Gmail's Conversation View Can Be Disabled

Gmail added an option that allows users to turn off threading. Not everyone likes grouping messages into conversations, but this is one of the few core features that made Gmail stand out.

In most email clients threading is just an optional feature that can be easily disabled. Gmail's web interface has been inspired by Google Groups, so it's obvious that threading was an important feature.

Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer that developed Gmail, says that Google tries to increase the adoption of Google Apps by making Gmail more enterprise-friendly.

It's my opinion that when designing products, especially new products, it's better to have some people love it than have everyone tolerate it. This generally means aiming for simplicity and philosophical consistency. If you're aiming for "everyone tolerates it", then the approach switches more towards creating a "giant pile of features". I suspect that this change is driven by their desire for greater enterprise adoption (Google apps), where the "more features and checkboxes" approach very often wins out, even if it's ultimately a worse product.

Google says that the conversation view is not for everyone. "Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years."

Conversation view can be disabled from the settings page by checking "conversation view off" in the General tab. This option may not be available right away, but Google promises that it "will be rolling out over the next few days". Google Apps users will only see this option if the administrator has enabled "pre-release features".

Why would you disable Gmail's conversation view? 

Google Translate's Conversation Mode

Google has recently demoed a new feature that will make Google Translate a lot more useful: conversation mode. Instead of typing the text you want to translate, you can just speak it and Google will convert speech into text, translate the text and use text-to-speech to output the result. You can already do that if you install the Google Translate app from the Android Market. Conversation mode lets you quickly switch between two languages, so that two people can have a conversation even if they speak different languages.

"Google showed off a new application that translates conversations on Android mobiles at a recent conference in Germany. Google employees held a conversation over two Android mobiles with one person speaking German and the other English. The application worked its magic after each persons statement and then referred the translated message back to the other person," reported Simon Thomas.

Unfortunately, the results aren't always great. Google Translate's conversation mode will be released in a few months.

$10 million for Project 10^100 winners

Two years ago today, we began Project 10^100 by asking you to share your ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible. Your spirit and participation surpassed even our most optimistic expectations. People from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 ideas. We selected 16 big ideas and asked the public to vote for their favorites. The five ideas that received the most votes are the winners of the Project 10^100. Over the past 12 months, we’ve reviewed concrete proposals to tackle these ideas, and today we’re pleased to give a total of $10 million to five inspiring organizations working on solutions to each of these global challenges:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free
Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Idea: Enhance science and engineering education
Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.

Idea: Make government more transparent
Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Idea: Drive innovation in public transport
Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.

Idea: Provide quality education to African students
Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to master's and Ph.D. study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

Here’s a short video celebrating the inspiring work of these organizations:

We’ve learned that it takes quite a bit of effort and time to move from 150,000 ideas to five funded projects, but are excited about the potential of the ideas and projects you helped us choose. We’re happy to conclude Project 10^100 with today’s announcement of five winning ideas and encourage you to follow the progress of these projects on the organizations’ websites.

More Options for Importing Files into Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets improved the feature that lets you import files. After uploading a file, you can preview it, select a separator character and choose where to put the data. You can create a new spreadsheet, insert a new sheet, replace the spreadsheet or only the current sheet, append the data to the current sheet or replace the data starting from the selected cell.

You can't select multiple delimiters, exclude certain columns or pick the data format before importing the file. These features are available in Microsoft Excel and, even though some them aren't necessary, they make it easier to properly import the data you need.

Finding your hidden treasure: international campaigns with AdWords

In 2000, Antoine Assi founded the Middle Eastern export website www.aldoukan.com—it was one of the first e-commerce business in the Middle East. He was just 20 years old and he made time to develop the business in between the computer science classes at his university. He needed a way to advertise his website from the comfort of his own dorm room, so he decided to test out the Google AdWords.

His friends didn’t believe him when Antoine said he was going to sell and advertise the traditional Middle Eastern foods and goods online. However, by 2004, his business had grown so rapidly that he decided to take leave from the school to run it full-time. He then started his second company, www.mosaicmarble.com, which sells handcut decorative tiles online internationally.

Antoine believed there was a gap in the mosaic market and he wanted to share these artistic and historic decorations abroad. He knew there was a market for these tiles internationally—he just didn’t quite know where the opportunity existed. To identify these international growth opportunities, Antoine built on his knowledge of AdWords: He ran several AdWords campaigns, each targeted at the location and language of the test country.

From there, Antoine measured sales and percentage of website traffic from each country and campaign. He ended campaigns for countries with low sales volume and invested in campaigns for countries with higher sales volume and greater return on investment. Where he saw steady product sales, Antoine even had the company website translated into the language of the successful host country. As you can imagine, translating the site to the language of a country in which he’d already seen success only further promoted sales in that location.

Antoine refers to his AdWords campaigns as his hidden treasure, telling us that “the second month we started advertising on Google, we started feeling overwhelmed by the orders and the inquiries... We had to hire new employees on a weekly basis.”

Mosaic Marble quickly grew from two employees and eight artists to more than 40 employees and 120 artists. And the company’s website is now available in seven languages: Arabic, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Swiss.

In addition to helping him expand his business, these international campaigns helped Antoine and his colleagues share these cultural icons with a larger part of the world. There are now homes and public spaces adorned with these ancient Greek creations in more than 50 countries worldwide. “Due to Google,” says Antoine, “we have customers such as the President of Congo, the Dubai Minister of Internal Affairs, the Princess of Jordan, and the Royal Music Academy of London.”

Discussing innovation and democracy in 2010

Over the past few U.S. election cycles, Google the and YouTube have have become catalysts for a more engaging, meaningful dialogue between the citizens and government leaders. From asking questions of candidates to finding your polling place, our tools are helping to make the elections and politics more personal and more democratic, and have opened up Washington, D.C. in exciting new ways.

With less than six weeks until the midterm elections, we wanted to hear from some of politics’ most creative minds about what the innovation and democracy mean in 2010. So on Monday we’re joining forces with the POLITICO to host an event at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where we’ll discuss the increasing contributions of technology to democracy and the political process.

As part of the event David Axelrod and Ed Gillespie will answer questions and offer thoughts and predictions about the upcoming elections. Arianna Huffington will then moderate a panel about innovation in media, and will be joined by Becki Donatelli, Stephen Hayes, Nate SilverAmy Walter. We’ll also demonstrate tools built for citizens and government officials using YouTube and Google Maps, and will be joined by our friends on the politics team at Facebook. and

The panelists want to hear from you, so if you’d like to submit a question for any of them, you can do so at youtube.com/citizentube. You’ll also be able to watch the entire event live on YouTube on Monday.

As we approach the election homestretch, we’ll continue to develop useful ways for voters and campaigns to engage one another around the important issues in 2010.

It's Easier to Add YouTube Videos to Playlists

YouTube added more features to the "plus" button displayed when you mouse over a video thumbnail. Until now, the button could only be used to add videos to a queue, so you can play them later. If you click on the small arrow next to the button, you can add the video to your favorites or to one of your playlists. It's much easier to build the playlists from search results and from the related videos.

Another change is that the "save to" drop-down has been replaced with a button that adds the video you're currently watching to the queue. Click on the arrow next to the button and you can add the video to a playlist.

When you add a video to the queue, YouTube shows a small bar that lets you manage the videos from the queue, save them as a new playlist, disable autoplay or load one of your playlists.

More Options for Importing Files into Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets improved the feature that lets you to import the files. After uploading a file, you can preview it, select a separator character and choose where to put the data. You can create a new spreadsheet, insert a new sheet, replace the spreadsheet or only the current sheet, append the data to the current sheet or replace the data starting from the selected cell.

You can't select the multiple delimiters, exclude certain columns or pick the data format before importing the file. These features are available in the Microsoft Excel and, even though some them aren't necessary, they make it easier to properly import the data you need.

Google Chrome Frame, Out of Beta

Internet Explorer users who can't update the browser or switch to a better browser have another option for running modern web apps: Google Chrome Frame, a plug-in that uses Google Chrome to render the pages that include a required tag. Chrome Frame is now out of beta and can be installed if you use Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8.

Google Chrome Frame is especially valuable for enterprise users, so Google added a MSI installer that helps IT administrators deploy the software in a network.

Microsoft has recently released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 and showed that it can develop a browser that's fast, standards-compliant and better suited for running web apps. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 9 can't be installed in Windows XP, which is still the most popular operating system. Even if Internet Explorer 8 has been released more than one year ago, almost half of the users haven't upgraded to the latest version of the browser.

Chrome Frame is already used by many Google services: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Orkut and other services will start to support it soon. Chromium's blog says that the main goals are to "to improve performance and ease the transition for users as they drop support for legacy browsers". After installing Chrome Frame in Internet Explorer 8, I noticed that Google Reader loaded much faster and had a better performance. If you want, you can load all the pages using Chrome Frame, but it's not recommended to do that.

Google Reader's Web Page Monitoring to Be Disabled

Google Reader's blog announced that the feed generator for pages that don't have feeds will no longer be available starting from September 30. Google says that not many people used this feature, which is not surprising, considering that it's quite difficult to find it.

Google Reader's page tracking feature was useful to monitor the web pages that don't have feeds. For example, you could use it to find when Google changes the privacy policy, when Google Chrome adds new extension APIs or when there are new products in the Google Store.

Unfortunately, Google Reader's feeds looked terrible. The title for each item was "generated feed for [URL]", the feature didn't detect new images and the feeds were updated when the new versions of the pages were added to Google's search index. Here's Google Reader's feed for google.com and here are the changes found by Page2RSS. Page2RSS found 8 changes in September, while Google only found one. Page2RSS has another important advantage: the service constantly monitors web pages and it's not tied to a search engine that indexes billions of web pages.

Google Docs Editing for Android and iPad

Google announced that it will soon add the support for editing the documents in the mobile Google Docs.

"Today we demonstrated new mobile editing capabilities for Google Docs on the Android platform and the iPad. In the next few weeks, co-workers around the world will soon be able to co-edit the files simultaneously from an even wider array of devices."

It's interesting to see that the updated Google Docs will support the iPad, but it won't be available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Right now, the mobile version of Google Docs shows a read-only view of your documents and you need to install third-party apps to edit your documents.

Google says that more than 3 million businesses use Google Apps and that the number of Google Apps users is about 30 million. It's not clear if Google Docs editing will only be available for Google Apps users, but it doesn't make any sense to add some unnecessary limitations to a feature that will make the Google Docs much more useful. 

Print Selection in Google Chrome

Printing is one of the Google Chrome's weakest points. Google's browser still doesn't offer print preview and, until recently, you couldn't print the selected text. In Google Chrome 6 for Windows, you can select some text and some images from a web page, click on "Print" in the unified menu and choose the "selection" option.

If you frequently print the pages in the Google Chrome, you can add a print button and install iReader, an extension based on the Readability that removes the clutter from the web pages, makes pages easier to read and adds the option to hide the images.

In other Chrome-related news, Chrome 7 beta will be released next Monday and print preview has been pushed back to the next release (Chrome 8). "Because the M7 feature freeze was on Aug 30, moving this to M8. Each cycle is six weeks."

Google Calendar Sound Notifications

Google Calendar has a Labs feature called the "Gentle reminders" that replaces pop-up reminders with a better notifications. "When you get a reminder, the title of the Google Calendar window or tab will happily blink in the background." If you use Google Chrome, you can also enable your desktop notifications in the settings.

Google has recently added the sound notifications. You can enable this feature by going to Settings > Gentle reminders (labs) and selecting Play a sound notification together with the reminders (requires Flash).

New Look for Google Docs Viewer

Google's document viewer has a new interface that's more consistent with Google Docs. The viewer added a menu bar, a button that lets you save the file to Google Docs and a button for sharing the document with your contacts. The View menu includes a new feature called "compact controls" that hides the navigation bar and the header.

Google Docs Viewer is only useful for PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and TIFF files. It's integrated with Google search, so you can quickly preview PDF files without installing Adobe Reader or another PDF reader. There's also a Chrome extension that previews documents in Google Docs Viewer.

Print Selection in Google Chrome

Printing is one of the Google Chrome's weakest points. Google's browser still doesn't offer the print preview and, until recently, you couldn't print the selected text. In Google Chrome 6 for Windows, you can select some text and some images from a web page, click on "Print" in the unified menu and choose the "selection" option.

If you frequently print pages in Google Chrome, you can add a print button and install the iReader, an extension based on the Readability that removes the clutter from the web pages, makes pages easier to read and adds the option to hide the images.

In other Chrome-related news, Chrome 7 beta will be released next Monday and print preview has been pushed back to the next release (Chrome 8). "Because the M7 feature freeze was on Aug 30, moving this to M8. Each cycle is six weeks."

Quiksee Acquired by Google

The Israeli startup Quiksee confirmed that it has been acquired by the Google and its employees will join the Google Geo team. "Quiksee is an Internet start-up company that focuses on creating the location based on interactive videos. Our vision is to fill the world maps with the Quiksee tours that will let people virtually travel across the planet as if they were there," explains the Quicksee's site.

Haaretz says that "the firm's technology is regarded as the missing link in the Google's Street View service (used by both Google Maps and Google Earth), which allows users to view the photos along numerous streets around the world". Quiksee's software allowed you to create interactive panoramic tours from your videos, without having to use a Street View camera. TechCrunch speculates that Google could "accept geo-tagged, 3D panoramas uploaded by consumers" to improve Google Maps.

Here's a video that shows how Quiksee could integrate with the Google Street View:

Google might even use Quiksee to add interactive Street View videos to Google Maps, like the ones demoed by Microsoft's Blaise Agüera y Arcas at a TED conference.

Google Me: a Social Upgrade, Not a New Service

Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference that Google will add social features to the existing services, but it won't launch a standalone product to compete with the Facebook.

"We're trying to take the Google's core products and add a social component. If you think about it, it's obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better. Everybody has convinced themselves that there's some huge project about to get announced in the next week. And I can assure you that's not the case," said Eric Schmidt, according to the MSNBC.

Google's CEO also said that "the best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."

Wall Street Journal speculates that YouTube is one of the services that will add more social features. For example, you'll be able to see when a video is watched by many of your friends.

Ever since Google Profiles has been launched, back in the 2007, Google added social features to services like Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, but failed to create a compelling interface that integrates all these features. The most important attempt to integrate the Google's social services is Google Buzz and Google should focus on improving Buzz, create a standalone interface for the people that don't use Gmail, adding more privacy features, introducing reciprocal friendship and building a meaningful social graph.

Until Google users can answer the question: "who are my Google friends?", Google will never be able to develop successful social services. Are they the Google Chat buddies, the contacts from the Friends group, the people you follow in the Google Buzz? Google ignored for many years Gmail's contact manager and automatically added entries to the address book when you replied to Gmail messages. The problem was only solved when Google launched a business version of the Gmail and users wanted to sync their contacts. Now Google will have to solve the friendship issue.

Gmail Stats

Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that shows interesting stats about your Gmail account. The extension lets you to type one or more queries and plots the results on a graph.

"Our inboxes contain a tremendous amount of the information. Nearly every substantive action we take online generates email, from buying goods to booking flights to the social network activity. Despite this large amount of data, extracting and graphing this information can be extremely difficult," says Bill Zeller, who developed the extension.

You can use Gmail's advanced search operators to refine your query. For example, the from: operator lets you to restrict the results to one or more senders, the subject: operator restricts the results to the messages that have your keywords in the subject line, the label: operator finds the messages that have a certain label. You can search for label:chat to visualize your chats, label:buzz to visualize your Buzz messages or label:important for messages classified as important.

The nice thing about this extension is that you can click on one of the datapoints to view the corresponding Gmail conversations. Unfortunately, the extension doesn't integrate with the Gmail's interface and it's quite slow, since it processes a lot of messages. It's not a good idea to try queries that return thousands of the results, since Google might disable your account for abnormal usage.

Another important thing: according to the author, "the extension does not save any personal information and does not send any personal information to any server. It does not request or record your email password. This extension does not modify the Gmail website or your email in any way." After checking the source code, I can confirm that the extension only sends requests to Gmail and iGoogle, which is used for obtaining search results using the Gmail gadget.

Google Me: a Social Upgrade, Not a New Service

Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference that Google will add social features to the existing services, but it won't launch a standalone product to compete with the Facebook.

"We're trying to take the Google's core products and add a social component. If you think about it, it's obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better. Everybody has convinced themselves that there's some huge project about to get announced next week. And I can assure you that's not the case," said Eric Schmidt, according to the MSNBC.

Google's CEO also said that "the best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."

Wall Street Journal speculates that YouTube is one of the services that will add more social features. For example, you'll be able to see when a video is watched by many of your friends.

Ever since Google Profiles has been launched, back in the 2007, Google added social features to the services like Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, but failed to create a compelling interface that integrates all these features. The most important attempt to integrate the Google's social services is Google Buzz and Google should focus on improving Buzz, create a standalone interface for the people that don't use Gmail, adding more privacy features, introducing reciprocal friendship and building a meaningful social graph.

Until Google users can answer the question: "who are my Google friends?", Google will never be able to develop successful social services. Are they the Google Chat buddies, the contacts from the Friends group, the people you follow in Google Buzz? Google ignored for many years Gmail's contact manager and automatically added entries to the address book when you replied to the Gmail messages. The problem was only solved when Google launched a business version of the Gmail and users wanted to sync their contacts. Now Google will have to solve the friendship issue.

Google Buzz Is Here to Stay

Many tech blogs say that Google Buzz is an unsuccessful project and Google will have to abandon it. Google Buzz is not an experimental service like the Google Wave, it's an extremely important project for the Google's future and it's a key component of Google's social strategy.

To see how important is Google Buzz for the Google, consider that Buzz wasn't launched in Google Labs. It wasn't even launched as a standalone service: Google Buzz was integrated with the Gmail, one of the most popular Google products. Google Buzz is also the only Google service that has a special icon and a special search command on Google's mobile site. In less than 7 months since Buzz's launch, the service already has a powerful API, it's integrated with the Google Maps, Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums and it's constantly improving.

Google Buzz is actually the service planned in 2007 whose goal was to integrate the Google's social applications and become the central place for sharing the photos, documents, videos, news with your contacts. Google Buzz already streams some activities from the Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums, Blogger, YouTube.

Google Photos blog reports that Google Buzz can now share private Picasa Web Albums:

"It used to be all or nothing when it came to sharing a new Picasa Web Album in Buzz. If you created a public album in the Picasa Web Albums, it created a public Google Buzz post. That was great for when you wanted to share your photos broadly. But for those times when you wanted to share with a smaller circle — no Buzz. Now when you create a private album, the select people you choose to share your photo album with will see a notification in the Google Buzz as well."

Google Buzz also added two other important features: muting posts by source, so you can hide someone's Twitter posts, Flickr photos or the posts from another source, and editing posts and comments from the mobile interface.

It should be clear that Google Buzz is here to stay, even as a feature of a future service.

Quiksee Acquired by Google

The Israeli startup Quiksee confirmed that it has been acquired by the Google and its employees will join the Google Geo team. "Quiksee is an Internet start-up company that focuses on creating the location based interactive videos. Our vision is to fill the world maps with Quiksee tours that will let people virtually travel across the planet as if they were there," explains Quicksee's site.

Haaretz says that "the firm's technology is regarded as the missing link in the Google's Street View service (used by both Google Maps and Google Earth), which allows users to view the photos along numerous streets around the world". Quiksee's software allowed you to create interactive panoramic tours from your videos, without having to use a Street View camera. TechCrunch speculates that Google could "accept geo-tagged, 3D panoramas uploaded by the consumers" to improve Google Maps.

Here's a video that shows how Quiksee could integrate with the Google Street View:

Google might even use Quiksee to add interactive Street View videos to Google Maps, like the ones demoed by Microsoft's Blaise Agüera y Arcas at a TED conference.

Google Instant Promotional Message

Google shows a large promotional message below the list of the search suggestions: "Love Google Instant? Make Google your Homepage." Since this feature is not yet available in your browser's search box or in Google Toolbar, it's a good opportunity for Google to promote its homepage.

Gary Price from ResourceShelf wonders if this is one of the larger promo ads ever seen in a drop down. I remember that Google displayed a similar message when Google Instant was launched: "Welcome to Google Instant. Feelings of euphoria and weightlessness are normal. Do not be alarmed."

I wouldn't be surprised to see that Google starts to show AdWords ads below the suggestions, a feature that has already been tested in Google Suggest.

YouTube Live Streaming

YouTube started to test a new platform for the live streaming. "Starting at 8:00 a.m. PT, we will begin a limited trial of a new live streaming platform in the conjunction with four of our partners: How cast, Next New Networks, Rocket boom and Young Hollywood. This new platform integrates with live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera."

YouTube says that live streaming is "a natural evolution to online video that adds an extra level of the engagement", but this is also a feature that could make the YouTube's integration with the Google TV even more useful. YouTube wants to become the central hub for the online video, so it now focuses on adding more premium content: live events, music videos, movies and TV shows, movie rentals.

Try Google Instant Search

Google will soon release a new interface that shows the results as you type a query. If you want to try the new feature before it's officially released, use this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy.

My first impression: you can now get useful results after typing a few characters. Google has never been so fast.

To watch a webcast of Google's search event where streaming search will be launched, visit youtube.com/google.

Update: The feature is called Google Instant. "Feelings of euphoria and weightlessness are normal. Do not be alarmed."

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press 'search.' Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way."

Google Instant Shortcuts

Google Instant Search, the feature that shows search results as you type, is now publicly available. According to a press site, "Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the latest browsers (Chrome versions 5 and later, Firefox version 3 and later, Safari version 5 for Mac and Internet Explorer version 8). Please note, users on domains other than Google.com and Google.ru can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account."

If you don't see the new feature, go to Google's homepage, click on "Google.com in English" and log in to a Google account. If you still don't see it, try this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy.

When you start to type a query, Google moves the search box to the top of the page and shows a list of 4 suggestions, followed by the search results for the first suggestion. That means you can just type "ny" and get the search results for [ny times] almost instantly. Google shows the predicted query in the search box, but the characters automatically added by Google are grayed out.

If you intend to type [ny times crossword], you can press Tab or use the right arrow to add "times" to your query and continue typing "crossword". Use the up/down arrows to pick a different suggestion and you'll notice that the results are displayed without having to press Enter.

The nice thing about the new interface is that you can use the "I'm feeling lucky" much more easily. For example, to visit the top search result for [ny times crossword], select the suggestion using the down arrow and perform "I'm feeling lucky" using the right arrow.

How to visit New York Times homepage using 4 keystrokes? ny Down Right. How to go to Yelp using 4 keystrokes? ye Down Right.

Another great thing about the new interface is that the search box always has focus. You never have to click on the search box to add a new word to your query.

If you don't like Google's suggestions, you can always ignore them and press Enter to find the results for the query that you've typed.

To sum up:
Tab/Right arrow = pick the first suggestion
Up/Down arrow = select another suggestion from the list
Right arrow while selecting a suggestion = I'm feeling lucky
Enter or Esc = ignore the suggestions and find the results for your query

Google Features No Longer Available in Instant Search

Google Instant Search is a very interesting experiment that could change the way you find the information on the Web, but the new interface comes with a lot of unpleasant side effects.

1. Google Suggest can no longer be disabled. Even if you disable Google Instant, suggestions will still be displayed.

2. You can no longer change the number of results. The interface would be less fluid if Google had to fetch 50 or 100 results every time you change your query.

3. Google Suggest no longer shows previously typed searches from the Google Web History. This was a great feature for the repeated queries. Marissa Mayer said last year that "40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for a user".

4. Google Suggest no longer shows 10 suggestions. Because of the space constraints, Google only displays 4 suggestions, followed by your original query.

5. The fade-in animation has been removed. This feature used to hide the navigation bar and all the links from the homepage until you moved your mouse.

6. "Search within results" is no longer available. This feature has never been useful because it didn't actually search within results. It only allowed you to add new keywords to an existing query.

7. Google's search box is not displayed at the bottom of the page. As Amit Agarwal points out, you have to scroll to the top of the page to change the query.

Yahoo Developed an Instant Search Interface in 2005

Stephen Hood, a former Yahoo employee, says that Yahoo developed an interface similar to the Google Instant 5 years ago. It was called LiveSearch and it was launched as an experimental interface for the AllTheWeb.com.

Yahoo would not let us ship LiveSearch on yahoo.com or as a part of the Yahoo's search engine. Instead we were only allowed to launch it on AllTheWeb, a smaller, lower-traffic search engine that Yahoo had acquired years earlier and largely left to atrophy. (...)

You have to remember that, at the time, Yahoo's search business was doing just well enough that there was very little institutional appetite for the product risk. As a result, "big" or disruptive ideas were too often left to whither on the vine. By focusing on the local maximum, Yahoo unwittingly traded innovation for the incremental optimization.

LiveSearch was thus relegated to a tiny test bucket of the users who didn't actually use Yahoo's search product (or any modern search engine). Usage data from this flawed test was used to internally evaluate its success in comparison to the model it was actually trying to disrupt. Lacking high-level support for its larger vision and starved for the resources, LiveSearch was understandably put out to pasture.

Here's an excerpt from Yahoo's blog post that announced LiveSearch:

"Livesearch has that uncanny knack of figuring out exactly what is on my mind. As soon as I start to type a query, Livesearch suggests the right query and shows me the results page before I even press a search button. For example, I wanted to look for 'mission impossible 3'. Just as I finished typing 'mission', Livesearch is already recommending 'mission impossible 3' as the search, and then instantaneously shows me the results page."

Stephen thinks that Google "still has the organizational courage to challenge its own preconceptions" and that's the reason why it can launch features like Google Instant, which change "a user interaction model that's been largely unchallenged for the years".

When Google changes the interface of a product, many people say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". Fortunately for the Google, the company has never followed this principle. As Colin Powell said, "'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It's an excuse for the inaction, a call to non-arms."

Google's Particles Doodle

Google's homepage shows another animated doodle, but this time Google doesn't offer any information about the doodle. The homepage animates some particles which are used to create the Google logo.

It's very likely that the interactive doodle celebrates Google's 12th birthday. Google usually celebrates its birthday on September 7th or September 27th, depending on the year. "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake."

Happy Birthday, Google!

Here are Google's previous birthday doodles: