Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea—people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search- as -you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search- before -you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed. As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant . Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful. Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant: Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need. Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for. Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down. Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth: To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google. The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second! As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms. We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

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Search: now faster than the speed of type

Jon Glick is one of the leading experts on search, having literally both wrote the code at leading search engines and later becoming an SEO professional. I remember speaking with him in 2004 at the Ghost Bar in Las Vegas and it was perhaps the most fascinating conversation about search I have ever been part of. I have wanted to interview him for years & just recently was able to. In some past interviews (like this one ) you have highlighted how Google’s key strength is perhaps brand rather than relevancy. After seeing Yahoo! bow out of the search game do you still hold that same opinion? What do you think of the Bing brand? Brand is still Google’s strongest competitive asset in search. It means that to get someone to switch you have to be significantly better than they are, which is a tall order. Bing is the first search offering from MSFT that is in the same league with Google, so it’s more about branding and positioning than objective quality at this point. If Bing was a standalone brand they wouldn’t have a chance, but it has the advantage of default positioning in IE, so for now it just has to be close enough that people won’t swap it out. Over time Bing may evolve some interesting differentiation from Google, but that’s not really the case right now (at least it seems to be pressuring Google to experiment/innovate a bit more). It’s been quite a while since using a MSFT product was “cool” and Bing has that drag on its brand. Some of the new upstarts entering the search game believe that perhaps the thinning of the herd is creating an entry opportunity? Have you checked out Blekko yet? Any other new general search projects interest you? Google rose to prominence during the dot-com bust when the existing players were quite disinterested in search, since at the time (pre-PPC) it was money loser. Search is so ridiculously lucrative right now that any promising technology that starts to get traction or buzz is likely to be quickly acquired by one of the major players as a blocking measure. Google’s rumored attempt to acquire Cuil for $80MM pre-launch is an example. There is an opportunity, but it’s more about getting bought out for a sweet price than taking down the SEs. There is also so much manual tuning in search these days that even a great system will take a lot of effort to return great results. “Plumber OR Pipefitter” is a Boolean query, “Portland OR Plumber” is not, and someone’s got to build code to recognize that. This is where the existing players have a huge legacy advantage. Looking at new search technologies I’m very cautious about those that ask users to do more work in return for better results. Search is a low-intensity activity that people don’t really want to learn or spend time on. This is where an approach like WA (that Bing is also aiming towards) looks interesting. We’d all like search to be like the computer from Star Trek that gives you back exactly the answer/data you ask for. The complication with this, beyond the technical issues, is what benefit it has for the webmasters (i.e. why should I let you crawl/index my site). Current SEs take your data for their use, but provide traffic in return, which an answering system would not. You are one of the few guys who literally wrote the relevancy algorithms & then later worked in the SEO space. Do you consider the roles to be primarily complimentary or adversarial? So is SEO good or bad for SEs? On the whole I think it’s a benefit for them. From an algo perspective it’s a lot easier to determine the intent of a well SEO’d page. The SEs give webmasters a lot of tools and encourage them to use them because it makes search better. 301 your pages so we know where the content went, let us know what parameters don’t impact page content so we don’t get caught in robot traps, tell us what language your page is in using the metatags so we don’t have to guess, etc. If one of these tools ends up being a net negative, SEs can always change how they treat it (NoFollow), or just start ignoring it all together (Keywords MetaTag). This is not to say that a lot of work doesn’t have to be put into removing spam and factoring out overly aggressive optimization, but it’s a lot less than what they’d need to do if no one SEO’d. Given your experience on both sides of the table, do you feel that ranking great in other search engines is like stealing candy from a baby, or is it still hard? What aspects of the SEO process do you find most challenging? For SEO-ing established businesses it’s not a slam dunk, but it is still possible to generate very strong returns. At Become.com we have dozens of people working on SEO in a very organized manner and paybacks on investing effort are better than almost any other aspect of our business. The challenging part is the innate volatility of SEO and the fact that ultimately the SEs control our destiny. You can put together a great growth plan, and then watch an algo update like MayDay shred it. For the spammers, it’s like stealing candy from a sleeping Doberman. It’s easy until the Doberman wakes up. Does your experience allow you to just look at a search result and almost instantly know why something is ranked? If so, what are the key things SEOs should study / work on to help gain that level of understanding? I wish. There is always some pattern recognition that comes from experience (i.e. this is a collage site), but there are so many nuances in the code and off-page stuff that it’s not always instant, you just get better at knowing what to look for. The real learning comes from looking at pages that are ranking well for no obvious reason and seeing what they are doing. It’s no secret why apple is #1 for “ipod nano,” but what is that site I haven’t heard of doing right to get the #5 position? Also if we see a competitor suddenly see a step-function traffic lift we look to see what they changed/added that the SEs seem to be liking. Back in 2006 you highlighted the rise of some of the MFA collage websites. In 2010 content mills are featured in the press almost every week. Are you surprised how far it has went & how long it has lasted? I think Google actually likes folks like Demand Media. What they are doing is seeing where GG’s users are looking for something and not finding it, then plugging that hole. It may not be the Pulitzer Prize-winning content, but it allows users to find something and thus makes Google more useful and universal. When better content comes along those pages will slip down, but they serve a purpose in Google’s ecosystem. Collage websites (stitch sites in Yahoo! parlance) are another story entirely. They add virtually no value and are pretty much spam IMO. The difficulty is in detecting and eradicating them as fast as they can be robo-created. You mentioned looking at the aboutness of a site for Become.com when judging links. Do you think broad general search engines care about link relevancy? Personally, I have not seen it have much of an impact, which is a shame. I think the main reason is that it is quite difficult for general SEs to judge which site relationships are meaningful, and which are not. For example, a golf course might get links from a real estate site; golf and real estate might be classified as very different verticals, but the links are quite relevant because the real estate agent is pointing out one of the benefits of the community. As a result link relevancy has become more about avoiding bad neighborhoods (3Ps, link farms, etc.) than finding good ones. How important do you think temporal analysis is in judging the quality and authenticity of a link profile? It’s certainly a red flag if a site gains too many links too quickly. The same is true if the profile of the links looks unnatural. If all your new links are coming from PR3-PR4 blog sites, something’s off. If bloggers are suddenly that interested in you wouldn’t a lot of PR0 comments exist, FB mentions, tweets, and a few higher PR press mentions? At Yahoo! sites that got a sudden upsurge in inlinks were classed as “spike” sites. Legit spike sites (ex. the website of some unknown who wins an Olympic medal) have typical hallmarks like temporally-linked mentions in media sites that you can’t buy access to (AP, NYT, Time, etc.). The spikes that are blackhatted look totally different. In an interview a couple years ago Priyank Garg mentioned Yahoo! looked at the link’s location on a page. Do you feel other search engines take this into account? All of the major SEs have been doing boilerplate stripping for a while. They recognize footers, rail nav., etc. and look at those links differently. Also, SEs will only follow a limited number of links per page. They typically collect all the links, remove the checksum dups (note: if your links vary by even one parameter they will not be deduped at this phase), and follow the first N links from the code. None of the SEs will say exactly what N is, but it’s probably somewhere between 75 and 300 links (Google recommends you have

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Jon Glick Interview

by Mike Moran If you have a business-to-business (B2B) Web site, you’re probably tired of all the trite advice you see out there from experts who are clearly speaking to those in the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry. I mean, each time you read these opinions about what you should do, do you find yourself asking, “How is that realistic in my B2B business?” And you might be wondering where the really smart B2B marketers look for their new ideas. And the answer is…those crazy B2C Web sites. Let me explain why. No matter that all of your customers are businesses themselves, each person you sell to is also a consumer, and they spend far more of their time online being a consumer shopper than a business shopper. What that means is that every time they come to your site, they bring all the sensibilities of a consumer to your business interaction. They expect you to be just as easy as Amazon.com—being a B2B company doesn’t change what they expect. Image by dailyinvention via Flickr So, when you are trying to figure out how to improve your B2B experience, look to B2C for your inspiration, because they probably got there first. Which of these things wouldn’t improve your Web site? Providing customers the choice of buying online or offline Making products easy to return Providing chat or phone support for those unable to understand your Web site Now, not all of these things are affordable for you, but you might be able to do something better than you are doing now. Don’t believe me that your customers want what they get as consumers? Take a look at the history of B2B experiences: It wasn’t long ago that most B2B companies did not accept credit cards, requiring credit checks and paper billing at the end of each month. B2B sites didn’t offer any form of sign-in or other means of personalization, but now several do. B2B sites never posted ratings and reviews, but now a number of them do. If you expect that B2B user experiences will remain wholly unaffected by B2C experience improvements, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening. Your cheapest market research on what’s next in your business might be to look at businesses that you aren’t in. Just a note to regular readers. I am disappearing for the next few weeks for my annual August vacation, but I will see you in September. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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How Good B2B Marketers Cheat

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. We work hard to consistently develop new tools, features and algorithmic changes to help us better understand what you mean when you enter a query into the Google search box—and we ultimately use that understanding to get you the information you’re looking for as fast as possible. Understanding is core to our mission —particularly as we strive to be as useful in your everyday tasks. For example, if you search for a local sports team, and there’s been a recent game, we’ll show you scores. If you’re visiting Boston and looking for a restaurant, you’ll find tailored search suggestions based on the best Beantown spots. It’s these features that enhance the experience of searching and help you find exactly what you’re looking for. This week, we’ve made a few changes that we hope will make Google search even better for you. Spelling Corrections in Suggest Since we first launched Google Suggest, we’ve offered spell-corrected search completions to provide you with similar search queries from other users. With this feature, not only does Suggest help you rest your fingers because you don’t have to type out a full query—you can also catch a mistake quickly and easily. An example of old spelling correction in Google Sugge st This week we launched an update that makes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you’re typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a “Did you mean” suggestion for your query—giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search. These spelling suggestions already exist on the results page, but by moving them to an earlier point in the search process, we hope we’ve made it faster and easier to get to the results you’re looking for. Right now, this feature is offered only for google.com in English, but we’re working to roll this out internationally in the near future. Google Suggest with the new spelling corrections feature Mobile app results in mobile search With tens of thousands of apps available for both Android and iPhone phone, there are plenty of options to choose from when you’re looking for new apps. And it makes sense that if you hear about a great new app while you’re out and about, you’ll want to download it then and there. In an effort to make apps even easier to find, this week we launched a new feature for mobile search that helps users on Android-powered devices and iPhones find and download mobile apps. So the next time you’re looking for the latest action game, multimedia app or travel tool on your phone, we’ll show you a special result at the top of your mobile search results showing basic information about the app you’re looking for, including title, price and publisher. You’ll also find a link that will take you directly to the app’s installation page in the Android Market or Apple’s App Store. Example mobile searches on your iPhone or Android device: [ download pandora ] or [ bank of america app ] A new look for the Google homepage Search is more fun when it’s personalized. That’s why I was delighted to announce our new feature that allows you to personalize your Google homepage with a favorite photo. Whether you choose a picture from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery of photos hosted by Picasa, Google is now yours to personalize. To get started, head to google.com and look for the “Change background image” link in the lower left-hand side of the page. Keep an eye out for more fun announcements with this feature! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more next week. Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

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This week in search 6/6/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. We work hard to consistently develop new tools, features and algorithmic changes to help us better understand what you mean when you enter a query into the Google search box—and we ultimately use that understanding to get you the information you’re looking for as fast as possible. Understanding is core to our mission —particularly as we strive to be as useful in your everyday tasks. For example, if you search for a local sports team, and there’s been a recent game, we’ll show you scores. If you’re visiting Boston and looking for a restaurant, you’ll find tailored search suggestions based on the best Beantown spots. It’s these features that enhance the experience of searching and help you find exactly what you’re looking for. This week, we’ve made a few changes that we hope will make Google search even better for you. Spelling Corrections in Suggest Since we first launched Google Suggest, we’ve offered spell-corrected search completions to provide you with similar search queries from other users. With this feature, not only does Suggest help you rest your fingers because you don’t have to type out a full query—you can also catch a mistake quickly and easily. An example of old spelling correction in Google Sugge st This week we launched an update that makes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you’re typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a “Did you mean” suggestion for your query—giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search. These spelling suggestions already exist on the results page, but by moving them to an earlier point in the search process, we hope we’ve made it faster and easier to get to the results you’re looking for. Right now, this feature is offered only for google.com in English, but we’re working to roll this out internationally in the near future. Google Suggest with the new spelling corrections feature Mobile app results in mobile search With tens of thousands of apps available for both Android and iPhone phone, there are plenty of options to choose from when you’re looking for new apps. And it makes sense that if you hear about a great new app while you’re out and about, you’ll want to download it then and there. In an effort to make apps even easier to find, this week we launched a new feature for mobile search that helps users on Android-powered devices and iPhones find and download mobile apps. So the next time you’re looking for the latest action game, multimedia app or travel tool on your phone, we’ll show you a special result at the top of your mobile search results showing basic information about the app you’re looking for, including title, price and publisher. You’ll also find a link that will take you directly to the app’s installation page in the Android Market or Apple’s App Store. Example mobile searches on your iPhone or Android device: [ download pandora ] or [ bank of america app ] A new look for the Google homepage Search is more fun when it’s personalized. That’s why I was delighted to announce our new feature that allows you to personalize your Google homepage with a favorite photo. Whether you choose a picture from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery of photos hosted by Picasa, Google is now yours to personalize. To get started, head to google.com and look for the “Change background image” link in the lower left-hand side of the page. Keep an eye out for more fun announcements with this feature! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more next week. Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

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This week in search 6/6/10

Using Google today, you may have noticed that something feels slightly different — the look and feel of our search results have changed! Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout. While we are constantly rolling out small changes and updates, today’s changes showcase the latest evolutions in our search technology, making it easier than ever to find exactly what you’re looking for. The new Google look, with simple left-hand navigation. What’s new and what’s changed? We’ve added contextually relevant, left-hand navigation to the page. This new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Over the past three years, we’ve launched Universal Search , the Search Options panel and Google Squared , and it’s those three technologies that power the left-hand panel. Universal Search helps you find the most relevant types of results for your search. The top section of the new left-hand panel builds on Universal Search by suggesting the most relevant genres of results for your query and letting you seamlessly switch to these different types of results. The “Everything” option remains our essential search experience with different types of results integrated into the main results, but now you can also easily switch to just the particular type of results you are looking for. Our expandable Search Options panel launched last spring brought many rich slice-and-dice tools to search. The new left-hand navigation showcases these tools and enables you to get a different view of your results. Perhaps you’d like to see images from each of the results or just the newest information? These options are all on the left, and our technology will suggest the tools that are most relevant and helpful to your query. Google Squared (available on Google Labs) helps you find and compare entities. Our “Something different” feature builds on the technology in Google Squared to find other entities that are related to your query, so you can easily explore not only the results for your current query but other related topics. In addition to the left-hand side changes, we’ve updated our look and feel in terms of our color palette and our logo. These changes are slight, keeping our page minimalist and whimsical, but make our overall look more modern. The new design refreshes and streamlines the look, feel and functionality of Google, making it easier to pinpoint what you’re looking for. It’s powerful, yet simple. Today’s changes are the latest in our continuing efforts to evolve and improve Google. We’ve been testing these changes with users over the past few months, and what we’re launching today reflects the feedback we’ve received.. We want to ensure that the Google you use today is better than the one you used yesterday, and these latest changes open up many possibilities for future features and enhancements. To hear more about our new design, check out this video: Our new interface begins rolling out today globally across 37 languages. We are also launching the mobile version concurrently for English interfaces in the United States. Search on! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

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A spring metamorphosis — Google’s new look

Webmaster Level: All Anticipating the start of the season of barbecues and potlucks, we’ve added recipes as our newest rich snippets format. This means that for certain sites with recipe content, Google users will see quick facts when these recipe pages show up as part of the search results. For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad , you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets. Recipes is the fifth format we support, following the introduction of reviews , people , video and, most recently, events . If you have recipe content on your site, you can get started now by marking up your recipes with microdata, RDFa, or the hRecipe microformat. To learn more, read our documentation on how to mark up recipe information or our general help articles on rich snippets for a more complete overview. Please remember that to ensure a great user experience we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that we can’t guarantee that marking up your site will result in a rich snippet when your page shows up on our search results. However, we encourage you to get started, and once you’re done you can test your pages with our rich snippets testing tool . Written by Jun Gong, Kosuke Suzuki, and Yu Watanabe

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Better recipes on the web: Introducing recipe rich snippets

Webmaster Level: All You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web . As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs . Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites. If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site: Page Speed , an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement. YSlow , a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist. In Webmaster Tools , Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance . Many other tools on code.google.com/speed . While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page . Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site. We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet. Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

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Using site speed in web search ranking

I played with an iPad yesterday. Here’s my mini-review. The screen is bright and the touch sensitivity is fantastic. Given that it reminds me the most of an iPhone, it’s surprisingly heavy. It feels dense with potential. On the childlike-sense-of-wonder-scale (as fake Steve Jobs would say), the iPad is better than the Macbook Air but not as stunning as the iPhone when the iPhone first came out. I played with my wife’s iPhone for just a few minutes before I knew I had to have an iPhone. But I never really cared about the Macbook Air, mainly because the screen resolution was worse than my current laptop. The iPad fits between those two products in the spectrum of desirability for me. The form factor is… weird. You’re going to feel strange carrying one of these into the grocery store, in the same way you felt weird using your cell phone in the grocery store at first. Leave it to Apple to blaze a trail of coolness though; the iPad will make this form factor acceptable, so you won’t feel quite as strange carrying a tablet into a meeting in a few months. The form factor fundamentally is awkward though: the iPad is book-sized, but much more delicate than a book. A screen this big with no protection will get scratched or scuffed. I’d expect to see plenty of articles about dropped iPads like you did about Wiimotes getting thrown into TVs and windows . The gadget lover in me wants one, but the part of me that cares about open source and tinkering is stronger. I’m with Cory Doctorow on this one. The iPad is gorgeous, but it’s still not worth it for me. Yesterday, I also bought two books at the bookstore to read on a trip. Walking back to my car with “paper media” felt a bit dorky–why am I buying books on paper in 2010? If I could buy a book digitally and really own it (not just obtain a license to read a book, where the license could be revoked), I’d quickly switch to buying my books digitally. But the success of the Kindle shows that a lot of people care more about the convenience than completely owning what they’re buying digitally . I think the iPad will be a huge hit. Non-tech-savvy consumers will love it because of the user experience, the simplicity, and the lack of viruses/malware/trojans. It’s like a computer without all the hassles of a typical computer (pre-installed crapware, anti-virus software, inconvenient software upgrades). Lots of tech-savvy consumers will love the iPad for the same reasons, and especially for the polish and user experience. The current iPad lacks a few things (such as a camera), which ensures that future generations of the iPad will also be a huge hit. But the iPad isn’t for me. I want the ability to run arbitrary programs without paying extra money or getting permission from the computer manufacturer. Almost the only thing you give up when buying an iPad is a degree of openness, and tons of people could care less about that if they get a better user experience in return. I think that the iPad is a magical device built for consumers , but less for makers or tinkerers . I think the world needs more makers, which is why I don’t intend to buy an iPad. That said, I think the typical consumer will love the iPad.

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Mini-review of the iPad

One way we love to help you make iGoogle your own is with our artist and designer themes — ranging from food and fashion to games and comics . Today, we’re excited to announce a set of new themes , tailored to the world traveler in all of us. These new themes, focused on destinations all over the globe, allow you to experience beautiful landscapes, historic monuments, stunning beaches, iconic cities and other picturesque sites — right from your homepage. To bring you this imagery, we’ve partnered with a few leading organizations including National Geographic Society and LIFE , who photograph some of the most breathtaking destinations on earth. Lonely Planet , UNESCO and visiteurope.com have also shared a selection of incredible images. Here’s a quick preview of some of what you’ll find: The World Passport Sampler theme, which brings together many of the great destinations. India , Greece and Egypt , all captured spectacularly by National Geographic. Classic beach destinations from LIFE.com, including Monte Carlo, Waikiki Beach, and the French Riviera. Incredible vistas from Spain , Italy , Thailand and Japan , captured by Lonely Planet. The opportunity to view World Heritage sites , such as the Sydney Opera House and the Old City of Dubrovnik in Croatia, provided by UNESCO. Hopefully, you’re as eager to try out these new themes as we are. Whether these themes remind you of one of your favorite places or allow you to experience a global destination on your homepage, we hope you enjoy them. Bon voyage! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

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Around the world in 25 iGoogle themes…