ updates all over the stream, so app activity will only appear when it’s relevant.” Of course one person’s “relevant” content is another’s spam, so take that claim with a bucket or two of salt.

Items you share from sites and apps using Google+ Sign-In show up as a slightly different “interactive” post in your friends’ Google+ stream. Clicking on these items will lead them to the app where they can listen to or buy or review the item you shared.

If you want to add Google+ Sign-In to your site or app, head on over to the new developer site and read through the documentation.

Image: Karin Dalziel/Flickr.

Google’s Cloud Platform tools are now available on GitHub. The move to GitHub will make it easier for developers already using GitHub to get started with Google’s various Cloud Platform offerings.

Thus far most of the repositories in Google’s GitHub account consist of code samples and projects related to offerings like App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage.

The Google Open Source Blog says that most of Google Cloud Platform’s existing open source tools will be migrated to the new GitHub organization “over time.”

For now though you can get started building apps on Google Cloud Platform just by forking one of the demo repositories and tweaking the code to fit your project. Sample apps like the guestbook demos for Python and Java, along with the OAuth 2 helper apps, make a good place to start if you’ve never built anything on Google’s cloud platform before.

Image: Don O’Brien/Flickr.

Google cautions that its new Disavow Links tool should be thought of as a last resort. It’s far better to get any spammy links actually removed from the web. In fact “the vast, vast majority of sites do not need to use this tool in any way,” writes Simon. But for situations where you can’t make the offending links go away — for example, with a client who might have made some bad SEO decisions in the past — Disavow Links offers a solution.

It’s worth noting though that Simon says that any links you disavow will be seen as “a strong suggestion rather than a directive — Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment for corner cases.”

Inbound links are perhaps the best known thing that Google uses to calculate PageRank and order search results. While PageRank is just one of more than 200 “signals” Google looks at to determine where your site will be in search results there’s no question that better inbound links mean your pages end up higher in search results.

There’s a flip side to inbound links though. If the wrong sort of sites point at your site it hurts your PageRank. If you’ve got inbound links from known paid link or other shady link-swapping schemes that violate Google’s guidelines, you can quickly find your site has disappeared from Google’s search index.

For more info on how the Disavow Links tool works, check out the video below from Google’s Matt Cutts. Also be sure to read through the FAQ over on the Google Webmaster Tools blog.

Everything in its right place. Image: Google.

If you’ve ever wished you could search all your mail and documents from the main Google.com search box, your day has arrived. Google is expanding its experimental integrated search features to make your mail and documents part of the Google.com search results.

Sign up for the trial and when you’re logged into your Google account you’ll be able to search Gmail and your Google Drive documents directly from the Google search page. Your mail and documents appear in a sidebar next to the usual results from around the web.

Google kicked off the Gmail search results on Google.com earlier this year with a limited “field trial.” Now, after what Google Software Engineer Bram Moolenaar (perhaps best known as the creator of Vim), calls “very positive feedback from those of you testing it out,” the company is expanding the universal search feature to a wider audience.

As Moolenaar writes, “when you search on Google.com, your results will include relevant information and messages from Gmail … and now — new in this field trial — also files, documents, spreadsheets and more from Google Drive.”

The updated trial also brings Google’s instant search results to Gmail. When you search in Gmail links to relevant email will pop up in the search bar as soon as you start typing — just like Google.com.

The new integrated search still isn’t the default behavior by any means, but it certainly looks like Google is moving in that direction. For now you’ll still need to sign up for the trial if you’d like to experiment with it. Note that the trial is only available in English and to those with @gmail.com addresses. (Google Apps accounts are out of luck for now.) If you opt in and decide you hate it, you can always go back to the sign up page and turn universal search off.

“I’m Feeling Puzzled” will take you to Google’s puzzle a day project. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Google Instant Search eliminates not just the need for, but the opportunity to even press the venerable “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. With Instant Search, results appear the minute you start typing, without pressing any buttons. That might help explain why Google appears to be phasing out “I’m Feeling Lucky” with some whimsical Easter Eggs instead.

Head to the Google homepage and hover your mouse over “I’m Feeling Lucky” and you’ll see it spin like a slot machine, landing on things like “I’m Feeling Stellar,” which searches for various nebula and other stellar objects, or “I’m Feeling Wonderful,” which takes you to random pages on the World Wonders Project.

Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System points out that there are currently eight different options that the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button will morph into, which is at least somewhat in keeping with the random spirit of the original.

Page Speed’s rewriter is done before the unoptimized version even starts loading images. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Google has added yet another trick to the company’s Page Speed web optimization service — a page rewriter that turbocharges your site by making sure that your visible, above-the-fold content loads before anything else.

Google started on its web optimization quest with the Page Speed browser extension, then it moved the Page Speed tool online with an API and then created the Page Speed Service to handle some of the tricky bits of web optimization for you. Now the Page Speed service has another trick for users.

Page Speed’s new rewriter, which Google refers to as “Cache and Prioritize Visible Content,” works by optimizing three main things on your site — all of which are standard best practices for speeding up a website, but are often hard for smaller sites to pull off. First off the Page Speed rewriter isolates those parts of the page that can’t be cached (logged in user info for example) and caches the rest of the page.

The next step is, as the name implies, to “prioritize visible content rendering.” The Google blog is a little unclear on how this works, saying only that the rewriter “automatically determines and prioritizes the content that is above the fold of the browser, so that it doesn’t have to compete with the rest of the page.”

The third part of Page Speed’s optimization is to defer the loading of any JavaScript until the visible content is loaded.

At the moment the Page Speed Service is invite-only, but if you’d like to request access, head on over to the sign-up page and drop your e-mail and URL in the form.

While you’re waiting for access, if you want to see what Page Speed’s rewriter might be able to do for your site, you can head over to Web Page Test, which now has a profile for the Page Speed rewriter. I ran my personal site (a very simple, static HTML site served by Nginx) through it and found that, as you can see in the image above, the rewriter considerably improved the first load time of images (pretty much the only thing that takes any time to load on my site).

Image: THOR/Flickr

Google has a long history of unceremoniously killing off its less-used services, having previously axed once-high-profile efforts like Wave, Buzz, Knol and Gears, among others.

The most notable Google service on the chopping block this time is iGoogle, the company’s customizable homepage. Similar to Netvibes, MyYahoo or the now defunct PageFlakes, iGoogle was a dashboard for the web, allowing users to embed gadgets like weather, email and news.

When iGoogle first launched in 2005 it was something of a me-too effort, duplicating features found in other services, but adding numerous Google-centric gadgets. Eventually iGoogle’s gadget selection grew to encompass everything from feed readers to web-based games.

Citing the growth of mobile and web apps that “put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips,” Google says “the need for iGoogle has eroded over time.”

Fans of iGoogle don’t need to panic just yet, Google doesn’t plan to completely shut the service down until November 1, 2013. Presumably Google sees Google+ as a replacement. Other alternatives include Netvibes and PageFlakes, which both offer similar widget-based dashboard home pages. [Update: PageFlakes ceased operation in January 2012. Other possible replacements for iGoogle include UStart and ProtoPage.]

The other four services on Google’s spring cleaning shortlist include a Symbian search app, Google Talk Chatback (an embeddable Google Talk widget), Google Video, which long ago stopped taking new uploads, and Google Mini, part of Google’s enterprise search service.