Rumors of Google Drive, or GDrive as it was named in the beginning, started to emerge at around the same time that the popular file synchronization and hosting service Dropbox opened its doors to the public (that was 2007). All went quiet shortly thereafter and it appeared as if the project had been canceled by [...]

Google Wallet is the name of Google’s recently launched cell phone-based credit card payment system. The system uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to exchange data between the cell phone (that is containing the user’s financial information) and the store. The system has several advantages over physical credit cards, including a potential for greater security when [...]

As soon as you start using the Internet, your actions are tracked by specialized companies. This not only includes web server logs but also third party tracking through advertisement, social networking scripts and other third party scripts. Google is about to launch Screenwise, a project that allows them to monitor the sites users visit and [...]

Google is running yet another design test on their homepage currently. With the frequency of layout changes increasing, it feels as if the search giant does not really know what they really want anymore. As of right now, at least two designs are life for all users. First the single button menu interface with a [...]

Last week Google announced changes to its privacy policy that, on the face of it seem perfectly reasonable.  In essence they want to treat all the different Google services you use as a single big account and share the data.  What this ultimately means though is that the company will know absolutely huge volumes of [...]

Users of Google’s blog hosting service Blogger may notice quite a significant change in the coming weeks. Instead of being able to access blogs hosted on Blogger directly, they may now be redirected to a country specific domain. A user visiting a blog from Australia for instance will be redirected to blogspot.com.au automatically whenever a [...]

Google recently revealed the plan to merge the privacy policies and terms of service for most of the company’s products. This move gives all Google services direct access to all user data. Google search for instance can take into account what kind of emails a user gets in Gmail to personalize the search results based [...]

While closing some of the company’s lesser popular services, Google’s popular services such as Google+ or YouTube have received plenty of updates in the past. Google today announced that they have updated YouTube’s browse, video editor and video manager pages. Channels have moved into the focus on YouTube with recent updates, and the new browse [...]

One of the issues that many users who tried Google Music experienced was the inability to download music officially to a connected device. And while the service’s app saved some of the songs locally while listing, it did not really provide a comfortable user experience. Third party programs like Google Music Downloader filled the gap, [...]

An announcement was posted yesterday on the official Google blog that indicates that changes are being made to Google’s privacy policies and terms of service. What first looks like a reasonable thing to do is in fact something that will keep privacy advocates up at night. Google will merge their privacy policies, of which about [...]

Google Takeout is a service that Google users can make use of to export their user data to their local PC. Not all Google services are supported by Takeout though, which limits the use of the service somewhat. Up until now, it only offered to export Picasa Web Albums, Google+ related information, Google Voice data [...]

Google has a distinct advantage that other companies on the web do not have. Google Search at the time of writing controls more than 50% of all search on the web, which can go up in some countries to more than 90%. Google uses this to their advantage by promoting their own services in search. [...]

Google has just announced the third wave of product retirements after retiring Google Buzz and Knol, Wave, Friend Connect and Google Gears previously. The official Google blog lists six products that will be discontinued in 2012 of which the majority of Internet and Google users probably never heard of. Picnic is probably the services that [...]

If you are using Google Calendar to keep track of things, you’d probably notice that you only get notifications on your desktop computer if you are on that computer and have the Google Calendar page open. That’s fine if you are working on your desktop most of the time, but won’t do you any good [...]

Smartphone users can access most Google services on their smartphone. Those using Android are often logged in to a Google account all the time. Most do not know however that they can use their smartphone to log into their Google account on another computer. This is done with the help of a unique QR code. [...]

Sometimes I’m searching on Google to copy the search results link into another application. This is an extremely frustrating experience as links are manipulated by Google. When you copy a link in Google’s search results you’ll notice that the link target are displayed correctly when you hover the mouse cursor over the link, but when [...]

While testing a new userscript for Google I noticed that the company once again had changed search on their site. I was greeted with a “Welcome to Search plus Your World” phrase at the top which takes search results personalization a step further. When you are logged in your Google account you will get personal [...]

Christmas was a good week for all of us, but a great week for apps with analytics firm Flurry reporting a 60% leap in app downloads on the previous week.  The figures which cover smartphones and tablets for just iOS and Android operating systems estimated that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas day [...]

Google Docs users have quite a few options to synchronize their online documents with local computer systems. Among them Gladinet Cloud Desktop, the Microsoft Office add-in OffiSync or DocSyncer. Insync is a new option for Mac and Windows users (and soon Linux as a Linux port is in the making) who want to synchronize their [...]

Google Health was a centralized health information service that allowed users to manually or automatically upload health records to the service. It acted as a management central for those records. The service provided users with a health record summary, background and related information, as well as interactions between drugs, allergies and conditions. Google Health became [...]

Google is putting lots of effort into their social networking service Google+. Changes happen on a weekly basis and it is often hard to keep track of everything that gets added, modified or removed from the service. The company yesterday announced new features that improve Google+ significantly. Users who maintain Google+ pages can now add [...]

The majority of users visiting the Google homepage or another one of Google’s properties will have noticed that Google made another change to the header area. The company did away with the black bar and replaced it with a menu that is activated with a click on the Google logo. This new menu displays a [...]

Those of you who follow me will know that in addition to writing here, being an author and all the other things I seem to do, that I’m also a teacher.  I’ve spent the last few years teaching adult basic skills, which is helping adults with poor literacy and numeracy skills, or those without qualifications, [...]

There is an intriguing infographic that has been released showing how much revenue Google had in 2010.  In typical infographic style, and you can view the whole thing below, there’s all manner of comparisons including saying that the company makes more money than the combined gross domestic product of the world’s 28 poorest countries.  These [...]

One way to improve online account security is to use so called 2-step verification systems when they are offered by companies and services. Companies like Google, PayPal or Yahoo are already offering multifactor authentication systems to their users. These systems are optional for now and improve security by combining standard log ins with a second [...]

Google’s Android store has had it’s 10 billionth download this week, and the news was announced on the Google blog.  To mark the milestone the company has also announced that for the next 10 days it would cut the price of some of the top apps to just 10 cents each. The growth in apps, [...]

Google about six months ago started to roll out the black bar on top of most of their properties. This bar displayed the logged in Google user’s username, linked to popular Google destinations such as Google Search, Maps or Mail, and displayed options to modify user account related preferences, privacy settings or settings that affected [...]

Did you know that YouTube saves information about every video that you view on the video hosting site when you are logged into your Google account and also when you are not? And that those video views are saved indefinitely by the service? The saving of YouTube video views may be a privacy issue to [...]

Larry Page, the new CEO of Google, is continuing to retire Google services (check out Google retires Google Buzz for additional information about previous retirement waves). This time a set of not overly-popular services face termination: Google Knol, Wave, Friend Connect, Search Timeline, Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal, Bookmark Lists and Google Gears will all [...]

Last year Google started to push the HTTPS protocol on many of their services which basically meant that users always connected to the https version of the site regardless of their own preference. Before that, https was only an option in a service’s settings. Gmail users for instance were able to enable https for their [...]

It would appear that Google’s unfortunately lax approach to vetting apps submitted to the Android store is counting heavily against the platform, as McAfee have released figures showing it is now becoming the biggest target for malware writers. Nokia’s now mostly retired Symbian operating system still sits in a resounding first place with just under [...]

I have already talked about Google Verbatim, a new search tool that is currently rolled out for all users of the Google Search engine. With Verbatim, users can search for contents that match their search query exactly. This means no interpretations by Google, no adding of synonyms, removal of words or personalization of the search [...]

Music in the cloud, that’s where the journey goes. At least if you trust Apple, Amazon and Google in this regard. All three companies have introduced a cloud hosting and streaming service for music in past months. You can get an overview of the core services here. Apple recently has added iTunes Match to iCloud [...]

When you search on Google you often get results that have nothing to do with your original search query. Take the search for Appel for instance. You probably would not expect sites about Apple in the search results. Google on the other hand thinks that is what the user is looking for and displays three [...]

A few days ago I published a small tutorial on creating banners for the Google+ profile page. The core idea was to add a professional looking banner to the profile page which served two purposes. It first made the page look more professional. Instead of having no images or unrelated images displayed in the five [...]

ITunes Match, Apples cloud based synchronization service has just launched. Before you read on, here are the facts. The iTunes Match service is only available in the United States, requires iTunes 10.5.1 or newer and costs $24.95 per year. What do you get for that? The service has been designed to match a user’s music [...]

Of all the smartphone and tablet operating systems available at the moment, the one that I simply can’t recommend to people is Google Android.  Unlike Apple, Microsoft and some other companies Google don’t properly screen programs that go into its app store and, as such, large amounts of malware keep getting through. This is a real [...]

There are not many Internet users left on this earth that do not have an account at a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter or Google+. The same can be said for webmasters, bloggers and organizations who are more or less forced to have accounts on those sites. With that many profiles it is important [...]

With Google Labs projects being discontinued by Google came the cancellation or transfer of popular services. One of the services that will be discontinued this November is GoogleLookup. GoogleLookup is a Google Labs technology that allows Google Docs spreadsheet users to search for and add data into their spreadsheets. Spreadsheet cells that make use of [...]

Those of you who follow my articles with any regularity will know that one of the biggest arguments I make about the modern technology industry is their insistence on playing Patent tennis with each other.  This back and forth of legal battles, and the scrabbling by technology giants to buy up valuable patent libraries only [...]

I sometimes feel the urge to check for new email messages during work. Other users may feel the same urge when it comes to checking social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus for new messages and updates. Others may not be able to resist watching that funny video that just got posted. Sometimes [...]

Google Buzz was a social networking service that Google integrated into the company’s web-based email product Gmail. Google Mail users were able to make use of Buzz to share messages, photos, videos and other information with their Gmail contacts or the public. Google Buzz was a first attempt to compete with successful social networking sites [...]

If you are a regular on Google’s social networking experiment Google+ you have noticed that the company makes changes to the site constantly. Sending messages to other Google+ users was something that you could do in two ways in the past. You could use the send an email option to contact a Google Plus user [...]

Google recently introduced What’s Hot On Google+ on their social networking site. The new feature is linked on the Google+ sidebar under What’s Hot and in the user’s stream directly. The most recent message of the What’s Hot message pool is directly displayed in the stream. While it is possible to collapse the feature, it [...]

A black toolbar is displayed on almost every Google property. The bar displays links to popular Google services as well as options to sign in and to open the settings configuration menu. The black bar is part of a global redesign of core Google services, and has been only recently added to those web pages [...]

Google, the company that conquered the Internet by storm by offering mostly free services is slowly being turned around to make even more money than it is currently. One of the latest strikes in the hearts of Google advocates is the introduction of Google Maps Api access limits. What does that mean? Well it basically [...]

One of the points of criticism surrounding Google’s social networking site Google+ (Google Plus) was the fact that Google Apps users could not join the service. That was irritating for many Google Apps users, not only because they pay money for the Google Service but also because it was not really clear why they were [...]

Advanced search operators like the + or – symbols can be used to optimize a search. The – operator for instance makes sure that the term following is not included on pages in the search results. An example for this is the query technology -blog which would only display results that would match the technology [...]

Logged in Google users who do not follow the news as closely as the majority of Ghacks visitors may have noticed that Google started to redirect their searches on google.com from http to https automatically. While that is certainly not a issue on most systems, it could lead to issues on some. If you are [...]

Google in an effort to make their online music service Google Music more popular has created a website called Magnifier (more precisely a blog) which promotes the service by giving away music for free. Visitors need to have a Google Music account to benefit from Magnifier, and since it is currently limited to select countries [...]