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We get it. You love music. From propelling unknown artists to the top of the charts, to cheering on established artists as they reinvent the music video, to remixing and reimagining your own, music fans have turned YouTube into the world’s go-to music destination. Now, to celebrate music fans and the music you love, we’re announcing a new kind of awards show--one powered by you.

On Sunday, November 3, YouTube will host the first-ever YouTube Music Awards, a live-streamed event honoring the artists and songs that you have turned into hits over the past year. Lady Gaga, Eminem, and Arcade Fire will join other top artists and some of YouTube’s biggest stars including Lindsey Stirling and CDZA in performances and musical collaborations from Seoul, Moscow, London and Rio, culminating in a live event in New York City. Music-video visionary Spike Jonze will be the creative director and acclaimed actor Jason Schwartzman will host with VICE and Sunset Lane Entertainment acting as executive producers.



And we’ll need your help. In mid-October, YouTube Music Awards Nominations will be announced based on the videos that you watched and shared over the past year. We’ll then call on you to determine the songs and artists honored, by sharing the nominees across social media so the awards are judged in full view of everyone.

There will be a whole lot more music to enjoy on YouTube around the Music Awards. In the days leading up to the November 3 event, nominees will share official music videos, covers, parodies, concerts, interviews and fan videos on YouTube--so you can stay in the loop, find your faves and discover new music you didn’t even know you loved! Stay tuned for lots more info, and get ready for a nonstop week of music on YouTube.

Danielle Tiedt, Vice President, Marketing, recently watched "Lady Gaga - Applause (Official)," "Eminem - Berzerk (Official) (Explicit)," and "Arcade Fire- Here Comes the Night Time."

You're reading a web page and you're suddenly wondering: what font is that?


You can check the source code or select some text, right-click and pick "inspect element". You'll probably find a list of fonts and you won't be able to tell which one is actually used.

Chrome added a feature that tells you the name of the font that's used. This feature is available in Chrome 31+, so you can try it if you've switched to the Dev Channel or you use Chrome Canary. Right-click the text, pick "inspect element", switch to the "computed" tab, scroll down and you'll see "a summary of the typeface(s) used for that element". Paul Irish says that it "works great with Google Webfonts, Typekit, local fonts, @font-face typefaces, unicode glyphs, and all other interesting font sources."


As you can see, it's Helvetica, not Arial. No need to use WhatTheFont or WhatFontIs.

For some reason, this didn't work well for web fonts.


{ via Kristian Serrano. }

Remember the post about Google's new music video results? They're used by a Knowledge Graph carousel that shows a long list of songs when you search for things like [Moby songs], [Michael Jackson music], [Nina Simone list of songs], [Beatles track list].


Click one of the songs and you'll see the search results for that song's name. The top result is a music video from YouTube, which has a huge thumbnail. The video doesn't play inline, the thumbnail only links to a regular YouTube page.


You'll see the same interface if you search for a music artist and click one of the songs from the Knowledge Graph sidebar. You can also append "albums" to the query, click one of the albums and you'll see a list of all the songs from the album. Search for [Moby Wait for me songs] and you'll find a list of the songs from Moby's Wait for Me album.



It would be nice to play songs from the Google search results page. Even a short Google Play preview would be pretty useful. If that's not possible, then Google could embed YouTube's player, so you can watch music videos without opening a new page. Another improvement would be to automatically generate a YouTube playlist from all the music videos listed in the carousel, like YouTube does.

{ via Search Engine Roundtable }

We’ve all been there - coming home after work only to find a failed delivery notice at the door. What if you could never miss a delivery again? Today, we are expanding our pilot of the BufferBox service to San Francisco. Already available in Toronto, BufferBox joined Google last year and helps you receive your online purchases conveniently and securely.

With BufferBox, you can order from your favorite online retailers and have items delivered to a convenient BufferBox kiosk in your local coffee shop, supermarket, or retail store. You’ll receive an instant email notification when your parcel is ready for pickup. You can even use BufferBox with our recently expanded Google Shopping Express service -- simply enter your BufferBox Address as your shipping address when checking out and select the 9am-1pm delivery window to collect your items later that same evening.

You can find BufferBox kiosks at partner locations around San Francisco, including Dogpatch Cafe, Coffee Bar, Noe Hill Market, 7-Eleven and many others. San Francisco residents can start using BufferBox for free at bufferbox.com. It’s early days, but we look forward to integrating the service further, expanding to more locations, and sharing more news with you soon.

Posted by Mike McCauley, Product Manager, BufferBox

Google has a great mobile interface for image search. It was launched in 2010 and improved multiple times since then. You can use swipes to go to the next image result or to the previous one. It looks like Google changed the image search UI for smartphones and tablets and now sends you to a landing page that shows the image and loads the corresponding page in the background. Intuitive gestures are gone and now you have to use the back button.


This seems to be limited to iPhones and iPads running iOS 7, so it's probably a bug. A lot of people complain about this in the Google Search Forum.

There are many reasons why the new interface is strange: loading the associated page uses more bandwidth and that's not a good idea for mobile devices, it's more difficult to check multiple search results, thumbnails are smaller and even the desktop interface shows a bigger image instead of sending users to a new page.

YouTube's HTML5 player is great, but it's not enabled for all the videos. Even if you go to youtube.com/html5 and join the HTML5 trial, you'll find a lot of videos that use the Flash player. "Some videos with ads are not yet supported (they will play in the Flash player)," mentions the site.

There's a simple Greasemonkey script that forces YouTube to use the HTML5 player for almost all the videos you watch at youtube.com. You need to install Greasemonkey if you use Firefox or Tampermonkey if you use Chrome, then click the "Install" button here.

[Update (Octomber 3rd, 2013): For Chrome, use the old version from Sept 23.]

The script works better in Firefox. If you install the script in Chrome, it will disable the new Ajax interface, but everything else seems to work well.


Here's a video you can use to test the script. Please note that the script doesn't work for embedded videos.

As previously anticipated, Google's mobile site has a new layout that uses cards, just like Google Now, Google Maps, Google+ and an increasingly long list of Google services and apps.

"A new look and feel for Google Search and ads on your phones and tablets. It's cleaner and simpler, optimized for touch, with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you're looking for," informs Google's search blog.


Ads stand out a lot more and, depending on your phone's resolution and screen size, you might not even see a regular search result without scrolling down. Google shows up to 2 ads at the top of the page and no longer uses a different background color. There's just a small "Ad" label next to the URL.


Sections are clearly separated and there's more white space, so the information density is lower.


Pagination has been simplified and you can only go to the previous or the next page of results and to the first results page.

This year, Google's birthday doodle is interactive: it's a game that asks you to get as many candies as you can from a piñata. "A piñata is a container often made of papier-mâché, pottery, or cloth; it is decorated, and filled with small toys or candy, or both, and then broken as part of a ceremony or celebration."

The game uses HTML5 and you can also try it on your smartphone or tablet. You can share your score on Google+ and generate URLs that remember your high score.



Here's a video that shows the game, just in case you don't see the doodle yet (you can also visit Google Australia):


The Google Doodles site has a list of all the other birthday doodles: the first one is from 2002. The doodle from 2007 has a lot in common with this year's doodle.

Happy Birthday, Google!

Google's Knowledge Graph feature gets smarter every day. You've probably noticed the carousel that's displayed when you search for things like [dog breeds], [asian rivers], [swedish bands], [science fiction books], [surrealist painters]. For some queries, you'll now see a drop-down that lets you select other similar categories. If you search for [surrealist painters], you'll see a long list of genres: abstract, cubist, impressionist, rococo, romantic.


Until now, Knowledge Graph displayed information about a single entity. Now you can compare 2 things. For example, you can search for [orange vs tangerine] and find out that oranges contain two times more vitamin C than tangerines.




"You can try this for some other things you might be curious about, such as dog breeds (compare pekingese vs. chihuahua) or celestial objects (compare earth vs. neptune) — and we'll keep adding more," informs Google.

It looks like Google brings back some features from an old Labs project called Google Squared and makes them more usable.

{ via Inside Search }

Mr. Jingles, the Google+ notification mascot, celebrates Google's 15th birthday with a pixelated animation. Just click the bell icon, read all your notifications or click "mark all as read" to see it.



"Friends of mine here at work found this old photo of me from back in 1998, the same year Google started up. Yes, I know I was a bit awkward back then – but so was Google (check out this link for proof). Anyways, enjoy this retro version of me in your Notifications tray for the next day or so. Oh, and Happy Birthday, Google!"

Mr. Jingles also changed its profile photo: "A little change of pace in my profile photo for #throwbackthursday.". The file name is self-explanatory: "1998-jangles-avatar.png".

Search Google for [Google in 1998] and you'll see a search results page from 1998, the year when Google was incorporated as a privately held company. It's an Easter Egg that reminds you how much Google has evolved, while preserving a simple user interface.

The old search results includes the original Google logo that had an exclamation mark just like Yahoo!, GoogleScout - another name for the feature that returns similar pages, a drop-down that lets you pick the number of results per page, search within results, the size of the cached pages and a list of links to other search engines. All the search results link to the Wayback Machine, since most of them no longer exist.




Google's birthday is in September, but the date has changed over the years. "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake," mentioned a Google page. Google has usually celebrated its birthday on September 27 and this year is special: Google is 15 years old. Happy birthday, Google!


{ via Search Engine Land }

Google has its own search quality raters, but it doesn't hurt asking regular users to improve search results. A recent Google experiment highlights 2 search results and asks users which one is better.


Users don't have the read the search quality guidelines first, they only need to visit the 2 pages and tell Google which one they prefer. There are 4 choices: the first result, the second result, both results are equally good, neither result is good enough.

One of the 2 results was the Amazon page for a book and it already had a high ranking. The second result was the book's homepage, which had a lower ranking, but was placed above the Amazon result for this experiment. Google probably wanted to check if the Amazon result was indeed better.

{ Thanks, Marcus. }

Chrome shows a new version of the welcome screen for the updated new tab page. Instead of "changes to the new tab page", you'll see "Chrome has updated". It looks like Google wanted to synchronize 4 important changes:

1. the new Google navigation interface
2. the updated new tab page
3. Chrome's app launcher
4. the new Chrome apps


There's an interesting synergy that deserves some explanations. Google's new drop-down menu from the homepage and search results pages looks just like the app launcher, but it only links to Google apps and you can't customize it. Chrome's app launcher was first available in Chrome OS and it's now added to the regular version of Chrome. It includes the apps that were previously available in the new tab page, but it's optimized for a new breed of apps that work offline and look just like native apps. They can be launched from the operating system's taskbar, use APIs that integrate with the hardware, open links in a browser tab. Install any app from this page to enable the app launcher.




The old bookmark apps have a small arrow just like regular Windows shortcuts and open in a new Chrome tab, the new apps don't have the small arrow and open in a new chromeless window.

Chrome's new tab page has a different goal: teach people to use the omnibox (the unified address bar and search box). Many people type google.com and use the search box from Google's homepage to search the web. Google decided to replace the new tab page with a modified Google homepage that uses the omnibox instead of the regular search box. "While you can search straight from the omnibox in Chrome, we've found that many people still navigate to their search engine's home page to initiate a search instead. The goal is to save people time by helping them search and navigate the web faster," explained Google.


To sum up: the new Chrome apps are no longer bookmarks to websites and no longer open in Chrome tabs, so they're moved outside of the browser. There's a new bookmark called Apps that links to chrome://apps, where you can still find the old apps list. The updated new tab page is an educational feature that tries to simplify the search workflow for regular users.

Advanced users probably don't need it, so here are two ways to tweak the updated new tab page (Google might remove them in the future):

1. How to replace the updated new tab page with a local version that doesn't load Google's homepage and doesn't show doodles? Paste this in a new tab:

chrome://flags/#enable-local-only-instant-extended-api

and click "Enabled" in the drop-down below "Enable local-only Instant Extended API", then click the "Relaunch Now" button at the bottom of the page to restart the browser.

2. How to go back to the old new tab page? Paste this in a new tab:

chrome://flags/#enable-instant-extended-api

and click "Disabled" in the drop-down below "Enable Instant Extended API", then click the "Relaunch Now" button at the bottom of the page to restart the browser.

You can read between the lines and notice how Chrome adds more and more operating system features: it has its own apps, a "start menu" replacement, a notification system, a remote printing feature, support for multiple users and a guest mode.

Say you have a list of errands as long as your arm, but the weather couldn’t be more perfect. Run errands or run in the park? Google Shopping Express, a service that offers same-day delivery from local stores, lets you do both.

Earlier this year, we invited some Bay Area shoppers to help us test Google Shopping Express. Today, we’re excited to make Google Shopping Express available to everyone living or working in our Bay Area delivery zones, from San Francisco to San Jose. This new service brings the speed of the web to the real world by helping you shop your favorite local stores online—in a single place—and get what you need delivered the same day. We are also launching a new mobile app, available for both Android and iOS, to bring you the convenience of Google Shopping Express even when you’re on-the-go.


Your favorite stores, all in one place
Whether you’ve run out of something essential or need to get a last-minute gift, you can shop your favorite stores all in one place, and get everything delivered in just a few hours. With Google Shopping Express, you can shop national, regional, and local stores, including American Eagle, Blue Bottle Coffee, Lucky, Office Depot, Palo Alto Toy & Sport, Photojojo, Raley’s Nob Hill Foods, Staples, Target, Toys“R”Us/Babies“R”Us, and Walgreens. And starting today, you can also fill your cart with items from DODOcase, Guitar Center, L’Occitane, REI, and Whole Foods Market.

Same prices and promotions as in-store
Stores price the items on Google Shopping Express the same as they do in-store, so you’ll pay the same amount for whatever you’re buying. You can add your retailer loyalty program number at checkout to take advantage of member prices. We’re working with many more local retailers and look forward to bringing them to Google Shopping Express soon.

Shopping made simple - wherever you are
To make it easier for you to buy what you need on-the-go, we’re also launching the Google Shopping Express app for Android (v4.0+) and iOS (v6.0+). With the app, you can easily order your essentials, search for specific items, or browse different stores wherever you are—and have them delivered right to your door that day. You can download the app on the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store.


Getting it delivered on your schedule
With Google Shopping Express you can select a delivery window that’s convenient for you, starting in the morning and running as late as 9pm. To make this all work, our engineers put their heads together to figure out the most efficient way to get all the packages delivered across town in the delivery windows promised. And be sure to keep your eye out for our new hybrid fleet around town.


Want to give it a try? For a limited time, you can get six months of free, unlimited same-day delivery when you sign up for our free membership.* To get started, visit google.com/shopexpress.

We want to thank all of our early testers who shared their invaluable feedback to help us improve the service. We’re always looking to make Google Shopping Express better, so please continue to share your feedback with us. Let us know what you think and get updates by following Google Shopping Express on Google+.

Happy shopping!

Posted by Tom Fallows, Product Management Director, Google Shopping Express


*Your account must be in good standing to remain eligible. Offer expires 12/31/2013. For complete terms and conditions see g.co/shopexpressterms.

It started as an experiment in 2010, then Google encrypted searches for logged-in users, then Firefox, Chrome and Safari switched to Google SSL and now almost all Google search URLs use HTTPS.

"In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity — except for clicks on ads. Google says this has been done to provide 'extra protection' for searchers," reports Danny Sullivan.


For example, if you type google.com in your browser's address bar, you'll be redirected to https://www.google.com. "SSL encrypts the communication channel between Google and a searcher's computer. When search traffic is encrypted, it can't easily be decoded by third parties between a searcher's computer and Google's servers," informs Google.

Danny Sullivan speculates that this move may be aiming to block NSA spying activity, but I don't think that's the case. Google still logs all the search traffic and it can send that information to the authorities.

A major downside of switching to encrypted searches is that webmasters can no longer obtain a list of the Google search keywords that sent traffic to their sites without relying on Google services. Google Webmaster Tools includes a list of keywords, but this feature is limited and doesn't integrate with analytics software. There's an exception: ads. "Ad search traffic has never been made secure. No encryption stops people from eavesdropping on the terms used when someone searches at Google and clicks on an ad. Google's also never prevented this information from flowing directly to advertisers, in the way it has for non-advertisers," says Danny Sullivan.

Android Device Manager now lets you lock your Android devices remotely, in addition to ringing devices and erasing data. It's a clever feature: click "Lock" and Google asks you to enter a new password for locking your device. No matter which screen lock feature you use, Google will switch it to "password" and lock your devices using the password you've entered.

This only works if your phone or tablet is online and you've checked "Allow remote lock and factory reset" in the Google Settings app that's installed by Google Play Services. If your device is offline, it'll be locked once it's back online.



It's interesting to see that Android Device Manager doesn't use Google Play branding and it's available at google.com/android/devicemanager. The service has a generic name which suggest that it could add other features not related to finding your phone. For example, it could let you backup your data online, manage your apps or check your notifications. Android Device Manager's codename is Google Nova, while the service name is "androidconsole".

{ via Android Police }

Just like Blogger, YouTube will switch to Google+ comments, but it won't be optional. YouTube already asks users to connect their channels with Google+.

"When it comes to the conversations happening on YouTube, recent does not necessarily mean relevant. So, comments will soon become conversations that matter to you. In the coming months, comments from people you care about will rise up where you can see them, while new tools will help video creators moderate conversations for welcome and unwelcome voices. Starting this week, you'll see the new YouTube comments powered by Google+ on your channel discussion tab. This update will come to comments on all videos later this year, as we bring you more ways to connect with familiar faces on YouTube," informs the YouTube blog.

Here's a screenshot that shows the new commenting interface:


YouTube's comments are rarely insightful or useful. There's a lot of spam, trolling and hate speech. Switching from anonymous aliases to Google+ profiles might improve the quality of comments.

"You'll see posts at the top of the list from the video's creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles. You can choose to start a conversation so that it is seen by everyone on YouTube and Google+, only people in your Circles or just your bestie. Like Gmail, replies are threaded so you can easily follow conversations. You have new tools to review comments before they're posted, block certain words or save time by auto-approving comments from certain fans. These can help you spend less time moderating, and more time sharing videos and connecting with your fans."

Blogger's commenting system powered by Google+ has been disappointing so far. Google doesn't offer comment moderation tools in the Blogger interface and Google doesn't do a good job at detecting spam or at ranking comments. There's a lot of noise and Google even shows a list of people who +1'd the post.

{ Thanks, Adrià. }

To kick off this fall shopping season, Google is teaming up with the Council of Fashion Designers of America and popular fashion designers to experiment with a new social shopping experience. This exclusive shopping app for Google+ Hangouts On Air allows retailers to discuss trends or specific products in a publicly broadcasted multi-person video chat while customers can simultaneously browse or buy a curated selection of products available for purchase online.



The first shoppable Hangout On Air will launch with Diane von Furstenberg on October 3, 2013 at 8 pm ET. She will be inviting fans to join her on the Hangout as she shares top trends this season from her headquarters in New York City. To participate, visit: www.dvf.com/shopthehangout

This October, Rebecca Minkoff, Rachel Zoe, and Marcus Wainwright and David Neville of rag & bone will also be sharing their fall collections using the shopping app for Hangouts On Air. To learn more, follow the designers and the Council of Fashion Designers of America on Google+.

Posted by Ria Tobaccowala, Google+ Lifestyle Partnerships & Laura Jones, Shopping Product Marketing Manager

If you have a popular YouTube channels with more than 5,000 subscribers, you'll be able to find more about the people who love your videos. "The Fans page shows a list of some of your most engaged and most influential fans, based on their public interaction with your YouTube channel. By default, the list is sorted by a combination of subscriber count and engagement level, but you can also sort by either factor on its own," informs YouTube.


"For each person on the list, you can see how many subscribers they have, how engaged they are with your channel, an example comment they've left on one of your videos, and how long they've been a subscriber. Engagement is based on that person's public interactions with your channel, such as commenting, liking, subscribing, etc."

You can also create a Google+ circle for your top fans in the insights page. "See what other videos and channels they're into, and reach out via Google+ to ask a question, start a conversation, share behind-the-scenes photos, or upload a private video just for them."

{ Thanks, Stefan. }

10 years ago, browsers were a lot less powerful and you had to install plug-ins to watch videos, play games, open PDF files. Applications like QuickTime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Adobe Reader, Java installed plug-ins that added missing features. Now browsers can play audio files and video files without plug-ins, some of them include PDF viewers, many of them render interactive 3D graphics natively. NPAPI plug-ins are no longer that necessary, they have plenty of security issues and the NPAPI plug-in architecture from the Netscape era is now outdated.


Google addressed some of the NPAPI issues in Pepper and bundled a Pepper version of the Flash plug-in with Chrome. Pepper is also used by Native Client and the PDF viewer.

The next step: Chromium's blog announced that the NPAPI support will be gradually dropped next year. "NPAPI isn't supported on mobile devices, and Mozilla plans to block NPAPI plug-ins in December 2013. Based on anonymous Chrome usage data, we estimate that only six NPAPI plug-ins were used by more than 5% of users in the last month. (...) Starting in January 2014, Chrome will block webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins by default on the Stable channel. To avoid disruption to users, we will temporarily whitelist the most popular NPAPI plug-ins that are not already blocked for security reasons:" Silverlight, Unity, Google Earth, Google Talk and Facebook Video. Java is already blocked by default for security reasons. "In the short term, end users and enterprise administrators will be able to whitelist specific plug-ins. Eventually, however, NPAPI support will be completely removed from Chrome. We expect this to happen before the end of 2014, but the exact timing will depend on usage and user feedback."

A simplified version of Google Earth is now available in the new Google Maps, while the Google Talk plug-in will no longer be necessary in Chrome when Google Hangouts switches to WebRTC. Silverlight is mainly used for streaming premium video by sites like Netflix, but the DRM support for HTML5 video will change this.

Some Chrome extensions include NPAPI plug-ins. Google will no longer accept new Chrome extensions with NPAPI plug-ins starting today and will unpublish these extensions from the Chrome Web Store in September 2014 if developers don't remove the NPAPI plug-ins.

"There are several alternatives to NPAPI. In cases where standard web technologies are not yet sufficient, developers and administrators can use NaCl, Apps, Native Messaging API, and Legacy Browser Support to transition from NPAPI. Moving forward, our goal is to evolve the standards-based web platform to cover the use cases once served by NPAPI," informs Google.

It will be interesting to see if Google will actually drop NPAPI support next year. There are still many sites that rely on plug-ins and some of them are no longer updated.

To see a list of the plug-ins you use in Chrome, open a new tab and paste chrome://plugins/ in the address bar. Click "Details" to see more information about them (including their type: NPAPI or PPAPI - Pepper). You can also disable plug-ins or check "always allowed".


You'll see at least 4 PPAPI (Pepper) plug-ins that are bundled with Chrome: Flash, PDF Viewer, Native Client and Chrome Remote Desktop Viewer. The list also includes a separate NPAPI version of the Flash plugin that's used by Firefox, Opera, Safari, a Google Update NPAPI plug-in and some other NPAPI plug-ins for software you've installed (Google Talk, Java, iTunes Application Detector, Picasa, Google Earth Plugin).