Shrink the Google News headlines

Google News search results now have overly large ‘shouty’ headlines. Shrink them down a bit by adding this to whatever Stylus or UserScript CSS-fixer you have running…

.MBeuO {
font-size: 16px;}

Before and after:

Google’s Live Caption, now on desktop PCs

Isn’t the Internet wonderful. Just this morning I was searching and wondering why is there no audio “automatic transcription” software for desktop PCs? This evening… Google’s Live Caption feature is now available on the desktop PC, via the Chrome browser. For free, and running locally and offline and without a Google login.

To enable real-time live subtitles (aka ‘closed captions’ or ‘live captioning’) as your audio or video plays back, first get the latest Chrome then go…

Advanced

Accessibility

Captions

> arrow icon

Live Caption

…and turn it on in Chrome. At this point a set of speech-definition files will be downloaded, to enable the real-time detection of what’s being said. While you’re waiting, set up the preferences for fonts and colours etc.

Those used to AI sets of 1Gb or more will find the Live Caption’s are downloaded in a few minutes, even on a slow connection. Other than the initial download of the definition files the services work locally on the PC and without a Cloud connection. So far as I’m aware this is the first time such a free service is available without a Cloud-upload being needed, still less in real-time.

For this reason I would expect to see third-party UserScripts relatively soon, to enable the transcription to be easily captured into an editable text file as it plays. The playback / transcription continues to run, even when Chrome is not the focus of what you’re doing on the PC, which should help with scripted capture. Obviously if you want the whole thing you would have to let it play back first, to get a full transcription.

Can a recorded .MP3 be loaded and work? As well as a live stream? Yes, it works very well. A podcast with a 90 year-old guy on a smartphone, and kind of ok-ish voice quality… it handled that well. In real-time.

As you watch it, it occasionally goes back and auto-corrects and seems to be doing this based on word context. So I’m guessing it’s not just speech-to-text, but also text-to-text context tweaking. But it can’t work miracles: “gorilla campaign” rather than “guerrilla campaign” etc. And swearing does get f****** bleeped out with asterisks. It can’t detect different speakers. You can’t copy-paste. Still, it’s going to be very useful, especially if you just want a few paragraphs for a quote. Until we get a capture script, you can do things like screen grab with Microsoft OneNote, which handles small fonts fine and can make text from a screengrab very easily.

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Update: Nuance Dragon Professional Individual 15.x can do the job reasonably well from an .MP3 file on a Windows desktop, albeit at a substantial one-time-purchase cost and definitely not in real-time. Mac development of the software has apparently been abandoned, because… Apple.

Two vital Google Search UserScripts, fixed

Newly fixed vital UserScripts for use with Google Search:

Google Search Sidebar

Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs). This restores readable URL-paths in search results, a vital aid to avoiding the growing amount of spam in Google Search.

Add the following to the top of the Breadcrumbs script, to stop it working on Google Books.


// @exclude http*://www.google.*tbm=bks*
// @exclude http*://www.google.*.*tbm=bks*


Partial fixes for Google News changes

The Google News page layout has updated, here in the UK. Here’s the latest on how to tame it…

---

1. Hide thumbnails and icons:

Add these lines to the foot of your uBlock Origin block list, save, reload…

These lines should hide your thumbnails and ID icon on Google News…

! Always autohide Google News thumbnails and ID icons - but retain source name
google.*##*.sYpfDb
google.*##*.QyR1Ze

---

2. Fix the colours and font size.

Headline text colour and font size is controlled via CSS thus…

/*** Fixes Google news headline colour and font size ***/
.nDgy9d.JheGif
{
color: #3d69ac!important;
font-size: 15px !important;
}

/*** Fixes Google news source-name colour and font size ***/
.WF4CUc.XTjFC
{
color: #4c7d48!important;
font-size: 13px !important;
}

/*** Highlights date on Google news result ***/
.WG9SHc
{
color: #e3732a!important;
font-size: 11px !important;
}

This can be added to the bottom of anything you have controlling the CSS for Google, e.g. the Stylus browser addon and a UserStyle.

---

3.

Block search suggestions as you type your search query.

! Block Search Suggestions on Google News
google.*##li.gsfs.sbsb_c

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I’m worried about Google Search…

Google has announced a new anxiety stress-test. No, it’s not one of their infernal ‘captchas’ on Google Search, guaranteed to send stress levels through the roof. This is a post-lockdown “seven-question survey” about one’s personal anxiety, developed with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The Googlebots will keep the results private and locked down forever, or so they promise. But I’d be a little worried about that.

UserScript ‘Google search in several columns’ – temporary fix

This is an update to my January 2020 Google Search in three columns: how to do it in 2020 tutorial post. It’s needed because the key UserScript Google search in several columns has stopped working, due to changes in the Google page code. Even with this script installed, Google Search reverts to a long scrolling page of links, a format highly unsuited to searchers who use a widescreen desktop monitor.

For the time being, the fix is to keep on running this script, but also run these two at the same time…

* Stylus UserStyle Google – show search result in two columns and hack the script to show “3” columns.

* Stylus UserStyle Google Search in columns with “3” columns set on install.

On a widescreen monitor, a manual fix the top of the Stylus UserStyle ‘Google Search in columns’ also helps with overlap between results…


/* columns */

.big .mw,
.s {
max-width: unset !important;

to…


/* columns */

.big .mw,
.s {
max-width: 80% !important;


The result gives imperfect but reasonably acceptable three-column display for Google Search and Books results…

‘Google – show search result in two columns’ will need to be temporarily turned off for Google News results.

Note that I have the UserScript Google search in several columns set not to work on Google Books, having added a couple of lines to the script. See my linked post for instructions on how to add that blocking.

See my full Google Search in three columns: how to do it in 2020 tutorial for details of how to bock other page elements, such as huge ‘video suggestions’ blocks and cover thumbnails for Google Books results.

Breadcrumbs begone

Got itchy breadcrumbs in your Google Search results? The new UserScript Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs) works for me.

You’ll want to add the following to prevent it working on Google Books…


// @exclude http*://www.google.*tbm=bks*
// @exclude http*://www.google.*.*tbm=bks*


JURN pagination links fixed

In the last week or so Google has made some slight changes to the default styling templates for CSEs, resulting in the numbered pagination links at the foot of the search results becoming very small and grey. This has now been fixed on JURN, and your per-page links to more search results should now look like this. They should be far more easily selectable now, and especially for touch-screen users…

My thanks to Amit Agarwal of India, for the elegant snippet of commented CSS for the .gsc-cursor-page element. If you have the same problem with your own CSE, this snippet goes in the style header of your page. Colours are controlled elsewhere, in the ‘Look & Feel’ | Customise | Refinement section of your CSE admin dashboard.

Changes may not show up until you and your users refresh your main page a few times, due to Web browser caching.

GRAFT has also had the same fix applied.

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Update:

Also add padding for the pagination row, by adding the following to your CSS style (I have mine in the page itself)…

Google and Archive.org indexing

It appears that Google Search doesn’t track the Internet Archive (Archive.org) in anything like real-time for the useful content. For instance, see:

site:archive.org staffordshire -cannock -bbc

On this search you have to go to “Last year” to get anything useful from Google Search. With September 2018 being the latest datestamp I can see among those results. This gives the appearance that Google is only indexing Archive.org on a quarterly or bi-monthly basis?

Yet a search for…

site:archive.org + the ‘last week’

… does pick up material from Archive.org, but by the looks of it it’s only the utter rubbish, sex fantasies and spam that Google will want to rapidly exclude or make effectively undiscoverable. My guess is that there’s an ongoing low-level indexing of the new material purely in order to identify the junk, expose it to some user selection to try to sift out anything that’s a false-positive, and that this is then fed in as an ‘exclude’ junk-list for each larger quarterly re-indexing.

GoogleMonkeyR fix – stop it running on Google Images

Here are some updated fix instruction for the latest GoogleMonkeyR UserScript, which many desktop power-searchers use to give their Google Search results a three-column multicolumn layout.

* Problem: the script breaks Google Image search results, by running on such searches. Specifically, the script appears to be preventing the central ‘slider’ div from opening up, when an image is selected from the Google Image search results.

* Solution: In your Web browser, access the raw GoogleMonkeyR script. For instance, in Opera this is done via: Extensions | Tampermonkey | Installed UserScripts | GoogleMonkeyR | Edit.

You then need to paste in a line of code that explicitly turns off GoogleMonkeyR, but only whenever the browser is running a Google Images search. To do this, add the following line to the header of your GoogleMonkeyR script, below all the // @include lines…

// @exclude http*://www.google.*/search?*isch*

Google Image searches have “isch” in their URL, so we can grab onto that and exclude such URLs. Save (click the disk icon) and exit. You should now be able to operate the Google Images results as usual, which still retaining your usual three-column layout for the main Google Search.