Google Sandbox Search

This search engine comes close to the standard Google search engine. It makes use of a similar user interface with the main difference that the search result pages do not display advertisements or other elements that Google likes to add to those pages. [link]

Google XHTML

Google XHTML is a search interface for mobile devices. It can be accessed by desktop computers and normal web browsers. The benefit is a faster interface that displays the search results without additional noise. The search result listings are aligned to the left and contain titles and short descriptions of the contents. [link]

Google IE

Another interface for mobile devices. The IE suggests that it might be related to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in some way. This one the most barebone of them all which especially becomes apparent on the search results pages. The results only consist of the page titles with no description or other information thrown into the mix. This can be confusing if many of the websites listed in the results use the same or a similar title. [link]

Got anything to add? Let us know in the comments.

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A lot of information are displayed in Google Dashboard many with links to the services to look and manage the information. It is likely that a lot of Google users will be surprised at the wealth of information that are displayed in Google Dashboard.

Probably even more useful than the display of the data are links to various privacy policies and options to clear or manage the data that gets stored in the accounts. It is for example possible to use a link to remove items or clear the web history, manage privacy settings in Orkut or Google Reader, manage Gmail https settings or manage Blogger blogs.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Google Dashboard is definitely an interesting concept to manage many privacy related tasks from one central interface. Users who want to try it out to see the data that is stored in their Google account can visit the Google Dashboard website directly. (via official Google Blog and Connected Internet.

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The chance is however relatively good that some developers have already created extensions for popular web services. This article will look at five Google Chrome extensions for popular Google web services including Gmail and Google Reader.

Gmail Checker

Gmail Checker is a simple extension that displays a button in the Google Chrome menu bar. This button displays the number of unread email messages in the Gmail account which makes the extension useful as the user will be notified about new Gmail messages without having to visit the Gmail website first. [link]

Google Reader Checker

This is from the same developer who developed the Gmail Checker extension for the Chrome web browser. It is therefor not surprising that it works exactly like that extension. It will display a new button in the Chrome menubar that shows the count of the unread news items in Google Reader. [link]

Google Tasks

The Google Tasks add-on integrates Google Tasks into the web browser by allowing the user to access the tasks directly from within the web browser without having to open the Google Tasks website. [link]

gPDF

This extension allows the user to open pdf documents directly in Google Docs. There are two advantages of this method. First, no pdf reader needs to be installed on the computer system to read pdf documents and second, it will reduce the chance that the document exploits security vulnerabilities in the installed desktop pdf reader. [link]

Google Wave Checker

A basic extension that will display the unread Google Wave messages in the Google Chrome statusbar. [link]

Verdict:

Extensions are finally beginning to appear in greater numbers for the Google Chrome web browser but are hardly a match for the incredible amount of extensions for the Firefox web browser. It is likely that this is not going to change in the near future. The first step to make extensions more popular to both developers and end users would be to add extension capabilities to the public version of the Google browser.

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The Firefox add-on Google Sidewiki Client adds the full Google Sidewiki functionality to the Firefox web browser. Google Sidewiki information are added to a new sidebar which can be displayed by pressing the Sidewiki button in the status bar.

Users of the add-on can read the reviews and notes that have been posted by Google users about the website they are on. A little bit unfortunate is that the information are not automatically refreshing. The information are only refreshed if the button in the status bar is pressed again. This needs to be done for example when switching tabs or loading new links in the active tab that lead to other pages or websites.

Users who are logged into their Google account can submit their own reviews of the website, express their opinion about other reviews by voting for or against them, share reviews or report abusive reviews. It is basically the complete Google Sidewiki client in the Firefox sidebar.

The add-on is in an early stage which becomes apparent in two key areas. The first is the already mentioned auto-refresh that is missing. This makes the add-on cumbersome to use. The second are the missing controls in the sidebar. It is not possible to go back or forth and the login screen breaks the layout of the sidebar.

Interested users can download the Firefox add-on from the Mozilla website where it is available for all Firefox 3.x versions.

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To find out if it is running in Windows press [Ctrl Alt Del] on your keyboard to open the Windows Task Manager. According to Google GoogleCrashHandler.exe has the following characteristics:

GoogleCrashHandler.exe runs continuously on your computer if you’ve selected to send anonymous usage statistics and crash reports to Google for certain Google software, like Google Chrome. It helps send crash details to Google when your Google software unexpectedly shuts down. We use this data to help determine how to prevent these errors from happening in the future.

The process can be turned off in the installed Google programs. That could be a bit of a problem if several Google applications are installed on the computer system. In Google Chrome – Google’s web browser – you have to go to into the Options, switch to the Under The Hood tab and remove the checkmark in front of “Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google”.

Other Google applications have similar options. If more than one Google app is installed you need to go through all of them to turn off the crash reporting in all of them. Once that is done GoogleCrashHandler.exe will not be running on the computer system anymore starting with the next start of the computer system (restart or kill the process for immediate effect).

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Currently, it is pretty evident from all the pictures and rumors that the Droid is heading for the Verizon Wireless (and may be other places too). The real question is when does it get here. Logic would suggest that making a grand entry before the imminent holiday season is the best way to go. And indeed, it looks like that is exactly what will happen.

MobileCrunch has posted a conversation where an official from VZW reveals that the Sholes is coming soon. The conversation took place on twitter of all places! I mean I can see a non-descript meeting at an undisclosed public place and the usual “this conversation never took place” deal. But twitter? Seriously?

Anyway, there have been a lot of rumors around this device and a quite a few spy shots have been posted on the Internet. What is interesting to note is that there is no consistent source for this, except for may be the Boy Genius Report blog. They have been putting up a lot of Sholes/Droid spy shots and screenshots lately. But other than them, you have such varied places as motofan , Engadget Mobile, Mobile Crunch and there was also the Verizon Google announcement where the CEO’s of the two company held out unannounced phones and did not say a thing about them. Pretty much everyone caught that one.

About the specs, we know very little. From what the rumor mill has churned out, it seems like the phone will be powered by an ARM Cortex A8 chip and there are some who think it will be the Qualcomm Snapdragon. If it indeed is the Snapdragon, then we are likely to see a pretty snappy Android phone. The kind that we are yet to experience. This article from Anand of AnandTech explains why the Android phones have been sluggish and why it is about to change as of 1.6 (Donut).

All in all, it is quite likely that this Android phone will blow your socks off with its speed and performance. And that is not the only thing that is pulling people to this new offering from Motorola. This is going to be a ‘Google Experience’ phone. That means this phone is not going to have any bit of that MOTOBLUR UI that has hurt the CLIQ more than it has helped it. The Droid will instead have the pristine elegance that Google intended for the Android.

Looking at the screen shot from BGR that shows the official name of the phone, there seems to be scope for another speculation that is tied in with the device. It shows the firmware version as 2.0. That means it is already running Android 2.0 AKA Éclair, right? I would like to remind you folks that a giant foam Éclair was delivered to the Google lawn only recently.

So if the Droid is around the corner and it is running the Éclair release and the said Éclair was already delivered to Google HQ, does that mean 2.0 for the rest of us isn’t very far away? We’ll see. Meanwhile, enjoy this video of the Droid booting, complete with robot voice.

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The Google Wave add-on for Firefox informs the user when new messages arrive for him. It works like any other notification add-on and tool available on the Internet these days. It starts by entering the account data of the Google Wave account in the add-on’s settings.

This is required to access the data of the account. It can – and certainly will – turn away security conscious users who do not want to part with their account data. Those who do will from then on be notified of new Google Wave messages in Firefox. The add-on places an icon in the Firefox status bar that is displaying the number of unread messages with the ability to hover over the icon to see previews of the messages.

The Google Wave add-on for Firefox is available at the Mozilla Firefox website. The add-on is compatible with Firefox 3.5.x only at the moment.

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Google decided that it was time to educate the masses about web browsers. The first step was the production of a one minute video that explains in plain English what a web browser is and is not. Most tech savvy users would probably call the video web browsers for dummies or something like that.

The video begins with the statement that the web browser is the most important software on computer systems. That’s definitely a bold statement and in most cases not likely to be true. Take a look at the rest of the video to see how they explain web browsers.

Google has also created the website What Browser which contains textual information about web browsers. Not only about Google Chrome but also Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer. Some pages of the website contain tips that might be useful for users who came there not knowing what a web browser is while the graphs, charts and web benchmark section is probably not suited at all for a website like this. The website does offer direct links to the homepages of the five web browser developers which is probably the most useful part of it right now.

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Users who have been in shock then might want to stop reading at this point because it could get worse. Techcrunch was the first to write an article about Google’s new experimental homepage which only displays the Google logo and the search form on the page initially. No buttons, no other links.

Those links only become visible if a user moves the mouse in the window. Take a look at the video to see how the new Google search page could look like in the future:

Users with eagle eyes notice that there is no Search button at the end of the form and no I’m feeling lucky button either. It somehow does make sense from a usability standpoint. Many users simply type in the search query and hit enter on the keyboard to perform the search. Since they do not move the mouse at all for this operation they do not need the links on that page. Everyone moving the mouse might want to click on the links or use the mouse to perform the search.

It still could be very confusing for users and it is very likely that many will call tech support to ask if something is broken. You can also visit the custom search page if you want a barebones search interface.

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Some search engine users might want a cleaner search results list without the additional search results that are offered by Google. The Digital Inspiration blog found an interesting alternative url to perform clean Google searches without video, image and news results.

Users who want nothing but the plain top 10 search engine results for a specific keyword can point their web browsers to http://www.google.com/custom to perform a custom search without the additional search results and advertisements that are added to the default Google search.

Google default search:

Google custom search:

It is also possible to add the custom Google search engine to the list of search provides. How this is done depends on the web browser that is being used. A quick overview of how this can be done can be found in the article about Google’s Sandbox search engine here at Ghacks.

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Yahoo and Xoopit have now announced that they will discontinue the Xoopit services for Gmail, Facebook and basically any other service except for Yahoo Mail. Xoopit for Gmail and the Xoopit web service will be closing down on November 13. The Xoopit team has created a faq for Gmail and Xoopit users that is trying to address the most common questions.

Xoopit itself has been rebranded as the My Photos application in Yahoo Mail where it allows Yahoo Mail users to quickly look at all pictures that have been send to them. Additional features include photo uploading and sharing capabilities. The following video outlines the features that My Photos is offering to Yahoo Mail users.

The official reason for discontinuing support for Gmail is the following:

We’re sad to say goodbye to our users on Gmail but we know that we will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don’t want you to end up with a lousy experience.

Many users on the other hand suspect that it has more to do with the competition between Yahoo Mail and Gmail that the service is discontinued.

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At risk are web applications that perform actions based on input from trusted and authenticated users without requiring the user to authorize the specific action. A user who is authenticated by a cookie saved in the user’s web browser could unknowingly send an HTTP request to a site that trusts the user and thereby causes an unwanted action. (source Wikipedia)

Google has (finally) started to implement cross-site request forgery protections to protect Google users and their online services according to an article posted at the Register.

Sometime in the last three days, Google’s login pages began setting a cookie with a unique token on each user’s browser, according to Mike Bailey, a senior researcher for Foreground Security. That same value is also embedded into the login form. If the two don’t match, the user will be unable to log in.

Security experts have criticized Google in the past for not implementing a cross-site request forgery protection. Google engineers were quick to close security vulnerabilities that were caused by this attack type but did not implement a generic protection against these types of attacks.

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The project is run by a Google engineering team which is maintaining the information on the website. The website lists 24 different Google services currently for which information are provided on how to import and export data in and out of them.

The information provided usually concentrate on showcasing the import and export features of Google products without going into to much detail. Below is the informatin provided on the Google Docs page at the project’s website.

The following Google services are currently listed at the website: Google AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Business, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Bookmarks, Contacts, Google Docs, Finance, Gmail, Google Health, iGoogle, Google Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Picasa Web Albums, Reader, Google Voice, Web History, YouTube

The team is taking suggestions from users and seems to update the pages of the project fairly regular. Internet users can visit the Data Liberation Front website for additional information and the import and export guides.

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Google has added new custom search options yesterday which are now accessible in Google Search. The following four options have been added to Google Search:

• Past hour and Specific date range: With these tools you can choose to see only the most recent results in our index, or see results from a specific time period. This can be particularly helpful when you’re looking for the freshest information, or if you have some idea of when the information you’re looking for may have been published to the web.
• More shopping sites and Fewer shopping sites: Now you can choose “More shopping sites” to show additional commercial pages and display prices from those pages right in the search results. If you’re doing product research and are not quite ready to make a purchase, you can choose to see “Fewer shopping sites” to filter out many of the commercial sites.
• Visited pages and Not yet visited: Rediscover pages you’ve visited before by clicking “Visited pages,” or filter out the websites you’ve seen by clicking “Not yet visited.” This can be particularly helpful when you’re researching something you’ve already explored and you want to return right where you left off. To use this option you’ll need to be signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled.
• Books, Blogs and News: Click on these filters to see results only from these sources. Putting these filters together, along with videos, forums, and reviews, allows you to quickly switch between different source types right on the search results page.

The past hour and specific date range parameter was accessible through url parameters before only. The inclusion in the search options makes it easier to use this parameter. Search engine users can now increase or decrease the amount of shopping sites that are displayed in the Google search results which can be very handy depending on the type of search performed.

Visited pages and not yet visited is only available for users who are logged into their Google account and have web history enabled. This can be interesting to continue a search at a later time without having to revisit pages that have been visited before. Books, blogs and news finally allows to refine search to only see results from these sources. They are similar to the previous source filters which allowed search engine users to only display results from sources that were videos, forums or reviews.

It would be interesting if Google would reveal statistics about these custom search options to see how many search engine users make use of them. Which leads to this question: Have you used the custom search options?

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The process is semi-automated. The translate gadget will automatically compare the language of the website with the default language of the visitor’s computer system. If the two match nothing will happen at all. If the two do not match a toolbar will be displayed on top of the website with the option to translate the website into their language.

Installation of the Google translation gadget is simple. Just copy the code from the Google Translate website and paste it into an appropriate file on the web server.

Several aspects of the translation gadget are not clear as of yet as Google has not addressed them. Among them the question if the translated websites will be indexed by Google or if the code interferes with other code on the website. It should also be noted that machine translations are not perfect which makes the translation gadget not suitable for some types of websites.

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Best chance for most interested users is therefor if they have filled out the registration form at the Google Wave website back when it was announced for the first time. Everyone else will have to wait just a bit longer before they can experience the service first hand.

Take a look at the video about Google Wave if you have not heard about it before: (it’s long)

Your best bet currently is to signup at the website as soon as possible for a chance to be included in one of the upcoming invitation rounds (it is likely that there will be more or that Google will let users who have registered join eventually).

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• Files must be fairly high-resolution — rule of thumb is 10 pixel character height.
• Maximum file size: 10MB, maximum resolution: 25 mega pixel
• The larger the file, the longer the OCR operation will take (500K: ~15s, 2MB: ~40s, 10MB: forever)

Supported image formats that are uploaded on the demonstration page will be turned into text documents and displayed in Google Docs once the process has been completed. The quality depends largely on the quality of the image. It is usually necessary to look over the text and correct errors that have been made during character recognition. Google Docs helps in the error correction by underlining unknown words in red in its interface. It still takes some time to correct the errors.

The OCR demonstration is linked to a Google Docs account but not integrated into Google Docs yet. It is very likely that Google will integrated OCR capabilities to Google Docs in the near future. You can use the demonstration page for now to test the OCR service.

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There are two options on how to use Google Docs Viewer:

The first option is to visit the Google Docs Viewer website. All it takes to view a document online is to paste its url into the web form at the page.

This will then display three links that can be pasted and embedded into websites. Probably the most interesting option is to view the document directly online.

This will open the document on a new page.

The second option is even simpler than that. All it takes is to append the url of the document to the basic Google Docs Viewer url:

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=

This will only display the document on a new page. The links to embed the document are not displayed with this method. Google Docs Viewer offers an interesting option to uses who want to quickly view a document without having to download it. It can also be helpful if no viewer for the document type is available on the local computer system.

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Google Sidewiki allows Google Toolbar users to leave comments about any website or page that they are visiting. Comments that have been left by other users can be read by anyone but only users who are logged into a Google Account can leave comments.

Users can rate comments and only the most popular comments are displayed initially with the option to look at the rest of the comments on the next page. The Google Sidewiki team has released a video that is showcasing the functionality of it.

One of the problems that these kind of programs are facing is abuse of the system. Google tries to combat abuse with the rating system. It remains to be seen if this is good enough to keep internet marketers and spammers away from manipulating comments on popular websites.

The other problem that could turn down many users is the exclusive integration in the Google Toolbar. Users who do not want to install the toolbar can still read comments by using a method described at Digital Inspiration. Google Sidewiki can be downloaded at the Google website. It is compatible with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

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None of them can be considered real-time search results. Ran Geva posted an interesting article over at the Omgili blog which described a way to change the search parameters further to come close to real-time search results in Google. The default Google search result urls contain the qdr:x parameter if the results are filtered by time with x being replaced by d for days, we for weeks, m for months and y for years.

All he did was to replace the x value with n for minutes and s for seconds to get results that have been posted in the last 60 minutes or 60 seconds. It is furthermore possible to add a number behind the n or s value to customize the query further. The parameter qdr:n20 would search for results that have been indexed in the last 20 minutes.

The custom search parameter will be displayed as past minute or past second after performing the search and will persist even when conducing new Google searches. Seconds usually do not yield many results (if any at all) while minutes are usually well indexed already.

Steve Rubel acted quickly and created a bookmarklet to display the Google search results that have been indexed in the last ten minutes.

The bookmarklet can be changed easily to search a different time frame. All that needs to be done is to change the qdr=n10 part in the bookmarklet.

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