Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.

Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.

(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)

So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I recommend the dev channel version of Chrome. It gets all the cool features early, and it’s been very stable/fast for me.

Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we’ll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the “correct” query.

There’s a few nice things about this post besides the direct improvement on Arabic language searches. For one, this post joins other recent posts that pull back a little bit of the curtain on the 400+ ranking changes that we make every year. I hope that we keep doing these posts.

Another nice thing is that the post talks about the impact of the improvement (10% of Arabic language queries are affected by this change). For the recent blog post about how Google uses synonyms in ranking, Steven Baker mentioned that “synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.” I like giving a rough idea of a change’s impact. The vast majority of Google’s 400+ annual ranking changes affect a much smaller percentage of queries, so don’t get the wrong idea that every improvement to our ranking algorithms affects a large percentage of searches. One last nice thing is that this change again shows the value of historical search data to improve search quality. I know that few users care about that, but it’s good to point out.

Anyway, I like to point out when Google blogs about these internal changes to our scoring algorithms, because people always want to know more about how Google works.

Check out the blog post, but it’s easy to use: just add any url to Google Reader.

And here are the slides if you’d like to follow along:

The talk is almost half an hour, so I hope you enjoy it and learn something new!

Added: MG Siegler noted the change as well.

Read the blog post for more info, but I liked a couple examples that Steve mentioned. “Pictures” and “picture” often mean the same thing, but the query [arm reduction] is very different than [arms reduction]. Also, in the query [dura ace track bb axle njs] the “bb” is probably referring to a bottom bracket while in the query [software update on bb color id] the “bb” probably means blackberry.

Still not convinced? Here’s some new stats from Steve that we haven’t made public before:

However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches [note from Matt: of course, it could be a subtle change] across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

I hope Google continues to open up more about search quality and talk more about our search rankings. Steve is a smart engineer. I love that Google has a lot of smart engineers like Steve and with any luck we’ll continue to highlight the sort of work that those engineers do.

As far as concrete advice for webmasters, the same advice still holds that we’ve always said: think about the different words that searchers might use when looking for your content. Don’t just use technical terms–think about real-world terms and slang that users will type. For example, if you’re talking about a “usb drive,” some people might call it a flash drive or a thumb drive. Bear in mind the terms that people will type and think about synonyms that can fit naturally into your content. Don’t stuff an article with keywords or make it awkward, but if you can incorporate different ways of talking about a subject in a natural way, that can help users.

Added, Jan 22, 2010: Another nice post on the Google blog, this time about highlighting users’ answers directly in search result snippets.

I’ll embed the first video in the new series below (it’s about how PageRank flows from Twitter and Facebook in our web search rankings):

But usually I won’t blog about each new video. Instead make sure you follow @googlewmc . That way you’ll always find out first when new webmaster videos come out.

Google recently introduced a page with a large number of resources for the Haiti earthquake, including the ability to donate money.

Also, a bunch of Googlers have worked to bring updated satellite imagery to Google Earth. You can also click to see the earthquake’s aftermath on Google Maps.

Finally, it turns out that Google’s Map Maker (which allows regular users to contribute to maps) can help with this disaster. Google added support for Map Maker in Haiti last year after Haiti suffered through Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. In less than a year, Google Map Maker has become one of the most accurate maps of Haiti, and Google is sharing the raw data with the UN. The Google Maps API provides the latest Map Maker info as a map tile set. You can read more in the blog post.

How can you help? I’d start with Google’s resource page for the quake or this page on CNN.

Update, Jan 16, 2010: Google has created (with help from the U.S. State Department) a Person Finder for the Haiti Earthquake that you can embed on your website, too:

Update, Jan 21, 2010: Google also gathered 15cm imagery (much higher quality) and just pushed that live on Google Maps.

Update: David Drummond from Google appears on CNBC to discuss the situation more.

Also, Google just made it so that Gmail defaults to https. This means that even if you use a public wifi hotspot, you’ll have an encrypted tunnel for the communication between your browser and Google. This makes your email much more secure against sniffing or snooping.

Overall, realtime search triggered in under two minutes from the earthquake happening and within a minute of the first tweets appearing. The rough timeline (in Pacific time) is

~10:10 – An earthquake happened. (The USGS says the earthquake happened at 10:09:35 a.m.)
10:11 – The USGS government web site started to track the earthquake, with a “?” magnitude.
10:12 – Google’s realtime onebox triggers.
10:13 – USGS web site marked the magnitude as 4.1.
10:20 – USGS site updates their feed.
~10:25 – Google’s earthquake onebox gets updated earthquake info.

All in all, not too shabby, but still a perfect opportunity to identify ways to do better. For example, Stephen Shankland said it took about six minutes for him to see realtime results trigger, adding “which struck me as fairly impressive for such a mammoth operation as Google search.” We looked into it, and it looks like a data center timeout meant that a few people didn’t see the realtime results for a few extra minutes. Nothing to be ashamed of, but something we’ll look at improving in the future. Most searchers did see the realtime results trigger within a minute or two on Google.

Greg Sterling showed a screenshot (taken by Danny Sullivan) over on Search Engine Land that showed an earthquake onebox with stale info. It looks like that happened because the feed we were using from the USGS took ~10 minutes to update. Going forward, I’m sure we’ll check whether we could do anything differently on this, but if a feed has older info for a few minutes, there’s little we can do about that.

Overall though, I think Google acquitted itself quite well on this earthquake. Realtime search triggered quickly and accurately for the vast majority of people. And Google’s realtime search was able to pull in not only tweets, but relevant blogs and news articles. The search quality team will keep working to make sure that the triggering speed/thresholds, relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness of real-time search matches the high expectations that people already bring to Google’s web search results.

One last thing: I love that many Google employees’ first instinct when they feel an earthquake is to start searching on Google to see how well our real-time search works.