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One of the Google Labs prototypes lets you personalize your Google home page to include the news headlines, bookmarks, and other content that you use most. see improvements because Google engineers develop these projects in their spare time. Although Google encourages this experimentation, each engineer’s priority is still the support of current, non-Labs tools. By browsing the Graduates Of Labs list on the Google Labs page, you can get an idea of some of the prototypes that were successful enough to capture the attention of Google’s decision-makers. Past Google Labs experiments that are now standard Google features include Google SMS (see “Message Marvel” on page 81), Google Desktop Search (see “Search Engine Jr.” on page 93), Google Groups 2 (see “Get The Message?” on page 73), Google Deskbar (a Google search field on your Taskbar), Web Alerts (email updates about new search results), Google Local (see “In The Neighborhood” on page 46), Google Glossary, and Google News Alerts (see “Read All About It” on page 38). Now Testing As of press time, there are many prototypes available for testing on the 18 www.smartcomputing.com / Guide To Using Google A LL A BOUT G OOGLE Google Labs page. We’ll cover each of the Google Labs tools below. Please keep in mind that Google often pulls existing Labs prototypes with no warning, and it also frequently adds new Labs prototypes. For this reason, some of the features we cover may no longer exist or may have graduated from the Google Labs area. Likewise, there may be newer Google Labs tools that were not yet posted at press time. Personalize Your Homepage (www .google.com/ig). As of press time, Personalize Your Homepage was the most recent addition to Google Labs. This feature lets you create a start page from which you will find the types of news stories, search tools, and other content that you have chosen. You can personalize this start page to contain the tools and links that you access most often. You must have a Google Account to create and save a home page. To get started, click Personalize Your Homepage. Click Add Content instead if you’ve already personalized your page in the past. A list of options appears in the left panel. Google divides your potential page content into several categories (My Stuff, News, Business, Technology, Sports, Lifestyle, Fun, and Create A Section). Click the arrow next to any of the categories to expand the list. You can then add items, such as Bookmarks, Movies, BBC News, and Weather, to your personalized page. Any content you choose will appear in the right pane, in a preview of your page. To change individual items on your page, such as Top Stories or Weather, click the Edit link for that item. As an example, if you click Edit for Top Stories, you can choose how many headlines appear by selecting from a drop-down menu. When you are finished, click the Save button. If you do not need to make any changes, click Close Edit. To remove any items from your home page, click the X button next to it. For instance, when we created our page, Google automatically displayed the weather forecast for Happy, Texas. To remove this forecast, we clicked the X button next to Happy, TX. Finally, you can rearrange the items on your home page by clicking and dragging them to a new location. For instance, you might want to move the Weather and News sections to the top of the page, so you can see the forecast and headlines at a glance. When you are finished editing your home page, click the Save Page button in the upper-left corner of the right pane. The site will prompt you to log in to your Google Account if you’re not already logged in. Because Google Labs tools are still experimental, they may not always work as expected. Here, you can see that Personalize Your Homepage didn’t work perfectly when we tried it out. The Edit and Close (X) buttons didn’t display or function properly for the first news section. Google Extensions For Firefox (toolbar.google.com/firefox/exten sions/index.html). These extensions are small programs that you can load into your Mozilla Firefox browser to add special Google functions to the browser. These Firefox-compatible tools include Google Toolbar, Google Send To Phone, and Google Suggest. The Firefox Google Toolbar is very similar to the Google Toolbar already available for Internet Explorer. (See “Tool(bar) Time” on page 88 for more information about the standard, IEcompatible Google Toolbar.) With Google Send To Phone, you can send short segments of text from a Web page to your cell phone as a text message. To use Google Send To
Phone, you just highlight the text you want to send, click the cell phone icon, type the phone number in the To field, choose your phone’s carrier from the Carrier drop-down menu, and click the Send Message button. Because text messages are short, you will not use Google Send To Phone to send lengthy news articles or similar items. Instead, this tool is most useful for sending phone numbers, addresses, movie times, and other information you might look up online. Finally, you can use Google Suggest with Firefox. You can learn more about Google Suggest later in this article. Of the three Firefox extensions, Google Suggest is the only one that does not require you to download and install software. To use the Firefox Google Toolbar or Google Send To Phone, downloadable utilities are required. You can add items such as bookmarks to favorite sites, movie listings, news headlines, and even RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom feeds to your personalized home page. Personalized Search (www.google .com/psearch). This is another Google Labs tool that gives you access to more personalized content and requires you to have a Google Account. If you sign up for Google’s Personalized Search, Google will retain records of your previous searches. As it learns more about the types of searches you run, it will adjust the results of future searches accordingly. For instance, if you frequently run searches related to horses, Personalized Search should return A LL A BOUT G OOGLE more horse-related results and fewer Ford-related results than the average user would get. Your search results should get more accurate the longer you use Personalized Search. Now let’s say that one day you do want to search for sites about Ford Mustangs, but you’re getting too many results about horses. Simply click Turn OFF Personalized Search For These Results from the page of search results. If you don’t see that link at the top of the page, you know that your personalized results didn’t differ from what any other user would see. Google Video (video.google.com). Google Video is similar to Google Images, except that it searches for video content rather than still images. You can search only for videos that you can play on your computer by selecting the Playable Video radio button, or you can select the All Video radio button to search for all video, including television content that is not online. If you choose All Video, you will see thumbnail images of still shots from television shows and a brief description. If you click the thumbnail, you will see larger still images from that episode, as well as excerpts of the script taken from closed captioning. On the left side of the page, Google Video may also show air times for the program under About This Show. You may need to click Edit Location to enter your ZIP code. Google Video is a very new tool, and we found that we couldn’t get any listings for our ZIP code, so the usefulness of this feature depends on your geographic location and the participation of your local TV stations. In addition to results from TV broadcasts, you will also see online videos that you can play. If you can play a video, a play icon will appear next to the video’s title. To play these videos, you will need to download and install the Google Video Viewer (video .google.com/video_download.html). Google Web Accelerator (webaccel erator.google.com). Google Web Accelerator is another tool that requires a download. Once you install the Google Web Accelerator, if you have a broadband connection, your pages should load faster. Google accomplishes this by dedicating specific servers to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic, storing copies of or prefetching pages you visit often, letting your system download Google Video is a new tool that lets you search for playable videos and TV listings. only changes to a Web page rather than the entire content, and compressing data. Google Web Accelerator has a counter that shows you how much time you’ve saved by using it. We were not able to try out Google’s Web Accelerator because the project had already reached its maximum capacity. A message on the project’s page indicated that Google planned to increase the number of users that its Web Accelerator can support. My Search History (www.google .com/searchhistory). If you choose to activate this tool, which recently became part of Google’s Personalized Search, you can access records of your previous searches. This could be useful if you are conducting academic research, looking for genealogy records online, or doing other long-term work in which you might want to see which searches you’ve already done. Once you activate My Search History, you can view past searches by signing into your Google Account and clicking Search History. If you want Google not to store some searches, click Search History and Pause. To begin storing search data again, click Search History and Resume. Reference Series / Guide To Using Google 19
Page 3 and 4: Guide To Using TABLE OF CONTENTS RE
Page 5 and 6: 145 Google Hacking How Hackers Use
Page 7 and 8: Google not to waste their time with
Page 9 and 10: Google Searches Per Day 2,400 2,000
Page 11 and 12: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE Find The Digita
Page 13 and 14: 7| Catalogs Many retailers let cust
Page 15 and 16: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE The Way Of Goog
Page 17 and 18: more than a Google user’s misgivi
Page 19: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE Test Drive Thes
Page 23 and 24: processing power to Folding@home (f
Page 25 and 26: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE How’d They Do
Page 27 and 28: it easily. Click the Toolbar’s Go
Page 29 and 30: Placement in Google’s search resu
Page 31 and 32: are not highlighted in the search r
Page 33 and 34: T HE S EARCH One In A Billion Advan
Page 35 and 36: specific results. You can, for inst
Page 37 and 38: T HE S EARCH Image Search Elements
Page 39 and 40: Google will omit most explicit imag
Page 41 and 42: evolved over time. To read coverage
Page 43 and 44: Greyhounds, and Environmental Engin
Page 45 and 46: any part of the product description
Page 47 and 48: price between which to search, we h
Page 49 and 50: est combination of usefulness and p
Page 51 and 52: You remember Mr. Know-It- All. Mayb
Page 53 and 54: account profile for this informatio
Page 55 and 56: afford to promote all of their titl
Page 57 and 58: T HE S EARCH Are We There Yet? Goog
Page 59 and 60: plenty of detail for planning trips
Page 61 and 62: As a scholarly research tool, Googl
Page 63 and 64: T HE S EARCH Boutique Searches Spec
Page 65 and 66: to result in plenty of information
Page 67 and 68: the upper-right corner of the page.
Page 69 and 70: emails to and from the same person
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apply any label you’ve created to
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second text box, and click Send Cod
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What do an Indonesian acoustic guit
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Sign In link, enter your email addr
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also called newsgroups, resemble vi
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Search By Numbers a comprehensive m
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Low-tech text messaging? Meet the h
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On a Motorola MPX220, text messagin
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(also free) to organize them. If yo
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and stare at it. To return to Hello
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card, AutoFill completes your addre
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page to perform a Google search. Ty
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Search Engine Jr. Google Brings Its
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(an undocked search box). This page
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G OOGLE T OOLS Meet Blogger Join Th
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sign in at the top of the page to a
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By setting up a Mail-to-Blogger add
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To allow any reader, even someone w
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You can view buildings for dozens o
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available to free version users. Yo
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www.microsoft.com) covers a lot of
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To fix red-eye, click and drag over
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Focus, Glow, and Focal B&W, you can
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Google In Your Language & Domain In
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Könguló. It’s Icelandic for “
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THE B USINESS E ND Most of us think
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esults within your budget. It also
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programs rather than manual labor t
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You may be surprised at who links t
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T HE B USINESS E ND Give Your Web S
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etween the checked> and tags, howe
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T HE B USINESS E ND The Ins & Outs
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Google’s Not The Only Game In Tow
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Aproductive company can no longer b
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information that’s at different l
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Web site asks visitors to supply da
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T HE B USINESS E ND Beyond Classifi
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of service as its largest, but we d
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about known flaws in that particula
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JUST F OR F UN Agog About Googlewha
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dictionary and run your fingers dow
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Looking for popcorn machine on T hi
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Keep in mind that there are a coupl
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Get Fit Sit Anywhere Bean Bag Item
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Millions of Internet users love Goo
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