Google Webmaster Tools Gets Major Overhaul

Google has announced a major overhaul of Webmaster Tools that’s filled with both major and minor design and functionality changes.

The most obvious change is the new dashboard that now shows Top
search queries, Crawl errors, Links to your site, and Sitemap
information — saving users what used to be several clicks to get this
information. Here’s a look:

(Pssst, hey Webmaster Tools team: It would be really cool if you’d let users build our own dashboard, like we do in Google Analytics. Just sayin’….)

The main navigation has been reorganized, with tools moved into more
logical groupings called Site Configuration, Your Site on the Web, and
Diagnostics. The Enhanced Image search feature is now gone. And Google
is now saying that all sites must be verified in order to access
Webmaster Tools — some tools used to be available to unverified sites.
The full list of changes, along with a video explaining them, is available in Google’s announcement.

The new design is available now at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/new. Google says the current/old design will remain in place for a couple weeks.

Google Image Search Adds Color Picker

Google Operating System spotted a new feature on Google Image Search. The feature allows you to click on the color of images you want to be found, and Google will filter your query based on images that match the query and the color you selected.

For example, I search on [flowers] and then chose the color red, to be shown flowers in the color of red. As you can see from the URL structure, Google added on &imgcolor=red, which was how you were manually able to filter by color. Here is a picture of the results:

As you can see, there are 12 colors to filter by, including:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Teal
• Blue
• Purple
• Pink
• White
• Gray
• Black
• Brown

It is also interesting to note that this works for me on Firefox but not on the Safari browser.

Postscript: The Google Blog has now announced this new feature on their blog.