Google Docs is a great way to share documents (such as this article), but keeping track of shares can be tricky. That can be remedied with some thought-out collections (folders) and by avoiding a few habits. The idea is to think like an administrator. You want to make sure you know who can use what [...]

I just signed up for a new Youtube account for one of my other sites. The signup process is pretty straightforward. Enter your desired username, email address, birthday and gender, and on the second page your password and the verification captcha. If everything is correct, Google will send out a verification email. This email is [...]

I have reviewed Google’s Search by Images yesterday and was impressed by the new search feature. The image recognition works extremely well in most cases. Search will still turn out blank occasionally but most of the time you get the information that you wanted to find. Today I’m going to look at different uses of [...]

Everyone and their mum seems to be releasing a new cloud based online storage service these days. It started with Amazon and its Cloud Drive service, followed by Google’s announcement of Google Music Beta and now Apple with its iCloud service that replaces MobileMe. Choice is good, but it can be very confusing at the [...]

We may still be at least a year away from Windows 8′s big debut in 2012, but the OS arena is heating up like never before, and new competitors are stepping up to the plate. It’s no big secret that Google has been preparing a streamlined, Chrome-esque operating system to challenge Microsoft’s double decade monopoly. [...]

After showing you how to protect your Facebook account login from malicious attacks, it is time to show you how to protect your Google account and login as well. Your Google login can be the key to all Google services, from Google Mail and Google Apps to Google Analytics, Adwords or even plain Google Search. [...]

There’s been so much news in recent weeks about stuff that’s going to turn into our computing future that I’m hardly surprised most people have failed to join the dots. If you look at some of, if not all of, the major technology announcements in recent weeks we can see that there is a very [...]

Last week a bill was tabled in the American senate that would allow the Department of Justice to take out a court order against sites accused of infringing copyright. Google’s Erik Schmidt came out strongly against the bill in London on the 18th. Is this an attempt on Google to do no evil, or is [...]

You may know that I check the running processes of my computer regularly. This is mainly a security precaution to detect malicious processes that may be running. More often than not I catch unwanted processes that I do not need but run anyway. GoogleCrashHandler.exe is such a process. I recently saw it running on my [...]

Didn’t I write recently on Facebook’s general lack of privacy, intentional or otherwise? How ironic is it then that Facebook chose to attack Google on its general disrespect for personal data privacy? This would have been bad enough, but the way that Facebook chose for its attack turns the story from just plain ridiculous to [...]

Google yesterday announced the immediate availability of Music Beta, a new cloud based music service that shows many parallels to Amazon’s Cloud Drive service that has been rolled out earlier this year. Google Music Beta in its current stage offers storage space in the cloud to store up to 20,000 songs. Plans are to turn [...]

We know that Google is constantly running experiments on google.com. Those experiments are only visible to a subset of visitors to test them before they may go live for all users eventually. The majority of tests make small changes to the search page or result’s listing. Some users may not even notice that they are [...]

The sheer volume of excitement about Windows 8 has taken me quite by surprise with more leaks than we ever saw with Vista or Windows 7 in the same time-frame.  The excitement and hype easily matches that of Google’s Chrome OS in the same period of its development, even though when the operating system finally [...]

Up until today I have never tried to send an executable file via Google’s email service. When I tried that today, it looked at first as if it was not a problem. The file was uploading fine and showing up under attachments in the send message window. When I tried to send the email however, [...]

One of the annoying aspects of web mail accounts is that you cannot navigate away from a page after you have initiated an action. This includes uploading larger attachments or sending emails. If you move away, the operation breaks and you have to start all over again. Background Send is a new Google Mail feature [...]

Google recently made the announcement that they would shut down their video hosting service Google Video for good. I have covered the announcement in Google Video Closing Down, What You Need To Know. Google posted two deadlines: The service would shut down for visitors on April 29 which meant that it would no longer be [...]

Many websites look up the IP address that you are connecting with, or other browser header information, to redirect you automatically to a language specific website. While those systems usually get it right, they are annoying for users who do not want to be redirected to a country specific domain name or different language version. [...]

Google rolled out a new version of Google Image Search some time ago. The most prominent change is that all image results are now displayed on the same page, with new images being loaded as the user scrolls down. The number of image previews on a search result page has increased as well. This can [...]

Before Youtube, Google tried to conquer the video hosting niche with a service that they called Google Video. When they discovered that they could not compete with Youtube, they bought that service and made people forget all about Google Video. There are actually many similarities to Google’s attempt in past years to get a foothold [...]

Apis of popular web applications like Facebook, Google, Dropbox or Twitter allow third party developers to create services and tools that offer additional features or functionality. These third party services require user authorization before they can access account related data. One example of such a service is Find Big Email which crawls all your Google [...]

Roman messaged me yesterday about a problem one of his friend’s was experiencing. His friend’s Gmail account was more or less at the storage size limit which meant that the friend either needed to buy additional storage from Gmail, or delete emails. Deleting the largest emails in the inbox should free up some space. But [...]

I have more than 1000 contacts in Google Mail, all people that I know and hold dear. Just kidding. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who send you an email in the past was automatically added to your contacts, as was everyone that you send an email to. That was not really comfortable considering that spammers [...]

Google introduced the text completion service Google Scribe in September of 2010. Back then it was only available for English texts. The Google labs service Google Scribe analyses the text that has been written by the user to give real-time word and phrase auto-suggestions. Scribe displays suggestions as soon as you start typing the first [...]

Did you know that Google has a labs-like feature for Google Search? Labs-like feature, what was that again? The Google Chrome browser, Google Mail and other Google products offer experimental features to all users. Google is sometimes unsure if a feature should be fully integrated into their product, which is why they are offering them [...]

Google just made an announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog that they will start introducing a +1 button to Google Search and as a button for websites. Google +1 seems awfully similar to Facebook Like. It is a social sharing button that logged in Google users can click on to recommend a service, ad [...]

Google recently changed the header on many of their pages, from more or less static links leading to often used features, the account, settings and sign out to a menu like interface that opens up when the user clicks on it. The menu should pop up on a left click, but this has not happened [...]

The Chrome extension Personal Blocklist was apparently only the first step in Google’s quest for a personalized user experience on Google Search. You may remember that Personal Blocklist was introduced to give Chrome users options to block domain names from appearing in Google’s search results. The domains are simply filtered out of the results, which [...]

Google has turned from a search engine into a jack of all trades. The company started many different en devours ever since its rise to power; Some successful, like Google Maps, others not so like Google Video. Problems related to that became apparent years ago when Google started to include their own properties prominently in [...]

If you can’t log into your Gmail account this morning it could be because engineers at Google are trying to recover all your emails that they accidentally deleted last night. Some estimates say that as many as half a million Gmail users have had their inboxes wiped as a software bug has reset some accounts.  [...]

I love to search for new userscripts on the official website. The owners of the site use Google Search to display search results which in itself is not bad. The one thing that bothered me for quite a while were missing sorting and filtering options. I’d like to see the newest entries on top for [...]

Google is making a lot of changes lately which can partially be attributed to the rising criticism that search quality has taken the dive in recent years. The aim of the latest change that has been rolled out yesterday in the US is to move “more” quality sites to the top of the search results, [...]

How are you managing your documents? Are you using a desktop application like Microsoft Office or Open Office, or do you prefer a could based service like Google Docs or Zoho? Some users see benefits in both ways of managing documents, which usually means that they have to find a way to transfer documents between [...]

You may have heard about Google’s latest effort to improve the account security for Google account users: 2-Step verification. Google basically adds a second authentication layer to the standard username and password log in process. The second step utilizes a smartphone with options to receive a one-time code per SMS or to install an app [...]

All web browsers are getting serious overhauls with the most recent being Internet Explorer 9 with its new one box. This is a unified address and search box and it makes sense as you could always search from the URL box in browsers anyway. Now ConceivablyTech are reporting that Google is now considering its options [...]

One of the main points of criticisms of Google’ online document viewer Google Docs Viewer was that several widely used formats were not supported by it. Among the unsupported formats were Microsoft Excel files, both .xls and xlsx to be precise, the new PowerPoint format .pptx, Adobe Photoshop .psd files and many lesser used but [...]

You may have read that Google created an extension for its Google Chrome browser exclusively that can be used to block results in Google search from appearing again. The main reason for creating the extension however is not that, even though it is a nice side effect. You see, every site that gets blocked is [...]

A Google account is currently only protected by a username, which in most cases is an email address, and a password. Threats like phishing, brute forcing and social engineering are very common on today’s Internet. To protect its users, Google has decided to roll out an advanced sign-in security feature for Google accounts that makes [...]

It’s great to see new, different and exciting ways that new technology is being put to.  The latest is Google Earth, which has been used to study potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia according to the New Scientist.  Nearly 2,000 sites have been found in the country by the University of Western Australia without having [...]

If you have followed the news lately you may have noticed articles about Bing stealing Google’s search results on all major tech blogs. Lifehacker, Download Squad, Neowin and dozens of other blogs repeated what the original source over at Searchengineland claimed. According to Danny Sullivan’s article Google setup a honeypot to lure Bing into the [...]

Google search suggestions displays the most likely search terms in the search form once the user begins typing. Sometimes it is enough to enter one letter and hit the tab key to complete the suggestion. This can save some time and offer search options that the user may have otherwise not have thought of. One [...]

Maybe you remember reading about Google’s try to buy Groupon, a leading deal of the day website, that is offering its users a deal per day based on their location. Google’s 6 Billion offer fell through and the Internet giant decided to follow one of the oldest credos on the Internet: If you cannot buy, [...]

Gmail is a free ad-supported web-mail service using both POP3 and IMAP4 email protocols. It is provided by Google, the company that runs the search engine website of the same name. Gmail works with any browser, but the extra plugins, add-ons and extensions to Gmail work best with browsers like Firefox, Mozilla, and Google’s own [...]

I’m going to come clean, I’m not a fan of Google’s Android operating system.  I just don’t think that a desktop / icons approach is appropriate for either a smartphone or a tablet.  That said I’ve now seen the demonstration video for Google’s forthcoming ‘tablet’ version of the operating system, codenamed Honeycomb and I’m quickly [...]

Google have launched their new own-branded Smartphone, the Samsung-made Nexus S, to lots, some, a bit of fanfare around the world.  The handset runs the latest version of their Android operating system and includes some interesting new features including Near Field Communications (NFC) that can allow people to make electronic payments by swiping their phone [...]

A report compiled by security company Bit9 has named the “dirty dozen” web browsers with the most discovered vulnerabilities, and the results, which have been posted by NeoWin come as something of a, well let’s face it, a major surprise. Bit9′s CEO, Harry Sverdlove said “A variety of vulnerability types – including buffer-overflow and cross-site [...]

Google’s new addition to it search engine, Instant Previews, is getting lots of press since its introduction. Google claims the new feature adds 5% to the search engine users satisfaction, others do not like the feature at all and want to disable it (see How To Disable Google Instant Previews for that). If you have [...]

Google Instant Previews is the latest in a series of improvements that Google has added to their search engine. Instant Previews add a small spying glass next to each page title in the Google search results. Hovering over the spying glass does nothing, as Instant Previews needs to be activated once by clicking on any [...]

Despite questions over Google’s ability to continue making huge profits, the company has this week given all its staff a huge 10% salary increase and big bonuses. The report by Business Insidersays that every employee has been given a $1,000 “holiday bonus” on which the company is also paying everybody’s tax, and salary bonuses of at [...]

Google has not touched their core business search for a long time. Only recently have they started to implement changes to their search engine, that many that it almost feels like a different search engine by now. Features like the search sidebar, instant search, integration of other Google products and a massive increase in advertisement [...]

Every Google Search user may access search settings to configure some settings, like the number of search results per page or if search results should be opened in a new window, or not. The options available are limited, and third party developers have created numerous tools to modify Google Search one way or the other. [...]