When you search Google for [Christmas], [Hanukkah], [Kwanzaa], [Festivus] or other related queries, you’ll see some special decorations related to each holiday. Festivus is « a holiday celebrated by those seeking an alternative to the commercialism and pressures of the Christmas holiday season. » Christmas trees, Santa Claus, the Christmas star adorn the Google search page and […]

Google’s knowledge graph card tests a feature that lets you like or dislike movies and TV shows. For example, when you search for « It’s a Wonderful Life », you can click like or dislike and check the percentage of Google users who liked it. The same buttons show up when you search for a TV show

For some reason, Google Translate now has a limit of 5000 characters per translation. There’s even a character counter at the bottom of the input box. If you happen to paste a long text that has more than 5000 characters, you’ll get an error message (« maximum characters exceeded: X characters over 5000 maximum ») and a

Just in time for New Year’s dinner, Google has a new mobile interface for recipe search. I searched for [avocado mayo] and noticed a long list of keywords below the search box and ads: salad, chicken, shrimp, vegan, bacon and more. You can select more than one keyword and this helps you refine the results.

YouTube has recently started to experiment with replacing Google+ notifications in the navigation bar with YouTube notifications. You get notifications for recently uploaded videos from your subscribed channels, but only if you’ve enabled notifications for those channels. For example, you can go to the subscription manager and click the bell icon next to a channel

It looks like YouTube’s notification experiment is now a regular feature and you can no longer disable it by clearing cookies. When sign in to your Google account, YouTube’s desktop site no longer shows Google+ notifications in the navigation bar: it replaces them with YouTube notifications. « Your notifications live here. Subscribe to your favorite channels

Google Image Search’s mobile interface tests a new feature that starts playing snippets from a YouTube video at the top of the search results page. It’s not disclosed as an ad, there’s no sound and you can’t stop or hide the video, which continues to play on repeat. Right now, the experiment seems to be limited

Google Image Search has a different way to display suggestions: it now shows a long list of colorful boxes with related searches. You can click one or more boxes to dynamically refine search results. For example, when searching for [sportswear], Google shows suggestions like: [women basketball], [tennis], [badminton], [golf], [volleyball], [nike woman], [alexander wang], [adidas],

If you try to send a JavaScript attachment using Gmail or if you want to download a .js attachment, you’ll get a new anti-virus warning: « Blocked for security reasons », « 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled ». .JS has been added to the long list of file types that are