Play Snake in YouTube's Player

Play Snake in YouTube's Player

YouTube's player has a clever Easter egg: make sure the player has focus, press the left arrow on your keyboard for about 2 seconds and you can play Snake while watching the video.



This trick only works in YouTube's new player, which is only available for videos that don't include annotations or ads. It's limited to the videos played on YouTube's site and it doesn't work for embedded videos. Here's an example of video you can use to play Snake.

YouTube is not the only Google product that lets you play games. Gmail has a Labs feature called "old Snakey" that adds a Snake game inside Gmail.

Google Image Search Adds Infinite Scrolling and Shows Less Clutter

Google Image Search Adds Infinite Scrolling and Shows Less Clutter

Google launched a new interface for Google Image Search which replaces pagination with infinite scrolling, hides the information about the results until you mouse over an image, shows bigger images and uses space more efficiently. When you click on a results, Google shows a larger thumbnail on top of the web page that included the image.



Google says that the new layout is more dense, you can get up to 1,000 images when you scroll and you can scroll using keyboard shortcuts like Page Down and Page Up. Google still shows page numbers "so you don't lose track of where you are".

Another new feature is image search ads that will replace the text ads that are displayed at the moment in Google Image Search. "This ad format combines an image with text, offering richer, more relevant advertising on Google Images search results pages."

It's interesting to see that Google reintroduces two features previously tested without success: image ads and a simplified interface that hides useful information about images. Infinite scrolling was one of the distinctive features of Bing Image Search and Windows Live Image Search.

Google Image Search's new interface makes it easier to scroll through results, but I don't think a regular user will look at hundreds of images. Google's goal is to find relevant results, so showing too many images is overwhelming and a lot of the images aren't useful. Hiding information about the image's size, the domain that includes the image and no longer showing a snippet from the page is a purely aesthetic decision. Sometimes it's useful to know if an image is large, if it's included by a site you trust and even the filename could offer relevant information. Google offers a "show sizes" option in the sidebar, but it's not enough.

Old interface:


New interface:


Bing:


If you don't see the new interface yet, try a different browser. Google says that only 10% of the users can see the new UI and it will be available for everyone in the coming days.

Gmail's SHVA Parameter

Gmail's SHVA Parameter

Ever since Google launched a new version of Gmail, back in 2007, some people wondered why Gmail's address includes a parameter called "shva".

"Just curious, what does the SHVA parameter in the new gmail URL stand for? Is it an acronym? I'm not really asking about the technical usage or the functionality; I'm just interested in the choice of name," asked BRKR. "I know GMail is not an Open-Source program so we can trace the code. But every website tries to make the URL shorter so they ideally shouldn't add redundant data to the URL," thinks Omar Dolaimy.


According to Mike Sego, a former Gmail engineer, "shva" is an acronym for "should have valid authentication". Apparently, the parameter is only included after a successful authentication.