Google Related is was a browser toolbar that offered contextual information about the web page being displayed in the main browser window. For example, when looking at a restaurant’s website, Google Related would show a map/address, reviews and similar restaurants/businesses.

In its announcement today, Google says “the product isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like, and while we still believe in the value provided to our users, we’ll be retiring the existing product over the next few weeks.”

As I said, that’s just one of several announcements. Here’s a quick look at some of the others:

• Google Patent Search is going away. Formerly available at www.google.com/patents, Google says it’s now offering a better patent search experience through Google.com, and plans to add more patent search features there in the future.
• Google One Pass has been shut down. This was the company’s payment system for publishers that launched in February 2011. Google says it’s working with its partners to transition to Google Consumer Surveys and other platforms.
• Google’s Flu Vaccine Finder has been passed over to HealthMap and relaunched there as the HealthMap Flu Vaccine Finder.

There are also API- and mobile-related announcements, along with a couple related to Picasa, on Google’s blog post.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan:

When Google Related rolled-out last August. I can recall some worries by some that this was going to push Google products unfairly over publishers. As one person commented back at the launch:

I run a restaurant guide website. When I browse a restaurant page on my site, it pops up offering me links to: Google’s Place page for the same restaurant; the Google maps page for the same restaurant; links to Google places pages for other restaurants nearby; some web results to other competitors sites. Perhaps some of this is useful to the user, but the abundance of links to Google properties makes me more than a little sceptical as to the true intentions here.

If that was really Google’s plan, this stands as a testament that just because Google releases something, that’s no guarantee it’ll do well. See also Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google TV….

On a personal note, telling us that the Related team will now “focus on creating more magic moments across other Google products” just sounds like Google is going way over on the marketing speak. Related didn’t work. Got it. But “magic moments?” Just give us some products that work, and that will be magical enough.

As for Patent Search, I’m just waiting for someone from Google to complain that it’s not really closing that service, since it’s just “redirecting” it. Yeah, it’s closed, and there’s nothing magical about that. Google wrote:

We’re redirecting the old Patent Search homepage to google.com to make sure everyone is getting the best possible experience for their patent searches.

How on does dumping people who were going to a dedicated vertical search engine on patents to the Google home page which searches the entire web by default become “the best possible experience.”

If you want to do patent searches, you have to be one of the few people who may have caught Google’s post today and noted that there’s an advanced patent search page that’s also being offered. Why not just redirect Google Patent Search to that page? That would have been the best possible experience.

Postscript 2 From Danny Sullivan: Turns out, trying to reach the old Google Patents site at patents.google.com redirects you to the Google.com homepage but with a filter in place to search only against patents. It also says that in the search box, “search patents,” but I totally missed this. That’s much better than I thought, but I think it’ll still be confusing to some.

Related Articles

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• Once Condemned Google Now Hailed By Publishers For One Pass
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• Google Shuttering Buzz In Favor Of Google+; Farewell To Labs
• Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures!
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As several sites have reported already, PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar, but Google changed the lookup URL. This change has prevented third-party tools that check PageRank from looking up a page’s PageRank. If you use Internet Explorer and turn on the Google Toolbar, you will still be able to look up the Toolbar PageRank score. But you may not be able to do so if you use a third-party tool, not until they update their lookup scripts.

The OLD URL:

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&features=Rank&ch=8f3b58e04&q=info:[URLHERE]

The New URL:

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&features=Rank&ch=8f3b58e04&q=info:[URLHERE]

Googler John Mueller confirmed this on Google + and added a hint for webmasters to look beyond PageRank.

So do not panic, your site’s PageRank has likely not gone to zero.

For more on PageRank, see our article named What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

Related Stories:

• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
• Google: Low PageRank & Bad Spelling May Go Hand-In-Hand; Panda, Too?
• First Google Toolbar PageRank Update Of 2011
• Google: PageRank Drops Most Likely Because You Sell Links
• What Is A Link Worth? Part 1: Valuing PageRank
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Google’s Norvig: PageRank Is Overhyped

(1) You simply lose a link from a third party page that had a lot of high PageRank.

(2) You have weird canonicalization issues with your site and domains that caused confusion.

(3) The most common reason, Matt said, was because the site is selling links and thus Google will demote the PageRank of that site in order to remove the incentive from link buyers to purchase links from that site.

Here is the video:

Matt also explained that – Google PageRank Toolbar is updated three to four times per year, in order not to have webmasters focus on the PageRank, over content and other SEO concepts. Also, Google PageRank Toolbar data is not unreliable, just rounded on a scale from 0 to 10.

Finally, if you are/were selling links and have seen a PageRank drop, simply stop selling links, submit a reconsideration request and Google will review the site.

For more on PageRank, see our What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

Related Stories:

• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
• First Google Toolbar PageRank Update Of 2011
• What Is A Link Worth? Part 1: Valuing PageRank
• Google’s PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?
• Why PageRank Isn’t A Useful Metric For International Link Building
• Google’s Norvig: PageRank Is Overhyped
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

Google has just released a new info discovery tool named Google Related that allows users to find and access content that’s similar to what they’re viewing in their web browser.

Before the brief overview below, we need to point out that we’re writing this post without having had an opportunity to actually use Google Related. In other words, we’re reporting on what we saw in a demo and in screenshots.

How Google Related Works

If related material (websites, videos, products for sale, maps, etc.) is available (as determined by an algorithm) it can be viewed in a toolbar found at the bottom of the web browser window. The related material will come from or via a number of Google web sites and properties.

Here are a few examples of the types of material Google Related can provide:

1. You’re looking at the Wikipedia entry for Beyoncé. Inside the Google Related toolbar you might find her music videos, recent news about her and/or web pages about her.

One thing we like about Google’s new service is that the video content it brings back (via YouTube) can be viewed in a pop-up window attached to the the actual Google Related toolbar. In other words, you don’t have to leave the web page and open a new tab or window. In fact, all of the content Google related provides does not require a new window or tab.

2. You’re looking at a web page for a restaurant you’re considering dining at for a your friend’s birthday dinner. This time, Google Related brings back a map of the area where the restaurant is located, reviews, and other “related” restaurants that might be worth a look. So, without having to be on the actual Google Places page for the restaurant users still can easily and quickly access the same info.

3. You’re doing a a price search for a new smartphone on Amazon. Google Related provides comparison pricing data, related products, and video demos.

To see a bit of Google Related in action, Google has a short demo available on YouTube.

Potential Benefits Of Google Related

The potential benefits for the searcher are saving time, effort, and being able to quickly see if they might have missed something from a source (or a Google property) they might have missed or did not know about.

For Google it means that users will spend more time using Google’s services. Of course, it would be possible to monetize the actual Google Related toolbar.

What We Would Like to See

As the amount of data on the Internet continues to explode tools like Google Related have a lot of potential to save users a lot of time especially if the related algorithm works well. One thing that would help Google Related go to the next level is allowing users to plug-in a variety of databases from many providers. For example, a college student might be able to include full text results from their e-text books from a database of archived journals and newspapers.

Of course, with Google being involved in a wide (and expanding) number of products and companies these days, we also need to see what type of coverage that can generate for Google Related.

Google Related & Browser Compatibility

The Google Related toolbar is now available for Chrome and IE users and can be downloaded with the regular Google Toolbar. Firefox and Opera users are out of luck.

We do not know if or when versions for these browsers will be available. Given that Google announced that they’re ending support for their Firefox search toolbar last month, we’re not holding our breath.

The Return Of Contextual Search?

While Google Related is brand new, this type of search — sometimes referred to as contextual search or real-time contextual search — has been around for more than a decade providing a variety of related info from a variety of disparate sources.

Although previous attempts at this type of search and search tools have not been “the next big thing,” perhaps the time is right to give it another try? We will have to wait and see not only the value that the Google Related technology can provide but also if Google makes an all out effort to market the product.

As with many Google services there are also enterprise possibilities for Google Related technology. For example, a searcher starts with a Google search and then begins reviewing results. As they look at different pages, related results from both other open web, fee-based, and local databases appear.

Old is New Again: A Bit of Contextual Search History

For the web search historians out there, here are a few of the context search products we’re talking about. Most were around in the the late 1990s or early 2000s.

• Flyswat
• Atomica/GuruNet
• Watson (Watson was also part of the MSN Toolbar beginning in 2005)
• Zapper

Google Related was developed by Google’s R&D Center in Israel. The person in charge at the center is Yosi Matias who was the Chairman, CEO, Co-Founder of Zapper, a company that was doing contextual search in the late 1990s. Here’s a paper on contextual search by Mattias and his colleagues at Zapper: Placing Search in Context: The Concept Revisited. The paper was presented at WWW10 in 2001.

Learn More

In addition to releasing the toolbar, Google’s also released a video explaining more about how it works:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google said the Google Toolbar works in versions of Firefox 4 or younger, but not the new version 5 of Firefox. Google explained, “many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser.” So Google has decided the toolbar doesn’t offer enough of a value-add on Firefox and thus is no longer supporting it.

The Google Toolbar was first introduced over years ago for Firefox. Then later came to Internet Explorer. As you know, Google has their own browser, Chrome, without support for the Google Toolbar – but like they said above, Google’s Chrome browser has many of the toolbar features built directly into the browser.

Alex Chitu said that you can still run the Google Toolbar on Firefox 5 if you install the add on compatibility reporter.

This makes for the third Google service closing in two days, we had Google Labs shutting down and the Google Directory closing.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: It’s rather stunning to see this closure. For one, Google uses the toolbar to track user behavior. It’s one way that Google gets site speed data that in turn is used to influence its search results. Many suspect that that surfing behavior is also used. The article below has more:

• Turning The Tables On The Google Toolbar & Disclosure Claims

The argument that many features of the Google Toolbar are built into the browser doesn’t wash. Firefox doesn’t offer a native way to perform site-specific search, not to view cached pages, nor to perform specific vertical searches on Google, not to get PageRank data.

Firefox also doesn’t feed back into Google Web History. Only the Google Toolbar does that, which means Google has now permanently broken a part of personalized search for Firefox users going forward (and made no mention of this in its help pages). More about how the toolbar works with personalization is below:

• Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
• Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results

Why would Google do such a thing, cutting both users off from their personalized data and itself off from receiving that information? My guess is that Firefox users weren’t found to be using the PageRank meter much (which in turn enables Web History / personalization).

Google’s never had a Google Toolbar for Chrome, so it has likewise been blind to getting information about site speed or user behavior through it, at least if you believe what Google says about not monitoring what people do in Chrome.

This leaves Internet Explorer as the only browser with support, unless you want to stay with an older version of Firefox. However, I’d recommend Groowe as a solution for the toolbar-less on Firefox 5.  It’s a long-standing plug-in that mimic most of the major features of the Google Toolbar, plus other search engine toolbars. I’ve happily used it for years.

Related Stories:

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• Google Toolbar For Firefox 3.0 Adds Great Features
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Google said this URL will only be used to link to official Google properties, explaining it is reserved “just for Google websites.” Google explained that “you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service.”

Back in December 2009, Google launched a URL shortening service at goo.gl for public use. Google said that non-Google properties can be linked to using the goog.gl URL shortener but g.co is only for Google use.

TechCrunch says that single letter .co domains normall run over $1.5 million.

Related Stories:

• URL Shorteners Come To Google & Facebook
• Google URL Shortener Opened To The Public; Comparing To Bit.ly & Twitter

Google Instant has to be activated via the Toolbar Options menu, and once it’s on, Instant works the same way it does on Google.com. The Escape button on your keyboard takes you back to the page you were on before you started searching.

Another new feature is personalization on the toolbar — the tools you use most will remain visible, while others will be moved to a “More” button.

Finally, Google has collected all of its privacy settings on a new options menu tab. It looks like users can choose which “enhanced features” to activate/disable on an individual basis

The new toolbar is available for download now in English, and will be ready in other supported languages within the next week.

Bing Toolbar & Google’s Results

Questions about Google’s toolbar came up in the wake of Google’s accusations that Microsoft’s Bing search engine was copying some of Google’s search results by monitoring how people search on Google, through installations of the Bing toolbar and the Suggested Sites feature in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Bing has rejected those copying allegations, even though it does admit that there is a “search signal” that these tools collect which in turn influences Bing’s results.

Bing says this signal is simply one of many different signals that it uses for ranking search results, isn’t a major factor and isn’t Google-specific. However, Bing does agree that in some cases, Google might be the only source of a search signal for a particular answer.

Bing also pushed back on Google’s charges by saying that is just doing the same thing that Google itself does, collecting information about what users do through its toolbar, to improve search results.

So is it true, some have wondered: Is Google watching Bing, as well?

Search Signal Harvested, Not Used

Yes, Google does see what’s happening on Bing, at least for users who have the Google Toolbar installed and configured to use “advanced features” such as the PageRank meter or SideWiki. But no, Google doesn’t use any of that information to reshape its search results, the company says.

“We absolutely do not use search activity on other search engines to influence our search results,” said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm

Google sees searches in on other search engines but doesn’t use that data? How can that be?

Consider how in the real world, a wheat harvest collect the entire wheat plant but ultimately only uses the grain. Similarly, while Google is “harvesting” search activity along with other user behavior, that search activity is tossed out, Google says.

Other Toolbar Signals Used?

So what Google Toolbar activity is used by Google to improve its search results? Here, Google is staying tight-lipped. The company fears that revealing too many specifics will enable people to harm its search results. There are some things it has confirmed, however. Toolbar data is being used to:

• Measure site speed, which influences rankings
• Detect malware sites, which may cause some sites to get warnings in search results

These are things that Google has previously disclosed. I understand Google’s concerns that talking more about toolbar usage could potentially cause its search results to be harmed. Still, I wish the company had shared more.

Disclosure Issues

Not naming all the things that the toolbar is used for weakens some of Google’s earlier arguments that the Bing toolbar wasn’t adequately explaining to users that it would record their searches on Google in order to improve Bing’s search results.

Clearly, Google’s not going to list all the things the toolbar is used for. However, the company did say that it’s going to make some general disclosure improvements:

“We are changing the dialog box in toolbar installation to fix some language that, upon review, we found could be clearer,” Singhal said.

For more background, see our past articles on this topic:

• Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
• Bing: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations
• Turning The Tables On The Google Toolbar & Disclosure Claims

Over the past week, Google has pushed at least three times that Bing is somehow gathering data via Internet Explorer to improve Bing’s search results without fairly disclosing this to IE users.

Microsoft Does Disclose

The first time was during my initial meeting with Google on January 28, when it aired its allegations against Bing. When I wrote my story from that meeting, I looked in detail at Microsoft’s disclosures for Suggested Sites and the Bing Bar, features for Internet Explorer that can send back information. I found nothing wrong:

It’s hard to argue that gathering information about what people search for at Google isn’t covered. Technically, there’s nothing misleading — even if Bing, for obvious reasons, isn’t making it explicit that to improve its search results, it might look at what Bing Bar users search for at Google and click on there.

But Google Claims Better Disclosure

Disclosure came up again during a panel at Bing’s Farsight 2011 event on Tuesday, with the same suggestion that Microsoft wasn’t being explicit enough. The discussion starts about 9 minutes in, and the head of Google’s web spam fighting team Matt Cutts also argued that Google itself goes out of its way to warn people about the data collection that its own Google Toolbar does, saying:

Whenever you install the Google Toolbar, there’s a big red letter in capital letters that says “Please read this, it’s not the usual yada yada.”

The “Mom Test”

Hang on to that comment. I’ll come back to it. On Thursday, Cutts continued to press the disclosure issue, writing in a post on his personal blog:

I don’t think an average consumer realizes that if they say “yes, show me suggested sites” that they’re granting Microsoft permission to send their queries and clicks on Google to Microsoft, which will then be used in Bing’s ranking.

I think my Mom would be confused that saying “Yes” to that dialog will send what she searches for on Google and what she clicks on to Microsoft. I don’t think that IE8′s disclosure is clear and conspicuous enough that a reasonable consumer could make an informed choice and know that IE8 will send their Google queries/clicks to Microsoft.

OK, let’s turn those tables now and do the “Mom Test” on the Google Toolbar.

“Enhanced Features” & Page Tracking

The Google Toolbar is installed on millions of computers. How many, I don’t know. I’ve never seen Google confirm the figure, even though Google has been asked about this many times over the years. Available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the toolbar makes it easy to search Google right from your browser, obtain cached copies of page, share pages and offers many other handy features.

The Google Toolbar will also monitor every page you visit on the web, if “Enhanced Features” are switched on. This allows the Google Toolbar to enable the PageRank meter that some SEOs and searchers find useful. It’s also how Google Sidewiki is made to load related information to a page. If you use Google Web History, the toolbar can also feed into that.

Not The Usual Yada Yada

Years ago, back when the Google Toolbar was new (it first came out in 2000), it had a unique warning to alert people to read all of its terms. From 2003, it said:

PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY IT’S NOT THE USUAL YADA YADA

By using the Advanced Features version of the Google Toolbar, you may be sending information about the sites you visit to Google.

The warning has changed over the years. Here’s an example from a PC Magazine article about the Google Toolbar in December 2007:

Yada Yada Goes Missing

Somewhere along the way, that “Not The Usual Yada Yada” warning disappeared. Yesterday and today, I installed the Google Toolbar on Internet Explorer for Windows and for Firefox on both Windows and the Mac. That warning was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, this is the screen I got with any of the installations I tried:

Nothing above stands out as Google doing anything especially unique to get users to read about what the toolbar might track. Instead, it seems like a pretty typical disclosure screen where everything is buried in the fine print.

Long Terms, Old Terms

For example, only the first of over 75 numbered subsections of the Google Terms Of Service are shown. Those terms are dated April 16, 2007 and so can’t encompass newer features that the toolbar gathers data for, such as Google Sidewiki, if that’s enabled.

The Google Privacy Policy for the Google Toolbar, arguably more important to show as part of the install process, isn’t available in the scroll window. You have to click on a link to see it separately. The privacy policy dates from December 9, 2009, so it might not cover some newer issues, either.

Site Speed Usage Not Detailed

I’ll come back to the privacy policy. But let’s continue with the install process. After it is finished, the toolbar is loaded into your browser and comes up with this message, if you’re installing into Firefox:

You have to make a choice: do you want to enable “Enhanced Features” or not? You’re told this is what the features will provide:

PageRank and future page-related services are part of the enhanced Toolbar. For enhanced Toolbar features to work, Toolbar has to tell us what site you’re visiting by sending Google the URL.

Now, using the “Mom Test” that Cutts suggests, the toolbar should be specific about any other uses of browsing data it collects. One of those uses, we know from past Google statements, is to measure the speed of sites, which in turn is one of Google’s ranking criteria.

Mom’s not told that.

Google’s Catch-All

There may be other things that Google Toolbar data is used for that is not explicitly revealed. One omission suggests there may be more. That’s not to say that Google’s violating its privacy policy by collecting whatever it wants and using it however it wants. Similar to Microsoft, the privacy policy contains a catch-all provision:

We process your requests in order to operate and improve the Google Toolbar and other Google services.

In short, Google doesn’t occupy any higher ground than Microsoft, from what I can see, when it comes to using data gathered from browser add-ons to improve its own services, including its search engine.

No “No” Option For Internet Explorer

Finally, look closely at the “Enhanced Features” confirmation screen below:

This is the screen I got when I installed the Google Toolbar into Internet Explorer. Notice the choices are “Ask me later” or “Enable enhanced features.” There’s literally no “No” button on that screen.

With Firefox, either installing to Windows or Mac, this screen had a “No Thanks” option. It’s odd that IE doesn’t have exactly the same options.

To be clear, “Ask me later” seems to operate the same as “No thanks.” Select it, and the enhanced features remain off. But will you get a nagging prompt later, to try them again? I don’t know, as I’ve only just installed the Google Toobar into IE, which itself I use rarely.

I’m hoping to follow up with Google more about the Google Toolbar in the near future, to better understand what it collects, how that information may be used for search rankings and perhaps to discover why it’s “Ask me later” in Internet Explorer but “No thanks” in Firefox.

For more background on Google’s issue with Bing, and Bing’s rebuttal that it’s not copying Google, see our stories below:

• Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
• Bing: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations

Postscript: See Google On Toolbar: We Don’t Use Bing’s Searches

I posted the news at the Search Engine Roundtable yesterday, where there are close to 40 comments in less than 24 hours on the PageRank update. Honestly, I am a bit upset to see so many SEOs and webmasters interested in this update. As we know, Toolbar PageRank is very out of date and does not have a direct impact on a site’s ranking. Heck, even well-known Googlers have call PageRank Overhyped.

That being said, Toolbar PageRank is often a badge of pride to many webmasters and I understand why some webmasters smile when their PageRank goes up and frown when the PageRank goes down.

I am wishing you all more Google green pixels for your web sites!

Related Stories:

• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
• Search Illustrated: Google PageRank Explained
• Google Quietly Drops PageRank From Webmaster Tools
• Google’s Norvig: PageRank Is Overhyped
• Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google …
• Move Over PageRank, Meet Webmaster Happiness Rank