PCIN.net Update

Posts Tagged ‘google’

What’s a bookmarklet? Well, the Bookmarklets.com home page describes them in this way:

Bookmarklets are simple tools that extend the surf and search capabilities of Firefox and Explorer web browsers.

Bookmarklets are free.

Bookmarklets allow you to:

* Modify the way you see someone else’s webpage.
* Extract data from a webpage.
* Search more quickly, and in ways not possible with a search engine.
* Navigate in new ways.

…and more. Over 150 bookmarklets are available.

Bookmarklets work on all platforms (Windows, Macintosh, Unix,…)

You do not have to download or install software to use Bookmarklets.

In the past I’ve used bookmarklets that have let me download YouTube videos, modify a New York Times article link so that I didn’t need to be logged in, and test a new Google search page before it was “live”. Essentially they are just little bits of javascript code that let you do something on a web page. Check out the Bookmarklet.com web site for a listing of what they have available.

From the Toronto Star:

Those seconds you spent playing Google’s interactive Pac-Man fed a worldwide productivity drain of 4.82 million hours, an online calculation says.

RescueTime, a software tool to measure how employees spent their time, found that people who clicked through the Google-Pac-Man logo on Friday squandered an average of 36 extra seconds more on google.com, compared with the previous Friday.

The dollar tally was $120,483,000 in lost productivity, RescueTime said Monday. That’s based on an average Google user cost of $25 an hour.

I played it. Did you?

From the New York Times:

…Almost a decade after Google promised that the creed “Don’t be evil” would guide its activities, the federal government is examining Google’s acquisitions and actions as never before, looking for indications that the company’s market power may be anticompetitive in the worlds of Web search and online advertising…

I always tease my wife if she’s typing something up. She spends 5 minutes doing the typing and an hour on Google Images looking for good clipart to go with what she is typing. I’m sure many of you are the same. I recently heard about a “hidden” feature of Google Images that might help. It let’s you search for specific sizes of images. For a while now there has been a drop down list where you could choose between small, medium, large, and extra large. Well, along with your search term, if you put in imagesize:1024×768 (or whatever size you want, you’ll only see results of that size. This is particularly useful for finding desktop wallpaper.

For instance, doing a search for…

imagesize:1024×768 Niagara Falls

…brings up hundreds of pictures of Niagara Falls that are that size.

Along with 1024×758, other common desktop wallpaper image sizes are 1680×1050 (widescreen), 1440×900 (laptop widescreen), 1280×1024, and 800×600. Also, icons are generally 32×32 or 64×64. Unfortunately, clipart could be any size, but you might try a small/medium size of 400×400 or 400×300 and see what you get.

From the New York Times:

Logging on to Gmail or other e-mail service has become a routine of daily life, completed without a thought. What would you do, however, if you woke up tomorrow, plugged in your user name and password as you always do, but then received an unfamiliar message: “User name and password do not match”?

If you’re a Gmail user, what you’ll want to do after a few more unsuccessful, increasingly frantic attempts is to speak with a Google customer support representative, post haste. But that’s not an option. Google doesn’t offer a toll-free number and a live person to resolve the ordinary user’s problems.

Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks.

From the New York Times:

If you read the comments on our post asking who uses AOL, you would think that a big number of the company’s users simply keep their AOL.com e-mail address to hear from long-lost correspondents who haven’t heard they have moved on to Gmail.

I checked with comScore to see how they measure AOL’s audience, and the perception that Gmail is trouncing AOL mail simply isn’t true. Yahoo’s mail service is the king of the hill, towering over everyone else.

AOL’s e-mail seems to be a big and engaging service that is holding its own with users. Gmail, by contrast, is growing in the number of users, but is far behind the other big Web mail providers in how often users check their mail and how much time they spend on the site. That would imply that it is Gmail, far more than AOL, that is being used as the supplemental throwaway e-mail address.

Google Operating System has a great post about a new layout to iGoogle, the customizable Google portal:

The new version of iGoogle, currently available for a small number of randomly-selected users and for developers, will bring together all the Google services in a single fluid interface. At some point, iGoogle was a part of an initiative called Fusion that allowed users to combine content from across the web. The next major iteration of iGoogle goes further and it lets you actually access the full content, monitor the updates and share them with your friends.

I followed the instructions at the end of that post to use the new interface, and I love the new look!