Google usually returns pretty good search results, but only if there are pages that include the words from your query or some synonyms. Google doesn't understand the query, it only tries to match the words from that query. Sometimes Google can answer questions like "How tall was Albert Einstein?" or "What's the real name of Al Pacino?", but it can't go beyond simple facts.

Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President at Google, says that Google works on building "a huge knowledge graph of interconnected entities and their attributes". Freebase was just the starting point: Google's knowledge graph has 200 million entities, while Freebase only has 22 million entities. The graph is actually an encyclopedia with structured information obtained from the web. This will help Google understand your queries, provide answers to complex questions and find more relevant results.

Right now, Google only uses the graph to show a list of related searches for singers, actors, painters etc. As Google improves its infrastructure, the knowledge graph will be used more and more.

For some reason, Google added a YouTube contact group to many Gmail accounts. I currently have 82 contacts in the YouTube group and they have only one thing in common: they sent me or I sent them an email in 2006, 2007 or 2008. They don't have anything to do with YouTube and some of the email addresses couldn't be used to create Google accounts (for example, the Writely email address for importing documents).


The YouTube group can be renamed or deleted, but it's strange that it was automatically created. Gmail has some system groups for Google Latitude, Google Talk, Google Buzz, but they're hidden and can't be removed.

Do you see the YouTube group in your Gmail account?

{ Thanks, Katty and everyone who commented on Google+. }

This year's doodle is actually a video that uses Tony Bennett's song "Cold, Cold Heart" to tell the story of a boy who tries to find a gift for the girl he loves, but fails to impress her.



The doodle is available if you visit Google Australia, Google Japan and other domains for countries that celebrate Valentine's Day because it's already February 14 there.


Here are the other Google doodles for Valentine's Day.

{ Thanks, Dan. }

Google's feedback tool that's used in many services for reporting bugs has a new interface. It looks much better and it doesn't open a new page to show the information that's sent to Google. You can also see a list of all your bug reports.





"Google Feedback lets you send Google suggestions about our products. We welcome problem reports, feature ideas and general comments," informs Google.

To try Google Feedback, go to Gmail, click the "settings" menu and then "report a bug". A similar feature is available in Google Docs, YouTube and many other Google services. You can see the old version of Google Feedback if you click "Report a bug" in YouTube's footer when you watch a video.


Google Feedback started as an extension and now it's a web app.

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Here's a simple way to learn more about a Google image search result without actually clicking it. Just drag the image to the search box and you'll be able to use "search by image" to find similar images and pages that include the image.



You can also mouse over the result and click "similar" or click the result and use the "search by image" feature, but drag-and-drop is faster. Another advantage is that you can edit the query and filter the results. For example, you can find pages that include the image and the word "hotel".

{ Thanks, Itamar. }

Google Spreadsheets has recently added an interesting feature: keyboard accelerators for menus, but it only works in Chrome. You can now press Alt+F (or Ctrl-Option-F for Mac) to open the File menu. Then type one of the underlined characters to select an option. It's now much easier to use features that don't have keyboard shortcuts, just like in a native application.


Chrome is the only important desktop browser born without menus and that's probably the reason why web apps can override shortcuts like Alt+F. It's important to point out that you can use shortcuts like Alt+F and Alt+E to open Chrome's wrench, but not in Google Spreadsheets.

While Chrome's interface was so great that many other browsers used it as an inspiration, Google Docs continues to use the old-school menus from Microsoft Office 2000.

While Google hasn't abandoned the navigation bar launched last year, both the old and the new interface are used today. If you load google.com in Chrome's incognito mode, the old interface shows up more often than the new UI. The simplified interface made navigation more complicated, even if it looks better than the black bar.

Google even tests a slightly updated version of the old bar that uses the services from the new UI, more spacing and a different color scheme.



Here's how you can try the latest Google experiment. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+, open google.com in a new tab, load:

* Chrome's JavaScript console (Ctrl+Shift+J)
* Firefox's Web Console (Ctrl+Shift+K)
* Safari's Web Inspector (how to do that?)
or
* IE's Developer Tools (press F12 and select the "console" tab)

and paste the following code:

document.cookie="PREF=ID=381502750b6e9119:U=aaee74aefea7315a:FF=0:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1328391998:LM=1328392000:S=yPtlCgLbEnezu5b4; path=/; domain=.google.com";window.location.reload();

Then press Enter and close the console. If you're not in the US and you're using a different Google domain, replace ".google.com" with your domain in the code (for example: ".google.co.uk" in the UK).

If you'd like to go back to the old interface and reset the Google PREF cookie, repeat the same steps, but use the following code:

document.cookie="PREF=; path=/; domain=.google.com";window.location.reload();

Google Instant is supposed to make searching faster, but you need a pretty good Internet connection, a modern browser and a decent computer. Google Instant is not available if you use IE6 or other outdated browsers and it's automatically disabled if you have a slow Internet connection.

Now Google also disables Instant if you have a slow computer. "If Instant gets automatically disabled, we continue to check your computer speed and will re-enable Instant if your performance improves," informs Google. If you don't like this change, you can disable it from the search preferences page. Just select "always show Instant results" in the "Google Instant predictions" section.


I've tested this feature on an old laptop and Google's implementation isn't great. Google Instant continues to be enabled for the initial query even if it's slow, then it's suddenly disabled when you visit Google Search again. Google doesn't show a message next to the search box to explain why Instant is disabled and not many people will visit the search preferences page, which both an explanation and a fix.


This is just one of the 17 updates from last month that improved Google Search.

Just in case you don't like the Google Groups interface and want to customize it, there's a new light gray theme you can try. Just click the settings button, click "Themes" and select the "soft gray" theme. This only works in the new Google Groups interface.



A similar theme is also available for Gmail and it will be interesting to see if Google Groups will add support for the other Gmail themes. Maybe apps like Google+, Google Docs, Google Reader and even services like Google Search will support Gmail's color themes.

{ Thanks , Herin. }

Google doesn't like to manually review user-generated content. It's not efficient and algorithms can do a better job. Imagine how many people would need to be hired to watch all the videos submitted to YouTube (60 hours of videos uploaded every minute).

In some ways, uploading an application to the Android Market is just like uploading a video to YouTube. Sure, you need to pay a fee, but you don't have to wait until a Google employee checks the application. Unfortunately, this also means that the application can include malware, deceive users, crash or spam your contacts. Google usually reviewed the app only after enough users reported that the app is malicious.

Now there's a new service called Bouncer "which provides automated scanning of Android Market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience of Android Market or requiring developers to go through an application approval process. The service performs a set of analyses on new applications, applications already in Android Market, and developer accounts. Here's how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags. We actually run every application on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior".

That seems like a great idea: Google actually tests the apps without having to wait until other users install them and notice there's something wrong. The bad news is that this service was tested last year and was used to find potentially-malicious apps. Despite that, the apps infected by DroidDream were found by a security vendor and not by Google.

"The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise," says Google. Another explanation could be that Google's service is not good enough.

Google also says that Android "makes malware less potent" because it uses sandboxing, it displays the list of permissions and Android Market can remotely remove malware. I don't think that most of the users read the list of permissions. They simply ignore them, click "OK" and install the application. Maybe it would be a better idea to require users to explicitly enable sensitive permissions when they're using the apps.

While security vendors try to scare Android users and push their products, Google should focus on removing spam and malware from the Android Market and make it a safer place. Improving Android's security model and finding ways to install security updates faster are also important.

An upcoming Google Docs update will bring a better interface for selecting paragraph styles and new features that lets you customize styles.



Google Docs will also add some new open source fonts from the Web Fonts project: Amaranth, Arvo, Dancing Script, Lobster, Merriweather, Open Sans, Philosopher, Quattrocento.


Google has recently updated the Android app for Google Docs and added offline support, while also improving the reading layout for tablets.

Update (February 6): Custom styles are now available.

{ Thanks, J. }

Less than 2% of the Gmail users have enabled keyboard shortcuts and actually use them, but that doesn't mean Google shouldn't improve them. Many people complained that Gmail's rich text editor doesn't have a shortcut for inserting hyperlinks and now it's available: Ctrl+K (or Cmd-K if you use a Mac).


The same shortcut is also used in Outlook, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and other apps. "Just select any text, and then press the Ctrl and K keys at the same time. A dialogue box opens where you can type a link," informs the Microsoft Word blog.

I wonder why Google doesn't offer the option to use the top search result for the text you've selected or at least pick one of the top results from the "edit link" box.

{ Thanks, Cougar. }

Google found an interesting trick to defend Blogger blogs against local laws: redirect readers to country-specific domains and only remove those URLs if required.

"Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or 'ccTLD.' For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader's current location," explains Google.

"Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD." That means [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to exist, but it's not clear if the users from that specific country will still be able to access it.

Blogger will start to use country-specific domains, just like many other Google services. If you're in Australia and visit google.com, you'll be redirected to google.com.au, but you can opt-out by clicking "Go to Google.com" or visiting google.com/ncr. The same option is available for Blogger: "Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted NCR URL. NCR stands for 'No Country Redirect' and will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, whether you're in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog."

Google doesn't mention the list of countries that are affected by this change, but Techdows.com reports that India is one of them. Obviously, blog owners can use custom domains if they don't like the new feature. Even if Google made sure that the duplicate URLs are properly handled by search engines, it could be annoying to see so many URLs that send people to the same page.

{ Thanks, Venkat and Herin. }