Google+ Gets Multi-Admin Pages, Stream Filters And More

Google is putting lots of effort into their social networking service Google+. Changes happen on a weekly basis and it is often hard to keep track of everything that gets added, modified or removed from the service. The company yesterday announced new features that improve Google+ significantly.

Users who maintain Google+ pages can now add up to 50 managers as administrators for a page. This is especially useful for large brands who maintain very popular pages on Google+. It is not clear yet if managers will have the same powers as the page creator, or if their power will be limited. Google merely notes that managers will stay in “the loop on all the activity that takes place on a page” so that they can “stay involved in page conversations”. The feature will roll out in the coming days to all users of Google+.

More interesting from a user perspective are new stream filters that are currently rolled out. A slider to manage the filters appear on all circle pages on Google+.

The four filtering options have the following functionality:

• Show nothing from the stream in the main stream
• Show fewer things from this stream in the main stream
• Show most things from the stream in the main stream
• Show all posts in the main stream

The default setting is always set to show most things that get posted in the circle in the main stream. This way you can filter out posts by circles that you are not that interested in, and make sure that all posts from a circle that you are interested in appears in the main stream.

Notifications that appear after you click on the notification count in the Google header are now more meaningful. This includes better previews and the ability to see the +1′s and shares posts have received since the last check.

Photo Viewing has been improved with a new lightbox that offers improved navigation. The Google Blog offers additional information about each feature and videos that demonstrate each feature’s functionality.

Oh, and if you have not already: Follow us on Google+.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Google Experimenting With New Toolbar Menu

A black toolbar is displayed on almost every Google property. The bar displays links to popular Google services as well as options to sign in and to open the settings configuration menu. The black bar is part of a global redesign of core Google services, and has been only recently added to those web pages (see New Google Sign-In Page and Change Google’s Black Navbar Back To White as starting points).

François Beaufort discovered (likely via Motou Xiao) that Google is already experimenting with a new toolbar layout that changes the display significantly (again). Francois posted instructions on how to display the new menu right now.

The two commands show what’s inside. They do not trigger the new menu, and are probably only interesting to developers or coders who know they way around JavaScript.

Go to www.google.com/ncr, open your console, and enter dir(window.google.Toolbelt) and dir(window.google.kennedy) to see what’s inside.

I tried to run the commands but could not get them to work. The menu looks like this.

The new toolbar, or toolbelt as Google calls is, is a dropdown menu that appears when a user clicks on the arrow next to the Google icon on a page where it is enabled. The dropdown menu displays the very same links that are displayed in the black navigational toolbar at the moment.

The black navbar has been completely removed and most of its elements have been moved into the header of the Google page itself. The unread messages count and share button on Google+ for instance have been moved to the header on that page.

It is not clear if Google will remove the black toolbar on all of its properties to replace it with the new menu layout, if it is a Google+ only change or if project Kennedy won’t make it to a public release.

The benefit of the new layout should be obvious: More screen estate for the site’s contents.

What’s your take on the new layout? Do you think that Google will go ahead and make it the new default design for their pages?

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Google Replaces + Search Operator

Advanced search operators like the + or – symbols can be used to optimize a search. The – operator for instance makes sure that the term following is not included on pages in the search results. An example for this is the query technology -blog which would only display results that would match the technology term and not the blog term. The + operator on the other hand made sure that the term following would also be included on each of the result pages.

Google users who use the + operator nowadays for their searches will see a notification at the top notifying them that the “+ operator has been replaced” and that they now have to use double quotation marks to search for an exact word or phrase in the search engine.

Instead of searching for technology +news in Google, users now have to use the search phrase technology “news” instead for the desired result.

What if you want multiple exact words or phrases included in your search phrase? Then you need to use double quotation marks for all the terms. Say you want to search for technology and both news and blog included on each of the resulting pages. You would then search Google for technology “news” “blog”.

A Google Rep on the official Google Search support forum confirmed the change.

We’ve made the ways you can tell Google exactly what you want more consistent by expanding the functionality of the quotation marks operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine "latina"].

We’re constantly making changes to Google Search – adding new features, tweaking the look and feel, running experiments, – all to get you the information you need as quickly and as easily as possible. This recent change is another step toward simplifying the search experience to get you to the info you want.

The question here is if the new method simplifies search. Users now have to use two symbols instead of one to include exact single word searches. It simplifies search if an exact search phrase needs to be included on the websites in the results, as users would have used double quotation marks in this case anyway for the desired result.

Some users on Webmaster World have criticized Google for that move as it can now happen that pages appear in the search results that do not include the exact phrase. While the pages are mostly relevant to the search query itself, it can happen that the exact term does not appear on said pages (e.g. some results for the query “new york train timetable” do not contain that exact phrase.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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New Gmail Interface Leaks in Video

Google accidentally (or maybe not) published a video on the company’s official YouTube video channel that introduced a new Gmail interface. The video has been set to private shortly thereafter but viewers were quick enough to save it and re-publish it on YouTube.

The video announcement highlights many upcoming Gmail design changes and features. This includes a new look and feel that looks very similar to the Google Plus interface, and other new features like Gmail’s ability to adapt automatically to the windows size in which it is displayed. Users who resize their Gmail window will notice that the relevant information, for instance the sender, subject and date of each email in the inbox, are always visible on screen.

The options button at the top right leads to additional display density options. The default comfortable setting uses big margins and whitespace areas between posts which users can reduce by switching to the cozy or compact display density options.

Another new feature is the slider that allows users to increase or decrease the label or chat area on the left sidebar.

Google has uploaded new high resolution themes that users can switch to.

Conversations have been redesigned to improve readability. You will also notice that profile pictures have been added if available.

Google has updated search as well. If you are a Gmail user you know that search consists of just a single form that you can use to search.

The new search comes with filters that include from, to and subjects as well as words, attachments and date filters.

Filters can now also be created right from the search box. You can see the video with all the changes discussed in this news article below.

There is no official word yet on the availability of the new features but it is likely that they will be rolled out soon.

I’m not really affected by the changes as I’m using Thunderbird as my main email client. If you are a Gmail web interface user, what’s your take on the changes announced in the video? (via)

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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