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Google has recently sent notifications about some domains that are about to expire. "Your registration of domain.com is about to expire. This means that users will no longer be able to access your website at that time." The domains were registered using Google Domains, but they were set to automatically renew, so Google's message was confusing. Google realized that it was a mistake and sent another message: "An automated email was sent out to you earlier in error with the subject 'Your domain registration is expiring'. Please discard the erroneous message. Since your domain is set to auto-renew, your domain will be renewed on the expiration date as expected. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused." Unfortunately for Google, the message was sent to 1664 people and all the email addresses were added to the "to" field, so everyone can see them. Whoops! Update : Google sent a new message. "Yesterday, we sent an email to select Goo...

Google Image Search has a new mobile interface. When you tap a thumbnail, Google shows the image result, a link to the page and a long list of related images. Below the search result, you can find a list of similar images. You can still swipe left or right to go to the previous or the next image result. Tap the image to hide everything else.

Google bought Word Lens last year and brought a very useful feature to Google Translate: real-time visual translation. Use a phone or a tablet running Android or iOS , point the camera at a sign or text in a foreign language and Google will translate the text almost instantly, while preserving all the other details. It's like using a magic camera that translates text and lets you read street signs, restaurant menus, user manuals, newspaper articles even if they're written in foreign languages. Visual translation now supports 20 additional languages . "You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai." Back in January, the feature was launched with only 7 supported languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and...

Google has a new feature for local search cards. When you search for restaurants, stores, museums and other places, you can now see the busiest times of the day or week. The new "popular times" section shows when it's a good time to go to a certain place and when it's best to avoid it because it's too crowded. "Now, you can avoid the wait and see the busiest times of the week at millions of places and businesses around the world directly from Google Search. For example, just search for "Blue Bottle Williamsburg", tap on the title and see how busy it gets throughout the day," informs Google . For now, it seems that this feature is only available in the mobile interface. Google says that the data is based on historical visits, so I assume it uses Location History  and other location services for mobile devices. Google Maps has a similar feature that shows typical traffic.

Google+ Photos has a few search filters that are pretty useful. You can find them if you click the small arrow from the search box: Auto Backup, Hangouts, Google Drive, Posts, Auto Awesome, Videos and more. The nice thing is that most of them are also available in Google Photos. Google Photos has a search page that shows a few filters: Creations (replaces Auto Awesome), Google Drive, Video, Recently Added. Here are some searches you can use to bring back the filters from Google+ Photos: #AutoBackup - shows all the photos automatically backed up from your mobile devices and desktop computers #Desktop - shows the photos automatically backed up from your desktop computers #Posts - shows the photos added to your Google+ posts #All - shows all your photos #PhotosOfYou - photos you've been tagged in #CAMERANAME - replace CAMERANAME with the your camera's model or brand to see all the photos taken with that camera. Some examples: #Nexus5, #Canon, #iPhone.

After so many years of promoting Google+ and integrating it with other services, Google realized that Google+ doesn't mean a lot for many Google users and it started dismantling Google+. Google Photos is now a standalone service and other Google+ features will follow suit. In a blog post , Google announced that Google+ profiles will no longer be required and YouTube will be the first service that will make this change in the coming weeks. "A Google Account will be all you'll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. Your underlying Google Account won't be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don't plan to use Google+ itself, we'll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles." A lot of YouTube users complained when YouTube switched to a new commenting system which required Google+ profiles, but Y...

I'm not sure if this is new, but I've noticed that Google now promotes the Inbox app when opening Gmail in the mobile browser. "Get Inbox by Gmail, a new email app from the Gmail team," suggests the interstitial page, which still lets you "go to the mobile Gmail site". Here's a screenshot from an iPad: And another screenshot from a Nexus 5: Google used to promote the Gmail app.

YouTube has recently changed the settings for notifications . When you subscribe to a channel, there's a box that says "Send me all notifications for this channel". The settings page has a new label for the email digest checkbox: "Occasionally notify me of new videos and activity from my subscriptions" and you can choose if you want email notifications, mobile notifications or both email and mobile notifications. Mobile apps for Android and iOS have a notification section in the settings, which lets you disable or enable notifications, customize notification types (subscription activity, recommended videos, comments and replies) and also see all your notifications.

The latest version of the Google Maps app for Android lets you add private names for places . Search for an address or drop a pin on the map, tap the 3-dot menu icon and pick "Edit name". You can add a name that lets you quickly find the place on the map, just like you can find "home" or "work". The private name is saved to your Google account and you're the only one who can see it. Here's an example for a local business (this feature is even more useful for places that don't have a name in Google Maps): To edit a name or delete it, open the side menu and tap "Your places". At the top of the section, you can find the named places, including "home" and "work". Google Maps also has a new interface for location history: it's called "your timeline" and it's available on the web and in the Android app. "Your Timeline allows you to visualize your real-world routines, easily see the trips you'v...

Now that Google+ Photos is discontinued , Google Apps admins received a message which informs them that Google Hangouts will only use Picasa Web Albums for photo sharing. "The photo-sharing functionality in Hangouts is changing. Going forward, the ability to share photos and other multimedia in Hangouts Chat will be set by the Picasa Web Albums service rather than by the Google+ service. If Google+ is enabled in your domain, no further action is necessary. Google+ requires Picasa Web Albums so you can continue to share photos using Hangouts Chat just like you always have. If Google+ is not enabled for your domain and you want to use the photo-sharing functionality in Hangouts Chat, you must turn on the Picasa Web Albums service in your Admin console." This change also affects regular Google users, since photos shared using Hangouts aren't added to Google Photos and you'll only find them in Picasa Web Albums when Google+ Photos will shut down. The same thing will happe...

There's a new version of Google Patents that's available at patents.google.com . The interface now uses Material Design, there's a checkbox that lets you search Google Scholar, advanced search options are available in the sidebar and you can quickly navigate between search results, which are now grouped by category. The prior art finder is now properly integrated and no longer uses a different interface. You can now click the navigation icons at the top of the page to go to the previous or the next search result. Keyboard shortcuts also work: use the left/right arrow keys. "The new Google Patents helps users find non-patent prior art by cataloguing it, using the same scheme that applies to patents. We've trained a machine classification model to classify everything found in Google Scholar using Cooperative Patent Classification codes. Now users can search for [autonomous vehicles] or [email encryption] and find prior art across patents, technical journals, scientif...

If you like Google Inbox and you're wondering why it doesn't replace Gmail, there's a setting that redirects Gmail to Inbox. Just go to Inbox, open the settings box, switch to the "Other" tab, enable "Redirect Gmail to inbox.google.com" and click "Done". The next time you type mail.google.com, gmail.com or click on a Gmail shortcut or bookmark, you'll be sent to inbox.google.com. You can still open Gmail: just click the new "Gmail" menu item, which is placed below "Contacts" in Inbox's sidebar. The URL that temporarily disables redirects is https://mail.google.com/mail/?ibxr=0 . "If you often go to Gmail in your web browser when you really mean to go to Inbox, you can turn on a setting so that you'll automatically be taken to Inbox when you visit gmail.com or mail.google.com on a computer. You can always get back to Gmail using a simple link in Inbox," informs Google . The setting was added a few weeks...