Varies With Device

This post varies with device. It can't be displayed because there are so many devices and each one is different.

This paragraph varies with device. It's just a placeholder for a paragraph that should have revealed a lot of useful information. Unfortunately there are so many devices and they have different characteristics, so it's hard to write a paragraph that encompasses their complexity.

This screenshot varies with device. It should show some important information about the Google+ app for Android, but it doesn't because there are multiple Google+ APKs and each one is different.

On a more serious note, there are many Google Play apps that show the uninformative "varies with device". The size of the app varies with device, the current version varies with device and so is the required Android version. That's because Google Play allows developers to upload multiple APKs for the same app:

Multiple APK support is a feature on Google Play that allows you to publish different APKs for your application that are each targeted to different device configurations. Each APK is a complete and independent version of your application, but they share the same application listing on Google Play and must share the same package name and be signed with the same release key. Android applications usually run on most compatible devices with a single APK, by supplying alternative resources for different configurations (for example, different layouts for different screen sizes) and the Android system selects the appropriate resources for the device at runtime. In a few cases, however, a single APK is unable to support all device configurations, because alternative resources make the APK file too big (greater than 50MB) or other technical challenges prevent a single APK from working on all devices.

Even though Google doesn't encourage developers to use this feature, most Google apps use it: Google+, Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Play Books, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Translate.

Since Google knows which devices are associated with your Google account, it could show a drop-down that lets you select one of your devices and show the appropriate information. For example, you have a Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 and a Galaxy S3 running Android 4.1. Select one of the devices and replace "varies with device" with something more useful.

AppBrain manages to show some useful information:

Blogger Requires to Write the Title First

I don't know about you, but I like to write the title of the post at the end. It makes sense to pick a title only after writing an article because the title usually summarizes the text. Sometimes I have no idea what's the right title, but it reveals itself after writing the last paragraph.

This post is not about finding the right title for a blog post, it's about a new Blogger feature (or a bug?) that shows this message as soon as you start writing a post: "Required field must not be blank". The warning is placed below the title field, but it's not obvious that it refers to the title. Click "ignore warning" and the warning is displayed again in a few seconds.

You can't save, preview or publish post if you haven't picked a title. This is really dangerous: what happens if you write a long post and the browser crashes? Until now, Blogger automatically saved the post as a draft and you could find it later. Now it's no longer saved until you write a title.

You could write a temporary title and change it later, but why use a workaround? The title should not be a required field. Blogger could show a warning before publishing the post and that should be enough. It's important to mention that Blogger has never required post titles before. You could even publish posts without a title.

To sum up: here's a feature that's annoying, not useful, dangerous and hard to understand. It's really difficult to come up with something like this, but someone did.

What if Gmail had a similar feature?

Update (July 8th): The feature has been removed (or the bug has been fixed).

{ Thanks, Beben. }

A Google Trends Annoyance

It's sometimes helpful to read some instructions, especially when you use advanced features. What happens when you can't dismiss these instructions and you have to see them every time you use a service?

Google Trends shows an annoying box every time you click the search box: "Explore Trends. Separate terms by commas to compare. Some examples: [GMC, BMW, Honda], [Swine Flu], [Madonna, Adele]."

Google Trends used to display this information on the homepage, but now the homepage shows a list of hot searches.

Here's the old Google Trends homepage:

Chrome Web Store and Unsupported Operating Systems

If you use a phone or a tablet and click a link that sends you to a Chrome Web Store page, you'll see this message: "Sorry, your operating system is not supported just yet. The Chrome Web Store is available on Windows (except RT), Mac and Linux. Why don't you send yourself a reminder to try it later?"

What if you open the same page in Firefox, Internet Explorer or any other desktop browser? The page loads and you only see a short message informing you that "you will need Google Chrome to install most apps, extensions and themes". That's the right thing to do and it's surprising that Google doesn't load a page because "your operating system is not supported just yet".

You can't install extensions if you use any other browser than Chrome (for desktop), but there are other reasons to open a web page. Maybe you want to read the reviews, write a review, check the screenshots. For now, you can install Chrome for Android or iOS and use the "request desktop site" feature to load the offending page.

Google Play does a much better job: it not only loads in almost any browser and operating system, but it also lets you install applications remotely.

Too Many Google Results From a Single Site

I don't know about you, but there's a feature that ruined many of my Google search results pages. It's not that Google can't return relevant results, the problem is that Google tries to be clever and detects keywords that are associated with a site. If it finds one, Google will return a lot of results from that site. In fact, sometimes you'll have a hard time finding results from other domains.

Ever since its launch, Google promoted diversity and used host crowding to show "up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name". Sometimes Google displayed a link that restricted the results to that domain or subdomain, but users had to click it. Matt Cutts wrote in 2007 that "we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen".

Then Google introduced sitelinks and started to show more pages from a domain. Two years ago, a Google blog post announced that "for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site". Since that announcement, host crowding was a thing of the past and Google started to include more and more results from a single domain.

I complained about this back in 2010 and mentioned that this feature could become annoying, but now it's much worse. Sometimes you can find queries that return mostly results from a domain. For example, when you search for [apple itunes] Google assumes that you want results from apple.com and starts to return a lot of irellevant pages. Sure, you can still find results from other domains, but 31 of the top 50 results are from apple.com.

If you search for [yahoo mail], Google returns a lot of uninteresting results from Yahoo's international sites, instead of including news articles, blog posts, reviews, tutorials.

Search for [berkeley college] and 26 of the top 50 results are from berkeley.edu. That's just too much. Having to constantly add to the query "-site:dominantresult.com" is annoying, not to mention that most Google users don't even know about search operators and shouldn't have to use them.

And this annoyance is not limited to navigational queries. What if you're not in India, search for [sony led] and Google's top 7 results are from Sony India? That's what happened when I disabled Google Instant and set Google to show 50 results per page.

Showing too many results from a domain is a bad idea because a search engine should offer information from multiple sources, while results should be relevant and comprehensive. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but Google forgot to make the information accessible.

Query	Domain	Number of results in top 50
imdb ratings	imdb.com	49
imdb ratings are broken	imdb.com	46
google play	google.com	31
playstation	playstation.com	28
wordpress	wordpress.org	28
samsung led display	samsung.com	27