Depending on your personal preferences, you may want to enable none or some of the experiments in Google Chrome. The list of available settings is large, which is why I will look at only a handful of experiments that have been added to the flags listing in recent time.

• Smooth Scrolling – Chrome users up until now had to install extensions like Smooth Scroller if they experienced scrolling issues in the Chrome web browser. With the Smooth Scrolling flag, they now can enable the feature natively.
• Lazy Background Pages – All extension background pages are loaded when the browser starts. This setting changes the default behavior so that they are loaded when needed.
• New Apps Install Bubble – When you install a new application in Chrome a new tab page is opened automatically. This can be irritating if you install many apps in the browser. This new flag changes the behavior by showing a bubble pointing at the new tab page instead.

• Enable NTP bookmark features – The new tab page in Chrome currently only lists the most visited sites and apps in its interface. This setting enables a Bookmark page on the new tab page.

• Enable syncing open tabs, syncing search engines – The two options can be used to sync both all open tabs and all custom search engines with all connected Chrome browsers.
• Enable shortcuts in the omnibox – Remembers autocomplete results and offers those the next time the same search term is typed in the Chrome address box

Chrome users find several useful experiments on the flags page that can change the behavior of the Chrome browser noticeable. Are you a Chrome user? If so, are you making use of experimental features in the web browser? (thanks Vineeth)

My guess is that they monitor usage and other metrics to aid them in the decision whether to add the feature to the Google service.

Google Experimental Search, that’s the name of the labs-like feature for Search, is currently offering three different features of which only one can be active at any time.

You need to be logged in to your Google account and visit the Google Experimental Search page afterwards to add one of the features to your account.

You can add a feature to your account with a click on the Join this experiment button next to the feature title.

Available for selection are the following three features:

+1 button: The +1 feature was revealed yesterday, and you can take a look at our initial coverage of the Google +1 button here. The feature will be enabled shortly on google.com, and later this year on other localized Google Search properties. Users who join the search experiment can use the +1 button right away.

+1 is basically a social recommendation service that will be used by Google as one of their search engine ranking signals. Your Google Contacts will furthermore see your recommendations if they make related or the same searches.

Why do not you +1 Ghacks if you enable that feature by following this link: http://www.google.com/search?q=ghacks&pws=0

Keyboard shortcuts: The second experimental feature adds six keyboard shortcuts to Google Search.

The j and k keys select the next or previous result, o or enter open the selected result, / puts the cursor in the search box and Esc removes the cursor from the search box.

You basically go up and down with the j and k keys and press enter or o to load a search result. You can append the parameter esrch=BetaShortcuts to search results to enable keyboard shortcuts on that page, for instance:
http://www.google.comjjk/search?q=rattlesnake&esrch=BetaShortcuts

Accessible View: The third and final experimental feature combines keyboard shortcuts with improved accessibility of search results. It offers a similar set of keys to navigate the search results, plus additional shortcuts. This includes i or h to move between categories, = and- to magnify and shrink items, a to switch to Accessible search results and w to switch back to the standard results view.

This feature is only compatible with the Firefox web browser for now, according to Google’s experimental search page.

You can test drive the feature by visiting this link.

Have you tried any of the experimental search features? If so, what is your impression of the ones you tried?

Three ideas are currently listed on that page: Alternate views for search results, Keyword suggestions and Keyboard shortcuts.

Alternate views for search results provide timelines, maps and in-context information. A search for Civil Rights Movement would for instance display a timeline above the search results that is showing the amount of information available for that period in time. A click on a period displays only search results about that time period.

Those alternative view modes work best when searching for people, events, companies and the like and can provide specific search results easily.

Keyword Suggestions, the second entry at Google Experimental is known by Firefox users. The search box in Firefox is showing suggestions when typing in search queries in Google Search. It’s known as Google Suggest.

The third entry Keyboard Shortcuts introduces keyboard navigation in search results. The following keys are set:

• J Selects the next result.
• K Selects the previous result.
• O Opens the selected result.
• Opens the selected result.
• / Puts the cursor in the search box.
• Removes the cursor from the search box.

Most of these commands are also known from other Google products like Google Reader where they have similar functions.

Google Experimental is offering a view of what is probably to come in the future. It’s worth visiting that website every now and then to check on updates and additions.