100 Million "Active" Users?

In January, for example the company's CEO Larry Page said that the site had 90 million users at that time and that "+users are very engaged with our products — over 60% of them engage daily, and over 80% weekly." That, however, was a pretty misleading statement. While it may sound that Page was saying that 60% of Google+ users come back to Google+ every day, his argument was simply that 60% of those users who signed up for Google+ also use any other Google+ service on a daily basis. Those numbers said absolutely nothing about the engagement Google+ is seeing from its users.

Today, Google's VP for engineering Vic Gundotra – in what is clearly a reaction to the WSJ piece – talked to the New York Times' Nick Bilton and once again used the same kind of tactic. "On a daily basis, 50 million people who have created a Google Plus account actively use the company’s Google Plus-enhanced products, Mr. Gundotra said. Over a 30-day period, he said, that number is 100 million active users." Google+, of course, is now part of virtually every other Google product, including search, which most of the company's users probably use on a daily basis without ever trying to actively engage with the company's social network.

Nice, Meaningless Numbers

Google is obviously trying to paint a nice picture here by using large numbers that, at the end of the day, say nothing about Google+ and how engaged its users are. Maybe things are great at Google+ and it has a huge, highly active community (though most of us aren't seeing it in our own accounts). The problem with this is that unless Google provides us with any concrete data, it just looks as if the company has something to hide.

In it research, Google found that most searches for a symptom are followed by a search for a related condition. To save its users some time, the search engine's algorithms now automatically discover the kinds of conditions are related to certain symptoms.

According to Google's chief health strategist Roni Zeiger, it's important to remember that this list is generated by algorithms and not authored by doctors.

It's worth noting that Microsoft's Bing, in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, has featured support for enhanced health search results for more than two years now.

Another interesting tweak is that images on high-quality landing pages will now rank higher in image search results. The quality of related searches, which often appear at the bottom of the search results page, has also been improved.

Here is a complete list of the tweaks and new features Google announced today:

• Fresher results. [launch codename “nftc”] We made several adjustments to the freshness algorithm that we released in November. These are minor updates to make sure we continue to give you the freshest, most relevant results.
• Faster autocomplete. [launch codename “Snappy Suggest”, project codename “Suggest”] We made improvements to our autocomplete system to deliver your predicted queries much faster.
• Autocomplete spelling corrections. [launch codename “Trivial”, project codename “Suggest”] This is an improvement to the spelling corrections used in autocomplete, making those corrections more consistent with the spelling corrections used in search. This launch targets corrections where the spelling change is very small.
• Better spelling full-page replacement. [launch codenames “Oooni”, “sgap”, project codename “Full-Page Replacement”] When we’re confident in a spelling correction we automatically show results for the corrected query and let you know we’re “Showing results for [cheetah]” (rather than, say, “cheettah”). We made a couple of changes to improve the accuracy of this feature.
• Better spelling corrections for rare queries. This change improves one of the models that we use to make spelling corrections. The result is more accurate spell corrections for a number of rare queries.
• Improve detection of recurrent event pages. [launch codename “neseda”] We made several improvements to how we determine the date of a document. As a result, you’ll see fresher, more timely results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events.
• High-quality sites algorithm improvements. [launch codenames “PPtl” and “Stitch”, project codename “Panda”] In 2011, we launched the Panda algorithm change, targeted at finding more high-quality sites. We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines. We also released a minor update to refresh the data for Panda.
• Cross-language refinements. [launch codename Xiangfan] Previously, we only generated related searches based on the display language. With this change, we also attempt to auto-detect the language of the original query to generate related search queries. Now, a user typing a query in French might see French query refinements, even if her language is set to English.
• English on Google Saudi Arabia. Users in Saudi Arabia can now more easily choose an English interface to search on google.com.sa.
• Improved scrolling for Image Search. Previously when you scrolled in Image Search, only the image results would move while the top and side menus were pinned in place. We changed the scrolling behavior to make it consistent with our main search results and the other search modes, where scrolling moves the entire page.
• Improved image search quality. [launch codename “endearo”, project codename “Image Search”] This is a small improvement to our image search ranking algorithm. In particular, this change helps images with high-quality landing pages rank higher in our image search results.
• More relevant related searches. Sometimes at the bottom of the screen you’ll see a section called “Searches related to” with other queries you may want to try. With this change, we’ve updated the model for generating related searches, resulting in more useful query refinements.
• Blending of news results. [launch codename “final-destination”, project codename “Universal Search”] We improved our algorithm that decides which queries should show news results, making it more responsive to realtime trends. We also made an adjustment to how we blend news results in Universal Search. Both of these changes help news articles appear in your search results when they are relevant.
• Automatically disable Google Instant based on computer speed. [project codename “Psychic Search”] Google Instant has long had the ability to automatically turn itself off if you’re on a slow internet connection. Now Instant can also turn itself off if your computer is slow. If Instant gets automatically disabled, we continue to check your computer speed and will re-enable Instant if your performance improves. We’ve also tweaked search preferencesso you can always have Instant on or off, or have it change automatically.

The Temporary Solution

If you just want to see what your regular results without search+ would look like, you can just use the toggle in the top right corner of the screen. This selection isn't sticky, however, and Google will just revert to Search+ the next time you come back to Google to search (note: you will only see this toggle once Search+ is enable for your account).

If you want to switch the default to non-personalized results, though, you have to do a tiny little bit more work.

Going Nuclear

Step 1: head to the search settings menu by clicking on the cogwheel in the top right corner of the screen and click on "search settings"

Step 2: Scroll down a bit and look for the "Personal results" section. Select "Do not use personal results."

Step 3: Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the blue "Save" button.

Search+ is now off by default, but you can still use the regular toggle to turn it on for this specific search session again.

Oddly enough, though, it's now a month later and very few users actually have actually seen the new design yet. That's a very slow roll-out, especially by Google's standards.

If you don't have access to the new Google Bar and Google Menu, though, fret not. Here is the official word from Mountain View about the rollout. According to a Google spokesperson, the roll-out is proceeding as planned: "Since its launch, we rolled out the new Google bar to some users and are looking to broaden the rollout in the coming weeks."

Clearly, this new design affects virtually all of Google's properties, so it's obviously a massive roll-out. Somehow, though, I can't help but feel that Google jumped the gun a bit with its announcement.

Given the short attention span of the tech blogosphere, it also shouldn't come as a surprise then that some of the writers who are seeing the new design pop up here and there now think it's actually an experiment.

In addition – and just in time before the holidays – Google is also launching a doodle store on Zazzle, where you can get shirts, cards, posters, bumper stickers, mugs, stamps and other swag with your favorite doodles going back all the way to the year 2000. Until now, the only place to get doodle-themed swag was Google's employee store, which sadly isn't open to the public (though Google's employees are allowed to bring in a guest or two).

When Google first announced this program, the company stressed that it was mostly interested in working with independent local merchants. Merchants also had to apply to be included in this program. True to form, the new indoor Street View images come from small, independent stores, including the comic book store you can see below.

Interestingly, it doesn’t look as if these images are linked to the larger Street View and the surrounding streets, though. Instead, the only way to get to them right now, it seems, is by going through the business’ Place Page. It would be nice if Google made finding these images a bit easier.

As one business owner pointed out on Hacker News earlier today, the total visit from the Google team took about 20-30 minutes (though things didn’t go right the first time around and they had to come back).

It’s worth noting, by the way, that Microsoft’s Bing has been offering interior views of some businesses since last December.

As Google notes, this new data should help researchers and developers to “revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online.”

The self-governing parliamentary Cook Islands in the South Pacific made their debut this year. As Google only received fewer than ten request from the former British protectorate, it won’t release any data about the nature of these requests.

As for the U.S., Google specifically notes that it did not comply with a number of requests that would have resulted in the deletion of videos that were allegedly portraying police violence. With regard to China, Google also notes that it received three requests to remove a total of 121 items from its services. Two involved AdWords and Google complied with those, but the company notes that it has “withheld details about one request because [it has] reason to believe that the Chinese government has prohibited [it] from full disclosure.”

You can find the full report here.

A few months ago, after a long regulatory delay, Google finally closed on its acquisition of ITA Software, a major supplier of IT solutions for airlines and travel services (including Orbitz and many major U.S.-based airlines). This flight search feature is the first fruit of this acquisition and finally gets Google a strong foothold in the travel market – a potentially lucrative market that Google, for some reason, waited a long time to enter.

Features

There are obviously already plenty of flight booking services out there, ranking from Kayak to Hipmunk. For the most part, Google offers the same feature set to search for flights and lets you filter by airline, airline alliance, departure time, etc.

Google, however, is using some smart visualization features to get ahead of the competition. You can, for example, easily compare flight duration and price on a scatter graph and then use the built-in slider to filter out flights that are too long or expensive. The list of available flights is then updated in real time.

There are also advanced tools, including the ability to search for multiple nearby airports and the ability to discover days when tickets are the cheapest. You can also easily compare the prices on different dates.

Verdict: A Winner

While still limited by the low number of airports it currently supports, it’s already clear that Google has a winner on its hands here. In testing the service, it quickly becomes clear that it is faster and easier to use than Kayak and similar services.

The deal, it should be noted, still has to receive regulatory approval from the appropriate agencies in the U.S., Europe and other countries, so it could take a while before this deal goes into effect and the full ramifications of it become clear.

What Did Google Just Buy?

Motorola Mobility: the focus of Motorola’s Mobility unit is the mobile phone business. Until January 2011, this unit was known as Motorola’s Mobile Devices division, but at that point, it was split off from the parent company and became its own business. Once upon a time (in the 1990s), Motorola was among the top manufacturers in the mobile phone business. Since then, though, its competitors like Nokia and Samsung leaped ahead – both with regards to technology as well as sales. Motorola is now the seventh largest handset manufacturer and focuses exclusively on Android-based devices.

With regards to financials, Motorola Mobility’s revenue for 2010 was $11.4 billion with an operating income of $76 million. The company has 19,000 employees (Google itself had about 29,000 until now).

Why?

The obvious question to ask here is why Google would be interested in this deal. Motorola itself decided to split its mobility unit from the rest of its business so it could shop it around. This sale itself then doesn’t come as a real surprise – the surprise is that Google bought it.

• Patents: the current state of the patent system keeps big companies in a constant cold war-like state where the mutual threat of patent litigation keeps all sides from attacking each other. Google, however, doesn’t have many mobile-related patents, so it’s hard for the company to defend Android from attacks (specifically from Microsoft and Apple). Google CEO Larry Page: “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”
  Interestingly, Motorola itself was also planning to sue a few of the other Android manufacturers before this acquisition. In a way, Google is protecting its own ecosystem from Motorola by this acquisition, too.
• Integrating hardware and software to rival Apple: Apple’s success in controlling both the hardware and software side of its business has shown that this is really the way for the mobile industry and that customers – for the most part – prefer this model. While Google regularly releases its “Nexus” reference phones to show vendors what it expects an Android phone to look like, the Android market has suffered badly from the fragmentation of the market – especially when it comes to providing software updates. By controlling both sides of the business, Google can force the other manufacturers to keep up.
• A foothold in the living room: this has gone relatively under-reported, but as Larry Dignan rightly notes, Motorola Mobility is also one of the world’s largest suppliers of cable boxes. This isn’t a business that moves very fast (how often does your provider update your cable box?), but in the long run, this could allow Google to bring its technology into more living rooms (the GoogleTV project, after all, wasn’t exactly a huge success).

Potential Problems

• Motorola is no Apple: while integrating the software and hardware business makes for larger margins and hopefully for better products, Motorola hasn’t exactly shown the kind of design finesse we’ve come to expect from Apple. It’ll be interesting to see if Google can turn this around.
• What will the other Android smartphone makers say? Henry Blodget rightly asks how HTC, LG, Samsung and the other handset makers will react to this. Officially, they all say that they love this deal, but there is surely an undercurrent of anxiety there as well. Are these companies going to feel as if Google is “stabbing them in the back,” as Blodget says?
• Google is not a hardware company: The hardware business is fiercely competitive and includes far more moving parts than any other business Google has ever entered. Despite its size, Google has never been very good at marketing – something that is essential in the consumer electronics business.

This means that some Labs experiments will soon end, while others will be rolled into other products and technologies. Google notes, though, that many of those experiments that are currently available as Android apps will continue to be available in the Android Market.

What Will Happen to All the Cool Stuff in Google Labs?

Google Labs was always a fun part of Google and included experiments like Google Scribe, the web-based 3D demo Google Body and other tools for users and developers that weren’t quite ready to be stand-alone products or features yet. Some of the experiments, of course, weren’t that useful (remember Intersection Explorer?). Others, however, like Art Project, were very interesting. Hopefully we will see some of the more useful ones again in some other form.

Focus and Prioritization Instead of Public Experiments

Just last week, Google’s co-founder and current CEO Larry Page noted (on Google+, of course) that the company wants to simplify and streamline its product lines and that “focus and prioritization” will be what will drive Google forward in the coming years. Clearly, focusing on public experiments is not part of this strategy.

Given that it is just a window into the mobile site, it has the same limitation as that version of Google+. You can’t really share links well and while you can +1 posts, you can’t +1 comments or easily post + replies. As the mobile site expects to run in a window with a fixed width and length, you also can’t resize the GClient window on the desktop. While testing the app, we also had some issues with crashes.

Just Use Fluid for Now

GClient is an interesting way to keep tabs on what is happening on Google+ without having to have a tab open for it at all times. For now, though, I would rather use an application-specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Chrome’s application shortcut feature (or Mozilla’s Prism) to let Google+ run in its own window. This solution gives you the full functionality of Google+ without having to make any compromises. Once Google+ gets an API, we will likely see more interesting, Tweetdeck-like re-imaginations of its interface that make more sense on the desktop.

[Source: The Next Web]

Google, being late to the party, had the advantage of being able to learn from Twitter, Facebook and every other social network out there right now.

Note: I’m consciously not saying that it’s a threat to Facebook (at least not for now), as I think the group dynamics and strong network effect that made Facebook what it is today will continue to be relevant and have locked users in for now.

Twitter’s Problem and Google’s Advantage

What Google+ makes abundantly clear is that Twitter’s success was a happy accident. While Google was able to bake all of Twitter’s current core functions (status updates, /replies/retweets/shares/photo sharing etc.) into its service at launch, Twitter grew organically. That, at the time, was to Twitter’s advantage. Now, however, it is holding the company’s growth back, as those conventions that grew out of this are anything but intuitive for newcomers. Indeed, one could argue that everything Twitter has done over the last few months was meant to rein this chaos in.

Why Twitter Should be Concerned

So here is why I think Twitter should be very concerned:

It’s Everywhere Google Is: Google added a Google+ notification icon to the Sandbar (the black bar that sits on top of every Google product now). It’s crack. It keeps drawing you back to Google+. If you regularly use search, Gmail or Google Docs, Google+ will also be just one click away.

Even though Google’s +1 buttons don’t do much yet, those buttons will soon be connected to Google+ in some form as well, giving Google+ an instant presence on virtually every major website.

Circles: Google took Twitter’s asymmetric follower model and put some great twists on it. Thanks to this, you can use Google+ just like you would use Twitter: to follow interesting people. When they share something publicly, it will appear in your stream.

While Google is mostly describing circles as a way to share content privately or semi-privately with select groups, it’s also an easy way to create Twitter-like lists with interesting people you would like to follow. Consuming content – whether from your friends or media brands – will become a major part of the Google+ experience.

Comments: Twitter’s @replies are clunky at best and hard to explain to new users. On Google+, you just leave a comment and a real and real-time discussion can form around the content. That is far more compelling and easier to use than using @replies. Google uses +replies in these comment threads to make these discussions even easier to follow and to push out notifications to the Sandbar when somebody mentions you.

Google+ Will be a Platform: Currently, there are no APIs for developers to write products that could hook into Google+. That means we can’t have aggregation tools, third-party clients or anything else that has become standard in the Twitter ecosystem right now.

All of that is coming, though, and while Twitter has managed to squander most of its developer community’s trust, Google doesn’t have to worry about that at all. Indeed, Google will likely be able to offer access to the Google+ firehose to anybody who wants it, free of charge.

No artificial character limits: For a long time now, Twitter’s proponents have argued that Twitter’s 140 character limit was an advantage. It keeps posts brief and to the point. Once you use Google+ for a bit, though, you come to realize that those constraints are really just annoying at the end – and likely hard to explain to a mainstream user anyway.

Google Doesn’t Have to Worry About Monetization: After all these years, Twitter still hasn’t figure out how to make money in a way that won’t alienate its users. Google can just stick some AdSense ads into the Google+ sidebar if it really wants to monetize Google+ directly.

Hangouts: Built-in video chats are a killer feature. Nobody else is doing anything this slick right now.

There are lots of other small reasons why I think Google+ could threaten Twitter: built-in photo sharing, for example, the potential for making it a platform for working collaboratively and extending it to every other Google product in some form. Then, there are the mobile apps for the mobile web, Android and iPhone (iPhone is coming soon). Those include a group messaging feature and Foursquare-like check-ins.

What do You Think?

What do you think? I’m I too optimistic about Google+ here and too down on Twitter? Let me know in the comments.

How Google Identifies Authors

In order to get this to work, writers will have to ensure that they have a Google Profile that is linked to their sites and that they use Google’s new authorship markup (specifically, the rel=”author” tag) to ensure that Google knows who wrote any given story on your site. A number of large sites, including the New York Times, have already implemented the necessary tags to highlight their authors. Adding the necessary tags to most blogs should be relatively easy for most writers, too, but for the time being, this new feature is just available in a limited pilot, though Google expects to expand this program over time.

Google, of course, has been struggling to prevent the mediocre content that most of today’s content farms push out from polluting its search results. With the recent updates to its search algorithms, it has made some strides in this direction. While it’s not directly linked to weeding out content farms, this new feature is meant to highlight content from people Google trusts. Indeed, Google argues that its users will trust content more when they know the writer and – at the same time – writers will hopefully do a better job at writing when they know their name is prominently linked to their stories.

Microsoft’s Goal: High-Resolution Aerial Images Everywhere

The tour features 154 locations and is worth a look, but what’s even more interesting is the technology and ambition behind this project. Microsoft aims to cover all of the U.S. and Western Europe with high-resolution images of at least 30cm (this program will likely expand beyond these two regions later). Since the project began in August 2010, Microsoft’s Colorado-based Bing Imagery Technologies team has finished just under half of this project and expects to complete it by the middle of 2012. After that, a regular refresh cycle will take the place of the initial imagery release schedule and the team will work on providing high-resolution images for the rest of the world.

To get these consistent images, Microsoft is working with partners who all use the same kind of camera: Microsoft’s own UltraCam digital aerial camera. Once these photos are taken, Microsoft’s team processes the images to ensure the quality is consistent before they appear in Bing Maps. According to Microsoft, the system currently uses “in excess of 16,500 compute cores and roughly 55 petabytes of storage.”

You can find out a bit more about how all of this works in the video below: