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Seo Master present to you: 2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: When I started work at Google, I visited the Google Earth team, hoping to find a 20% project on my favorite Google product. There I met Bruno Bowden, who introduced me to a problem I had never thought much about: how to take browser sizes into account when designing a page.

Bruno had noticed that many people who visit the “Download Google Earth” page never actually download, even though, as you can see, the button is pretty hard to miss:



He wondered if a significant number of users might have their browser windows too small to see the button:



To analyze this, Bruno looked at how large people's browser windows were when they visited this page. His first key idea was to measure not the entire browser window, but just the client area -- no toolbars, status bars, or other chrome.

Bruno's second key idea was to render several weeks' worth of page visitor browser sizes in a contour visualization:



Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn't see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren't downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.

Bruno and I realized that Web designers might benefit from this information if it could be made more generally available. We constructed a page that could overlay a DIV containing the contour visualization atop an IFRAME containing any other Web page:



This turned out to be a good way to see which controls were and weren't visible at typical browser sizes. The only problem was, the overlay DIV prevented mouse events from getting to the page IFRAME, so it wasn't possible to interact with the page.

To solve this, we split the overlay DIV into four:



Each of the outlines above (red, yellow, blue, green) represents a separate DIV. As the mouse pointer moves, we resize and reposition the DIVs to leave a small window of blank space around the pointer, and adjust background offsets for each DIV to make the overlay look like one seamless graphic. (We originally did this on a timer, but we found a simpler way: when the mouse touches any of the DIVs, resize/reposition all of the DIVs.) End result: a designer can click and otherwise interact with the page with the mouse, and thus interact with the site normally instead of repeatedly typing in URLs.

We are now making this tool available to the public on Google Labs. To try it, simply visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter the URL of a page you'd like to examine. The size overlay you see is using latest data from visitors to google.com, so this should give you a pretty good indication of what parts of your UI are generally visible and what aren't.

We look forward to receiving your comments at browser-size-external-feedback!

By Arthur Blume on behalf of the Google Browser Size team2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you:
By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Earlier this week, we launched a single Terms of Service for most of our APIs. You might know the Terms of Service (ToS) as those legal documents you click through quickly when you start using a new product, but they’re vitally important, as they specify exactly what you and we can expect from each other when you use our APIs. (Internally, we refer to the new terms as uToS [universal terms of service], pronounced "you toss".)

The project began some time ago as a general developer ToS cleanup. At the time, we looked at the Google Terms of Service shared across many consumer products, and figured developers deserved equal consideration. In reviewing the developer ToS documents, it became clear that there was plenty of language in common among various products. And this week, the new Terms launched, covering most APIs, with more to come in time. Of the APIs that are included, a few have additional terms, but these tend to be brief. And things overall are much simpler and cleaner than before.

This project is an example of something that affects every Google developer and Google too, and yet it’s not really a technical topic. This ToS simplification was no minor project: it was over two years in the making. Getting to simplify an important set of documents by removing over 125,000 words of text is a wonderful thing.

Speaking of universal things, the incredible Voyager 1 spacecraft is now about 18 billion kilometers from the sun and is nearing the end of our solar system. Voyager now inhabits a part of space between planets and other stars that has an intense magnetic field, among other unusual properties, and we’ll learn more about the place from Voyager itself. One scientist says that Voyager is now in a "stagnation region", and I think we all know what that feels like.

And finally, if you’re planning your holiday vacation over the weekend, you might want to see what happens if you ask Google Maps for walking directions from Rivendell to Mordor.


Fridaygram posts are just for fun, and sometimes even legal stuff can be fun. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

2013, By: Seo Master