It’s easy to have a love-hate relationship with the holidays. On the one hand, it’s a joyous time of the year full of festivities and delicious baked goods. On the other hand, it’s stressful. For something like traveling which is already stressful on its own, traveling during the holidays can feel like twice the trouble.

One way to cut down on some of the stress before you head to the airport is to plan ahead. Let’s say this year you’re traveling to France for the holidays. Here are some quick answers that can make your planning faster and easier -- we recently redesigned these features to be richer and more interactive on mobile and tablet, and now you’ll see them on desktop as well, so you can plan ahead whether you’re at home or on the go:

• Figure out your budget. Since luggage space is limited and you don’t want to pay an overage fee, you may want to buy your gifts when you land in France. Find the currency exchange rate ahead of time so you can figure out how much that $15 (USD) fruitcake actually costs in euros by searching [15 usd in euro] or [french currency].

• Learn about French traditions. Friends who live in Paris have invited you to their reveillon dinner. Trouble is, you don’t know what that means. You can quickly find the answer by typing [define reveillon] in Google.

• Plan your holiday Hangouts. Even though you’ll be oceans apart, you can still wish your family a happy holidays in person. Schedule a date for a Google+ Hangout, but don’t forget to factor in the time difference, which you can figure out by searching [time in france].

• Track your flight before you leave the house. To avoid arriving at the airport only to find out your flight’s been delayed for hours, you can quickly check the flight status by typing the flight number like [united airlines 942] or [UA942], into the search box.

Other quick answers we’re updating on desktop over the next few weeks are finance, unit conversion, holiday and sunrise times, and weather. And, of course, you can also make your holidays easier to manage using things like our Flight Search feature to book your trip, Google+ to share your photos with family and friends, Google Docs to track your holiday spending, and more.

Happy holidays!

Posted by Robert Stacey, Software Engineer

Search has always been about getting you the answers you need as quickly as possible. When you’re looking for the weather forecast or a stock quote, solving an equation, or converting kilograms into pounds, you’ve been able to see those answers right away on Google.

We’ve recently made improvements to some of these answers to make them richer, more beautiful, and more interactive. When you search for weather on tablet and mobile, you’ll see a new 10-day and hourly weather forecast that you can interact with. Our calculator feature also got a makeover—you can search for any calculation on google.com and you’ll get a fully functional scientific calculator at your fingertips.

Today when you search on mobile or tablet, you’ll see some more improvements in the way we provide these quick answers, including better understanding what information you need and surfacing the most relevant information for you. For example, in our flight status quick answer, we’ve included a flight progress indicator and increased the size of arrival and departure times so you can quickly see when your loved ones will be landing.


Other quick answer features we’re updating on mobile and tablet cover finance, currency conversion, unit conversion, dictionary definitions, local time lookup, and holiday and sunrise times. In all these quick answers we’ve simplified the experience so you can focus on the answer you were looking for. For example, for unit conversions the answer is displayed prominently for a question like [how many miles are 42 kilometers]. If you’d like to convert another unit of measure like [how many yards in a mile], you can simply tap the card and see the full unit converter right there.


These changes are rolling out to those searching on google.com in English on mobile and tablet. Stay tuned as we continue to develop our quick answers and bring these beautiful designs to desktop and international users as well.

Posted by Jeromy Henry, User Experience Designer

A few months ago we launched a graphing functionality right in search to help students and math lovers plot functions in an easy, simple way. In addition to calculating something simple like dividing up a restaurant bill or graphing more difficult math functions using the search box, people have also been plotting some really unique and interesting functions. You’ll be able to do even more with the graphing calculator, which now supports 3D plotting as well.

Just type any real two variable function into Google to see a dynamic, interactive, three dimensional plot. Click anywhere in the graph to rotate it to check out different angles, or scale the view by zooming in or out, or by editing the range in your equation or in the lower-right legend box. For example, if you’re a student studying advanced calculus, the ability to see a three dimensional graph will help you get a better visualization for real two variable functions.





This feature is enabled by a technology called WebGL, which we’re using for the first time in Google Search. WebGL is a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without the need to install additional software. This technology is currently supported on modern web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.

This feature is available globally, so now millions of students can explore and interact with compound math functions right in their search results. We can’t wait to see what kind of interesting functions you’ll plot!

Posted by Adi Avidor, Google Engineer and Math Lover

I’m a big music fan, so I spend a lot of time searching for music bands and artists. When I hear a new song or a friend tells me about an artist I should check out, I search to watch their music videos, find out recent news about them, and to learn more about them in general. I can also see right on the results page which sites have songs or samples of songs that I can listen to.

But to me, music is best heard live, so it’s always exciting to find out that a band I love is coming to town. For fellow concert-goers, now when you search for bands or artists, you may see upcoming concert tour dates right on the results page if they’re playing in your area. If they aren’t touring near you, the new results for concerts won’t appear, but if the band happens to be coming to your town within the next few months, you can see the concert dates listed under the band’s official website. You can then click on the band’s official site to learn more or click on other web pages to learn more about the event or to buy tickets.

For example, I was searching for the [black keys] to listen to some of their music online. I wasn’t explicitly looking for their tour schedule, but now I know I should keep my calendar clear on Friday May 4, since they will be coming back to the Bay Area, and I remember how great they were at Outside Lands last year:


To find upcoming concert tour dates, we aggregate relevant data for events from multiple websites and show it under the band’s official website with links to the event sites where you can find out more about the event or purchase tickets.

If you have a website listing upcoming events and would like them to appear in search, you should add rich snippets markup to your web pages. After following the instructions to mark up your events, use the rich snippets testing tool to test your markup and see how it would appear on Google.

This is currently available to those searching on google.com in English, and we’ll continue to expand the feature to more countries in the future.

Posted by Kavi Goel, Product Manager, Search

(Cross-posted on the Google Mobile blog)

With the December movie season in full swing, we’ve just made it even faster and easier to discover movies, showtimes and theaters, all from your smartphone. Now when you search for [movies] or your favorite theater like [century san francisco] on Google.com on your phone, you’ll see interactive results for movies in a new swipeable ribbon, with the most relevant information displayed at the top of the page.

For each movie, you’ll see the movie poster, a short summary, ratings and the nearest theaters and showtimes. Designed to help you quickly browse what’s playing in theaters now, this information instantly updates as you slide through the movie posters -- no need to wait for a page to load or to use the back button.


To learn more about a movie, tap the movie title to find details like the cast and a full summary. And if you see a play button on the movie poster, you can tap to view the official trailer. You can even buy tickets directly from your smartphone by tapping on underlined showtimes -- and skip past those long holiday box office lines!

So the next time you head out to see sagas of vampires, the world’s biggest Muppets fan, dancing penguins or nearly impossible heists, try the new interactive results for movies by visiting Google.com on your iOS or Android phone’s browser and searching for [movies], [theaters] or a movie title. This feature is available in English, in the US.

Posted by Toshi Tajima, Software Engineer

I still recall the day when my friend Yossi came to school and showed off his brand new graphing calculator. I was stunned by how easy it was to plot complicated functions -- meanwhile, the rest of us were still drawing them by hand on graph paper.

Today, I’m hoping to share that magical feeling with students around the world, with the introduction of graphing functionality on Google. Now you can plot mathematical functions right on the search result page. Just type in a function and you’ll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page.

You can zoom in and out and pan across the plane to explore the function in more detail. You can also draw multiple functions by separating them with commas. This feature covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions, and is available in modern browsers.

I hope students and math lovers around the world find this experience as magical as I found the graphing calculator so long ago.

Posted by Adi Avidor, Google Engineer and Math Lover

This summer we posted a video that takes a peek under the hood of search, sharing the methodology behind search ranking and evaluation. Through this methodology, we make roughly 500 improvements to search in a typical year. As we often discuss, that’s a lot of change, and it can be hard to make sense of it all.


However, for those of you looking to deepen your understanding of how search has evolved, the video highlights some important trends:

• Universal Results: With Universal Search—which returns results like images, videos, and news, in addition to webpages—we’re helping you find all different kinds of information in the same place. We’ve continued to make search more comprehensive, enabling you to find products, places, patents, books, maps and more.
• Quick Answers: Today on Google you’ll find more than just a list of links to websites. You’ll find Quick Answers at the top of the page for a wide variety of topics, including flight times, sports scores, weather and dozens more. As our technology gets better, we’re beginning to answer harder questions for you, right on the search results page.
• The Future of Search: We’ve also been focused on developing faster ways to search and save time, whether we’re shaving seconds off searches with Google Instant or helping you search from your phone with Voice Search. Searching should be as easy as thinking, and the future looks bright!

As part of making the video we also created a timeline of search features. It’s not the first timeline we’ve done, but I think this one does a nice job of categorizing the different kinds of Universal Results and Quick Answers we’ve added over the years:

The timeline depicts the approximate dates when we launched particular search feature enhancements. You can also download a larger image by following this link.

It’s been exciting to be part of the evolution of search over the past decade, and we’re thrilled about what’s in store next. If the past is any indication, we don’t know what search will look like in 2020, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it looks nothing like it does today.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Google Fellow

We’re happy to let you sports fans out there know that today you’ll start seeing more baseball information on google.com, in addition to the sports information we’ve started providing recently with NFL live results and baseball information from ESPN.

From now on, when you get results for MLB.com, you will see the latest scores, schedules and team standings. There will also be direct links to game previews, live updates, recaps and box scores on MLB.com, making it easier for you to get to more baseball information.  


Posted by Nitsan Oz, Software Engineer

We've previously introduced rich snippets for reviews, video, events, and most recently music, to help people determine more quickly if a particular webpage has the information they're interested in.

Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs. Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.

Here's an example of what the snippets look like:


You can see application snippets from several marketplaces and review sites, including Android Market, Apple iTunes, and CNET. If you’re a webmaster and would like more information about how to add the application rich snippets markup to your site, please refer to our Help Center article and send any questions to our discussion forum.

Posted by Alejandro Goyen, Product Manager

Just as the NFL season kicks off and you have your fantasy football league ready to go, you’ll be able to get useful information such as the latest scores, schedules, standings and stats for football-related queries in your search results. Last week, we started showing MLB results in partnership with ESPN and we’re now expanding sports live results to include the NFL. In addition to information on the football league, teams and players, you’ll also have direct links to previews, live streams, updates and game recaps. We hope to add more and more sports information on google.com, so stay tuned.

Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give you a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to your query. This week we started rolling out snippet improvements for pages that contain lists; results for these pages will now reflect the structure of the page, rather than just showing two lines of text.

If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we’ll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format. The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page (for example, “30+ items” in the screenshot below).



This change to snippets will be rolling out globally over the next few days. Over time we’ll keep making more snippet improvements to better reflect the content of our search results, making it easier for you to find the most relevant results.

Posted by Raj Krishnan, Product Manager

Editor’s Note: Today's guest author is Chris Jason from the Digital Media team at ESPN. With baseball season in full swing, Chris is writing a guest post to announce an improvement to baseball related searches with the help of data from ESPN. Like our search team here, Chris’s team is passionate about helping people find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily, whether they’re watching on TV or searching online for the latest sports news and scores. For more about ESPN, check out their Front Row blog, and stay tuned as we work to add more data from sports providers to improve your sports related searches.

For those of you who don't spend your day writing code, let me get the nerdy backdrop out of the way: microdata is a way to describe something – for example a person, event, place, etc. – through special use of structured HTML5 tags and properties in a Web page. This information can be used by computer applications – like a search engine or Web browser – to create a richer experience for users. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, no worries. I promise this will make sense by the end.

At ESPN we’re always looking for ways to reach and serve sports fans in better ways, and we know they aren’t always on ESPN.com or watching our television programming. As a manager in Digital Media my job is to use technology to reach, excite, and surprise those fans. For example, we have teams like our Stats and Information Group, who collect and produce as much accurate, timely sports information as they possibly can, and we’re always looking for ways to connect with people who otherwise might not see the great information we uncover.

ESPN Digital Media has been experimenting with microdata for a while and discussing internally the idea of creating a set of sports microdata. So, we worked with Google to create a series of sports-related microdata that include athletes, teams, leagues, and games. The idea is to apply meaning to the code in our content using microdata, in order to create a richer experience for users when ESPN webpages are displayed in Google’s search results. While this is a work in progress, we’re working with Google to standardize the format so that others can make use of this technology going forward.


Now, when you use Google to search for baseball-related information – such as teams, players, and scores – the results display high-level athlete information, stats, game scores, and links to key content on ESPN.com, including game previews and recaps, video highlights, photos, schedule, and roster information. You will also be able to interact more easily with some of ESPN's key products like GameCast, scoreboards and player pages.

Going forward our team is planning to create microdata-enhanced results for other sports like football, basketball, hockey, and soccer.

To all you sports fans out there using Google, we hope you’ll find that we've made it easier to access the sports information you're looking for and that you enjoy the new experience.

Posted by Chris Jason, Senior Manager of Product Development, ESPN Digital Media

Starting today, when you search for music, you may see songs that are available for you to play in the snippets of certain search results. Up until now, it’s been easy to find information about musical artists, such as their biographies, pictures from the latest awards ceremony, or recent related news items. However, it’s been comparatively harder to find audio recordings of an artist’s songs. When you’re looking at a results page, it’s not obvious which pages will have songs or samples of music that you can listen to.

We've previously introduced rich snippets for reviews, video, and events to help people determine more quickly if a particular webpage has the information they're interested in. Today we’re introducing rich snippets for music. Now when you search for an artist or album, certain sites that have implemented the new rich snippets markup for music will show up to four songs in their snippet on the results page.

The snippet will display the name of the song, whether it’s audio or video, the duration of the clip, and the album it’s from. Even better, the song title itself will act as a link to the site’s specific page for that song, so that if you know you just want to hear one particular thing, music rich snippets can get you straight there.

Content providers looking to have their sites display music rich snippets can take a look at our blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog explaining how to get started. The rich snippets testing tool will allow you to test your markup and see how it would appear on Google.

We hope that this will be the first step towards making audio content easier for you to find and easier for sites to surface. You can currently see audio clips on the results page from several partners who have used the rich snippets markup for music, including MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation. For instance, if you search for [gipsy kings] or [kelly clarkson], you’ll see some of the songs they have available to play right there on the results page. We’ll continue to work with more content providers to make sure you can always find the music you’re looking for.

Posted by Gideon Wald, Associate Product Manager