Polish up the old Google
Saturday, October 21, 2006
I follow the inner workings of Google frequently through the excellent blogs "Google Blogoscoped" and " InsideGoogle ". I get excited when new google products are announced, when upgrades are implemented and generally every time Google makes my Internet life a little easier. A Gmail and Reader tab lie open continually, I use Google ad products to promote and earn from, I use google bookmarks, search history, personalized homepage, calendar, groups and obviously search. I am sure I have at least dabbled with most other releases also. So I sing my praises where I can, indeed I spent a half hour session with my last boss showing him all the ins and outs of Gmail and all those subtle little features you need someone to showcase.
But then again not everything is perfect in the increasingly large and amorphous world of the GOOG. In general, the spate of recent releases and acquisitions over the last year or so has left Google with an assortment of great and good products that need more dedicated development time and overall integration with other services to become truly useful. It has become increasingly difficult to find or even remember that Google has a suitable method for dealing with a certain enquiry. Google's aim is to organise and make available the world's information - I fail to see how this can be achieved when their own development procedure and release methodologies lead towards an increasingly difficult plane to circumnavigate. It is a white-walled maze -
The faintest ilk of an integration process between products is apparent in the new blue bar atop of Gmail and other services, a loose link to the other tools you haven't yet used. I will now take this opportunity to list some areas within google products and services that I feel should be addressed, improved or provided, paying particular attention to the idea of focused integration and improved user experience.
The simplest and most effective integration is to provide access to all search services through a single search box. Blog search, News search, Book search, Scholar, Groups, Images, Finance, Video, Froogle, Maps, Code search - they all require you to visit their little section of google. For certain search terms one box results appear suggesting a search using a different tool and the top alternative search links are available for video, images, etc. The recent addition of the pop-up more box is also helpful. But I feel this is not enough.
There is no method to simultaneously search more than one service. This could be addressed using search operators within the search box, for instance:
Search History, an invaluable tool needs expanding to all of Google's search services also. It is slowly getting there and I imagine in a few months it will be available for most if not all services. Why not expand this service to let users choose what histories they wish to keep and discard? Why not provide a search operator that automatically excludes a search term from the search history ( e.g. #nohistory). With the power of Firefox's extensibility search history could also be expanded to search boxes on domains of a user's choosing. For instance I often want to see what I have searched for on Wikipedia, YouTube or various coding sites. To save terms searched for on any domain would be a powerful tool. Obviously for the sake of privacy and security this should be opt-in by the user and they should retain complete control over the data being stored. Of course this could be expanded to an extension that stores your history online and saves search terms from all sites - but this would generate a slew of privacy fears from the quite right security zealots.
Tools are the second big issue and these should ultimately be integrated. The recent greasemonkey script that puts Reader into Gmail is the clearest and most influential indication of the power of integration. At present I have to login using a hundred different forms to access a hundred different tools that have little to no interoperability. The Reader into gmail approach is a nice idea and one that could be expanded up on:
But then again not everything is perfect in the increasingly large and amorphous world of the GOOG. In general, the spate of recent releases and acquisitions over the last year or so has left Google with an assortment of great and good products that need more dedicated development time and overall integration with other services to become truly useful. It has become increasingly difficult to find or even remember that Google has a suitable method for dealing with a certain enquiry. Google's aim is to organise and make available the world's information - I fail to see how this can be achieved when their own development procedure and release methodologies lead towards an increasingly difficult plane to circumnavigate. It is a white-walled maze -
For all is clean and clear but hidden behind a thousand doors.
The faintest ilk of an integration process between products is apparent in the new blue bar atop of Gmail and other services, a loose link to the other tools you haven't yet used. I will now take this opportunity to list some areas within google products and services that I feel should be addressed, improved or provided, paying particular attention to the idea of focused integration and improved user experience.
The simplest and most effective integration is to provide access to all search services through a single search box. Blog search, News search, Book search, Scholar, Groups, Images, Finance, Video, Froogle, Maps, Code search - they all require you to visit their little section of google. For certain search terms one box results appear suggesting a search using a different tool and the top alternative search links are available for video, images, etc. The recent addition of the pop-up more box is also helpful. But I feel this is not enough.
There is no method to simultaneously search more than one service. This could be addressed using search operators within the search box, for instance:
- " Iraq War #blog #news" could search both blog search and news search for results on the Iraq War - or alternatively "searchblog,searchnews:Iraq War"
- "Scarlett Johansson #images #video" to search for both videos and images.
- "Literary criticism #books #scholar -#normalsearch " a search for literary criticism in books and scholar, excluding normal google search
- "all:Johnny Depp" searches all services and provides for example the top result for each with an expandable box that can provide a further 5 results or a list of results similar to normal queries but with an icon indicating which service generated the result and left-aligned thumbnails for images, videos, etc. For instance the list could contain first a link to Depp's IMDB page, secondly a link and thumbnail for the trailer to Pirates of the Caribbean 2, thirdly some images and fourthly a recent blog post.
- "media:Buffy the Vampire Slayer" - automatically searches the media services for information (e.g. images, video)
- " research:Capacitive Tomography" - automatically searches .edu and .ac.uk sites, scholar, books, wikipedia and other valued resources.
- "latest:Halo Movie " - automatically searches news, blogs and sites recently updated.
Search History, an invaluable tool needs expanding to all of Google's search services also. It is slowly getting there and I imagine in a few months it will be available for most if not all services. Why not expand this service to let users choose what histories they wish to keep and discard? Why not provide a search operator that automatically excludes a search term from the search history ( e.g. #nohistory). With the power of Firefox's extensibility search history could also be expanded to search boxes on domains of a user's choosing. For instance I often want to see what I have searched for on Wikipedia, YouTube or various coding sites. To save terms searched for on any domain would be a powerful tool. Obviously for the sake of privacy and security this should be opt-in by the user and they should retain complete control over the data being stored. Of course this could be expanded to an extension that stores your history online and saves search terms from all sites - but this would generate a slew of privacy fears from the quite right security zealots.
Tools are the second big issue and these should ultimately be integrated. The recent greasemonkey script that puts Reader into Gmail is the clearest and most influential indication of the power of integration. At present I have to login using a hundred different forms to access a hundred different tools that have little to no interoperability. The Reader into gmail approach is a nice idea and one that could be expanded up on:
- "Files" - A list of documents related to your google account i.e. those in spreadsheets and docs, groups (files in the new beta), pages and possibly Gmail attachments. The list could indicate permissions, size, file type, last accessed and direct links to editing them online (or an automatic process to edit them locally and re-upload only changes using the Google desktop search client). This could extend to directly editing Gmail attachments without having to download and re-upload to docs. Photos from Picasa and uploaded blogger files could also be included in this list. Each of these files could also be labelled as per the gmail tradition and of course be search-able both for the file and in the file.
- "History" - An integration of search history into Gmail that could include terms you have used to search through your mail and "saved searches" that could be quite complex (like the greasemonkey script " save persistent searches")
- "Blog" - Post directly to blogger from Gmail without having to send posts via email - I much prefer the editor in Gmail and I generally use it to compose all of my posts. The ability to edit from Gmail would also save me having to login to blogger to correct changes or add after thoughts - especially considering I have Gmail open all the time. Once again a list of previous posts and associated files could be made and use the new blogger-beta labelling system. Add multiple blogs in settings.
- "Schedule" - Show calendar inside Gmail - please, please please.
- "Links" - A list of hyperlinks that have appeared in emails or multiple emails recently with the option to store them to Google Bookmarks. The number of times I have to search for the email that contained the link to the web page I have forgotten is annoying.
- Make all of the above options smart (i.e. don't show blogs if they don't have a blogger account) and give the user the ability to disable them.
- "Add word to dictionary" option within Gmail rich text editor, though this may be redundant considering the new spellcheck feature coming in Firefox 2.0.
- Save advanced search options to account not just locally - I like to see 100 results and have SafeSearch off, this often gets reset.
- Use the inline expansion of topics in Reader within Gmail to quickly read new mail as an option and to provide some sort of consistent interface.
- Quick add items to calendar using Gmail or Google search boxes (e.g. using calendar:) operator.
- Gmail: Use label colour coding as shown by Matt Cutts.
- Gmail: Relegate Spam to a label that incoming mail can also be applied to.
- Gmail: Export to PDF (and other similar formats in 'docs') for emails.
- Gmail: Provide extra security, a search for "password" in gmail should ask the user to input their account password again to ensure Gmail has not been left logged in accidentally.
- A session management console. Oops I left myself logged in on a public PC - delete the session remotely to preserve security.
- Zeitgeist for email - who has emailed me most, who have I emailed most, most popular email domains, who have I chatted to most, etc.
- In Google Reader, let it recognise my own site feed (or let me define this) and if it's blogger provide a link to quickly and efficiently edit the post.
Posted by FofR
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