If theres a popular Google product thats different from any other Google products and services, it must be Android. Most Google services got the basics right and then started to add features. Before you could use image search, video search, voice search and flight search, Google started with a clean interface and relevant results that loaded quickly. I still remember that Gmail didnt have a delete button or support for drafts when it launched, but it had support for conversations, search, 1GB of free storage and a great spam filter. Back in 2008, Chrome didnt support extensions, it was Windows-only, you couldnt even preview pages before printing them, but it was fast, it had a clutter-free interface and sandboxed tabs. Android is the odd one out because it didnt focus on the users, it focused on apps and developers. It started with great APIs for developers before building a great interface, it started with voice search before running fast, it started with live wallpapers and widgets before optimizing battery life. Its like releasing a slow and cluttered Chrome with tons of great APIs for developers or launching Google Search with a lot of advanced search operators and natural language understanding, but the results arent relevant and you need to wait a few seconds until theyre displayed. Customization is important, APIs and third-party apps are important, but getting the basics right is the most important. The first iPhone was great, even if it didnt support third-party apps, 3G, MMS and many other things. It had an impressive user interface and a few well-built apps. Everything else was added later: third-party apps, multitasking, notification center, folders. Android focused on APIs and third-party apps. HTC had to come up with Sense to sell some Android phones because Googles interface was just a placeholder. Other phone manufacturers created their own interfaces and system apps. A lot of innovative ideas, but not much common ground. The only things that connected all the different devices were the Android APIs. Ice Cream Sandwich changed all that: the Holo theme was mandatory, Android added support for hardware acceleration and apps started to look consistent. Then Jelly Bean and Project Butter addressed lag. Paul Buchheit, the man behind Gmail, has a great post titled "If your product is Great, it doesnt need to be Good." He explains how to build new products: "Whats the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise." Thats how Gmail started. "It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent. There was no rich text composer. The original address book was implemented in two days and did almost nothing." Android focused on the wrong things initially, but still won because it was the only significant alternative to iOS, so carriers, phone manufacturers and users embraced it. Now its hard to go back to the basics and fix them, make apps less powerful, remove APIs and focus on what matters on a mobile device: smooth experience and battery life. Note: I use both Android and iOS. Android has improved a lot lately (even though Android 4.2 looks like a step backward) and I hope that constructive criticism will make it even better.

Remember Gmails sponsored promotions, the feature that combined ads with email? Google found an intrusive way to display these ads in the new inbox interface: theyre added to the promotions tab and look almost like regular messages. Sure, they have a different background color and theres an "ad" label, but inbox tabs should only include your messages, not ads disguised as email. "Its a new type of ad which you can forward to a friend, or star to save it to your inbox. If you dismiss this ad, you wont see it again," informs Google. You can click "dismiss" or use the "x" icon to remove an ad. If you want to see all the sponsored promotions for your account, go to this page. With the new inbox tabs, Gmail no longer displays web clips (which are mostly ads) above/below the messages from your inbox, so it now shows ads in the promotions tab. Web clips could be disabled from the settings, but the new ads cant be disabled. The only thing you can do is to hide the promotions tab by clicking the gears button and selecting "configure inbox". When you hide the promotions tab, Gmail will bring back the web clips ads, but these can be disabled from the settings.

I dont know why Google Play Services is an app in Google Play, but some of the reviews are great. Its hard to review a system component that adds support for new APIs, so some of the reviewers got creative. Here are my favorite reviews: 1. "I was given a Nexus 7 by an old shaman in a yellow poncho. He told me to install this package and sacrifice a living watermelon to Utanapishti, singing the Bollywood rendition of Love Train as an offering of my adulation. Upon completion, all the disease and sickness in my village was cured, and we knew no more sadness. Also, Mark Wahlberg came to visit and gave us all Nexus 7s before he returned to the 8th dimension of Kajiik Masunraht." 2. "After i installed this my screen went from 4.6 inches to 5! I say it was well worth it. But the best part was using my phones NFC as a key for my mustang. I bet it would work on a mercedes, just put it up to the steering wheel and tap it to turn the car on. Dont forget to activate your free netflix subscription!!" 3. "I got a pony, and a car, and unicorn, and a pony, and a leprechaun, and a pot of gold, and a reindeer, and a computer, and a slave, and a Santa, and a genie, and a unlimited wishes voucher, and a pony." 4. "This app has taken over my life. Im addicted so bad that my wife took the kids and left me! Ooh well, its well worth it woooooooooo" 5. "This game is amazing, if you collect all the frogs, beat the mini game and unlock Knights of the Round once you beat Level 10, (God Mode) there is a bonus level. I beat the bonus boss and my phone suddenly started vibrating and transformed into only what I can imagine is a Samsung Galaxy S 6!" 6. "This app give me an extra Maps to Mordor! And i can take pictures of Nàzgul while in 3D Panoramic Mode. And I can control Curiosity on Mars too! Thank you Google!" 7. "Cannot recommend this enough. Seamless integration with my Atari 2600 and immersive soundtrack. Inspired!" 8. "This is without a doubt the best game on the entire play store. the graphics are beyond console quality and the storyline is better than mos movies these days. Level 8 is quite impossible though... Anyway, props to Google for a job well done!" 9. "This service of play is the best there is. Beats Apple 5 services which dont play well with anything. Google plays well...very well. So well, they even have this nifty service. All my friends with Android devices use it too. How my life has gotten better with Google Play services ?? Well, for one thing, I dont have to think any more. Google Services reads my mind, and does stuff for me...WELL in advance of when I would have probably done it.... Sends emails, sets reminders, ANSWERS emails before they even arrive! It is so awesome... Actually, this is Google service writing this so my owner didnt have to...... Im awesome." 10. "Reunited me with my dad 26 years after he said he was going to the store to buy milk and cigarettes." Another app with many funny reviews is Samsung Push Service. Heres an example: "After 2 months of staring at the divorce papers, I picked up the pen preparing to flush 10 years down the drain. At that moment, the app download it. Screeching tires in my driveway and my wife came running in the house and ripped up the papers. Thank you Samsung, you saved my life." Any other Google Play apps with funny reviews?

Google Maps shows a clever promo for Map Maker in the classic interface: "Is something missing? Edit Google Maps." Its probably an experiment, but the message always shows up when using this URL. Even without the promotional message, youll usually see an option to "Edit in Google Map Maker" at the bottom of the map, next to the copyright message. "Google Map Maker is a Google Maps service that allows you add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more. Using Google Map Maker tools, you can visually mark locations and add detailed information about these locations," informed a Google post back in 2008, when Map Maker was launched. At that time, Map Maker was only available for 17 countries, including Cyprus, Iceland, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Bahamas and Vietnam. Google continued to add new countries and the service now supports over 200 countries. "More than 40,000 people around the world are making contributions and improving Google Maps through Google Map Maker each month," announced Google in April, when the UK was added to Map Maker. OpenStreetMap has more than 1.2 million users, but less than 2% contribute to the project.

Google bombing has a new meaning, with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph. From [more evil than Satan himself] to [miserable failure], Google bombs were created by getting many web pages to link to the target homepage and use the same anchor text. For example, Microsoft haters linked to Microsofts homepage and used this anchor text back in 1999: [more evil than Satan himself]. After a few months, Googles top result for [more evil than Satan himself] was Microsofts homepage. Googles "Im Feeling Lucky" button made Google bombs more popular, many people thinking that Google modified search results pages. Heres a screenshot from 1999, well preserved by bedope.com: ... and the well-known political message "miserable failure" (screenshot from 2007): Google started to use some algorithms to defuse bombs in 2007, but there are still ways to artificially inflate Google rankings for a page to show your opinion. For example, when you search for [completely wrong], Google shows pictures of Mitt Romney, the Republican Nominee for the US Presidential Election in 2012. Knowledge Graph brings a new meaning to Google bombs. If you search for [kłamca], youll get a Knowledge Graph box for Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland. "Kłamca" is a Polish word that means "liar". In fact, many of the top results for [kłamca] are about Donald Tusk, who is no longer popular in Poland. Apparently, this Google bomb has been reported back in 2010 by Polish news sites. Back then, the top search result for [kłamca] was the Wikipedia page for Donald Tusk. Now Google shows an entire sidebar with information about the Prime Minister of Poland. This reminds me of a screenshot from 2009. This time its from Bing: As Search Engine Land noticed, when you search for [miserable failure] using Google right now, you get an info pane about Google bombs and some disambiguation links for George W. Bush and political Google bombs. { Thanks, Jerzy. }

It took awhile, but Googles unified storage is finally here for almost everyone (some people got the new feature earlier, it was gradually rolled out). As previously mentioned, the 25GB plan is no longer available and the most affordable plan offers 100GB for $4.99/month. You get 15GB of free storage for Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ Photos and you can buy additional storage (100GB, 200GB, 400GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB). Until now, the storage was only shared between Google Drive and Google+ Photos and you got 15GB of bonus storage for Gmail. Now the entire storage is shared between Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ Photos. Heres what happens after upgrading to the 100GB plan: Youll get this message: "_Thanks for purchasing a Google Drive storage plan. (...) Starting today, youll have this storage shared across Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. To manage this plan, visit google.com/settings/storage. Remember that with the purchase of this plan, you have priority access to phone, email, and chat support from one of our specialists. Contact us. Thanks for buying Google Drive storage, and welcome to the cloud!_" If you have an old plan, youll see some extra storage called "early adopter bonus". As Google says, "any storage purchases, promotions, or adjustments that have been applied to your account in the past will be reflected in your amount of unified storage. In other words, your storage space will not be decreased".

Theres an entertaining video that shows 2 Google employees (Mike LeBeau and Amanda Rosenberg) finding answers to various questions using Google Glass. One of the questions is: "who sings that song where the guy goes How Bizarre?" Google Glass provides the right answer (OMC) and lists a few sites that mention this answer. I asked a similar question using the mobile Google Search app and Google displayed the following message below the answer: "mentioned in results below". Its nice to see that Google understands verbose questions. Unfortunately, Google no longer mentions the sources that provide the answer. For example, a query like [everest height] used to return an answer, followed by a list of sources. Heres how it looks today, after the upgrade to the Knowledge Graph: Google extracts facts from various web pages, so listing some of the sources is appropriate and helps users find reputable sources of information. If the answer is wrong or its no longer accurate, Google can always point to the sources. As Wikipedia says, "verifiability means that people reading and editing the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source". Google mentions that the "Knowledge Graph isnt just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. Its also augmented at a much larger scale because were focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And its tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web." Heres an example of wrong answer: Googles answer for [hardware wars running time] is 60 minutes, even though the right answer is 13 minutes. Another wrong answer: Hardware Wars was actually released in 1978.

Sometimes its a good idea to look at stats and see how many people use Googles products. Here are some official stats for the most important Google services and software: Google Search - 1 billion users (September 2010), 100 billion searches per month (August 2012) Google Maps - 1 billion monthly active users (June 2012) YouTube - 1 billion unique users every month (March 2013) Android - 900 million activations (May 2013) Chrome - 750 million active users (May 2013) Gmail - 425 million active users (June 2012) Blogger - 300 million monthly visitors (September 2009) Google Translate - 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com (April 2012) Google+ - 190 million active users in the stream, 390 million active users across Google (May 2013) As you can see, there are at least 3 Google services that have more than 1 billion users: Search, Maps and YouTube. The number of Android activations is higher than the number of active users, since some of the devices are no longer used and there are users that have multiple Android devices.

When Google started to answer questions about nutrition, I wondered why the new feature was limited to voice search. Sure, you could use it in Android, iOS and even in Chrome for desktop, but why not show the same results in the regular search interface? Now you can search for [how many calories are in popcorn?], [steak calories], [how much vitamin a is in a carrot?] and many other similar queries from any browser. Just type the query and youll get an interactive info card and a long list of nutrition facts.

Chrome Frame is a clever plugin for Internet Explorer that loads pages using Chromes rendering engine if those pages include some code that requests this. It was released back in 2009, a few months after Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 8. Back then, Internet Explorer was the most popular browser, but it didnt include many HTML5 features and it was pretty slow. "With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5s offline capabilities and , to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions," explained Google back then. Now Chrome is the most popular browser, Internet Explorer 9 and 10 added a lot of HTML5 features, while the outdated IE versions have a declining market share. Chrome Frame is no longer that useful and Google decided to discontinue it and "cease support and updates for the product in January 2014". Chrome Frame was mostly used by companies. Google suggests IT administrators to deploy Chrome for Business and use the Legacy Browser Support extension to quickly switch to Internet Explorer for the older websites and apps that require IE. Another option is to keep using Chrome Frame even after January 2014 because it will continue to work. Heres the video that introduced Chrome Frame:

And here are some browser market share stats from StatCounter:

StatCounter - desktop stats

IE

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

March 2009

62.52%

1.73%

29.40%

2.73%

May 2013

27.72%

41.38%

19.76%

7.96%

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Just like Google Drive, Google+ Photos uses some amazing image recognition technology to make photos searchable, even if they dont have captions or useful filenames. "This is powered by computer vision and machine learning technology, which uses the visual content of an image to generate searchable tags for photos combined with other sources like text tags and EXIF metadata to enable search across thousands of concepts like a flower, food, car, jet ski, or turtle," explains Google. Google acquired DNNresearch, a start-up created by Professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto. They built "a system which used deep learning and convolutional neural networks and easily beat out more traditional approaches in the ImageNet computer vision competition designed to test image understanding." Google built and trained similar large-scale models and found that this approach doubles the average precision, compared to other object recognition methods. "We took cutting edge research straight out of an academic research lab and launched it, in just a little over six months," says Chuck Rosenberg, from the Google Image Search Team. The paper, titled "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks" [PDF], explains how this works. It uses supervised learning, 7 hidden weight layers and feature extractors learned from the data. "Our neural net has 60 million real-valued parameters and 650,000 neurons. It overfits a lot. Therefore we train on 224x224 patches extracted randomly from 256x256 images, and also their horizontal reflections." Google says that the publicly available photo search feature recognizes 1100 tags. "We came up with a set of about 2000 visual classes based on the most popular labels on Google+ Photos and which also seemed to have a visual component, that a human could recognize visually. In contrast, the ImageNet competition has 1000 classes. As in ImageNet, the classes were not text strings, but are entities, in our case we use Freebase entities which form the basis of the Knowledge Graph used in Google search. An entity is a way to uniquely identify something in a language-independent way. (...) Since we wanted to provide only high precision labels, we also refined the classes from our initial set of 2000 to the most precise 1100 classes for our launch." Some other examples of classes that are recognized: car, dance, kiss, meal, hibiscus, dahlia, sunsets, polar bear, grizzly bear. The system recognizes both generic visual concepts and specific objects. "Unlike other systems we experimented with, the errors which we observed often seemed quite reasonable to people. The mistakes were the type that a person might make - confusing things that look similar."

Back in April, Google launched a cool feature for mobile search that loaded Wikipedia articles faster. Quick View loaded pages in less than 100 milliseconds from Googles servers thanks to a few tricks. For some reason, the experimental feature is no longer available. The blue button is missing and Wikipedia articles are loaded just like any other search results. Maybe its a temporary issue. The Quick View sign-up form is still available. "Mobile quick view is an experimental new project that makes websites appear almost instantly (around 100 milliseconds) after you click on a search result. More and more people are searching on the mobile web, and we will continue to work together with webmasters on making it faster and better. Sign up below to get updates about participating in the mobile quick view field trial," suggests Google.

Google has finally released an Android app for Cloud Print. The application lets you print from any Android device to a Cloud Print-enabled printer, send files to other Android devices or save them to Google Drive as PDF files. You can also track the status of your print jobs. Until now, you had to use third-party apps. One way to print a file is using the "print" button from the application and selecting the file you want to print. Make sure youve installed a file manager like ES File Explorer or OI File Manager to be able to print other files than images. Another option is to use the "share" button or menu item from almost any Android app and select "Cloud Print". For example, you can open a web page in Chrome for Android, pick "share" from the menu and you can print the entire page. You can also select some text from the page and print the text selection. There are a lot of Cloud Print-enabled printers from Canon, Brother, HP, Samsung, Epson, Dell. If you dont have one of these modern printers, you can still use the app if youve installed Chrome on your computer and enabled the Cloud Print connector (you computer needs to be on when youre printing). Speaking of Cloud-ready printers, do you have one? Does it work well with Google Cloud Print? Im trying to find the best home office laser printer that supports Cloud Print. { Thanks, Daniel. }

Theres a new section in the Google Account settings page: recent activity. Google shows a list of recent sign-ins and other security-related actions, with information about the browser, device, IP address and approximate location. The feature seems similar to Gmails account activity feature, but its not. Gmails feature shows information about about recent activity, whether its from a browser or an email client, and its only limited to Gmail. Googles new recent activity feature shows "security-related actions youve taken, like signing in to your Google Account, changing your password, or adding a recovery email address or phone number. This information is for your entire Google Account, so sign-ins from any Google product (such as Blogger, Gmail, or YouTube) will be listed in this section." Theres a subtle difference: "A sign-in is only listed when youve actually typed your username and password to sign in. For example, if youve been signed in to your account for several weeks on your phone, checking your email from time to time, well only list the time and location of your initial sign-in." Thats not the case for Gmails account activity feature, which is not limited to the initial sign-ins. In other related news, Google has a new security dashboard that shows information about your password, recovery options, notifications for unusual activity, 2-step verification and connected applications/sites. { Thanks, Florian K. and Herin. }

Google Image Search shows two arrows when you click a search results. The two buttons let you go to the previous or the next result. Until now, you could only use keyboard shortcuts (left/right arrow keys) to navigate between results. Im sure that website owners wont like this feature because its much easier to go to the next image result, but users will like it. Maybe Google will also add a slideshow mode in full-screen, so that you dont have to click the "next" button over and over again.

When it comes to hardware, Im usually a late adopter. Just when most people expect to see the Nexus 7 refresh, I decided to buy last years hardware. There are many things that deterred me from buying an Android tablet: from the aspect ratio to the hardware issues and the lack of tablet-optimized apps. Google got serious about tablets last year when it launched 2 tablets and started to encourage developers to build tablet-optimized apps. Andy Rubins stance didnt help. Now there are special sections for tablet-optimized apps in Google Play and thats a great thing. Tablets need apps that take advantage of the bigger screen, not bigger phone apps. I usually dont write reviews, so dont expect a Nexus 7 review. Its light, compact, there are many apps that work well and are more useful than their phone versions. Im still not convinced that 16:10 is the right aspect ratio for a tablet: Chrome feels cramped and browsing the web is not a comfortable experience, especially in the landscape mode. Im the one who writes tips and tricks, so this may sound surprising: any tips for a new Nexus 7 user? You had one year to find all the great apps, hidden features, workarounds and use cases. Note: Ill be gone on a short vacation for about a week. Ill read your tips, but dont expect new blog posts.

A few weeks ago, I posted about a new Google Image Search experiment for related searches. Now its no longer an experiment. Google shows some thumbnails next to the related searches, so you can preview the results and see if those queries are relevant. Until now, you had to mouse over the results to see the thumbnails. Click one of the related searches and you can see bigger versions of the same thumbnails. Theres an extra click to actually see all the results.

Chrome Beta for Android added a few weeks ago a cool graph that shows how much data you save using the compression proxy. Just go to Chromes settings, select "Bandwidth management", "Reduce data usage" and make sure that the feature is enabled. The numbers arent impressive if you open mobile-optimized sites, but this changes when you visit standard desktop sites. The nice thing is that Googles proxy doesnt slow down browsing, so you may not even notice that youre using it. For some reason, this is the only way to enable Safe Browsing, which protects you from phishing and malware and its enabled by default in the desktop Chrome. Heres a neat URL that helps you test if Safe Browsing works: http://malware.testing.google.test/testing/malware/. So, whats your savings percentage?

Back in March, Google announced that the CalDav API for Google Calendar will no longer be open to everyone. "CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers, and will be shut down for other developers on September 16, 2013. Most developers use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API, which we recommend using instead." Now Google changed its mind and decided to keep the CalDav API public and to make the CardDav API for Google Contacts available for everyone. "Since that announcement, we received many requests for access to CalDAV, giving us a better understanding of developers use cases and causing us to revisit that decision." Thats a great news because you can access your calendars and contacts in future third-party apps that couldnt be whitelisted by Google because they havent been created yet. Google still promotes the Calendar API and the Contacts API, which offer more features. Its also a good PR move, now that Google has been accused that it no longer cares about open standards. "Google, long a champion of open standards and one click away competition, has started dumping open standards, ostensibly to force fealty to Google products," says Matt Asay.

Yet another stock system Android app is uploaded to Google Play: the keyboard. Changing your keyboard is one of the distinctive features of Android: you cant do this in iOS. Its the stock Android 4.2 keyboard, but it only requires Android 4.0. That means more users can try Googles keyboard (not just Nexus users) and the keyboard will improve faster, detached from the operating system updates. Googles stock keyboard has been uploaded to Google Play by third-party developers, but this time its the official version and more people will install it. "Google Keyboard has Gesture Typing (which lets you glide through letters to form a word, just lift your finger to enter a space), automatic error correction, and word predictions. You can also tap the microphone to compose messages with Voice Typing when you’re on-the-go. Together with dictionaries for 26 languages (plus keyboard layouts for a dozen more), it provides a fast, accurate, and reliable typing experience," informs Google. For now, the app is restricted to a few countries, so you may see this message: "This item cannot be installed in your devices country". Google says its initially available for "English-speaking locales but theyll be adding more countries soon". Android Police has download links for the APK file, so you can bypass the restrictions.