Google recently enabled SSL on their main search engine google.com allowing search engine users to access https://www.google.com/ instead of the standard Google search domain. This secure search encrypts the data that is exchanged between the user’s computer and Google search so that third parties like other network users or the Internet Service Provider cannot spy [...]

Google has just enabled https on their core search domain google.com. Users who want to access the encrypted Google web search can point their browsers to https://www.google.com/ to do so. The technology, which is known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), encrypts the data traffic between the user’s computer and the Internet server they want to [...]

If you have visited the Google homepage today you might have noticed the Pacman logo instead of the usual logo that appears on the Google site. This logo has been placed there to celebrate the 30th birthday of Pacman, a video game created in 1980. This Google Doodle is unusual though as it is an [...]

On my phone (Android based) I use Google maps like crazy (I’d get lost in my own house I’m convinced). It keeps me from getting lost and misdirected. When at home, however, I like to refer to Google Earth to aid me in my quest to know my surroundings a bit better. Now, Google Earth [...]

Encryption on the Internet is still largely used on financial and shopping sites and for site log ins and neglected by most Internet sites. Using encrypted connections to access websites aids against network eavesdropping and a set of other online attacks. It does also protect the user’s privacy by revealing less information in Internet connection [...]

Are you one of those users who does not like the new Google Search homepage? The one that only displays the search form and Google logo until the search engine user moves the mouse for the first time? If you answered the above question with yes you might want to take a closer look at [...]

Not every Internet user is happy with the redesign of the Google search interface and the increasing number of extensions, userscripts and other solutions to bring back old Google is a clear indicator for that. The left sidebar does no the other hand offer several new features that have not been there before when using [...]

Windows only tool Google Password Decrypter can be used as a last resort to restore Google account information in case they have been misplaced or forgotten. The portable program only works with selected Google tools and Internet Explorer but will list the Google password and username in no time and with barely any efforts. Supported [...]

Have you ever felt the need to contact Google only to find out that the company that is present everywhere on the Internet is hard to come by? It feels strange that such a big company has no public support hotline but only email and forum supports. Google support employees exist but their contact information [...]

Webmasters who log into Google Webmaster Tools might notice a new notification message on top that reads “email@gmail.com is no longer verified by Google. Please verify the address or select a different email address”. Email in this case is the email address of the user logging into the webmaster tools. The message itself is not [...]

Google recently rolled out a redesign of their search interface turning its spartan looks into a sidebar driven version that gives users quick access to search filters. Many of the filters were accessible through commands and secondary pages as well before and this might be enough for some users. The Google Search sidebar displays a [...]

Google yesterday released a new tool that they call Government Requests tool which is a visual representation of the request Google received from government agencies to remove content or provide information about users of their services and products. The map shows the number of requests that Google has received between July 1, 2009 and December [...]

Back In January Google revealed information about a cyber attack that had been carried out against the company. The information released at that time were scarce but the impact was huge as it made Google rethink its Chinese market strategy when it became clear that China was behind the attacks. No information was provided how [...]

Google Street View is a service that is integrated into Google Maps and Google Earth. It basically allows the user to view panoramic views along many streets in the world. The photos are taken from Street View cars that drive around the country taking pictures of the streets that are later integrated into Google Maps [...]

Hot off the press: Google has updated Google Docs with some major improvements. Google Docs is a document storage and editing service offered by Google. Users with a Google account can upload documents and files to the service, view and edit documents online and save them to a local computer system. Google Docs supports many [...]

It seems that spammers have finally found a new target for their campaigns: Youtube. If you have lately performed a search on the video hosting platform and decided to sort the results by upload data you might have been in for a shock depending on your search query. Searches for popular games or applications for [...]

The Google Webmaster Central Blog today announced that Google has added a site speed factor to their web search ranking algorithm which effectively another ranking factor that webmasters have to look out for. The information are – as always – rare at this point. According to the blog post the feature was enabled a few [...]

Now that I have decided to run a computer system without local pdf reader installed I had to find another comfortable way of dealing with pdf documents. I’m currently using Google Docs for the purpose which is not that big of a nuisance because I have to open pdf documents rarely and I have the [...]

Google’s email service Gmail offered for some time now an overview of the recent Gmail account activities which listed the access time, account connection type, IP address and country of the last Gmail logins. Access to this feature is provided at the bottom of every Gmail page by clicking on the Details link there. But [...]

It took Chinese officials less than two hours to react on Google’s announcement to stop censoring their services in China. Google, two hours before the response, started to redirect their China mainland traffic to their Hong Kong domain serving unfiltered information and services to Chinese users. The official in charge of the Internet bureau under [...]

Google today announced that they stopped censoring Google services in China, something that many Internet users did not believe they would be doing even though they made it very clear that it was a possibility. As of today Google Search, Google News and Google Images search are delivering censor free search results to Chinese people. [...]

Google Calendar is a calendar application that is integrated into several other Google services like Gmail. A labs section is provided by for Google Calendar users that provides access to experimental features. The Google Calendar features can easily be activated in the labs section and Google just announced the addition of three new Calendar Labs [...]

We have not seen any statistics about the popularity about Google’s recently introduced service Google Sidewiki which allows Google Toolbar users to leave comments about any webpage they visit. The comments are displayed in a sidebar for everyone to see, at least if the Google Toolbar is installed or if one of the workarounds is [...]

Back in November of last year Google announced that they would be starting to add automatic captions in Youtube with the help of the voice recognition algorithm that was already been tested and used in Google Voice. Youtube began to roll out the feature on last Thursday on the video hosting portal and a new [...]

Gmail Labs has been introduced as an add-on for Gmail that allows developers to test Gmail extensions by providing access to them to all Gmail users. Only a minority is using one or several of the Gmail Labs applications which may or may not be included into Gmail fully eventually. It can therefor happen that [...]

I’m often spotting new features for logged in users in Google later than anyone else because I usually log out of my Google account before performing searches or doing anything else. That was different this morning which could only have meant that I forgot to log out yesterday night. Well that happens and imagine my [...]

If you want to search Google Buzz for public messages you need to log into Gmail and use the search form at the top. There does not seem to be another official option to search public messages in Google’s new social messaging service. The public messages might eventually make it into the Google search engine [...]

If you search for cancel Google in search engines you notice that this request can mean lots of different things depending on the user’s intention. The first and most obvious is to cancel a Google account which will remove the account and all Google services that were linked to that account. Google maintains a help [...]

Remember Aardvark? The community that was designed around experts that helped other users who experienced problems in their field of expertise? The premise of Aardvark was that every user in the world is an expert in something. Each Aardvark users would be able to ask questions which would then be answered by other users of [...]

Google Buzz has been announced publicly just a few days ago. It basically allows Gmail users to use social networking features that are similar to those offered on Twitter. Gmail users can follow others, write status notifications, post images or videos and read messages that are posted by their contacts. And the way those contact [...]

It feels like there is not a day where Google is not updating or publishing a new service. Google Buzz is the latest service that is being rolled out from today on to all Gmail users. It is a social networking service to share updates, photos, videos and more with contacts. If you think Twitter, [...]

Google’s Chinese search engine was launched in January 2006. Google agreed back then to censor some of the results which in their opinion was better than not offering access to the search engine at all in China. Google’s stance on the issue has changed lately with the uncovering of a targeted attack on the infrastructure [...]

Google Docs is currently a popular location on the Internet to store document formats like Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF documents. This is soon going to change according to a Techcrunch story on the subject. Google will roll out an update to Google Docs in the coming weeks that will remove the file type limitations [...]

Even if you do not like Google you must have to admit that they are brilliant when it comes to tapping in markets and providing products that many people want to use. Google Voice for instance offers that many additional features that it on its own is a very competitive and interesting product. Features like [...]

A statistic to analyse the number of intentional to unintentional leaks in 2009 would be very welcome and interesting as this passing year seems to be the year of the “leak”. The latest leak has been reported by the International Business Times website and it is about Google’s first netbook that will run the Google [...]

Privacy is a big issue on the Internet these days and companies like Google have to put a lot of effort into convincing or reassuring Internet users that they do care about the individual user’s privacy. A recent post at Google’s Privacy blog explains Google’s approach to privacy in the form a presentation that lists [...]

The news about Google’s new public DNS service seems to have ebbed down a bit after the initial announcement which can probably be attributed to the fact that reviews of the service where not all favorable. The two biggest points of criticism were privacy and speed. Some users do not want to use Google DNS [...]

Google has released the year-end statistics of Google Zeitgeist 2009 which includes information about the most search topics in various niches in 2009. The default statistics show the search queries for the United States with the option to switch the country to view them for several dozen other countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany [...]

Google Browser Size is a new web service that has been published by Google Labs that can be used to visualize the browser window sizes of users visiting a specific website. The service will display transparent information on top of the website that has been loaded visualizing how much of the website visitors see without [...]

One of the problems that we saw when we wrote about Google’s entry into the real-time search engine market was the spam factor. Real-time means that there cannot be a human review of the contents before it goes live. The only thing that Google can do is to select only trustworthy sources for the inclusion [...]

A long requested feature of many Gmail users has been finally added to the popular webmail service. Gmail users can now merge duplicate contacts automatically, something that was not possible before. The only option of dealing with duplicate contacts before the recent changes was to manually merge selected contacts in the Gmail contact list. That [...]

If You Have Something That You Don’t Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Doing It In The First Place. That is what Google’s CEO Erik Schmidt said in a live CNBC broadcast last week. The sentence itself does not make that much sense as there is a huge difference between doing something and [...]

We knew that it would be coming eventually and the time apparently has come today. At least for some users that is as Google stays true to its policy to roll out changes to their services over time. Real-time search is an addition to the standard Google search results that users see when they perform [...]

If there is anything left in the online world that Google is not offering a service for yet chance is that they are working on exactly that service behind the scenes to release it eventually to the public. Or, if they do not develop the service chance is they buy one of the first movers [...]

Starting today Google begins rolling out a new search personalization feature that has an impact on every search engine user that is using one of Google’s search engines. Previously personalized search results were only displayed to users who were logged into a Google Account. The new system changes this behavior so that every user will [...]

Search results are different depending on the search engine the user utilizes. The language plays another important role. A search for Berlin Sightseeing and Berlin Sehenswürdigkeiten will yield two (very different) sets of results. This is especially relevant if the search targets a region or country where the people are speaking a different language than [...]

The majority of Internet users has not probably come into contact with DNS, the Domain Name System, yet although they make use of it everyday on the Internet. DNS is basically a system to convert domain names into IP addresses. Domain names are easier to understand, memorize and write for humans while computers only use [...]

Android OS is about to make the migration from mobile phone to netbook PC (most likely thanks to Asus). If you’ve not seen an Android-based phone, you most likely are not aware just what the possibilities are. Although Android won’t take the desktop or standard laptop landscape by storm, the netbook landscape COULD be totally [...]

Google and Microsoft have recently published several posts that indicate that they are going to lay more emphasize on a website’s performance with the likely possibility that performance will play a greater role in determining a website’s search engine rankings. But improving site performance has additional immediate benefits to the webmaster and site owner that [...]

Several webmasters that I have talked to in the last year expressed their concern about Google’s website traffic analyzer Google Analytics. Once of the complaints was that the Analytics script would slow down the loading of the website. Some even moved to other web tracking scripts to make their websites load faster. Everton over at [...]