Hide sites to find more of what you want

Over the years we’ve experimented with a number of ways to help you personalize the results you find on Google, from SearchWiki to stars in search to location settings. Now there’s yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don’t want to see.

You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”

As always, Matt’s been gracious enough to let us use him as an example. His site is awesome, though, and we doubt many people will want to block it!

Once you click the link to “Block all example.com results” you’ll get a confirmation message, as well as the option to undo your choice. You’ll see the link whether or not you’re signed in, but the domains you block are connected with your Google Account, so you’ll need to sign in before you can confirm a block.

Once you’ve blocked a domain, you won’t see it in your future search results. (Side note: Sometimes you may have to search on a new term, rather than simply refreshing your browser, before you'll notice the domain has been successfully removed.) The next time you’re searching and a blocked page would have appeared, you’ll see a message telling you results have been blocked, making it easy to manage your personal list of blocked sites. This message will appear at the top or bottom of the results page depending on the relevance of the blocked pages.

You can see a list of your blocked sites in a new settings page, which you can access by visiting your Search Settings or clicking on the “Manage blocked sites” link that appears when you block a domain. On the settings page you can find details about the sites you’ve blocked, block new sites, or unblock sites if you’ve changed your mind.

We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future. The new feature is rolling out today and tomorrow on google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+, and we’ll be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon. We hope you find it useful, and we’ll be listening closely to your suggestions.

Posted by Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang, Search Quality Engineers

Improvements to Product Search for this holiday season

Every year retailers start the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier—and still I procrastinate until late December before getting started. This year I've already made my list and I’m ready to go.

I usually get my holiday shopping done in two ways: online (e-commerce) and offline (“brick and mortar” stores). I’ve found that shopping online is best when you know what you're looking for—you can search for specific items, research multiple brands or compare reviews. On the other hand, shopping offline makes it easier to explore products in person and sometimes discover things that you didn’t know existed. Plus, it’s usually the only way to take your purchase home the same day.

The line between online and offline shopping is starting to blur: According to a study by Forrester while 93 percent of retail purchases today happen in a store, more than 46 percent of those in-store purchases are influenced by online research. Not to mention that shoppers can access the web from anywhere at anytime—including from their mobile phones when browsing the aisles of a local store.

All of this got our team thinking about how we could help further bridge the gap between online and offline shopping. This week, we’re introducing several new features to Product Search that start doing just that.

Local availability on Google Product Search: We’ve partnered with more than 70 retail brands—including national retailers like Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma, as well as software manufacturers like JDA, Epicor and Oracle—to connect shoppers searching online with local stores that have the items they’re are looking for in-stock. For example, if you’re looking online to get your son that new Wii video game he’s been wanting, you can click on the “nearby stores” link to see where it’s in stock nearby. (If you’re a retailer who’s interested in taking part, you can learn more on the Google Retail Blog.)

Local Availability in Google Product Search

Google Shopper 1.3: Our mobile shopping app helps shoppers on the go research items and find the best place to buy them either online or in a nearby store—and it already has more than 2.5 million downloads. This version includes new search filters like “price” and “brand” to help refine your search. And, you’ll still get features like Local Availability, voice search and rapid continuous barcode scanning (so you can point your phone at a product and get information from the web).

“Popular products” and “aisles”: We’ve borrowed an idea from successful brick and mortar stores and in the coming weeks, we'll roll-out two features called “popular products” and “aisles” to help people learn about and discover new products. When you search for a category of products such as “camera lenses,” our new popular products feature helps you get started by showing you the lenses other people are viewing online. “Aisles” helps you browse and discover products by organizing results into sub-categories that others have found helpful. For example, if you’re looking for a new TV, you can choose between display types like LCD and plasma. If you’re interested in camera lenses for that brand new SLR, you can shop by the aperture of the lens.

Aisles and Popular Products

We hope these features make it easier for you to get your shopping done this holiday season—whether it’s online, offline or in the new space in between.

Happy shopping!

Posted by Sameer Samat, Director of Product Management

Extra! Extra! Google News redesigned to be more customizable and shareable

There’s an old saying that all news is local. But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Today we’re revamping the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. We’re also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks.

Before:

After:

The new heart of the homepage is something we call “News for you”: a stream of headlines automatically tailored to your interests. You can help us get it right by using the “Edit personalization” box to specify how much you’re interested in Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports or any subject you want to add (whether it’s the Supreme Court, the World Cup or synthetic biology). You can choose to view the stories by Section view or List view, and reveal more headlines by hovering over the headline with your mouse. We’ll remember your preferences each time you log in. If you don’t want customized Google News, hit “Reset personalization" to clear all personalization preferences. If you haven't previously customized and would prefer not to, simply close the “Edit personalization” box. You can always go back and change it later.

To give you more control over the news that you see, we’re now allowing you to choose which news sources you’d like to see more or less often. You can do so in News Settings. These sources will rank higher or lower for you (but not for anyone else) in Google News search results and story clusters. We’ve also added keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation, like in Gmail or Google Reader. When you’re in Google News, hit the question mark key to pop up a full list of shortcuts.

There are the subjects that interest you and then there’s the major news of the day. To make it easy for you to find the big stories like Hurricane Alex, we’re adding links to topics that many outlets are covering. You’ll find these topics in the Top Stories section on the left side of the homepage as well as in linked keywords above headlines. Clicking on a topic link takes you to a list of related coverage that you can add to your news stream. You can change your preferences any time in “Edit personalization.”


We’re also more prominently displaying the Spotlight section, which features stories of more lasting interest than breaking news and has been one of our most popular sections since we introduced it last fall. And then there’s local news; we’re now highlighting weather and headlines about your city or neighborhood in their own section, which you can edit with whichever location you want to follow.

Finally, you can now easily share story clusters with other people via Buzz, Reader, Facebook or Twitter. Just select the drop-down menu marked by an arrow on the top-right of each story cluster. In the drop-down, you can also choose to see more or less of the first news source.


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. For more information about these changes, check out the video below or visit our Help Center.

Posted by Kevin Stolt, Software Engineer

Blogger Template Designer now available to everyone

In March, we launched the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Today we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer has graduated from Blogger in Draft and is now available to everyone by default.

Blogger Template Designer is a way for you to easily customize the look of your blog without knowing any HTML or CSS. You can select from a variety of templates, images, colors and column layouts to make your blog an expression of you. See our post on Blogger Buzz for the highlights on this new tool.

You can try the Template Designer on your blog now by going to the “Design” menu, then selecting “Template Designer.” Even if you don’t have a blog — or weren’t planning to redecorate the one you have — you can try out the Blogger Template Designer and play around with potential designs. If you like one, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog.

If you want to learn more on how the Blogger Template Designer can help you create your own unique blog designs, watch our video and check out the Blogger Buzz blog.



Posted by Chang Kim, Blogger Product Manager

The art of a homepage

Last week, we announced a new feature that lets you add a favorite photo or image to the background of your Google.com homepage.

To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we‘ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage. Included in the collection are photographs of the works of Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma (隈研吾), Kwon, Ki-soo (권기수) and Tord Boontje, as well as some incredible photos from Yann Arthus-Bertrand and National Geographic. We’ll be featuring these images as backgrounds on the Google homepage over the next 24 hours.

Of course, since we want your Google homepage to be personal to you, you can still choose an image or photo from your computer or your own Picasa Web Album. Whether you select an image from our new artist collection or prefer to have a more personal touch on your homepage, you’ll still enjoy the speed and ease of use that you’ve come to expect from Google.

Niijima Floats, Dale Chihuly

Yann Arthus-Bertrand, GoodPlanet Foundation

We’re also excited to announce that this feature is now available internationally. We hope you enjoy the new artist collection and making Google feel more like your own!

Update June 10, 11:31AM: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

This week in search 6/6/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We work hard to consistently develop new tools, features and algorithmic changes to help us better understand what you mean when you enter a query into the Google search box—and we ultimately use that understanding to get you the information you're looking for as fast as possible. Understanding is core to our mission—particularly as we strive to be as useful in your everyday tasks. For example, if you search for a local sports team, and there's been a recent game, we'll show you scores. If you're visiting Boston and looking for a restaurant, you'll find tailored search suggestions based on the best Beantown spots. It's these features that enhance the experience of searching and help you find exactly what you're looking for. This week, we've made a few changes that we hope will make Google search even better for you.

Spelling Corrections in Suggest
Since we first launched Google Suggest, we've offered spell-corrected search completions to provide you with similar search queries from other users. With this feature, not only does Suggest help you rest your fingers because you don't have to type out a full query—you can also catch a mistake quickly and easily.

An example of old spelling correction in Google Suggest

This week we launched an update that makes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you're typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a "Did you mean" suggestion for your query—giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search. These spelling suggestions already exist on the results page, but by moving them to an earlier point in the search process, we hope we've made it faster and easier to get to the results you're looking for. Right now, this feature is offered only for google.com in English, but we're working to roll this out internationally in the near future.

Google Suggest with the new spelling corrections feature

Mobile app results in mobile search
With tens of thousands of apps available for both Android and iPhone phone, there are plenty of options to choose from when you're looking for new apps. And it makes sense that if you hear about a great new app while you're out and about, you'll want to download it then and there. In an effort to make apps even easier to find, this week we launched a new feature for mobile search that helps users on Android-powered devices and iPhones find and download mobile apps. So the next time you're looking for the latest action game, multimedia app or travel tool on your phone, we'll show you a special result at the top of your mobile search results showing basic information about the app you're looking for, including title, price and publisher. You'll also find a link that will take you directly to the app's installation page in the Android Market or Apple's App Store.

Example mobile searches on your iPhone or Android device: [download pandora] or [bank of america app]

A new look for the Google homepage
Search is more fun when it's personalized. That's why I was delighted to announce our new feature that allows you to personalize your Google homepage with a favorite photo. Whether you choose a picture from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery of photos hosted by Picasa, Google is now yours to personalize. To get started, head to google.com and look for the "Change background image" link in the lower left-hand side of the page. Keep an eye out for more fun announcements with this feature!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more next week.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Freeze frame!

From iGoogle’s debut in 2005 to our more recent launch of stars in search in March, we’ve enjoyed making your search experience more relevant, useful and fun through personalization. Today, we’re introducing a new feature that brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage. You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.

An example homepage featuring artwork by Jeff Koons, photographed by Sandy Volz

A second example page, featuring artwork by Tom Otterness, photographed by Cesar Perez

Whether you choose a photo of a loved one, a picture of your favorite vacation destination or even a design you created yourself, Google.com is now yours to customize. For those of you who want to enjoy the clean, simple look of Google as well as your personalized view, we’ve made it easy to switch between your customized search page and classic Google.

We are beginning to roll out this new feature to users in the U.S. over the next few days, so if you don’t see a link in the lower left-hand corner of Google.com now, check back soon. For those of you outside of the U.S., you can expect to see this new feature in the coming days as we roll it out internationally to offer similar, consistent experiences globally.

And if you’ve customized your look with a fun personal photo we’d love to see what your new homepage looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage and share it with us!

We hope you enjoy this fun new feature and that it makes Google search more your own.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Around the world in 25 iGoogle themes...

One way we love to help you make iGoogle your own is with our artist and designer themes — ranging from food and fashion to games and comics. Today, we’re excited to announce a set of new themes, tailored to the world traveler in all of us. These new themes, focused on destinations all over the globe, allow you to experience beautiful landscapes, historic monuments, stunning beaches, iconic cities and other picturesque sites — right from your homepage.

To bring you this imagery, we've partnered with a few leading organizations including National Geographic Society and LIFE, who photograph some of the most breathtaking destinations on earth. Lonely Planet, UNESCO and visiteurope.com have also shared a selection of incredible images.

Here’s a quick preview of some of what you’ll find:

• The World Passport Sampler theme, which brings together many of the great destinations.
• India, Greece and Egypt, all captured spectacularly by National Geographic.
• Classic beach destinations from LIFE.com, including Monte Carlo, Waikiki Beach, and the French Riviera.
• Incredible vistas from Spain, Italy, Thailand and Japan, captured by Lonely Planet.
• The opportunity to view World Heritage sites, such as the Sydney Opera House and the Old City of Dubrovnik in Croatia, provided by UNESCO.

Hopefully, you’re as eager to try out these new themes as we are. Whether these themes remind you of one of your favorite places or allow you to experience a global destination on your homepage, we hope you enjoy them. Bon voyage!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Express yourself with the Blogger Template Designer

In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
• Customizable colors, fonts and more

Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:



For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!

Posted by Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger

Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.


Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.

We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

Stars make search more personal

We've long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we've been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we're announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars.

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here's what the new "Starred results" feature looks like:


The great thing about stars is that you don't have to keep track of them. You don't even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you'll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.

Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results. With stars, we've created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content. For people who like annotations, we have Sidewiki, a more powerful way for people to contribute and discover helpful information next to pages across the Internet. All your existing SearchWiki edits will be preserved with your Google Account. You can learn more on our help center.

Stars in search are rolling out in the next couple days and will be available globally for all signed-in users.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager and Matthew Watson, Software Engineer