Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 9, 2012, 4:52 pm
Google's feedback tool that's used in many services for reporting bugs has a new interface. It looks much better and it doesn't open a new page to show the information that's sent to Google. You can also see a list of all your bug reports. "Google Feedback lets you send Google suggestions about our ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 9, 2012, 4:28 pm
Here's a simple way to learn more about a Google image search result without actually clicking it. Just drag the image to the search box and you'll be able to use "search by image" to find similar images and pages that include the image. You can also mouse over the result and click "similar" or clic...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 9, 2012, 11:23 am
Google Spreadsheets has recently added an interesting feature: keyboard accelerators for menus, but it only works in Chrome. You can now press Alt+F (or Ctrl-Option-F for Mac) to open the File menu. Then type one of the underlined characters to select an option. It's now much easier to use features ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 8, 2012, 5:50 pm
What's the message displayed by Gmail when there's no message in your inbox? If you answered "No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader", you are right. It was Google's subtle way to promote Google Reader. Before Google Reader was released, Gmail's "inbox zero" me...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 7, 2012, 2:02 pm
Many people wondered why Android's built-in browser is not called Chrome. One of the reasons is that Android's browser doesn't have many of the features of the desktop browser: data sync (bookmark sync is available in Android 4.0), extensions, themes, apps. Another reason is that Android's browser i...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 6, 2012, 11:43 am
Google's image search engine tests a new interface for related searches. Instead of only displaying a list of queries, Google also shows small thumbnails. Mouse over a query and you'll see 3 image results in a preview box. { Thanks, Pontus. }
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 4, 2012, 6:23 pm
While Google hasn't abandoned the navigation bar launched last year, both the old and the new interface are used today. If you load google.com in Chrome's incognito mode, the old interface shows up more often than the new UI. The simplified interface made navigation more complicated, even if it look...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 4, 2012, 2:34 pm
Google Instant is supposed to make searching faster, but you need a pretty good Internet connection, a modern browser and a decent computer. Google Instant is not available if you use IE6 or other outdated browsers and it's automatically disabled if you have a slow Internet connection. Now Google a...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 4, 2012, 1:46 pm
Just in case you don't like the Google Groups interface and want to customize it, there's a new light gray theme you can try. Just click the settings button, click "Themes" and select the "soft gray" theme. This only works in the new Google Groups interface. A similar theme is also available for Gm...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 2, 2012, 7:04 pm
Google doesn't like to manually review user-generated content. It's not efficient and algorithms can do a better job. Imagine how many people would need to be hired to watch all the videos submitted to YouTube (60 hours of videos uploaded every minute). In some ways, uploading an application to the ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Feb 2, 2012, 11:31 am
An upcoming Google Docs update will bring a better interface for selecting paragraph styles and new features that lets you customize styles. Google Docs will also add some new open source fonts from the Web Fonts project: Amaranth, Arvo, Dancing Script, Lobster, Merriweather, Open Sans, Philosopher,...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 31, 2012, 6:55 pm
Less than 2% of the Gmail users have enabled keyboard shortcuts and actually use them, but that doesn't mean Google shouldn't improve them. Many people complained that Gmail's rich text editor doesn't have a shortcut for inserting hyperlinks and now it's available: Ctrl+K (or Cmd-K if you use a Mac)...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 31, 2012, 10:52 am
Google found an interesting trick to defend Blogger blogs against local laws: redirect readers to country-specific domains and only remove those URLs if required. "Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 27, 2012, 7:21 pm
I've noticed an increasing number of ads that no longer send people to the company's sites. Instead, the ads only include a link to the official Facebook page. Sites suddenly look outdated, no longer include the latest information and people stop visiting them. There are still people that visit thos...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 26, 2012, 6:32 pm
Google+ changed the age requirements so that any Google Account user can join Google+. In most countries you need to be at least 13 years old to create a Google Account and join Google+, but there are 3 exceptions: Spain, South Korea and Netherlands. Until now, Google+ required to be at least 18 yea...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 25, 2012, 10:58 am
Google Takeout supports a new service: Google Docs. Now you can use the same interface to batch export your documents. I tried both Google Takeout and the built-in feature from Google Docs that lets you download your documents. Even if they have the same purpose, they're quite different. The Google ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 24, 2012, 6:11 pm
Google has been often accused of promoting its own services in Google Search. Whether it was Google News, Image Search, Product Search or Video Search, the specialized search engine showed results from all over the web and not just from Google's own services. Image Search wasn't restricted to Picasa...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 24, 2012, 3:15 pm
If you've ever wondered who designed Gmail's logo, Kevin Fox has the answer: Dennis Hwang designed the Gmail logo. At the time, Dennis designed virtually all of the Google doodles and he did a lot of the new logo work as well. The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 24, 2012, 2:34 pm
Nikolaas, a reader of this blog, noticed that Pegman - the Google Street View icon - looks different for Belgium. When you try to move the icon, you'll notice that Pegman got some French fries. "Occasionally Pegman dresses up for special events and occasions, or is even joined by peg friends in Goog...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 21, 2012, 10:53 am
Google usually ignores punctuation and mathematical symbols from a query because it doesn't index them. They rarely change the meaning of a query and Google's index would have to grow a lot bigger, without improving the results too much. Some punctuation marks and mathematical symbols are used to pr...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 20, 2012, 6:39 pm
Google tests a new interface for iGoogle, the personalized homepage that lets you add gadgets and themes. The updated interface uses the design patterns that should be familiar by now from other Google services. Tabs are now available in a dropdown that's displayed below the search box, while the le...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 20, 2012, 5:35 pm
If you thought that Google will no longer close other projects this year, you were wrong. Picnik, one of the best online photo editing service, will no longer be available starting from April 20. Until then, you can use all the features from the paid version of Picnik for free. Google will focus on ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 20, 2012, 3:14 pm
Sometimes Google's results aren't that useful and they don't answer your question. Maybe the query is imprecise or obscure, the results are outdated or you don't have the patience to check the first 100 results to find something helpful. Asking your Twitter followers or your Facebook friends could b...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 20, 2012, 6:53 am
... +. Until now, creating a Google account was quite simple. You could ... address or create a Gmail account. The redesigned form includes new ... number (not required). "Your Google Account is more than just Search. ... the page. You can still delete your Google profile, the Google+ content ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 19, 2012, 12:03 pm
Rodney G., a reader of this blog noticed a new feature in Google Maps. "When you search for a city or a county or a ZIP Code, Google Maps now highlights the boundaries of what you searched for. If you are zoomed out, the whole area is shaded pink. If you zoom in a bit, it has just a big pink border ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 19, 2012, 11:43 am
Google closed a lot of useful services to focus on Google+ and other core offerings. One of the best services that was recently shut down is Code Search, a search engine for open source code. If you go to google.com/codesearch, you'll see the following message: "Sorry! Sadly, this service has been s...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 18, 2012, 7:58 am
Google censored its homepage logo in the US to protest against two bills that could damage the Internet and destroy its core values. "Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmfu...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 16, 2012, 6:44 pm
How do you login to your Google account on a computer you don't trust? When you type your username and password, a keylogger could capture them and save them. If you have a phone or a tablet with you, there's a better way: 1. Just go to accounts.google.com/sesame on your computer (Open Sesame helps ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 12, 2012, 8:07 pm
Last year, Google released a feature that allowed you to block sites from appearing in your search results. After clicking a result and going back to the search results page, Google displayed a special link next to the result for blocking the entire domain. The feature no longer seems to work: the "...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 12, 2012, 9:10 am
Blogger's comment system has been updated and it now supports threading. You can now reply to a comment and read the entire conversation. "It is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread," inform...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 12, 2012, 5:47 am
Google's attempt to simplify the navigation bar wasn't very successful. The menu released six weeks ago is no longer available and it has been replaced with the old black navigation bar. I tried to see if it was just a temporary bug, but almost all the browsers I tested displayed the black navigatio...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 10, 2012, 1:37 pm
Google's search results are personalized even if you don't log in to a Google account. Google uses your location and your previous searches to customize the results. When you log in to your account, Google has more information: your search/browsing history, your social connections, the pages you've ...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 10, 2012, 9:33 am
Body Browser is one of the many products that was discontinued when Google closed Google Labs. The good news is that the service is now back online and it's hosted by Zygote, the company that provided the imagery for Google Body Browser. Zygote Body looks almost the same, still requires a browser th...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 7, 2012, 11:22 am
Now that YouTube uses Google Accounts, Google can easily integrate YouTube with other Google services. The latest YouTube redesign made the integration with social networks more prominent and the videos from Google+ are just one click away. YouTube now tests the header that's already displayed in Go...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 7, 2012, 11:16 am
Android.com hides a very simple game at the bottom of the page. Just click the Android logo next to the page's footer and you'll start the game: use your mouse to throw snowballs at the snowman. The game works in Chrome and Firefox, but it doesn't seem to be optimized for mobile devices. After hitt...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Jan 4, 2012, 6:55 am
If you search for, you'll notice that Chrome's homepage is no longer the top search result. The explanation is that a video ad for Chrome was used in a lot of blog posts that promoted Chrome and one of the posts linked to Chrome's homepage without using the nofollow attribute. "Buying or selling l...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Dec 31, 2011, 6:45 am
Last year's predictions weren't that great (the predictions for 2010 were better), but predicting the future is an addictive game, so I'll try again. Here are my predictions for 2012: 1. Oflline Google stores that will sell Chromebooks, Android phones, Google TV boxes, Google-branded shirts and more...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Nov 1, 2011, 8:11 am
Brian Shih, a former Google Reader Product Manager, says that the latest Reader update is "a disaster". One of the reasons could be that most of the initial members of the Reader team left Google and the new team doesn't understand the goal of the product. "It's as if whoever made the update did so...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Nov 1, 2011, 3:43 am
The latest Google Reader update removed all the social features, including the section that allowed you to read the items you've shared. Fortunately, the shared items page is still available at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/username (replace username with your Gmail username) and you can subsc...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 31, 2011, 5:25 pm
The new Google Reader interface is finally here and it also brings some functional changes: all the social features are removed and replaced by a Google +1 button. It's important to note that clicking the +1 button only adds the page to your Google Profile and you need to click the "share on Google+...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 31, 2011, 5:14 pm
Google tests a new search interface that brings back the icons for specialized search engines, but displays them in a horizontal list, below the search box. The icons are redundant right now, but they might replace the list from the sidebar, just like in the experimental interface for tablets.
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 31, 2011, 7:22 am
As previously anticipated, Google tests a new navigation bar that could replace the black bar. Guao.kh has some screenshots of the experimental interface and there are three important changes: the black bar has been removed, the list of Google services is now a drop-down next to the Google logo, whi...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 31, 2011, 7:01 am
Offline Google Docs has an updated interface that looks more like the regular version of Google Docs. At launch, Google used a completely different interface. Google Spreadsheets and the Google Docs word processor still use the old interface in the offline mode. A better idea would be to use the sam...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 27, 2011, 2:53 pm
As promised, Google+ is now available for Google Apps users. Administrators can enable the new service from the control panel, as explained here. Google+ requires that Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk are enabled and that the organization uses the new accounts infrastructure. If the two services ar...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 26, 2011, 2:01 pm
Chrome 15 brings a few changes and some new features. Here are some of them: 1. A redesigned new tab page inspired by mobile interfaces. There are two "homescreens" for apps and most visited pages, but you can create a new "homescreen" by dragging apps and pages to the bottom bar and selecting the n...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 26, 2011, 1:11 pm
Google experiments with a slightly different search interface for tablets. There's a new settings button below the search box that lets you disable SafeSearch and use the advanced search filters. The most popular specialized search engines are no longer hidden behind a small arrow: the new interface...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 25, 2011, 4:46 am
As promised, Google's Chrome Web Store has a new interface that uses promotional images and larger screenshots, opens extension pages in overlays and makes it easier to install extensions, themes and apps. Another change is that the new version is a lot faster as it uses AJAX to load extension pages...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 24, 2011, 10:55 am
Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs includes some unflattering quotes about Google and Android, but it also explains Larry Page's decision to close many Google products and to create a cohesive interface for Google. After announcing that it will become Google's CEO, Larry Page met Steve Jobs, "w...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 24, 2011, 9:31 am
... profile and get access to upcoming Google+ features on Blogger". Unfortunately, the links ... clear how Blogger will integrate with Google+. Maybe Blogger posts will automatically ... Friend Connect will be discontinued and Google+ could replace it. Friend Connect's ... the Blogger profile...
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Richard Knight posted an article on Society for Marriage and Lasting Relationships - Oct 22, 2011, 4:58 am
The plus operator from Google Search was useful to highlight one or more keywords that had to be included in the search results exactly as you typed them. If you search for. "Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query. But sometim...
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