Google has recently published a report about the Web, which includes a lot of interesting stats. The results were obtained from a sample of 4.2 billion web pages indexed by Google.

"The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire (Google took into account the embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets). Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed. In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host."

The average number of images per page is 29.39 and the average size of all the images from a page is 205.99 KB. A web page includes an average of 7.09 external scripts and 3.22 external stylesheets. The average size of the scripts is 57.98 KB and the size of the stylesheets is 18.72 KB. Google also found that only 17 million pages from the sample use SSL (about 0.4%).

Urs Hölzle, Google's Senior Vice President of Operation, said that the average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and it makes 44 calls to different resources. "Speed matters. The average web page isn't just big, it's complicated. Web pages aren't just HTML. A web page is a big ensemble of things, some of which must load serially," said Urs Hölzle.

Google offers a lot of tutorials that help web developers improve the performance of their websites. Google advises to use Gzip compression, use HTTP caching, optimize JavaScript code and properly combine scripts and stylesheets.

Google Maps URLs are very long because they include a lot of parameters. They're way too long to be added to a Twitter message, a news article or a banner.

To solve this problem, Google Maps Labs added a feature called "short URLs" that shows short permalinks when you click on "Link". The nice thing about this feature is that it uses Google's URL shortening service, which is very fast, and URLs are more descriptive because they include "goo.gl" and "maps".


To get the full permalink, you need to right-click on "Link" and copy the location. Unfortunately, Google removes the embedding feature if you enable "short URLs". Maybe it would make more sense to show the short URL as an additional option.

YouTube added support for playing videos that are bigger than 1080p. "Today at the VidCon 2010 conference, we announced support for videos shot in 4K (a reference resolution of 4096 x 3072), meaning that now we support original video resolution from 360p all the way up to 4096p. To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors," explains YouTube.

There aren't many 4K videos uploaded to YouTube, but you can find some examples in this playlist. To switch to 4K, select "original" from the list of versions that are available. YouTube says that you need an "ultra-fast high-speed broadband connection" and it's probably a good idea to play the videos in fullscreen on a big-screen TV.


For now, the support for 4K videos doesn't mean too much, but it's nice to see YouTube pushing technological boundaries.

Three months ago, I found some Google search shortcuts that trigger results from Google Dictionary and Google Translate. The keywords for Google Translate no longer work, but you can still add "en:en" before an English word to see the definition from Google Dictionary.

Google's results now include links to Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster and Answers.com. Two of these sites (Dictionary.com and Answers.com) have been previously used to show definitions for each word of a query. They have been replaced by Google Dictionary and the feature has been removed when Google launched a new interface, two months ago.

Here's an example of query that triggers the special definition results: [en:en overcast].


Google has another special result that's displayed if you search for [define word] or [word definition]. This time, Google shows definitions from WordNet.


There's also a define: operator that shows definitions from WordNet, Wikipedia, glossaries and other web pages.

Gmail added one of the most frequently requested features: rich text signatures. If you go to the settings page, you can edit your signature and change text formatting, add links and images. You can only create a rich text signature if you enable rich formatting in the "compose mail" page.

"Some of you have tried your own solutions, including Greasemonkey scripts, browser plugins, and even using canned responses from Gmail Labs. Others have simply lived with frustration of not being able to change the colors or font size of your signature, or insert images and links. Either way, you'll be happy to know that today we're launching the ability to write your own rich text signatures right in Gmail," says Mark Knichel, from Google.


Another useful new feature lets you create distinct signatures for the email accounts you're using when sending messages. If you send mail from different addresses, it makes sense to have a distinct signature for each account.


Unfortunately, the new features only work in the desktop standard Web interface. "Currently, only the latest desktop version of Gmail supports rich text signatures and multiple signatures. The older version and HTML version of Gmail, along with the mobile versions, use a plain text version of your primary account's signature."

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

YouTube released a preview of the Google TV interface: it's called YouTube Leanback. "YouTube Leanback is all about letting you sit back, relax and be entertained. Videos tailored to your interests play as soon as you visit the site and they play in full screen and high definition, continuously. There's no need to click, search, or browse, unless you want to, of course. Watching YouTube becomes as easy as watching TV," suggests YouTube's blog.

By default, YouTube plays videos from your subscriptions, but you can also select a category to play popular comedy videos, short films, music videos, news, travel videos and more. The interface doesn't work with a mouse, as you can only use the arrow keys and Enter to skip a video, select a category, search, pause or resume a video. YouTube Leanback will work well with Google TV's remote control, but you can also install an application like Air Mouse on your mobile phone.


Leanback is not the first YouTube interface designed for TVs: there's also YouTube XL, but the interface isn't fluid and there are too many options that get in the way.

Google's services have a big advantage: a lot of mobile phones include applications for services like YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search. Unfortunately, the native applications are rarely updated, so users miss the new features added to Google's services.

A good example is the YouTube application for iPhone, developed by Apple, which still uses 5-star ratings, doesn't support captions, annotations or search suggestions and offers a single sharing option: email. Google's YouTube application for Android is not much better, even if it's updated faster.

Web applications evolve faster, as they aren't updated only when a new version of iOS or Android is released. The latest update of the YouTube Mobile site shows that a web application can be almost as good as a native application, even when you're talking about a mobile phone.


"We launched YouTube on mobile devices in 2007 with about 1,000 videos available on the mobile site (m.youtube.com). While this suddenly opened up the possibility to access videos on the go, our site, mobile browsers and the hardware had limitations that prevented the mobile experience from keeping up with YouTube on the desktop. Today, more than ever, we know that you want to be able to find and access your favorite videos wherever you are. That's why we're rolling out an updated version of the mobile site," explains YouTube's blog.

The latest update adds features like search suggestions, replaces ratings with like/dislike buttons, adds the option to create playlists and to watch a high-quality version of a video even if you don't use WiFi. The site loads faster and it's easier to use on a touchscreen. "As we make improvements to Youtube.com, you’ll see them quickly follow on our mobile site, unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently."



YouTube Mobile can be accessed by visiting m.youtube.com on your phone. The new version only works if you have an iPhone or an Android phone and it's only available in English.

Google started to add links to related videos for search results from sites like eHow, Howcast, GameTrailers or Hulu. Google shows two additional videos from the same site below the main search result.



It's not the first time when Google tries to make the content of a site more discoverable. Google already shows sitelinks that highlight popular pages from a site, search boxes for site search, navigation breadcrumbs, related topics from discussion boards.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

One of the most popular advanced search feature is phrase search. Google and other search engines let you find web pages that include the exact phrase you type. "By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change," mentions Google's help center.

The nice thing about phrase search was that you didn't have to close the quotes. You could type ["Dual Polarization Antenna] and Google assumed that you forgot to close the quotes. This was especially useful if you changed your query by adding new words or if you typed the query using a virtual keyboard.

Unfortunately, the trick no longer works and you now have to close the quotes to use phrase search:


At some point, you could even enter queries like [Dual-Polarization-Antenna] and Google returned the same results as if you typed ["Dual Polarization Antenna"].

A Google employee has recently said that search engines have improved so much that people are surprised when they don't get good results. When Google has been launched, users were really surprised to see relevant results, even if they were much poorer than they are today.

When you search for [iPod], you expect that the first result is iPod's homepage. Google returns a different page (iTunes homepage) and doesn't even include the iPod homepage in the list of the top 10 search results.


Bing and Yahoo Search return much better results: iPod's homepage is the top result in Bing and the second result in Yahoo Search.



The most likely explanation why Google doesn't return the most relevant results is that apple.com/ipod used to redirect to apple.com/itunes, as you can see if you check Internet Archive. The most recent version of the page cached by the Internet Archive is from October 2009 and it still redirected to the iTunes homepage.

Lifehacker found an article from Google's help center that explains how Google Apps users will be able to access services that require a Google account.

Google will automatically create regular Google accounts for Google Apps addresses like my.name@mydomain.com, so you can use the same credentials to log in to Google Apps services (Gmail, Calendar, Docs) and Google Accounts services (Google Reader, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums).


What happens if a Google Apps user already has a Google account for the same email address? "For example, your Google Apps email address is email@my-domain.com. A while back, you may have signed up for Blogger with this email address, which created a Google Account. Since we've moved your Google Apps account to a Google Account infrastructure to allow access to all Google products, your other Google Account will be renamed to: email+personal@my-domain.com. You should add the +personal extension to your email address if you'd like to sign in to your old account."

Google's explanation is confusing and it's not clear why the existing Google accounts won't be migrated. Users will end up with two Google accounts for the same email address and won't be able to merge the accounts.

For now, the integration between Google Apps accounts and Google accounts is only available if you are a Trusted Tester, but Google promised that it will be publicly available in the coming months. "We intend to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily during the summer."

{ Thanks, Kevin. }

Google announced the acquisition of ITA Software, a flight information software company from Massachusetts that develops software for airlines, travel agencies and technology companies. One of the many ITA customers is Microsoft, which used its technology to power Bing Travel:

"Bing, Microsoft's new decision search engine, combines innovative fare prediction technology (previously known as Farecast) with the industry's leading airfare pricing and shopping system by ITA Software to assist travelers to make faster and more informed choices."

The list of sites that use ITA's technology is impressive: Kayak, Orbitz, CheapTickets, Hotwire, FareCompare and more. Google intends to pay $700 million to acquire a long-established company that provides technology for some of the most popular flight search services.

Marissa Mayer says that Google will develop its own flight search service. "Once we've completed our acquisition of ITA, we'll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket."

Right now, Google shows an OneBox that links to popular services like Expedia, Orbitz and Kayak:


In the future, Google will probably use the OneBox to promote its own service. ITA software offers an online demo of its technology, which includes cool features like interactive calendar for finding the lowest fares, real-time filters and color-coded bars that let you compare flights:

Grouping messages in conversations is one of the most useful Gmail features. It's also one of the few features that made Gmail unique and innovative back in 2004, when it was released.





"Gmail groups all replies with their original message, creating a single conversation or thread. In other email systems, responses appear as separate messages in your inbox, forcing you to wade through all your mail to follow the conversation. In Gmail, replies to replies (and replies to those replies) are displayed in one place, in order, making it easier to understand the context of a message -- or to follow the conversation," explains Gmail's help center.

Some people suggested that Gmail should make threading optional. They assumed that it's pretty easy to disable a feature that's usually offered as a presentation enhancement in email clients. In Gmail, conversations are a core feature and it would be very difficult to disable it without breaking other features.

Last month, Henry Blodget reported that Google intends to make Gmail's conversations optional. "Some Gmail users loathe the Conversations format -- complaining that is confusing and causes them to miss important messages. Google recently handed control over Gmail to a VP named Vic Gundotra. Vic regards Google's prior attitude toward issue as 'tone deafness' and plans to offer another option soon, sources say."

While Gmail's threading doesn't always work properly and it's not always useful, grouping messages and replies in conversations makes it easier to find messages, to read messages and to reply to other messages. Most Gmail features are designed to work with conversations and not with individual messages. For example, you can't label a single message, you can't archive a single message and you can't mark a message as read or unread and you can't detach messages from conversations without deleting them.

If Gmail offers an option to disable conversations, it's likely that Gmail will act like an IMAP client. "IMAP treats messages individually and not as a threaded conversation. If you move a message to an IMAP folder in your mail client, only that message in the conversation will move to that folder. However, in the web interface, the whole conversation will be given the corresponding label. The same rules will apply to labels applied through filters."

If you label a message, Gmail will also label the messages from the conversation even if it will no longer display conversations. I don't think that's a great user experience.

Now that even iPhone's mail client and Hotmail added threading, it's surprising to see that Google decided to make conversations optional and to offer a suboptimal interface that makes Gmail more confusing and difficult to use.

Update: Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail, says that it's not surprised.

It's my opinion that when designing products, especially new products, it's better to have some people [that] will 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.

Two years ago, Google started to test an analytics service for blogs. MeasureMap, the service acquired by Google to improve the interface of Google Analytics, was still available and MeasureMap users were invited to convert their accounts to Google Analytics. At that time, Google Analytics experimented with integrating MeasureMap features like showing information about comments, blog posts, links from other sites. For Blogger blogs, Google also added a "stats" tab on the dashboard.

It's not clear if the Google Analytics experiment is still available, but Google released Blogger Stats, a Blogger feature that lets you see real-time data about a blog: the most popular posts, the number of pageviews for each post, the total number of pageviews, a list of traffic sources and search keywords, a breakdown of pageviews by country, browser and operating system. Blogger Stats is only available if you use Blogger in Draft, a playground where Blogger tests many new features.

"The coolest thing about the new Blogger Stats is that it monitors and analyzes your visitor traffic in near-real-time. You can see which posts are getting the most visits and which sites are sending traffic to your blog right now," says Google. Blogger Stats doesn't use Google Analytics, which offers more complex reports, but they are updated every hour and sometimes even less often.

When Google announced WebM, an open video format based on the VP8 codec, Opera and Firefox were the first browsers that released nightly builds that supported WebM. Google released a Chromium build that integrated WebM a day later.

Opera 10.6 is the first stable version of a browser that lets you play WebM videos. Opera added support for many HTML5 features (geolocation, Web workers, offline storage), has improved JavaScript performance and fixed a thousand bugs since releasing Opera 10.54. The Norwegian company claims that Opera is "the fastest browser on Earth", but I think it's not really important to see which browser is the fastest. Chrome, Safari and Opera are extremely fast, Firefox is still pretty fast, while Internet Explorer continues to improve. It's important to constantly improve a browser, to learn from other browsers, to innovate, to support the latest technologies, without neglecting that a browser has to be fast, usable and secure.

Probably the best source of WebM videos is YouTube. The first thing you need to do is to join the HTML5 experiment. Then you can restrict the YouTube search results to WebM videos, by clicking on "Search options" and selecting "WebM".


Other browsers that include support for WebM videos: Google Chrome 6 Dev Channel and the upcoming Firefox 4 beta.

Even if HTML5 and WebM are important for Google, YouTube takes a pragmatic approach. YouTube says that browsers need to improve the native video support and provide features like robust streaming, content protection, fullscreen video, camera and microphone access. "We're very happy to see such active and enthusiastic discussion about evolving web standards - YouTube is dependent on browser enhancement in order for us to improve the video experience for our users. While HTML5's video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don't support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube's video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it," explains YouTube.

After many months of testing, Google News redesigned the homepage and made it more customizable. One of the most important changes is that each group of related news has a topic ("Mobile industry", "Toyota", "Tropical storm Alex") and you can easily subscribe to the topic.


Google News has a new section called "News for you" whose goal is to show news about your interests. You can add custom news topics, select how often you read news about each topic and choose if you want to see the news grouped in sections or as an uninterrupted stream.


If you like some news site or dislike news sources that provide biased or irrelevant news, you can now personalize Google News and list your preferences. Click on "Settings" at the top of the page, select "News settings" and start typing the sites you'd like to see more often or less often in Google News.

"Sources you promote or demote will be ranked differently for you (but not for anyone else) in your Google News search results and in the stories that you browse on the News homepage and other sections. Please keep in mind that demoted sources may not entirely disappear for you in Google News, and promoted sources may not appear in all of the stories you see," mentions Google.


Each news cluster has a small menu that lets you share stories on social sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader) or by email.


Google News also added keyboard shortcuts that are available in other Google applications like Gmail and Google Reader: j or n (next story), k or p (previous story), / (search), s (star), . or f (share), Enter (open the headline article for the current story). Unfortunately, keyboard shortcuts are an afterthought, so you'll find many flaws: after selecting the "Email" option, you need to use your mouse to click on the "To" field; after opening the main article of a story and going back to Google News, the story is no longer selected.

"The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We're making the ability to choose which sources you'll see more or less often available in all English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon," explains Google.

Google has a special page that provides more information about the new features and another page that shows you where are the old features and which features are new.

Google News is now more customizable and has a lot of features that should appeal to Google Reader users. You can't subscribe to news sites, but you can subscribe to topics and list your favorite news sites. Google News lets you star and share each story, navigate using keyboard shortcuts and read news recommended for you. Google News has suddenly morphed from a news aggregator into a news reader, from a website to a web application.



{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Google Docs Viewer, a service that lets you preview online PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, is now available for iPhone and Android devices.

Google added some features that make the service more useful on a touchscreen device: pinch to zoom (only for iPhone and iPad), buttons for zoom and pagination.

Unfortunately for Google, iPhone's built-in PDF reader and Microsoft Office viewer are much better than Google Docs Viewer because they don't convert documents to images. Some Android phones include a document viewer based on Quickoffice, which also does a better job than Google Docs Viewer. There's also Adobe Reader for Android, probably the best Android PDF reader you can download for free.

Computer World reports that many of the upcoming Gmail features will use HTML5. Adam de Boor, a Gmail engineer, said that Google's goal is to make Gmail load in less than a second.

"If the browser supports CSS3, Gmail will render the pages using these specifications, rather than its traditional approach of using the Document Object Model (DOM). The company has found that using CSS3 can speed the rendering time by 12 percent. (...) Gmail will also make use of HTML5's database standards. Now, the e-mail service uses Google Gears to store mail for offline reading, but over time that will migrate to the HTML5 standards."

Another feature that will be added to Gmail allows users to drag attachments to the desktop. This feature is not part of HTML5, but Google says that it will encourage other browsers to use it. Right now, you can drag and drop files from the desktop to Gmail, but only if you use Firefox 3.6 or Chrome.

Adam de Boor revealed how many lines of code are in Gmail: 443,000 lines of JavaScript code written by hand.

Gmail has added many features that used to be available only in desktop mail clients: fetching email from other accounts, threading, powerful spam filters, reading messages offline. Now it's time to better integrate Gmail with the browser or the operating system and to add notifications, a simplified way to handle attachments and a better performance.

{ spotted by George }

Each year in June, Google search results pages for gay-related queries include a multicolored bar. This time, Google added the colorful bar below the search box.


In the US, June is the "Gay & Lesbian Pride Month". "This month is meant to recognize the impact Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender individuals have had on the world. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual groups celebrate this special time with pride parades, picnics, parties, memorials for those lost from hate crimes as well as HIV and AIDS, and other group gathering events that attract thousands upon thousands of individuals."

Erica Baker pointed to a shirt of one the Googlers marching in the Global Pride Parades:



{ Photo licensed as Creative Commons by magic robots. Thanks, M. }

Google shows sunrise and sunset information in a special OneBox at the top of the search results. If you type [lima sunrise] or [paris sunset], Google will show the time for sunrise or sunset in that location.


Google says that this feature works for almost any location. "Whether you're looking to find the best time for a morning jog or trying to plan that perfect moment for a wedding proposal, knowing exactly when the sun rises or sets can always be helpful. (...) Unlike the weather, sunrises and sunsets are quite predictable, and as a result, we don't use a data source. Instead, we calculate sunrise and sunset times based on latitude, longitude and the current time. This calculation has been of interest to astronomers and mathematicians for millennia, so they've had time to get it just right. And for most locations, it's accurate to within a single minute."

You can also type [sunset] or [sunrise] and Google should show accurate information for your location. Google has similar OneBoxes for weather and time.