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Google pushes your buttons in its top strip bar - AGAIN

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Google has once again rejigged its user account navigation bar, making it ever more slavish to the company's strange devotion to all things social within its silo.

The world's largest ad broker said in a blog post yesterday that it had made yet more changes to the strip of buttons along the top of its pages, which was painted black, then grey and is now black again.

It's not all about the colour, though. Google+ is more prominently displayed than ever with Gmail - the Chocolate Factory's online email service with 350 million users worldwide - now further relegated (it will now simply be called 'Mail' in the search bar) in favour of the company's big push into social networking.

Google's YouTube got a promotional boost on the search bar - the timing of which is hardly surprising.

Mountain View revealed to US lawmakers late last month that one of the reasons why it was making changes to its raft of privacy policies - most of which are being cut and shut into one terms-of-service document - was due to the fact that it wanted to serve more targeted ads within its video-making service.

In other words, a user logged into Gmail chatting to a chum about poodles, for example, might then see ads featuring the curly-furred dogs when browsing through YouTube.

The company previously provided a link allowed users to search for videos across the internet. Now it's locking you into YouTube.

Google has killed the "Shopping" link via the same search bar in its latest redesign, which will be rolled out to all users over the next few weeks. ®

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