New features from Google

Google is continuously making small improvements to its toolbox. Here are a few from the last couple of weeks.

Color search in Google images

You may restrict you image search to pictures with a particular color scheme.

The Google Blog gives a “tulip” search as an example: “On the results page, click on the ‘All colors’ drop down [menu] in the blue bar and choose a color. ”

There is also a drop down menu that lets you filter images according to types of content. These are:

• News content
• Faces
• Clip art
• Line drawings
• Photo content

Furthermore you may restrict your search to different image sizes. Here’s an example of how you can combine the various filters.

More and better search refinements

Google has improved its algorithm for suggesting alternative search phrases. You will find these phrases at the bottom of the search result pages.

A search for “search engine marketing” will, for instance, bring up links to the following alternative searches:

search engine optimization marketing, social media optimization, search engine submission optimization and google adwords optimization.

It seems the list is based on how other searchers refine their queries when they can’t find what they are looking for.

For search engine marketers this is good news, as they can use these refined search queries to identify new keyword phrases for search engine and text ad optimization.

Google expands descriptions in search results for some keywords

Given that you make use of longer search queries combining more than three words, Google may now expand the description (or “snippet”) of the results to help you better understand what the pages are about.

Normally Google will restrict the number of characters to 156. Now the snippet may be longer.

Most often Google will fetch the snippet from the web page itself, but it may also make use of the description found in the Open Directory.

Google becomes more local

Normally you would have had to include your location in your search query to make Google understand that you were looking for a restaurant in — let’s say — Oslo, Norway instead of San Fransisco, California.

Now Google will make use of your IP address to identify your location and give you local search results for all queries of this kind.

They will also add a map with pins for the nearest relevant locations.

Inserting images in Gmail

Google’s online email too is a good one, but its way of entering images is primitive to say the least. You normally add them as attachments.

Just turn on “Inserting images” from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see a new toolbar icon that lets you insert images into the text itself.

Google Blog Search has been improved

Google recently changed its blog search algorithm to include information from the web pages themselves, and not only what is found in the RSS feeds of the blogs.

This did indeed make the search results more comprehensive, but it also meant that it would include stuff like blogroll links, page headers and footers. Bloggers trying to find blogs linking to their own sites, therefore got hits on every blogroll that had a link to their site, and not only on regular links found in the text of the blog posts.

Jeremy Hylton of Google had this to say over at Google Groups:

“We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix.”

Google Blog Search is a useful for finding out what is the latest buzz in the blogosphere. Combined with searches in Google News and Twitter search, it can give you a pretty good picture of what is happening right now.

Google Docs gets a drawing program

It will take some time before Google’s online office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool etc.) will become a real threat to Microsoft Office and Word.

Still, Google is a patient company that makes long term plans. In a couple of years Microsoft probably will feel the heat.

Now Google have added a drawing program to the free suite. Open a new Google Docs document and click Insert -> Drawing. It is a relatively primitive drawing program, but it can, for instance, be used for adding figures and flow charts to text documents.

The Google Docs blog says that the drawing feature relies heavily on a relatively new capability in browsers: the ability to render vector graphics.