CyberNet News » Google

The Google Alphabet

Ryan — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:41:34 +0000

Google’s auto-complete feature tries to predict what you want to search for by looking at popular search terms for your area. I decided to make a list of the most popular search terms in the United States, which I was able to accomplish by manually setting my location to the United States rather than my specific city. As of February 2012 this is what the most popular queries were according to Google for each letter of the English alphabet:

A is for Amazon
B is for Best Buy
C is for Craigslist
D is for Dictionary
E is for ESPN
F is for Facebook
G is for Gmail
H is for Hotmail
I is for iPhone 5
J is for JcPenney
K is for Kohls
L is for Lowes
M is for MapQuest
N is for Netflix
O is for Old Navy
P is for Pandora
Q is for QVC
R is for Redbox
S is for Sears
T is for Target
U is for USPS
V is for Verizon Wireless
W is for Walmart
X is for X Factor
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zillow

A lot of these items make sense based on their popularity, but I was a little shocked that the letter “i” came back with “iPhone 5″ instead of the more generic “iPhone” search query.

Gmail via Exchange on iOS: You Can Now Delete Instead of Archive

Ryan — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:27:45 +0000

Up until the other day on my iPhone/iPad I always used the IMAP protocol to access my Gmail accounts instead of Exchange because of the way Google handled deleting emails. For Exchange users Google would archive an email anytime you hit the trash icon, and if you really wanted to delete the message you’d then have to go into your “All Mail” label and delete it from there. It was a tedious two-step process, and that is still what they have in place by default. The good news is that you can switch this behavior now.

Google added an option to the m.google.com/sync site so that you can have emails trashed when you hit the delete button instead of archiving the emails. Basically all you have to do is visit the m.google.com/sync site on your mobile device, select your device from the list, and check the box to Enable “Delete Email As Trash” for this device.

That may sound pretty easy, but if you have a bunch of accounts it can be quite a pain since you have to login to each one to change the setting. If you have a lot of accounts I recommend using a desktop browser where you can change the user agent to an iOS device, which will make it go a little faster to login and logout of all the accounts to enable the delete instead of archive option.

Improving Your Android Phone’s GPS Reception

Pieter — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:44:00 +0000

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Gio, an entry-level Android smartphone priced at €149 (approx. $212). Overall my experience with the device has been great, but the phone seemed to have trouble picking up the GPS satellites and therefore couldn’t pick up a GPS signal in most locations. If your GPS-enabled Android phone has trouble locating you, there may be a simple way to improve your reception that doesn’t require a mobile internet connection.

Chartcross Limited has released a free Android app called GPS Test that displays diagnostic information about your GPS reception. After enabling your GPS, the device first needs to locate visible satellites and obtain a position fix. As soon as the GPS signal is locked in, the phone will have less trouble keeping tracking and updating your GPS position.

GPS Test displays information about the GPS satellites that are in sight. You can use this information to lock in your position as follows:

Enable your GPS and start the app. The GPS status icon should be yellow. This means the app is trying to connect to the satellites.
Move your phone around so that you have at least five satellites in sight. Also pay attention to the signal-to-noise ratio (higher is better).
When your satellite reception is good enough, stop moving your phone and wait for the signal to lock in. Some satellite indicators will become colored (indicating they are in use) and the GPS status will turn green as shown on the screenshot.
You can now switch to Google Maps (requires network connection or offline caching), MapDroyd (my favorite app for offline maps) or any app that uses your location.

After successfully connecting to the satellites, the GPS signal should stay locked in without too much hassle. GPS Test also offers some additional features you might find interesting, such as a display of the satellites mapped out on a compass. The GPS satellites can be used to determine your altitude, your exact UTC/local time and the time of sunrise/sunset. These features make it a nice companion for outdoor adventures.

Update: To avoid confusion, I’d like to emphasize that this tool doesn’t magically boost your GPS signal. However, if you’re unable to connect to the GPS satellites normally like I was, you can use this tool to move your phone into a position in which it sees enough satellites to establish a connection.

Minimalist Gmail for Google Chrome

Ryan — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:40:25 +0000

When Gmail first came out I was extremely impressed with the interface, but the lack of updating kinda left me wanting more. Then Google rolled out the Gmail Labs back in 2008, which drew me back to the web-based mail client because there were some pretty cool features and capabilities getting added that couldn’t be found in a desktop app.

There are a lot of different things that Gmail Labs is capable of offering, but it’s still not perfect. For example, since I’m a minimalist at heart there are some objects I wouldn’t mind removing such as the invite box in the left column. Good news though… there’s a Chrome extension that helps me fulfill that need. As you can see in the screenshot above there is an abundant number of settings you can configure in Minimalist Gmail, and with this extension you truly make Gmail your own.

What makes this extension unique is that it’s not a set-in-stone style that someone else made to fit their own needs. Instead you choose from nearly 100 interface objects that you can customize the appearance of, move around on the page, and enable/disable them. The best part is that you can still use one of the official Gmail themes you already love with this Chrome extension.

Want to see what options are supported before you install the extension? The developer has actually set up a page that lets you fully navigate the settings before you click the install button.

Get Minimalist Gmail for Google Chrome

Send/Receive Google Voice SMS Messages Using Google Talk

Ryan — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:27:17 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that I’m trying to use Google Voice more, and one thing that I’m shocked Google hasn’t done is tightly integrate SMS messages with the Google Talk instant messenger. That way if you’re online and someone sends you an SMS it will also flow through to your chat client so that it’s easier to respond.

Last week I decided to start searching around to see if anyone had found a way to do this… a way for me to receive my SMS messages as an IM to my Google Talk account, and then be able to turn around and respond to them as if it was a typical IM conversation. Turns out there is a web-based service called GVMax that works remarkably well in this regard.

As you can see in the screenshot above there are several different notification methods you can use including Google Talk, Prowl, email, Twitter, Howl, and more. For my purposes I’m only using it for Google Talk, and once I got it configured I was amazed with the results. You’ll notice that within seconds of receiving an SMS message you will receive the IM, and responding to it goes back through your Google Voice account as an SMS to the recipient. That’s right, this fully supports two-way (send and receive) conversations instead of just serving as a notifier. The person you’re chatting with will have no idea that you’re using Google Talk rather than your phone, and the history of your messages are still kept in Google Voice just as if you had sent them using a typical method.

There are some things to note though. For one all the messages you receive will appear as a new contact. If the number is in your Google Contacts they will show up as the name of the person followed by the label designated for a particular number. That might sound confusing, but it’s actually simple. The names of your contacts will look like “John Doe [mobile]” or “John Doe [home]” depending on the label you set to the phone number they sent the messages with.

After you set up the service it’s important to be aware that GVMax automatically creates a filter in your Gmail account so that the messages are forwarded on to a special GVMax email address that is specific to you. Make sure you don’t delete this filter, otherwise the service will stop working.

GVMax Homepage

Google Latitude Update Interval for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry

Ryan — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:58:17 +0000

I’ve been using Google Latitude with some friends and family ever since it was released last week for the iPhone. I noticed that it used very little battery on my phone, which made me wonder how frequently it actually sends updates. To get this information I went ahead and enabled the history functionality that keeps a log of all the coordinates that your device has sent.

I found that if I was relatively stationary for a period of time, such as being at home, that no updates would be sent to Google. In that respect it is pretty smart. That got me curious as to the logic that Latitude uses on my iPhone to determine when to send updates. After a little searching around I came across this article that explains the update interval for the different platforms. Interestingly enough Latitude takes into account how fast your moving, how much battery life is left, and whether you’re switching between cell towers. Here’s a breakdown of how it works on your device:

Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian:

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

iOS-only (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad):

Your location will only update in the background when you’re moving (exceptions: when you switch the app from foreground to background mode, or go from a “moving” to a “stationary” state, the app will continue to update your location for a few minutes).

How to use Filters to Enhance Gmail’s Priority Inbox

Pieter — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:32:04 +0000

A few weeks ago Google started rolling out Priority Inbox, a feature for Gmail that promises to sort your incoming mail so that all the important stuff is shown at the top of the page. Although the algorithm claims to improve automatically over time as it gets accustomed to your e-mailing habits, there’s a simple way to make ensure that certain kinds of e-mails are always marked as important or unimportant.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the concept of filters. Filters tell Gmail to take a certain action when an e-mail meets certain conditions. For example, you can instruct Gmail to assign the label “Work” to all incoming e-mail from your boss. You can create a filter in two steps. First, you pick the conditions that will trigger the filter. Secondly, you’ll have to tell Gmail which actions it should take when an e-mail meets these conditions.

Since Gmail unveiled Priority Inbox, you can let it automatically mark certain e-mails as important. You could, perhaps, mark all mails from Facebook as “Not important”. If your phone carrier sends you your monthly bill via e-mail, you might want Gmail to put these messages onto the “Important” pile. The possibilities are endless.

So how do you go about setting up a priority filter? First of all, make sure that you’ve enabled Priority Inbox. You should be able to find it by clicking on Settings (the link in the top right corner) and then going to the Priority Inbox tab. If there’s no such tab in your Gmail settings, it is possible that the feature hasn’t been rolled out to your account yet. All you can do in that case is wait for it to arrive.

Now you can start creating your filters. Go back to Settings and find the Filters tab. Click Create a new filter. Now you can set up the conditions that will trigger the filter. After clicking Next Step, you’ll see a list of e-mails that meet the conditions you just picked. Take a close look at that list to ensure that you’ve set up the filter correctly. Perhaps certain e-mails you’d expect to be listed there are not showing up. Or maybe the conditions you picked are way too broad and e-mails you didn’t want to be affected show up in the list. In both cases, you’ll have to go back and tweak the conditions until you get it right.

All that’s left to do now is choose the action that should be taken when an e-mail matches the filter requirements. Check either Always mark it as important or Never mark it as important, depending on your needs. You might want to take a look at the other actions that can be taken – perhaps you want to apply a label to selected e-mails. Having Gmail automatically apply certain colored labels on incoming messages can hugely reduce your inbox chaos. Optionally, you can select Also apply filter to conversations below if you also want the filter to be applied to the e-mail threads that are listed below the filter setup box.

WrapUp: Avast 5.0 Gets Heuristics, Google Reader Watches for Page Changes, and More

Ryan — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:24:00 +0000

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Apple iPad Hands-On Video
Last week Apple announced their new iPad device that will be available by the end of March 2010, and some people have had the chance to get hands-on time with it. The videos and demonstrations I’ve seen have left me rather unimpressed, but they say that it’s all about the experience you have when using it. The iPad is said to be fast, intuitive, and has a great form factor… and I’ll have to reserve my final judgement until I can actually try it out.

Google Chrome 4.0 Released for Windows
All Windows users can now enjoy the use of extensions and bookmark syncing in the Google Chrome browser. Early last week Google released Chrome 4.0 that included these milestone features, which Beta testers have been enjoying for quite some time. What may even more important is the fact that there’s a 42% performance improvement over the previous stable version, and a 400% improvement since Chrome 1.0.

Avast 5.0 (Free) Gets Heuristics & Performance Improvements
I’ve been using Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus of choice for a little while now, but before that was available I was using (and strongly recommending) Avast. It has always been pretty light on resources, and the new version 5 is even better in that regard. Plus they are finally including heuristics, which means the software will be able to detect viruses that aren’t even included in the definitions list.

–News in Brief–

Google Offers Rewards for Chrome Vulnerabilities that are Found
Google will pay out up to $1337 for vulnerabilities that users find in the Chrome web browser.

Nexus One Censors Speech-to-Text Input
The Android OS censors speech input to make sure it doesn’t mistakingly recognize normal words as swear words.

Sandbox Apps with the Free Comodo Internet Security 4
Run your programs in an isolated environment using the free Comodo Internet Security 4 (currently in the Beta stage).

Bing Search Engine Adds Recipe Interface
Bing will show recipes whenever you are searching for food-related terms that it detects.

Users Still Have Insecure Passwords
32 million passwords were posted a few weeks ago from a hacked site, RockYou, and analysis shows that 1% of them used “123456.”

Bill Gates Launches New Site
The Gates Notes is a site started by Bill Gates to cover his foundation and other items/ideas he would like to publicly address. It seems a bit too formal to me though… I would have liked to seen it be more of a casual blog.

Firefox 3.6 Available
The new version of Firefox includes performance enhancements, personas, and more.

IPv4 Addresses Reaching Critical Stage
Less than 10% of IPv4 addresses remain available, and it’s expected that they’ll run out in 2012.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Weave 1.0: Powerful Syncing for Firefox
Weave has grown very quickly to become the ultimate synchronization tool for any Firefox user. It is able to sync your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and tabs across all instances of the browser (regardless of platform). All of your information is securely stored in an encrypted format, and is kept with Mozilla which should give you some peace of mind.

Google Reader Can Watch Any Page for Changes Now
In my eyes Google Reader just got a feature that definitely sets it apart from all other feed readers… it can watch any page for changes. All you have to do is tell Google what URL you want to monitor, and if there’s no RSS feed available it will automatically try to generate a feed that you can use to track changes.

–Tips in Brief–

Advanced Spell Check Add-on for Firefox
After the Deadline is a Firefox extension that can perform spelling and advanced grammatical checking in text fields.

Turn Any Site into a Desktop Widget with Snippage
Snippage is an Adobe AIR-powered application that lets you select portions of a site you want converted into a desktop widget, much like what Safari can do on a Mac.

FreshStart Chrome Extension Syncs Sessions
By default Chrome is only capable of syncing bookmarks, but with this add-on you can sync your browser’s sessions/tabs.

Firefox 3.6 Tips & Tricks
Firefox 3.6 isn’t too big of an overhaul, and so there isn’t a lot of earth-shattering tips that haven’t already been available for previous version. These are a few that you may want to check out though.

7 Sites to Search for Album Cover Art
This is a list of various sources you can use to find cover art for your music albums.

Official Google Voice Extension for Chrome Available
Google has an official extension available for their browser that gives you direct access to some of Google Voice’s features.

Chromium Nightly Builds Adds “Phantom Tabs”
A new feature in nightly Chromium builds let you close pinned tabs and release the memory they are consuming, but their icons will remain behind for easy access.

Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe
This app will let you “lock” your computer so that little kids won’t get in and start moving/deleting files without you realizing it. These kind of apps are also handy for when you want to clean your keyboard.

–Downloads–

Audacity 1.3.11 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
CCleaner 2.28.1091 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Evernote 3.5.0.1258 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
FeedDemon 3.1.0.9 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Firefox 3.6 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Google Chrome 5.0.307.1 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
IntelliType Pro 7.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Maxthon 3.0.6.24 ^Alpha [Homepage] [Mirror]
Miranda 0.9.0 ^{Alpha 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
Notepad++ 5.6.6 [Homepage] [Mirror]
OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 ^RC4 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Opera 10.50.3206 ^Pre-Alpha [Homepage] [Mirror]
PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0.45 [Homepage] [Mirror]
PeaZip 2.9.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
RSSOwl 2.0.3 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Sandboxie 3.43.19 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
Silverlight 3.0.50106 [Homepage] [Mirror]
TeraCopy 2.12 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Thunderbird 3.0.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
uTorrent 2.0.0 ^RC4 [Homepage] [Mirror]
VistaSwitcher 1.1.2 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Vuze 4.3.1.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
Wireshark 1.2.6 [Homepage] [Mirror]

CyberSearch 2.0: Bing Support, Search Details, and More

Ryan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:48:08 +0000

I’ve been working on a new version of CyberSearch for a little while now, and I’ve been trying to come up with ways to add all of the most requested features. It wasn’t until about August 2009 that I started to get inspired to work on the extension again, which is when we all of a sudden saw a huge surge in downloads that has remained constant ever since. In the last 3 months we went from getting about 300 downloads a day and 10,000 active users to an astounding 3,000-7,000 downloads a day and almost 90,000 active users. I believe the rapid increase has been coming from the fact that we’re now a Mozilla “recommended” add-on, and as some users have pointed out to me our add-on sometimes shows up in the add-on management window within Firefox. So a big thanks to Mozilla for giving me the motivation to push out a new version, because without them the CyberSearch growth graph probably wouldn’t look like this:

CyberSearch 2.0 is almost a complete rewrite of the previous version, and I did that for performance concerns. Since I wanted to add more features I knew I had to squeeze every last ounce of juice out before I could move on, otherwise I could have ended up with something sluggish enough that people wouldn’t even want to use it. To put it in perspective… CyberSearch 2.0 actually does about half the number of computations that CyberSearch 1.0 did for each search that is performed.

As far as new features go we’ve got quite a few! The first thing is Bing support. You can now create keywords that use either Bing or Google, which is pretty cool if you think about it. That means you can make one keyword that searches Bing, and another that searches Google. If you don’t like the results that one search engine shows just try using the other… and all you have to do is change the keyword. The real reason I wanted to add Bing support, however, is because they have some API functionality that Google doesn’t offer. Thanks to Bing you can actually create keywords that will do conversions/calculations using their Instant Answer technology, or lookup the spelling of a word. You can do this all from the comfort of your address bar.

Next up: search descriptions. This is undoubtedly the most requested feature. You wanted some way to view the descriptions of all the search results just as if you were at the search engine page. I struggled with this for awhile because I didn’t want to try and cram the descriptions into the Address Bar menu which is already cramped, and could require a lot of scrolling to see all the results. That’s when I came up with the idea to use the area behind the menu for this! That way I have a large amount of space to work with, and am able to display way more details than I originally anticipated. For example, if you’re using a keyword with the Google Local service just press the arrows on your keyboard to highlight one of the results. You should see the background behind the menu dim down, and location details will appear… including a thumbnail of a map for where that place is located (as seen in the screenshot above)! All of the different types of searches provide you with customized details (video searches show the duration, book searches provide the ISBN number, blog searches show the publication date, etc…), and screenshots of them all can be found on the CyberSearch homepage.

Those are the two main highlights of the extension, but that doesn’t mean that’s all that changed. You’ll also find little things throughout CyberSearch 2.0 that should make your life a little easier. Things like a “snapback” button in the address for pulling up the last search phrase you used, or the ability to import/export your configuration and keywords so that setting up multiple machines with CyberSearch is a breeze! These were all your ideas, and hopefully they are exactly what you wanted.

When I describe my extension to people they often ask if it’s similar to Google Chrome’s “omnibar,” which is the name for their browser’s address bar. It eliminates the need for a search box just like CyberSearch does, but it isn’t nearly as powerful. Just watch this 3-minute video I put together and tell me if Chrome can do this:

The next thing I want to try and work on is localization so that CyberSearch supports other languages/countries, but it will probably be a little while before I can get to adding any big features like this again. If you find any bugs please report them so that I can try to get them fixed right away. Thanks again for all of your support and feedback!

CyberSearch Homepage

How to Stop Google, Yahoo & Bing from Tracking Your Clicks

Pieter — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:40:47 +0000

In 2008, Google said there’s no such thing as complete privacy. You’re being tracked all over the web by their AdSense ads, by sites that use Google Analytics and – probably the most important – their search engine. But Google Search isn’t the only search engine that tracks your behavior. Concerned about your privacy? In this article, we’ll show you how you can get rid of click tracking in search engines.

The secret redirect

Google

Whenever you click a link in Google Search, your click is redirected through a secret URL. If the site you’re going to is http://www.cybernetnews.com/, Google will do a secret redirect through a URL that looks similar to http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.cybernetnews.com/. In some cases, you can reveal the secret redirect by right-clicking on a linked search result. If that doesn’t work, your last resort is an HTTP sniffer.

There are several Firefox add-ons that claim to get rid of Google Search’s click tracking. CustomizeGoogle is one of them. Among other tweaks, it promises to remove click tracking and disable Google Analytics cookies. If you just want the anti-tracking feature without the bells and whistles, there’s a Greasemonkey script you can download called Google Tracking B-Gone. To use Greasemonkey scripts, you need to install the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox. Also, if you use an international version of Google such as google.co.uk, you have to change the script’s URL range from http://*.google.com/* to http://*.google.*/* to ensure that the script is allowed to operate on your local Google site.

Yahoo

Unlike Google’s redirect, the one Yahoo uses is always easy to find. Right-click on a link and look at your status bar to reveal an intimidating garglemesh of strange characters originating from rds.yahoo.com. You can get rid of that by installing this Greasemonkey script. However, my HTTP sniffer revealed that Yahoo does some additional click tracking from a URL that starts with http://search.yahoo.com/ra/click?. To disable this, add http://search.yahoo.com/ra/click?* as a filter to Adblock Plus.

Bing

Bing seems to have a very subtle click tracking mechanism. The only fishy thing Bing does is call some URL’s that start with http://www.bing.com/fd/ls/ whenever you click a search result. Again, Adblock Plus can help you deal with this if you add http://www.bing.com/fd/ls/* to its filter list. Turning off JavaScript on bing.com seems to help too.

Shutting off the HTTP referrer

Although the tips listed above can help you stop search engines from tracking your clicks, it does not keep websites from gathering information about your web search. This is done through the HTTP referrer. Any page on the web can retrieve information on how you stumbled upon it, i.e. which URL referred to their web page.

The referrer is also known to be used by site owners to retrieve information about the search engine you used and what your search query was. On rare occasions, some sites alter themselves if you found them through web search. For example, I’ve seen sites display “Welcome, Googler!”-esque messages and even sites that highlight your Google search terms on the page you landed on. Although this rather creepy practice is not widespread, it just shows how much a site really knows about you.

Fortunately, you can disable the sending of the HTTP referrer to the websites you visit. While it is possible to disable the HTTP referrer entirely in Firefox’s about:config, this can break certain functionality on some sites. There’s a Firefox add-on called RefControl that does away with this issue by allowing you to add exceptions for sites that need the referrer.

Other browsers

It is possible to use the Google Tracking B-Gone and Yahoo Click-Tracking Disabler scripts in other browsers. So if you’re really serious about extending your tinfoil hat protection to other browsers, you can check out these resources:

To disable the HTTP referrer, follow these instructions:

IE/Opera: How do I Disable Sending Referrers?
Safari: Is there a way to disable header referrals in Safari?
Chrome: currently really difficult

Since I’ve only tested this with Firefox, I cannot guarantee that the content from these resources is accurate.