Google's new Research Bar is nifty

I have to say, the research sidebar is very useful; Google is really trying to give Docs some powerful differentiators, and I'd say this is one.

Google Docs' new sidebar makes research faster | Ars Technica

 


Can Google pull this off?

Can Google pull this off? I don't know (I can think of about 100 different problems they have to solve) but its nice to think this could be possible one day.

Project Glass: One day...

 

SOPA Protests

Google's Homepage in protest of SOPA on 1/18/2012Today a portion of the web did something that I don't think we've seen before; website "black outs" and other activities to raise awareness for a legal issue. No matter your thoughts on SOPA I find it fascinating to see activism on this scale on-line; this isn't just a few fringe sites saying "legalize it" or "bring our troops home" this is major, major players in our web-economy taking a stand on a political issue. Given that most of these sites will be back to normal tomorrow, I'm going to try to capture screen shots of at least a few of the participating websites.

 

Google Chrome Themes

Just a week or two back I was bemoaning the fact that Google's Chrome browser clashed with my shiny black Zune desktop theme, and now I can fix that too:

http://www.itsalee.com/download-google-chrome-themes-skins-fre

Has several skins and instructions on their installation. Look at the links off that post too, as there are 4 or more posts with skins. Right now I'm rocking a nice dark grey theme that looks just pretty with Zune.

 

Google YouTube Video Ads

You can see it below, but I'm testing out Google's YouTube video ad block, and I have to say that I'm unimpressed. AdSense seems to pick up on the content of my site pretty well, but this thing is just crazy. I've gotten more videos for models doing tryouts and artists painting "web 2.0" paintings then anything useful or interesting.

Any one else have thoughts on it, or how I can improve the accuracy of what videos it picks?

 
Jon Hartmann, July 2011

I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.

Learn more about me on LinkedIn.