Category: Google

Who doesn't love pop-ups? Really, I mean, it has to be the world's most effective and well-respected mode of advertising. You're browsing along, reading something on the Web, and suddenly your screen explodes with color and NSFW video clips. Seriously, how can you not enjoy that? If you're one of the odd few who aren't enthusiastic about pop-ups, you might appreciate Better Pop Up Blocker. While ...

The Web is all about being social these days. When you take this "social" buzzword and reduce it down to brass tacks, you often end up with a bunch of widgets, buttons and other annoyances crowded around the content you're actually interested in reading. WidgetBlock is a Chrome add-on that makes short work of a whole bunch of common widgets and buttons for social services. In one fell swoop it ...

One of my favorite Gmail features is the ability to drag-and-drop attachments onto email messages. That's so cool! There's no more browsing for files – the whole thing feels much more like a desktop app. drag2up is a Chrome add-on that aspires to bring that same functionality to the whole Web. It's super-cool – when it works. I've selected the screenshot above for that exact reason. ...

Scraping is a technique whereby a website or tool extracts select information from another website. For example, when you type a difficult word into Google and instantly see a definition for that word from some Web dictionary, that's because Google "scraped" that information from the dictionary. The term (and practice) has some negative connotations, because scrapers can be used to steal blog ...

As fast as Google Docs has been growing, many people are still unwilling to abandon their desktop office software and take to the cloud. Well, Google just made it easier with Cloud Connect, a new Microsoft Office plug-in that connects Word, PowerPoint and Excel to Google Docs. That means anything you do in Office will be saved in the cloud using your Google Docs account. Cloud Connect actually ...

In yesterday's copy of the Los Angeles Times, a print version of Google's new 20 Things e-book has been found. The clipping relates to the Cloud Computing chapter of the book, but the chapter number doesn't match up. This is an obvious, and genius step for Google. Not only are they capitalizing on the book's great illustrations, but they're also dragging the untechnological masses kicking and ...

Gmail's very useful voice calling service is even more useful now, with the addition of call recording. The call recording feature enables you to save your Google voice chats without using any additional software. For incoming Google Voice calls only, you'll see a button to start/stop recording right in your call window. Call recording might be great for doing interviews, but it's not very ...

Once again, don't get your hopes up too much if you see the orange-yellow dot on your Google Chrome wrench icon today -- there are updates for both the Beta and Dev channels, but most of the changes aren't forward-facing. There are, however, some behind-the-scenes updates that are worth knowing about. On the Beta Channel, several Web Store related fixes were pushed. Access to Chrome's private ...

As a long-time Google Apps user, I was overjoyed when I could finally start using Google Reader with my Apps account a few months ago. And now, Google has announced that all Google services are to become available for Google Apps users over the coming months. After the jump you can watch a beautiful video explaining the change, but in a nutshell, you will now be able to access over 60 Google ...

I find Google's Autocomplete (or "suggest") feature very interesting because it seems to have spawned a quite a few by-products. Web Seer is a nice example. You feed it with a couple of prefixes, and it polls Google for all of the suggestions for them and then spews out a simple visual representation. The screenshot above shows a snippet of the output for "should they" versus "will my cat." ...

Voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation is now available for Google Maps for Android in Australia and New Zealand. This feature works if you have a smartphone running Android 1.6 or newer. Maps Navigation is integrated with Google Search and even Google Voice Search -- meaning that you don't even have to know your destination's name, you can just search for it either by typing or speaking. ...

My free Google Apps Gmail account has about 7.5GB of storage space, total. That's extremely generous on Google's part, but that amount of space does eventually fill up – especially if you have people sending you huge PowerPoint presentations, videos of their baby's first steps, or hilarious kitten photos in full resolution (because they have no idea what "resolution" means, much less how to ...

Google has just announced that it has started rolling out mobile editing support for Google Docs. The roll-out will take a few days and when it reaches you, you'll be able to edit documents in Google Docs by simply pointing your mobile browser to docs.google.com and clicking on Edit while viewing the document you wish to make changes to. This feature will only be accessible for owners of ...

Google has just introduced a new product, and this time it's a PC application (with a browser-based UI). It's called Google Refine, and it solves a problem that is enormous for some people: it lets you take massive sets of "messy data" and massage them into shape so that they're uniform, make sense, and can be statistically analyzed. The video after the jump shows a very good example, which is ...

The official Google Docs blog has announced a handful of new features, including LaTeX equation support, the option to place images in spreadsheet cells, and automatic corrections. LaTeX is a fairly significant addition, since it should greatly improve Google Docs' spreadsheet muscle. While that alone won't pull it even with Excel, it's certainly a step in the right direction. Image insertion ...