Gmail quicklings is a new feature rolled out in Google Labs for Gmail which enables you to create some links for frequents searches, but it can be used for much more. Not all of you have this feature yet, so if you don’t see any “Labs” option in your settings, try navigating to this link [...]

Microsoft just made a 100 million acquisition of semantic search engine Powerset in its bit to improve existing Internet Searching Technologies for its Live Search. I use Live Search regularly and would say the results are now very comparable to Google and in the case of Image Search much better organised. Better search is always [...]

I’ve been a user of FeedDemon RSS reader ever since it became freeware. It’s a fantastic application and has a lot of great features, not the least being synchronization between NewGator Online and multiple devices such as Mobile phones and desktops. However good as NewsGator Online is, after a while I began wishing FeedDemon synchronized [...]

Last week I suggested you give the new Flock 1.2 a try, and I don’t know if any of you would have… but if you do use Flock then I’ve found one extremely handy extension. Google Gears is one year old now, and although we haven’t seen a huge adoption across the web, it is [...]

Vista integrated search right across the operating system but restricted access to Windows Search technologies only. Windows Search provided decent performance, but just wasn’t as fast or efficient as Google Desktop. Google protested against Microsoft’s restrictions in Vista. Microsoft’s response was as of Vista Service Pack 1 to allow third-party applications to be set as [...]

I only glimpsed over the Lifehacker article in the Brief Firefox add-on and only the mail from Dark Kosmos made me change my mind. Google has added a very interesting feature to Gmail called Labs which is accessible in the account options. Labs is basically a testing ground for Gmail add-ons that are not yet [...]

Most users that I know have several email accounts at various email providers. I’m using about ten email accounts actively in Thunderbird and web interfaces and always thought that there must be a way to sync the contact information. Late last night I discovered the Zindus (via Download Squad) Thunderbird extension which syncs the Gmail [...]

I don’t know how it is in the states but SMS are a phenomena in Europe. It’s a very easy foolproof way to send someone a short message without having to call that purpose. The limited space seems to have a huge impact on the language used while sending those messages with abbreviations that most [...]

Some videos on Youtube are only available to users of a specific country, countries or region. Everyone else may not watch the video and receives a message stating that “This video is not available in your country.” Youtube is also restricting access to videos that have been flagged to contain (possible) inappropriate content and users [...]

Google Code University is an excellent resource for Computer Science students and programmers in general. All videos and Powerpoint presentations published at the University are released under Creative Commons. Four different kinds of courses are available right now, they are Ajax Programming, Distributed Systems, Web Security and Languages.

I just found a great Firefox extension while browsing Lifehacker, a small addon that will add a bar in place of the default, quite unuseful bar, and let you access features in other Google services right there. iGoogleBar ads the favicons of many Google services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Reader, even Documents, Notebook and Web [...]

If you are from the United States and have been visiting another country lately or if you are from another country and want to access google.com you might have noticed that you are automatically getting redirected to a country code domain of Google. Users from France for instance are redirected to Google.fr automatically.

Google has just release a document list uploader to help you upload your stuff in large batches, and this is one smart move, since I had some frustration a while back because of this. Nevertheless, this application is much more that meets the eye. All you need to do is enter your email address, your [...]

While browsing the GoogleDocs blog I found an interesting update about two updates already in this year. The less significant, although probably better update if you want to organize yourself is the ability to add sub-folders. For me this was a much awaited feature since no matter how many tags and other organizational stuff I can add, a good folder structure is always a must.

To me it really seems like Google is integrating everything they have. In the end they will just have one app, named GOOGLE and it will do everything from sending emails, sharing photos, making the dinner and flushing the toilet. Of course this is web 2.0, so you will be able to geotag and share [...]

I have to admit, I’m not the cheapskate, I don’t try dodging costs and I don’t employ the technique described here, but it is a fairly easy way to get rid of SMS expenses once and for all. There are numerous ways to minimize mobile costs nowadays, I have a “family pack”, which means that [...]

While trying to find and all-in-one feed reader solution I got frustrated and decided to go with the simple and the best, Google Reader. While it doesn’t sport the sleekest, most awesome web 2.0 design I’ve ever seen it is clean and usable. I have just discovered a new link added, “discover”, which shows you [...]

The process to search free file hosts for files is always the same and not dependent on the file host that you would like to search. While it is still possible to fire up Google and enter the search terms and site url manually it is far more convenient to automate the process.

The blogosphere was going crazy last week with rumors about the sudden Pagerank drops of several authority sites like Problogger or The Washington Post. Soon enough lots of theories made the round which ranged from being punished because of selling links to being in a blog network that would list all of its sites in the sidebar.

I was thinking about looking at other services that I could try to see if they were any better than the Google services that I’m using at the moment when I came upon a post by Everton who was writing about the same thing at this blog. His main domain received a major Pagerank decrease from 6 to 3 and this made him realize that it is probably the time to move on and look for services that do it better than Google.

Many popular websites and blogs have been hit with Pagerank decreases in the last days. Most went down two points (some even three) from one day to the other. The Pagerank drop does not seem to have an influence on other factors like website traffic or Adsense. It does seem pretty random though, some websites get hit, others that do the same do not get hit at all.

Until now it was possible to use the public id of any Adsense webmaster and place it on bogus sites to get the account of that webmaster banned. The public id is visible when viewing the source code of a website that uses Google Adsense to monetize.

A robots.txt tells the search engine robots about the directories and files that should be indexed on a website. A wrongly edited robots.txt file could mean that search engine robots are not crawling your website anymore with the result that new articles will not be indexed in the search engine index.

This can be quite devastating especially for webmasters who do earn their living from their websites. It takes up to two weeks until changes can be seen when you edit the robots.txt file which is way to long if you made a mistake.

It seems google released another beta program to the public, this time its google catalogs. You can now search through mail order catalogs. Apparently google scanned the whole content of hundreds of those catalags and made every word on every page searchable.