Googlified

It seems like Google have revived a feature that lasted only two weeks in early 2004 - WHOIS lookup. However, unlike last time querying Network Solution’s WHOIS database abusively, Google this time partnered with DomainTools to display limited information of a domain when users search for it. The feature currently display the domain’s creation and expiration date.

The feature was supposedly be released last month, according to Jay Westerdal, CEO of Name Intelligence (the company that owns DomainTools), in a March interview, but it seems like that Google has postponed it till now.

To use this feature, just search for “whois {domain.tld}” and replace “{domain.tld}” with the actual domain name. It should work with all TLDs, even those that are less popular, like .museum and .cat (there are some domains that do not show up on Google but show up on Domaintools though).

[thanks Tom :)]

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

Google is experimenting a new way to display OneBox results - placing them in the right hand side of the AdWords section. No, Google won’t remove the ads entirely - unless they want to go out of business - the ads will still be there, only that the OneBox results will be placed under the ads when the ads are present.

For instance, no ads return for “George Bush”, so the OneBox results on placed high on the page, but when searching for keywords like “Christmas”, AdWords ads related to the query will placed before the OneBox results (News, Images, and Books).

Google has been testing something similar with SearchMash for about a year.

You can try out this experiment by copy & pasting this link into the Google homepage’s address bar, hit Enter and refresh the page (you will probably need to clear your cookies before hitting Enter though).

Google is experimenting a way to index information from Orkut user profiles and show the results as OneBox results “when someone who is logged in to orkut performs a search on Google.com for another orkut user.”

A typical OneBox result will include “key details like your name, photo and location.” The setting is set to “show information” by default, so if you want to opt-out, just change the setting here.

Since Google is still experimenting this, only a small group of users will see the the orkut OneBox in their search results. If you are one of those lucky users, please send in a screenshot. :)

[via Google Operating System]

Google improved their results for flight status to show more information when users search for an airline and flight number. The new results “will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times.” Previously, Google only provide a link to traveling sites like Travelocity and Expedia.

I am the only one in my family who hasn’t travel oversea this year. *Sigh*

Google Experimental is currently running an experiment that allows some selected users to “influence [the]  search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.”

On a result page, you can choose move a search result to the top by clicking on the up-arrow corresponding result, which will be marked by an orange asterisk next time you search for the same keywords. Similarly, if you don’t like the page, you can hide it in future searches for the same keywords by clicking on the X button next to the title of the result, as shown in the above screenshot. Part of this experiment also includes the “Suggest a better page” feature I posted awhile ago.

One downside about this is that why would someone go back to the results page if s/he already on a page that s/he is satisfy with? (I personally open results in new tabs, I am just referring to people in general.)

[via Jessamyn West on Flickr]

Google search has a limit on the length of queries of 32 words? I didn’t know that…

Google is now showing randomly selected thumbnail images left to the results. Ruby guru Peter Cooper says,

My homepage has a picture of Amir Blumenfeld next to it rather randomly.

Those images are supposedly be thumbnails from video sites and since they are selected “rather randomly”, what’s the real purpose behind it?

Google Blogoscoped reported something similar last month.

Mike Grehan spotted that Google is now experimenting a new feature that allows users to personalize what pages to be shown on the top of the SERP for matching queries, indicated by a * symbol.

Wouldn’t your mama be proud of you when you search for “Online Latin Lessons” and have dozens of links to game sites on the top of the page? xD

[screenshot by Mike Grehan, via Search Engine Land]

Google today officially introduced the new unavailable_after META tag value which allows site owners to include a appropriate unavailable_after META tag value in a web page that tells the Google when to drop that specific web page from the search results.

This is how the META tag should look like:

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2007 23:59:59 EST">

The date and time after unavailable_after: should follow the RFC 850 standard.

Google note that using this feature will only drop the page from the search result, but not from their index. If you want to remove the page completely from Google index, you should use the URL Removals tool in the Webmaster Central to request for a page to be removed.

Also, Google now allows site owners to include META tag information in the HTTP Header so that you can apply the X-Robots-Tags to non-HTML files.

Google today launched a business edition of Custom Search Engine, which enables businesses/individual to have “Google-quality results” on their site without any software or hardware (GSA/Google Mini) installation.

Features over the standard Custom Search Engine service:

• Ad-free
• XML API
• Better branding/customization
• Search statistics report
• Customer support (email & phone)

Sure, that doesn’t come in free for you, the service starts at $100/year for searching up to 5,000 pages and $500 for up to 50,000 pages. If your site goes over the limit, Google will contact you for an upgrade.

Starting today, Google will be responsible for handling CNN.com’s searches, replacing Yahoo! Search. (Google cache, Web Archive)