Going worldwide in search of great art

South African rock designs. Brazilian street graffiti. Australian aboriginal art. Today we’re announcing a major development of the Google Art Project. From now on, with a few simple clicks of a finger, art lovers around the world will be able to find out not just paintings, but also sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries.

Since we introduced the Art Project last year, curators, artists and viewers from all over the globe have accessible exciting ideas about how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions worldwide asked to join the project, urging us to augment the diversity of artworks displayed. We listened.

The original Art Project counted 17 museums in nine countries and 1,000 images, almost all paintings from Western masters. Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student deficient to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.

The expanded Art Project embraces all sizes of institutions, specializing in art or in other types of civilization. For example, you can take a look at the White House in Washington, D.C., discover the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and continue the journey to the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. In the United States alone, some 29 partners in 16 cities are participating, ranging from exceptional regional museums like the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina to top notch university galleries such as the SCAD museum of art in Savannah, Georgia.

Here are a few other new things in the prolonged Art Project that you might enjoy:

* Using completely new tools, called Explore and Discover, you can find artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, displaying works from different museums around the world.

* Google+ and Hangouts are included on the site, enabling you to create even more engaging personal galleries.

* Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specifically designed Street View “trolley” took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also discover the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

* We now have 46 artworks obtainable with our “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be not possible to see with the naked eye.

* An enhanced My Gallery feature lets you select any of the 30,000 artworks—along with your favorite details—to build your own personalized gallery. You can add comments to each painting and share the whole compilation with friends and family. (It’s an ideal tool for students.)

The Art Project is part of our hard work to bringing culture online and making it accessible the widest possible audience. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re presenting high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities.

For more in sequence and future developments, follow the Art Project on Google+. Together with the fantastic input from our partners from around the world, we’re pleased to have created a convenient, fun way to interrelate with art—a platform that we hope appeals to students, aspiring artists and connoisseurs alike.

How to Find Visited Pages in Google Search

I'm not sure if this is a new quality, but it's pretty useful. Like most websites, Google's search engine changes the color of visited links from blue to purple. All browsers grip links this way by default, but websites can alter the colors using some CSS code.

If you're logged in using your Google Account and Web History is enabled, Google saves all the search results you visit to your Web History. When you're using a different browser or a different computer and you're logged in using the similar account, Google changes the color of the visited links from blue to purple, irrespective of the browser or computer you've used to visit them. For example, I searched for [haploid] using Chrome, I clicked on one of the results, then I tried the same query in Internet Explorer and the page I've visited in Chrome previously had a purple link.

Google also has a search filter that lets you limit the results to visited pages. Just click "More search tools" in the sidebar and select "Visited pages". For pages you're visiting regularly, Google shows an explanation below the snippet: "You've visited this page X times. Last visit: ...". When you mouse over the snippet, Google suggests to +1 the link: "You've visited this page X times. +1 to suggest it on Google search!".

New border for Google Instant Previews

Google tweaked the UI for Instant Previews and made the seek interface a lot cleaner. There's a new big icon for Instant Previews, but it's only displayed when you mouse over a snatch. Click the new icon or only hover over the gray bar and you'll see a much bigger screenshot. 

"Instant Previews have been about since last year, allowing you to click on the magnifying glass to the right of the result to see a visual overview of a page. Now these previews are no longer even a click away: if you move your mouse over a look for result, arrows will appear. Hover over them to see a visual sample of that result," explains Google.

Clicking the snippet no longer triggers an immediate Preview in the new interface. Unfortunately, the keyboard shortcut has been disabled, so you can longer get a glimpse of the page with the right arrow.

Google now repeats the title of the page and the URL then to the screenshot, while the links to the cached page and to other similar pages are incorporated in the new enlarged snippet. It's a bad news for those who regularly use the "cache" link, who now have to spend more time to find it.

The only action that's still displayed is the Google +1 button, but you require to log in to see it. Probably Google wanted to highlight the button, which is now located next to the URL.

Here's the old border:

Music Rich Snippets in Google Search

Last week, Google announced a new taste of rich snippets, this time for music pages. At that time, I couldn't see the new snippets, but now they ought to be obtainable for everyone.

"With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly shaped music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snatch so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to. Several early partners have implemented the music markup on their sites, counting MySpace, Rhapsody and Reverb Nation," explained Google.

The new rich snippets comprise links to music pages that could be establish by visiting the search result, but it's faster to bypass the search result and start to play a song. It's important to talk about that the songs aren't played on Google's results pages, so you still need to go to a different page. You'll only see the music rich snippets when your inquiry includes the name of an artist, a song or an album.

Google also shows rich snippets for events, profile pages, recipes, videos, reviews and products. "With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their satisfied to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating."

At some point, Google will make structured data searchable and it will be a lot easier to purify results. Recipe search previously lets you do that and it's pretty useful.

A New Look for Google Translate

Google Translate is the newest Google service with a new plan based on Google+. Since Google Translate's interface is simple, there aren't many changes: a new grey header, updated buttons and drop-downs.

"We're working on a project to bring you a new and enhanced Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll carry on to see more updates to our look and feel. The way people use and experience the web is developing, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and reliable online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you're using or what device you're using it on," explained Google last month.

After launching a new border for Google Search, Google created two themes that preview Gmail's new design and ongoing to test Google Calendar's new UI and Blogger's new UI. Up next: Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader and almost certainly other services.

Google Calendar's plan Refresh

After Google Search and Google Maps, it's time for Google Calendar to toggle to a Google+ interface. The new design is a lot cleaner, even if no significant feature was removed. "Quick add" is now obtainable if you click the arrow next to the "Create button" (not very intuitive), "Print" and "Refresh" are now buttons instead of links, the month view below the "Create" button can be distorted, "Save" and "Discard" buttons are only displayed at the top of the page.

"Right now, the changes are just aesthetic and have not affected the way Calendar works. You can choose to turn off the new look by clicking the gear icon and choosing Use the classic look (you can turn it back on by going to the gear icon and choosing Try the new look)," explains Google. Perceptibly, at some point, Google Calendar will put together with Google+ and we'll see even more changes.

No More Starred outcome in Google Search

Last year, Google replaced SearchWiki with starred consequences. You only had to click on a star to bookmark a search result and to rapidly find it later.

Unfortunately, this feature is no longer available and you have to find other ways to bookmark hunt results: bookmarklets, Google Toolbar and other extensions.

A Google employee established this change. "The Star feature no longer exists on Google. The Star function continues to exist throughout google.com/bookmarks though. Anything you formerly starred will show up when you visit bookmarks."

Starred results and SearchWiki were really useful for refinding web pages, but most likely not many people used them. These features were a lot more helpful than Instant Preview, which is still available.

Block Domains from Google's Search Results

Google has released a Chrome addition that lets you block domains and sun domains from Google's results. If you not at all find the results from experts-exchange.com useful, you can now click "Block experts-exchange.com" next to a search result from this site and you'll add the field to your personal blacklist.

Unfortunately, the extension does little more than storing a list of domains on your computer and beating the results from those domains. It's not tied to a web service and the blacklist is not saved to your Google account, so that you could use it from a different computer or another browser.

Matt Cutts says that the list of domains you've infertile is sent to Google. "We will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results."

Google Search Wiki used to offer a similar feature, but you could only use it to hide from view certain results. Blocking domains is more influential and it will be interesting to see if it will become a regular Google search feature. I think it's too influential and it might lead to unintended consequences: for example, some users might hide a domain just since a web page is not very helpful.

This week in search 2/4/2011

This week it got just a bit faster to discover the right things to buy and the right places to go, with a little help from Google—and your friends. Simply type a few characters and get Google Instant outcome in the “Shopping” view, and find recommendations from your friends with Hotpot in search results.

Instant results in the “Shopping” view

Now you can shop faster than ever and get the speed of Google Instant when comparing prices, looking for nearby stores and knowledge about products you want to buy. For example, if you’re searching for a cast iron skillet, we’ll start showing you applicable pans as you type [cast iro...]. Click “Shopping” in the left-hand panel and try penetrating for [sweater wrap shawl], [android phone] or anything else.

Hotpot recommendations in search results

Earlier this week we additional Hotpot recommendations to regular search results on Google. So now, if you’re looking for restaurants in San Francisco, you can simply look for Google for [restaurants sf]. If a friend has rated a particular place, you might see her estimation right under the listing. We also prolonged Hotpot to 38 new languages so people can share their favorite places around the world.

Whether you’re cooking at home or dining out, we hope this week’s updates help you find what you’re looking for just a little bit faster

Google Removes 3 Advanced Search Options

Google has recently removed three useful options from the advanced search sidebar. You can longer restrict the results to shopping-related pages or remove shopping sites from the results.

Another option that has been removed is page previews, which displayed a longer snippet and a thumbnail for each search result. This feature has been replaced by Instant Preview, but you can no longer see all the thumbnails next to the search results.

When Google launched the sidebar, back in May 2009, it was the first time when powerful features like restricting the results to recent pages didn't require to visit the advanced search page. "We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future."