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New Google Help Forums

For the last few years, the <a title="Google Help Forums" href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=portal_groups.cs&hl=en" id="nxic" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);">Google Help Forums</a> have been a great gathering place for users, developers, and anyone else who has an opinion about Google or its products. We've been taking stock of what you have to say, and we've been impressed by the hundreds of thousands of people who really understand our products and are willing to share their knowledge. It's because of experts like the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/orkut-help/web/who-are-the-orkuteers" id="j85a" title="orkuteers" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);">orkuteers</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/static.py?page=power_poster_bios.html" id="y5iu" title="Google Apps Power Posters" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);">Google Apps Power Posters</a>, <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/web/google-webmaster-help-bionic-posters" id="d_0g" title="SketchUp Sages">Webmaster Help Bionic Posters</a> and many others that the forums are a great place for getting quality answers, reporting bugs, offering product suggestions and sharing tips and tricks. To make it even easier to get you the right answers to your questions as quickly as possible and to spot the most helpful commenters, we are converting our forums to a new system designed to help, encourage and reward everyone who visits. Some of the features include: <ul><li> improved search results, including posts from current and new forums</li></ul><ul><li> the ability to designate especially helpful forum members as "Top Contributors"</li></ul><ul><li> a reputation and ranking system</li></ul><ul><li> the ability for users, Top Contributors and Googlers to mark questions as answered</li></ul><ul><li> easier access to Help Center content</li></ul><ul><li> expanded user profiles that highlight your forum activity</li></ul> This video gives you a few more details on our latest changes: <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6ka0bvcbuSo&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6ka0bvcbuSo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object> A few products -- <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords?hl=en&utm_source=googleblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=awforum">AdWords</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense?hl=en&utm_sourceid=aso&utm_campaign=ww-en-et-google_blog_11-06-08&utm_medium=link">AdSense</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market?hl=en">Android Market</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps?hl=en">Google Apps</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome?hl=en">Google Chrome</a> and most of our <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/?hl=pl">Polish products</a> -- have already switched to this system. Over the next several months, we'll convert more product Help Forums, initially in English and then in other languages. If you have a question, bug report, suggestion, or just want to mix and mingle, we welcome you to "stop by" our forums. Googlers will check in from time to time to answer questions, listen to feedback, and highlight great responses and the people who provided them. Posted by Katina Johnson, Google Help Team

New Google Help Forums

For the last few years, the Google Help Forums have been a great gathering place for users, developers, and anyone else who has an opinion ...

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The art of the field study

I'm Dan Russell, a member of the Search Quality team doing user experience research. This post is part of our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/search%20quality">ongoing series</a> to talk about the Search Quality team at Google, showing a bit of what we do in the day-to-day course of improving the quality of the user experience. The role of "user experience" research is to try and get the inside story on what people do when they search. We're constantly asking: What's the user's experience of search? What works and doesn't work for them? What are they looking for? What DO they want? To understand the full richness and variety of what people do when they are using Google, we spend many hours in the field, watching people search and listening to what they say as they do this. We hear it when they're happy, and when they're terribly frustrated. And perhaps most importantly, we also pay attention to the things they don't say -- the inexpressible "gotchas" that slow users down or get in the way of their search. It turns out that people are masters of saying one thing and doing another, particularly when it comes to nearly automatic behavior. We find that searchers often turn so quickly to Google that they don't really think too much about what they're actually searching for. It's surprising, but often we'll see people trying to find out something about a topic, but then never actually mention the topic itself. That is, there's often a big discrepancy between what they'll tell me (the human observer) they're trying to do, and the search terms they enter into Google. One person I shadowed for the day spent ten minutes trying to find the schedule of the ferry that runs between San Francisco and Larkspur, but somehow only thought of adding the word "ferry" much later in their search. We also study eye tracking. The eye makes a complex scan path over the search results, building up a composite picture of what is presented on the page. It's clear that what actually happens is a very rapid scan and assessment of each result as they are seen. In those milliseconds between the eye landing on the first fixation and seeing a few results, all kinds of decisions and choices are made--nearly all of them subconsciously. In this short video, you can see three different searchers all looking for the same thing (in this case, a child's backpack). The red dot is the searcher's gaze moving around on the search results page. Notice how methodically the gaze moves from result title to title, occasionally inspecting the snippet text to gain more detail about the result. <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ5Be93RTeY&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ5Be93RTeY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object> (Video courtesy of Kerry Rodden) So the job of figuring out what people actually do when they search isn't as simple as asking someone what they search for during the day. It's basically impossible to give an accurate telling of what you saw (or didn't see) on the results page while actively searching for a high quality results. Memories of your own behavior are also notoriously unreliable. People's search behavior in the lab is often different than when they're at home or at work. This is a natural (and expected) side effect of lab studies: people will work especially hard to please a researcher. If we ask them to search for a pair of brown shoes they'd like to buy for themselves, in the lab they'll find the first pair that seems reasonable and then stop, satisfied. If it was real, they would go on and spend more time. We still do lab studies, but we know what to watch for, and what to ignore. Data from field studies gives us insight into how people respond to the Google experience in ways that we can't otherwise measure. For instance, in several field studies we discovered that many of the people who went to the previous version of the Advanced Search page had a strong, almost visceral negative reaction when the page appeared. The text of the original page had language that many people saw as intimidating--words like "Domain," "Usage Rights" and "Safe Search" can be a bit much if you're not sure what they mean. The old Advanced Search page was a little off-putting (click on the image to see a larger version): <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheW61EfyCXnPcXef902wlidfZMatVZqxSFSyDUp3p0b-z-9OkJuXzM4HzUsyYu3LnWZE-auWL8oMlh8G1kgnyNmko8qbT85kuUj5RPyMzSjUki3RaBvKozXr2aTEZrSYiMIWM_Nf_JM-w5/s1600-h/Google-adv-search.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265610667405350274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheW61EfyCXnPcXef902wlidfZMatVZqxSFSyDUp3p0b-z-9OkJuXzM4HzUsyYu3LnWZE-auWL8oMlh8G1kgnyNmko8qbT85kuUj5RPyMzSjUki3RaBvKozXr2aTEZrSYiMIWM_Nf_JM-w5/s1600/Google-adv-search.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 525px;" /></a> Based on our field studies, we dug more deeply into how people were actually using our Advanced Search page, and quickly discovered that, indeed, a large number of users were going to the page, and then leaving it without ever filling in any of the slots. Armed with this insight from field studies, we redesigned the page, simplifying it by removing terms that were unclear to the average user (the word "occurrences," for example, just didn't mean anything to many of the Advanced Search page users), moving rarely used features (numeric range searches, date searches, etc.) into a part of the page that was expandable with a single click. That made them easy to get to for people who knew they wanted to search with those restrictions, but out of the way in a non-threatening way. One of the other things we noted in the field study was that people often didn't understand how the Advanced Search page worked. So we added a "visible query builder" region at the top of the page. As you fill in the blanks, the box at the top of the page fills in with the query that you could type into Google. It was our way of making visible the effects of advanced search operators. The Advanced Search page post-redesign (click on the image to see a larger version): <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0CkUiPUDgpsAWsbrmnpIjkcNaS-hQ217KKpW4bBtou2Hk6ZP2Mef4hU7C38yXShRRoxnpbCx9V_BeRPnwPUn8XIvEGdVGRR8Qbj2fMpLHSjWG-rq2cHHBxoDlRCqTbWlS6f9tEoz61Qlv/s1600-h/Google-adv-search-Oct-2008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265611107869300194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0CkUiPUDgpsAWsbrmnpIjkcNaS-hQ217KKpW4bBtou2Hk6ZP2Mef4hU7C38yXShRRoxnpbCx9V_BeRPnwPUn8XIvEGdVGRR8Qbj2fMpLHSjWG-rq2cHHBxoDlRCqTbWlS6f9tEoz61Qlv/s1600/Google-adv-search-Oct-2008.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 525px;" /></a> The good effect of these changes quickly became clear. The number of users that bounced out of the Advanced Search page dropped significantly. Interestingly, the total number of Advanced Search page users didn't increase significantly... at least not yet. By improving the UI on the page, we hope to attract even more searchers to the large range of search options available on Google. In the end, this example shows the kind of insights that field studies can bring. As with the eye-tracking example, asking someone about their emotional response to a web page just isn't a useful way to get that data. But watching them in situ, as they actually use Google to go about their daily search lives can reveal all kinds of remarkable, otherwise undiscoverable, and actionable insights into searcher behavior. Posted by Daniel Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality

The art of the field study

I'm Dan Russell, a member of the Search Quality team doing user experience research. This post is part of our ongoing series to talk ab...

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Accessible View: An ARIA for web search

From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. In the spirit of a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html">recent post</a> discussing some of our search experiments, last week we launched an opt-in search experiment we're calling <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental/">Accessible View</a>, which makes it easy to navigate search results using only the keyboard. Like many of our recent accessibility-related enhancements, this experiment is built using the basic functionality provided by W3C ARIA and <a href="http://google-axsjax.googlecode.com/">Google-AxsJAX</a>, an evolving set of HTML DOM properties that enable adaptive technologies to work better with AJAX-style applications. The Accessible View experiment is another step toward making our search results more accessible for everyone. In July 2006, we launched <a href="http://labs.google.com/accessible/">Accessible Search</a> on Google Labs, where the goal was to help visually impaired users find content that worked well with adaptive technologies. We continue to refine and tune the ranking on Accessible Search. And with Accessible View, users can easily toggle between regular Google search results and Accessible Search results by using the 'A' and 'W' keys. When we designed the Accessible View interface, we first looked at how people used screen readers and other adaptive technologies when performing standard search-related tasks. We then asked how many of these actions we could eliminate to speed up the search process. The result: a set of keyboard shortcuts for effectively navigating the results page, and to arrange for the user's adaptive technology to speak the right information during navigation. We've also added a magnification lens that highlights the user's selected search result. Since launching Accessible Search, one of the most requested features has been support for low-vision users. While implementing the keyboard navigation described here, we incorporated the magnification lens first introduced by <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/05/reader-can-i-have-lens-with-that-please.html">Google Reader</a>. Bringing it all together, we implemented <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental">keyboard shortcuts</a> that extend what was originally pioneered by the keyboard shortcuts experiment. These shortcuts help users navigate through different parts of the results page with a minimal number of keystrokes. The left and right arrows cycle through the various categories of items on the page (e.g., results, ads, or search refinements), and the up and down arrow keys move through the current category. Power users can leave their hands on the home row by using the h, j, k, and l keys. In addition, we enable an infinite stream of results viewed through the n and p keys — so you can move through the results without getting disoriented by a page refresh after the first 10 results. <table><tbody><tr><td>Key</td><td>Behavior</td></tr><tr><td>j/k</td><td>next/previous result</td></tr><tr><td>n/p</td><td>next/previous result, scroll if necessary</td></tr><tr><td>enter</td><td>open current result</td></tr><tr><td>up/down</td><td>next/previous result</td></tr><tr><td>left/right</td><td>switch categories (results, ads, refinements)</td></tr><tr><td>a</td><td>jump to ads </td></tr><tr><td>A</td><td>switch to Accessible Search results</td></tr><tr><td>W</td><td>switch to default Google results</td></tr><tr><td>r</td><td>jump to related searches</td></tr></tbody></table> Try out <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental/">the experiment</a> and give us <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/accessible/">your feedback</a>. Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist, and Charles L. Chen, Software Engineer

Accessible View: An ARIA for web search

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips th...

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Ending our agreement with Yahoo!

In June we announced an <a href="http://www.google.com/yahoogooglefacts/">advertising agreement with Yahoo!</a> that gave Yahoo! the option of using Google to provide ads on its websites (and its publisher partners' sites) in the U.S. and Canada. At the same time, both companies agreed to <a href="http://www.google.com/yahoogooglefacts/regulators.html">delay</a> implementation of the agreement to give regulators the chance to review it. While this wasn't legally necessary, we thought it was the right thing to do because Google and Yahoo! have been successful in online advertising and we realized that any cooperation between us would attract attention. We feel that the agreement would have been good for publishers, advertisers, and users -- as well, of course, for Yahoo! and Google. Why? Because it would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements. Better ads are more useful for users, more efficient for advertisers, and more valuable for publishers. However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement. We're of course disappointed that this deal won't be moving ahead. But we're not going to let the prospect of a lengthy legal battle distract us from our core mission. That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on. Google's continued success depends on staying focused on what we do best: creating useful products for our users and partners. Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Ending our agreement with Yahoo!

In June we announced an advertising agreement with Yahoo! that gave Yahoo! the option of using Google to provide ads on its websites (and i...

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A vote for broadband in the "white spaces"

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi0qE6PNdZZLDwIG3qge0yYOouREMN-9KU0NQquBqyVH08OKvtnlwQQRkZPKJfLUVzLElz8HL1ygyOCBWlR5sHlCXb8o9u6ht1ddXl1Lp2ebAhvbsJ0YCumzYIdbULGf4znB0V37WTej9G/s1600-h/ftagraphic.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5264939156036152146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi0qE6PNdZZLDwIG3qge0yYOouREMN-9KU0NQquBqyVH08OKvtnlwQQRkZPKJfLUVzLElz8HL1ygyOCBWlR5sHlCXb8o9u6ht1ddXl1Lp2ebAhvbsJ0YCumzYIdbULGf4znB0V37WTej9G/s320/ftagraphic.jpg" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 144px; height: 145px;" /></a>All eyes are on the presidential election today, but another important vote just took place at the Federal Communications Commission. By a vote of 5-0, the FCC formally agreed to open up the "<a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/search/label/White%20Spaces">white spaces</a>" spectrum -- the unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels -- for wireless broadband service for the public. This is a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications. The FCC has been looking at this issue carefully for the last six years. Google has worked hard on this matter <a href="http://www.wirelessinnovationalliance.org/?gclid=CIO2uKLD25YCFQYcHgodIx7K2g">with other tech companies and public interest groups</a> because we think that this spectrum will help put better and faster Internet connections in the hands of the public. We also look forward to working with the FCC to finalize the method used to compute power levels of empty channels adjacent to TV channels (we have a number of <a title="public filings" href="http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi?native_or_pdf=pdf&id_document=6520183501" id="ofa0">public filings</a> before the commission in this area and it is a vital issue in urban areas). I've always thought that there are a lot of really incredible things that engineers and entrepreneurs can do with this spectrum. We will soon have "<a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/05/larry-page-talks-about-googles-vision.html">Wi-Fi on steroids</a>," since these spectrum signals have much longer range than today's Wi-Fi technology and broadband access can be spread using fewer base stations resulting in better coverage at lower cost. And it is wonderful that the FCC has adopted the same successful unlicensed model used for Wi-Fi, which has resulted in a projected 1 billion Wi-Fi chips being produced this year. Now that the FCC has set the rules, I'm sure that we'll see similar growth in products to take advantage of this spectrum. As an engineer, I was also really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics. For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC's engineers to simply do their work. Finally, I want to applaud and thank FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the other commissioners, and the FCC <a href="http://www.fcc.gov/oet/">Office of Engineering and Technology</a> for their leadership in advancing this important issue. And, thanks to the more than 20,000 of you who took a stand on this issue through our <a href="http://freetheairwaves.com/">Free the Airwaves</a> campaign, the FCC heard a clear message from consumers: these airwaves can bring wireless Internet to everyone everywhere. Posted by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products

A vote for broadband in the "white spaces"

All eyes are on the presidential election today, but another important vote just took place at the Federal Communications Commission. By a ...

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healthy4u

New Google Help Forums

The art of the field study

Accessible View: An ARIA for web search

Ending our agreement with Yahoo!

Top searches on Election Day (part 3)

Top searches on Election Day (part 2)

A vote for broadband in the "white spaces"