Chrome 15 and above supports mapping input fields to specific types of data to improve the accuracy of autofill tools. The new WHATWG autocompletetype attribute proposal from Ilya Sherman of Google proposes 36 mapped tokens and two sections for autofill agents entering name, address, contact, credit card, business, or birthday data in a web browser.
Google's mobile search engine crawler now uses an updated User-Agent string designed to trigger iPhone-specific renderings of web pages.
Google released Chrome 13 into its stable channel this morning with over 5200 revisions including Instant Pages. If your webpages are not already differentiating between attended and unattended pageviews using the Page Visibility API for site analytics (and other functions assuming live eyeballs and the opportunity for interaction with page elements) your pageview numbers are now likely inflated.
Google search result pages now trigger a prefetch of top search result links in an effort to make navigating search results as easy as changing channels on your television. If Google's search algorithms determine there is a significant probability of user click-through on particular result they will instruct supporting browsers to preload the entire destination page including images, JavaScript, advertisements, and analytics. Update your web pages to be aware of the current page visibility state and track interactions, not background tasks.
Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header.
Google released its second web browser yesterday afternoon, adding additional headroom for web applications stretching the limits of what it's possible to accomplish within a web browser. The Google Chrome team assembled domain experts in various fields over the past six years, both through direct hires and acquisitions, to create a new browser and its critical components from scratch. GMail and Google Maps pushed the Web to its limits, taking advantage of browser technologies invented in Redmond but left dormant for far too long. Contributing to Firefox's core, writing browser extensions, and championing HTML could only take the $150 billion company so far: they needed to own the full browser to push their Web efforts forward at full speed.
On June 30 Adobe announced a partnership with Google and Yahoo! to better index SWF content on the Web. Search engines can now look inside the binary SWF format to extract text, links, and possible actions. In this post I will take a deeper look at search engine Flash interpreters and provide a few tips for successful indexing.
Google App Engine lets any Python developer execute CGI-driven Web applications, store its results, and serve static content from a fault-tolerant geo-distributed computing grid built exclusively for modern Web applications. In this post I will summarize Google App Engine from a developer's point of view, outline its major features, and examine pitfalls for developers and startups interested in deploying web applications on Google's servers.
Google released a new version of its Google Analytics tracking code last month. In this post you will learn about the new features available to webmasters and how to move away from the deprecated libraries.
Google is currently processing over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReduce jobs spread across its computing clusters.
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »