Tag: Google

  • Specific search sites for better* results

    I’ve been a user of computers and the internet for long enough to remember the first browser war. It used to be that I’d regularly use multiple search engines in order to ensure that I got the best* results. My defaults would be Yahoo, AltaVista, and Kvasir, but others were certainly in the mix, too.…

  • Paste text without formatting

    I recently had a long term collaboration with a number of colleagues, where part of what we did was produce, edit, and agree upon finalized versions of text. We applied various formatting such as color, cursive, and bold to track the status of specific text blocks. At the end of it all, we needed to…

  • Start a new Google Doc/Sheet/Slide deck straight from the address bar

    I recently learned of a nifty little trick for users of Google’s Workspace services (i,e. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms etc.): You can start a new document, spreadsheet, slide deck and so on from the address bar of your web browser. Simply enter the appropriate command (below) into the address bar, hit return, and watch as…

  • Improving your Google-fu

    Search engines can be a great way of finding what you’re searching for. Using them to their fullest extrent, however, requires a bit of knowledge about how to structure your searches. These examples are some that I use on a regular basis: Quotation marks searches for everything between them “James Brown” returns results matching James…

  • Setting up Google AdSense on WordPress

    Regular readers may have noticed that ads started appearing on the site back in the beginning of february. While I don’t expect to ever earn a lot of money on this site, it would be nice if it didn’t cost me money. Running a WordPress blog on a hosted domain isn’t all that expensive, and…

  • Top five Google apps

    Spending as much time online as I do, Google is an integral part of my day to day routine. This is my top five list of Google apps:   5: Google Search Google Search has been the market leader for search for years now, and that is not a situation that looks like it is…

  • Google Wave: First Impressions

    For the last month or so, I’ve been playing around with Google newest online toy; Google Wave. Billed as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”, it is designed to combine email, IM, wikis and social networking. Written in Java, using OpenJDK, Google has announced plans to release most of the source code as Open Source.…

  • Gears + Dropbox = Mobile computing

    I’ve been looking for a sturdy, simple and preferably free solution to enhance the way I take my computers with me. I’vew recently found just that. It all started a little while ago, with the discovery of the powerful tool Google Gears, which enables me to have my Google Documents, Google Calendar and GMail syncronized…

  • Seven tips for more efficient Googleing

    Since its start in 1998, Google has grown to become one of the largest search providers in the world. Here are seven tips to using Google more efficiently: Searching within a specific domain You remember where you read something, but not the exact name of the article. To find all articles containing your search word,…

  • Read your GMail while offline

    In a previous post, I talked about Google Gears. Now, let’s take a look at a practical application. First, the developers at Google brought us the next big thing in web-based email. Now, they are bringing a way to take it offline.   Bear in mind, Offline is a GMail Labs feature, so it is…

  • Google Gears for Offline and Online goodness

    The clever people at Google have made Gears, an Open-Source multiplatform program that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser, such as:   Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop Store data locally in a fully-searchable database Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance   To get…