Polish up the old Google

The fain­test ilk of an inte­gra­tion pro­cess bet­ween pro­ducts is appa­rent in the new blue bar atop of Gmail and other ser­vi­ces, a loose link to the other tools you haven’t yet used. I will now take this oppor­tu­nity to list some areas within goo­gle pro­ducts and ser­vi­ces that I feel should be addres­sed, impro­ved or pro­vi­ded, paying par­ti­cu­lar atten­tion to the idea of focu­sed inte­gra­tion and impro­ved user experience.

The sim­plest and most effec­tive inte­gra­tion is to pro­vide access to all search ser­vi­ces through a sin­gle search box. Blog search, News search, Book search, Scho­lar, Groups, Ima­ges, Finance, Video, Froo­gle, Maps, Code search — they all require you to visit their little sec­tion of goo­gle. For cer­tain search terms one box results appear sug­ges­ting a search using a dif­fe­rent tool and the top alter­na­tive search links are avai­la­ble for video, ima­ges, etc. The recent addi­tion of the pop-up more box is also help­ful. But I feel this is not enough.

There is no method to simul­ta­neously search more than one ser­vice. This could be addres­sed using search ope­ra­tors within the search box, for instance:

• ” Iraq War #blog #news” could search both blog search and news search for results on the Iraq War — or alter­na­ti­vely “searchblog,searchnews:Iraq War”
• “Scar­lett Johans­son #ima­ges #video” to search for both videos and images.
• “Lite­rary cri­ti­cism #books #scho­lar -#nor­mal­search ” a search for lite­rary cri­ti­cism in books and scho­lar, exc­lu­ding nor­mal goo­gle search
• “all:Johnny Depp” searches all ser­vi­ces and pro­vi­des for exam­ple the top result for each with an expan­da­ble box that can pro­vide a further 5 results or a list of results simi­lar to nor­mal que­ries but with an icon indi­ca­ting which ser­vice gene­ra­ted the result and left-aligned thumb­nails for ima­ges, videos, etc. For ins­tance the list could con­tain first a link to Depp’s IMDB page, secondly a link and thumb­nail for the trai­ler to Pira­tes of the Carib­bean 2, thirdly some ima­ges and fourthly a recent blog post.
• “media:Buffy the Vam­pire Sla­yer” — auto­ma­ti­cally searches the media ser­vi­ces for infor­ma­tion (e.g. ima­ges, video)
• ” research:Capacitive Tomo­graphy” — auto­ma­ti­cally searches .edu and .ac​.uk sites, scho­lar, books, wiki­pe­dia and other valued resources.
• “latest:Halo Movie ” — auto­ma­ti­cally searches news, blogs and sites recently updated.

I think you can quickly see the power of this approach and I haven’t even touched upon local searches or finance. Of course the exact imple­men­ta­tion is just my spe­cu­la­tion, another approach could be a list of check-able boxes. In advan­ced options you could ask that goo­gle auto­ma­ti­cally search all their ser­vi­ces for you (simi­lar to the all: ope­ra­tor) and pro­vide you with rele­vant results from across the board, based on some algo­rithm that knows based on your search term which ser­vi­ces are most rele­vant. Of course each of the main search ser­vi­ces has their own spe­ci­fic user inter­face and something that could accom­mo­date them all would be nee­ded, though I am sure it is all pos­si­ble. Cus­tom and save-able search ope­ra­tors, simi­lar to Yahoo’s approach are another option Goo­gle has not yet pursued.

Search His­tory, an inva­lua­ble tool needs expan­ding to all of Google’s search ser­vi­ces also. It is slowly get­ting there and I ima­gine in a few months it will be avai­la­ble for most if not all ser­vi­ces. Why not expand this ser­vice to let users choose what his­to­ries they wish to keep and dis­card? Why not pro­vide a search ope­ra­tor that auto­ma­ti­cally exc­lu­des a search term from the search his­tory ( e.g. #nohis­tory). With the power of Firefox’s exten­si­bi­lity search his­tory could also be expan­ded to search boxes on domains of a user’s choo­sing. For ins­tance I often want to see what I have searched for on Wiki­pe­dia, You­Tube or various coding sites. To save terms searched for on any domain would be a power­ful tool. Obviously for the sake of pri­vacy and secu­rity this should be opt-in by the user and they should retain com­plete con­trol over the data being sto­red. Of course this could be expan­ded to an exten­sion that sto­res your his­tory online and saves search terms from all sites — but this would gene­rate a slew of pri­vacy fears from the quite right secu­rity zealots.

Tools are the second big issue and these should ulti­ma­tely be inte­gra­ted. The recent grea­se­mon­key script that puts Rea­der into Gmail is the clea­rest and most influen­tial indi­ca­tion of the power of inte­gra­tion. At pre­sent I have to login using a hun­dred dif­fe­rent forms to access a hun­dred dif­fe­rent tools that have little to no inte­ro­pe­ra­bi­lity. The Rea­der into gmail approach is a nice idea and one that could be expan­ded up on:

• “Files” — A list of docu­ments rela­ted to your goo­gle account i.e. those in spreadsheets and docs, groups (files in the new beta), pages and pos­sibly Gmail attach­ments. The list could indi­cate per­mis­sions, size, file type, last acces­sed and direct links to edi­ting them online (or an auto­ma­tic pro­cess to edit them locally and re-upload only chan­ges using the Goo­gle desk­top search client). This could extend to directly edi­ting Gmail attach­ments without having to down­load and re-upload to docs. Pho­tos from Picasa and uploa­ded blog­ger files could also be inc­lu­ded in this list. Each of these files could also be labe­lled as per the gmail tra­di­tion and of course be search-able both for the file and in the file.
• “His­tory” — An inte­gra­tion of search his­tory into Gmail that could inc­lude terms you have used to search through your mail and “saved searches” that could be quite com­plex (like the grea­se­mon­key script ” save per­sis­tent searches”)
• “Blog” — Post directly to blog­ger from Gmail without having to send posts via email — I much pre­fer the edi­tor in Gmail and I gene­rally use it to com­pose all of my posts. The abi­lity to edit from Gmail would also save me having to login to blog­ger to correct chan­ges or add after thoughts — espe­cially con­si­de­ring I have Gmail open all the time. Once again a list of pre­vious posts and asso­cia­ted files could be made and use the new blogger-beta labe­lling sys­tem. Add mul­ti­ple blogs in settings.
• “Sche­dule” — Show calen­dar inside Gmail — please, please please.
• “Links” — A list of hyper­links that have appea­red in emails or mul­ti­ple emails recently with the option to store them to Goo­gle Book­marks. The num­ber of times I have to search for the email that con­tai­ned the link to the web page I have for­got­ten is annoying.
• Make all of the above options smart (i.e. don’t show blogs if they don’t have a blog­ger account) and give the user the abi­lity to disa­ble them.

Little things:

• “Add word to dic­tio­nary” option within Gmail rich text edi­tor, though this may be redun­dant con­si­de­ring the new spellcheck fea­ture coming in Fire­fox 2.0.
• Save advan­ced search options to account not just locally — I like to see 100 results and have Safe­Search off, this often gets reset.
• Use the inline expan­sion of topics in Rea­der within Gmail to quickly read new mail as an option and to pro­vide some sort of con­sis­tent interface.
• Quick add items to calen­dar using Gmail or Goo­gle search boxes (e.g. using calen­dar:) operator.
• Gmail: Use label colour coding as shown by Matt Cutts.
• Gmail: Rele­gate Spam to a label that inco­ming mail can also be applied to.
• Gmail: Export to PDF (and other simi­lar for­mats in ‘docs’) for emails.
• Gmail: Pro­vide extra secu­rity, a search for “pass­word” in gmail should ask the user to input their account pass­word again to ensure Gmail has not been left log­ged in accidentally.
• A ses­sion mana­ge­ment con­sole. Oops I left myself log­ged in on a public PC — delete the ses­sion remo­tely to pre­serve security.
• Zeit­geist for email — who has emai­led me most, who have I emai­led most, most popu­lar email domains, who have I chat­ted to most, etc.
• In Goo­gle Rea­der, let it recog­nise my own site feed (or let me define this) and if it’s blog­ger pro­vide a link to quickly and effi­ciently edit the post.

If you have made it to the bot­tom of this post I applaud you and if there is anything you think I have for­got­ten or there are fea­tu­res and chan­ges you want to see feel free to leave a note in the comments.