Sunday, August 31, 2008


15 Google Search Tricks

Most of us use Google search to search on various topics, products, tips, etc. No doubt it’s one of the best search engines available out there. In order to search something we simply enter the keywords in the search bar and search for stuff but did you ever know that there are several built in functions within Google which makes searching stuff even easier. Some of you’ll know about them. But well if you don’t, then here they are:

Google calculator:
Google search can be used as a calculator. It can calculate anything from the simplest math to the most complex equation. All you need to do is just enter the math in the search box and hit enter. You can use the following functions:
+ : add
- :subtract
* :multiply
/ :divide
^ :to the power of
sqrt : square root of a number

Dictionary Definitions:
You can define any word by entering “define:” following the word. For example define: ignoble
Google will display a list of dictionary definitions for that word.

Search for a specific title:
Suppose you came across a great article which you really liked but unfortunately forgot to bookmark it then you can find it easily with the help of Google provided you know the title of the article. Here’s how you do it:
Let’s say you read an article “Women talk three times as much as men” then you can search for it by typing “intitle: Women talk three times as much as men”

Google Convertor:
Using this feature you can convert units like millimeter into inches, kilometers into miles, liters into ml, etc. You can do so by typing ‘25km in miles’ for converting km in to miles, ‘50litres in ml’ for converting litres into ml, and so on.

Compare currencies:
Google’s search has an inbuilt currency converter. It allows you to perform any currency conversion. All you need to do is just enter the conversion you’d like done into the Google search box and hit “Enter” or click the Google Search button. For instance: “1 USD in INR”

Weather Updates:
You can easily know the weather condition of a specific place. In order to find out, all you need to do is just enter the place name followed by “weather”. For ex: “london weather”

Search for specific file types:
There are various kinds of files available over the net. Searching for a specific file type isn’t really easy. But using this tip you can easily search for a specific file type.
For instance if you want to search for a guide, let’s say a ‘Guide to Building a Successful IT Career’ in ppt format. You can make use of the “filetype:” function. So in order to search for the PPT version of the guide you can enter in search bar ‘Guide to Building a Successful IT Career filetype:ppt’

Search on a particular website:
If you want to search for something from a particular site using Google search then you can do so by using the “site:” feature. Here’s how you do it:
Let’s say you want to search for cloverfield DVD on Amazon, you can do so by typing “cloverfield DVD site:www.amazon.com”

Get the local time anywhere:
Wanna know what time is it in London now? You can ask Google by typing “what time is it London” in the search bar. You can also enter “time (location)” without the quotes.

Remove unwanted search results:
Suppose you wanted to search a Harry potter book review but you ended up in getting reviews of the movie rather than the book. Well in this case you can make Google to exclude the movie results from the search. You can do so by adding “-movie” at the end of the term. For instance: “Harry potter Chamber of secrets -movie” This will give search results excluding the movie- The chamber of secrets.

Search for URLs:
You can even search for URLs in Google search.For instance: “Women_talk_three_times_as_much_as_men”. You can also use “.” “-” instead of “_“. The search will bring up results with the URLs containing the above words entered.

Track flight status:
You can also track a particular flight status. All you need to do is just enter the airline and flight number into the search box and hit enter. You’ll get the arrival and departure time of the flight right inside Google’s search results.

Search Google groups by the subject line:
You need to be in the google groups search page before attempting this query; otherwise it might not work correctly. Using the “insubject:” function you can search google groups by the subject line. For instance “insubject:windows xp fast shutdown”

Find related sites:
Suppose you find an interesting website and you would like to find some other alternative to this site then you can do so by using “related:” function. For instance if you want to search an alternative for google.com you can do so by entering “related:www.google.com”

Find links to a specific URL:
You can find the webpages which have a link to a specific URL using the “link:” function. This is really great as it will help you if you own a website, you can easily find out the pages linking to a page in your site. To use it, you need to enter the whole URL after “link:”
For instance “link:http://www.cnn.com”
Well that’s it for now, hope you liked them. If you know more feel free to mention them here.

Whois Lookup service:

You can also search for information on a particular domain name. Just type in “whois domain.com” and hit enter. You’ll get to see the creation and expiry dates of the domain.

Suggests words, phrases and their results:

This is really helpful if you aren’t able to spell a particular word or you would like to know the results a particular word would contain when searched. Click here to do a search with suggestions.

Get movie showtimes:

If you are a movie buff and would like to know the showtimes of a particular theatre then you can do so by typing “showtimes zipcode” For instance “showtimes 93455” for knowing the for Santa Maria, CA 93455.


Top 11 Obscure Google Search Tricks


Searching on Google can be a magical experience once you find out how to make your search queries efficient. By making efficient I mean using some tricks or the cheat sheet provided by Google itself to quickly find what you actually require. Having being hooked onto Google for a long time now, I have come across some amazing search tricks which can change the way you look at Google today.

In this article I will list down the search tricks which I use quite frequently. Be it finding time, meanings or watching the cricket score, searching PDF’s, with Google as the search engine life cannot be more simpler. Here are the 10 most amazing Google Search tricks:

1. Different Types of Files at your will
How many times would you have asked for materials (PDF, PPT, DOC) for a particular topic from a friend? Its almost everyday that we might have the necessity to ask them either for knowledge, preparing a presentation, white-paper or for case studies. Such times it mostly difficult to look out what to exactly search for because most of the times you don’t know about the topic at hand. But this petty keyword unleashes its lethal power at such occasions.

Let’s say I want to implement a case study on SOA which means I have to read a lot of information for SOA. So I just have to find materials which might have already been uploaded on the web in the form of PDF’s, DOC’s or PPT’s. These materials can be easily obtained by doing a search for:

2. Scholarly Search
If you want some authenticity of the materials then it would be better to find the materials from educational institutes or universities. For this use the Google scholar search. But suppose you don’t like to switch to Google scholar search you can add the same query with an additional parameter to the normal Google search box,

3. Meanings of any word in an instant
Now you do not have to carry a dictionary or install a dictionary software just for the purpose of finding out a meaning of a word. With the wealth of information in Google’s hands, its a piece of cake to find out the meaning of the word. Just use the define: keyword. The meaning would of course be displayed but also a set of other links which might have an alternative definition are also given out with the link to read more about it.

You would argue here that, a dicitionary gives out more information than this. But what about words that don’t actually fall within the vocabulary. Suppose you want to know what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is then you would have no choice. Google Search comes to your rescue in this case,

4. Find the time of any location
Many of us might be probably working for client which are based at different locations. And communication has to be carried out frequently carried out in such cases. But before a communication you have to know which time zone the location is falling into otherwise you would be causing a disturbance.

I have seen people installing time zone software for showing the time of the location they would be calling to. But with Google at your hands you don’t have to install any software. It would be just simple to use a query for finding the current time such as,

psst….look closely the time on the little clock graphic. It also shows the perfect time!

5. Weather at your fingertips
I had been to GOA for a Christmas vacation in the last week of December. But I made a mistake of not finding out the temperature of GOA before leaving. Had I known that it is hot even in the winter I would not have made the mistake of carrying additional luggage consisting of blankets and jackets.

If you are thinking to visit a place it is useful to know what the temperature of the place is before hand, it can make efficient packing. Google helps you here too. Just use this query without asking anybody or waiting for the news to make a weather report. I wish I had thought of this!

6. Google does live commentary too!
Indians are cricket fanatics. But its amusing to see the organizations here trying to put together tactics to devoid cricket lovers from wasting time to watch the cricket scores instead of doing their work. What I think they fail to understand is that by blocking the live cricket scoring sites they are actually making the employees more curios and provoking them to hunt for proxy networks or listen to the radio or chat with their friends elsewhere.

Jokes apart, you actually don’t need proxy networks to view the live cricket scores if you at least have access to Google. If you want to find the latest info about all the cricket matches then just type,

But if you want to find out only about a particular match then use only the names of the two playing nations,

Remember that the scorecard will come only when the play is going on.

7. Calculate with your browser
Every OS has a calculator inbuilt but when the browser is the thing which is constantly open whey bother to open up a calculator. Open Google and straight away type your mathematical expression. You can go all the way from basic arithmetic to trigonometrical expressions. This is simply amazing stuff accomplished by Google.

8. Compare your currency with others
Now that the dollar is declining, the rest of the world must be busy trying to check the impact of the dollar on their currencies. But first of all one must know how much a particular currency amounts to when cashed in another currency. Google’s inbuilt currency converter just does this.

9. Keep track of the stocks
With the booming stock market it is very important to track the stocks on a day to day basis. Putting a stock ticker in the search box is the most obvious thing you would think of. But it is not always you would remember the stock ticker, you should add the keyword “stocks:” to the company name.

The best part of the obtained result is that it provides a chart which shows the trend in the company’s stock along with important statistics.

Note: Currently the results are restricted to the companies listed in the US stock markets.

10. Wanna find some faces?
This is most interesting trick. You might be needing images for various occasions and searching for images is the most difficult thing because what we expect might not be possibly mapped to a query. But Google has a parameter in place for images in situations we need an image which describes a face.

Suppose I search for the term “happy” then the Google results page displays smileys. But I would like to use images of happy people. Even if I choose the term as “happy face” the results don’t show images which contain people. For this there is a parameter “imgtype” which you can use with the URL. For this put in the URL as follows:

There are many more variations which can be bought about with the above tricks thus making your search experience not only enriching but also exciting. If I have missed any tricks of common usage, feel free to mention it.

Update 1: Google keeps on experimenting new ways of searching. If you liked the above tricks then don’t miss out my article which mentions how to use the new search experiments introduced by Google. Believe me, they are brilliant!

Update 2 : Search for your favorite movie information with Google and enjoy it even more. Have fun with the 5 Most Fantastic Movie Search Tricks With Google.

Update 3 : Why not carry out the search for exactly what we are looking for? Get excited for trying out 5 Most Exciting Search Tricks with Google Operators

11.Using a combination of advanced search operators that specify music files available in an Apache directory listing, you can turn Google into your personal Napster. Go ahead, try this search for Nirvana tracks:


-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana".


(Sub out Nirvana for the band you're interested in; use this one in conjunction with number 7 to find new music, too.) The same type of search recipe can find comic books as well.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008


Google changes its favicon, works really hard to find something worse

Google_favicon_family.jpg


Google must have had some feedback about its dull and horribly weak-looking new favicon, which is no doubt appearing in a browser tab very near you. The Official google Blog has put up a not-very-spirited defense. This points out that they hadn't changed it in 8.5 years -- yeah, that's a really good reason for making something worse.

Google also says: "The design process we went through was rigorous and interesting". In other words, "we screwed it up, but a lot of people did a lot of work to make sure we screwed it up really thoroughly." This is known in the industry as "the Microsoft defence".

Another good excuse is: "we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone". So trying to look good on a couple of million phones is a good reason for looking terrible on a billion desktops and notebooks? Would you like to take a vote on that?

The clincher is that the blog shows a whole panel of variations, which just goes to show that a monkey could have picked a better favicon with a pin.

Still, I shouldn't really complain about Google using a lower case g as a favicon, because the Guardian already uses a lower case g as a favicon. I should be grateful that they have made their's look worse than ours ;-)



Revert Back To Old Google Favicon


You all must have noticed the new Google favicon image, which is now a simple blue-coloured g, instead of the colourful-boxed G. Some people are liking it and have appreciated the new favicon, but on the other side there are people, like me, who think that the old favicon was better. I really don’t like this favicon, and have found a way by which you can revert back to the old one.

Revert Google Favicon

It’s a very simple Greasemonkey script (What is this?) which changes the new Google favicon with the old favicon image.

Requirements

The requirements are simple. You need to have Firefox (download here) with Greasemonkey script installed. Or you can alternatively use some add-on for Internet Explorer to run Greasemonkey scripts.

How To Revert Back To Old Google Favicon

  • Download and install this Greasemonkey script.
  • Enable it and enjoy!

You might need to refresh your already opened Google pages after installing this script for the changes to take effect.


Sunday, August 17, 2008


New chatback styles

We recently added the ability to create Google Talk chatback badges in several new styles. These options are available by clicking on the “Styles” drop down menu when creating a chatback badge. Examples of the new types of formats can be seen on the right.

New chatback badge style examples
One line basic:
Two line basic:
Hyperlink and status icon: Chat with Itala

The two borderless versions of the badge make it easier to fit into your page and customize the appearance as you like. You can just paste the code where you want the link to appear. If you want to further tweak the appearance, you can add some style parameters: Add fontfamily and fontsize to choose a specific font or size, and textcolor and linkcolor to set the colors using a hexadecimal RRGGBB value. You can add these parameters to either the new badge URL or to the iframe's src URL in the generated HTML. You can also use the h and w parameters to specify the height or width of the badge.

For example, &fontfamily=courier%20new&fontsize=13&linkcolor=000000&textcolor=880000 will give you Courier New 13 with black for the link text and dark red for the rest of the text. Here is an example of how this looks with the classic badge:

In addition to providing more flexibility in terms of appearance, chatback can now be used on web sites that don’t allow frames. For these sites, use the new HTML version of the badge. This version can’t display a status messages but it will show your status as a colored circle anywhere you can embed an image. And if you can’t embed an image (like in an email message), you can use the hyperlink by itself or just the URL.

To create a badge, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New or, if you are a Google Apps user, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/DOMAIN/badge/New replacing DOMAIN with the name of your domain.


Chat with your Gmail contacts on the iPhone

Last week, we launched a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone. It works right in your Safari browser, so there's no need to download or install anything -- just go to talk.google.com and sign in.*


Tip: Set Gmail as your default email client in Firefox 3

For those of you using newly released Firefox 3, or willing to give it a try, you can take advantage of a new feature that lets you set Gmail as the default for all email links -- those that contain "mailto:" in them. If you're like me and don't have a default email client set up, then clicking these links typically launches an installation wizard for a destkop mail client, or opens some email software that you don't actually use.

Now you can configure Firefox to launch Gmail when you click on email address links and avoid the hassle. The folks over at Lifehacker published these tips on how to set it up:

1) Go to Gmail and sign in.

2) While in Gmail, copy and paste the following into your browser's address bar and hit enter.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

Google Apps users can use this code (but be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your Google Apps domain name):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

3) Click "Add Application" when you are prompted1. Congrats, you just added Gmail to your browser's list of mail clients.



4) To set Gmail as your default, click on this link and you will be prompted with a dialog box listing available email applications. By selecting Gmail and checking "Remember my choice for mailto links" you won't have to tell your browser again. (You don't actually need to send an email after you click that link.)



You can always change this setting by going into "Tools" > "Options" (or "Firefox" > "Preferences," for Mac users) selecting "Applications" and going to the "mailto" option. There's a drop down next to the option that lets you change your default. Clicking "Application details" will take you to a settings page where you can completely remove Gmail or other mail apps.



1If nothing happens when you type in the code, double check that you copied the entire snippet correctly, and if nothing happens, you probably changed an advanced setting (maybe without even knowing) and need to set it back to default. To do it, type about:config into your browser and make sure that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is on the default setting: true.


Remote sign out and info to help you protect your Gmail account

Your email account can contain a lot of personal information, from bank alerts to love letters. Email that, I'm sure, you don't always want other people to see. We understand how important your Gmail accounts are to you, so we're adding a new layer of information and control. With this new feature, you can now track your recent sessions and you can also sign yourself out remotely.

If you are anything like me, you probably sign in to Gmail from multiple computers. I, for example, occasionally sign into my Gmail account from a friend's house when I need to check an important email. Usually I remember to sign out, but every once in a while I wonder if I really did. Now I no longer have to wonder.

At the bottom of your inbox, you'll see information about the time of the last activity on your account and whether it's still open in another location:



Using the above example, a quick glance at the footer while I'm at work shows that my account is indeed open in one other location. But I recognize the IP address - it's my computer at home. Turns out I left my Gmail account open when I left home in a hurry this morning.

Your IP address, or Internet Protocol address, is a number associated with your computer when you connect to the Internet. Some of you might want to know your IP address numbers (more info on finding out your IP address below) for an extra layer of control. For others who don't want to think about IP information, you don't need to.

Continuing with the above example, I can see more details about my recent activity by clicking on the Details link:



The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."

With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine. I remember using Gmail at the times and locations listed. Being extra cautious, I can also click on the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign out of the account I left open at home.

Note: We are in the process of rolling this feature out to the latest version of Gmail, which is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.


Updates to Gmail contact manager

We've heard from some of you that Gmail's auto-added contacts can lead to too much address book clutter. One of the advantages of automatically creating contacts is that all of the addresses you email subsequently show up in auto-complete. We wanted to preserve this benefit while giving you the ability to have a clean, uncluttered contact list, and we've come up with a solution that's rolling out this week. It separates your contacts into two groups: "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts."


My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now).

Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.

We realize there's a lot more we can do to make Gmail contacts even more useful, but let us know what you think so far.


Making security easier

From the day we launched, Gmail has supported something called https. Https keeps your mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and our servers, so someone sharing your favorite coffee shop's public wifi can't read it. Your bank and credit card websites use this same protocol to protect your financial data. Typically, free webmail services don't support https, but from the beginning we wanted to build a product so solid you could run a company on it -- we developed Gmail by running our own google.com mail on it -- so security is something we took seriously right from the start.

We use https to protect your password every time you log into Gmail, but we don't use https once you're in your mail unless you ask for it (by visiting https://mail.google.com rather than http://mail.google.com). Why not? Because the downside is that https can make your mail slower. Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn't travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data. That's why we leave the choice up to you.

We care about your security today just as much as we did when we launched, which is why we're constantly working on improvements like the recently launched last account activity and remote sign out. Today, we're making it even easier for you to use https to protect your mail every time you access it. We've added an option to Settings to always use https. If you don't regularly log in via unencrypted wireless connections at coffee shops or airports or college dorms, then you might not need this additional layer of security. But if you want to always use https, then this setting makes it super easy. Whenever you forget to type https://mail.google.com, we'll add the https for you. If you already have the https URL bookmarked, using this setting will ensure you access your account via https even when you don't use your bookmark. Any http link to Gmail (for example, the one at the top of Google.com) will be automatically redirected to https.


We're in the process of rolling this feature out to all Gmail and Google Apps users, so check back in your Settings menu if you don't see it right away. In the meantime, you can go directly to https://mail.google.com right now if you're nervous about snoops. (Or https://mail.google.com/a/example.com if your Google Apps domain is example.com.) Google Apps Premier Edition admins will also be able to select SSL connections for their users via a new preference in the control panel we'll be rolling out shortly.

P.S. Some products that connect to Gmail, like Google Toolbar, are not yet compatible with https. We're working to identify issues like this and get them fixed, so visit your product's Help Center if you encounter problems after enabling this setting. In particular, check out this Gmail Help Center page if you use the Gmail mobile app, as you may initially hit an error when you try to use it (we're working on a fix).


Get your Google Calendar in 38 languages

One of our goals at Google is to give everyone the information they want in the language they speak. We've been hard at work making Google products available in as many languages as possible. Recently we launched Google Calendar in eight more languages, bringing our total number of supported languages to 38 (and closing in on Gmail's 50). The new languages are Latvian, Romanian, Filipino/Tagalog, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hindi and Indonesian.

To use Google Calendar in your preferred language, just sign in, click Settings in the upper right hand corner and look for Language.


Seeing clicks but no revenue?

Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:
  1. Allowed Sites setup

    The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.

    To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.

    We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.

  2. Invalid clicks

    It's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.

    Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.


Google Gadgets for Linux 0.10.1

To celebrate the opening of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, we've just released Google Gadgets for Linux 0.10.1. This version contains two new built-in gadgets:
  • Photos - Displays your favorite photos (from either the Web or a local directory) as a slideshow. This gadget is very simple to use. Just get it from the Add gadgets dialog, and add your favorite sources in the Options dialog.

  • Gadget Designer - Similar to the Gadget Designer application for Windows, except that this designer is itself a gadget. Currently it only supports editing existing gadgets. Please get it from the Add gadgets dialog, try it out, and give us feedback. (Sorry, this gadget isn't available yet for Windows.)


Besides adding these two new gadgets, we've fixed many serious bugs. Many popular gadgets are supported now, such as the Google Calendar gadget. This new version also supports the Google Summer Games gadget, which displays a live medal count and event schedules on your desktop.

Friday, August 15, 2008


Google Sites on your domain

The most popular request we have had since our launch has been the ability to change site URLs, and we are excited to announce our first set of features in this area. Now Google Apps domain administrators can map public sites hosted on Google Sites to their own domains. Sites can be mapped individually to a specific URL, like http://www.example.com, and as a group under a specific URL, like http://sites.example.com/[name of site].


Map a site to a specific URL

The standard URL of a site in Google Apps currently looks like http://sites.google.com/a/example.com/site-name, but now you can let users access your site at a URL on your domain that is easier to remember. The new location can be your domain home page or any sub-domain in your domain (e.g. http://www.example.com, http://info.example.com, http://wiki.example.com, etc.), and can be set up on the “Web Addresses” tab of the Sites service settings in your Google Apps control panel.





Change the root URL for all sites

If you have several sites, you can also make them automatically accessible at a designated URL on your domain. For example, instead of being at http://sites.google.com/a/example.com/site-name, the administrator can make them available at http://sites.example.com/site-name or at any other sub-domain.




Remember these new features are currently only available for public sites in Google Apps (mapped URLs to private sites will redirect to the standard URL). Stay tuned for more exciting domain mapping news for private sites and sites created under http://sites.google.com/site.


For more details on this topic and specific setup instructions, see our online help center.


While writing this post I learned about RFC 2606, which designates example.com as a domain that can be used for, well, examples. Doesn't that make a lot of sense? I sure thought so.


Anonymous referrers for private sites

We have had some questions in our discussion group about why some outgoing links are sent through an extra redirect before getting to their destination URL, and we wanted to explain the benefits of this feature for private sites.

Normally if you have a link on your website to another website, and someone clicks on that link, the URL of your page with that link is passed to that site as referral information (and visible to administrators of that site). For example, let's say the Google Sites help page (http://sites.google.com/support/) has a link to http://www.example.com/foo. When a user clicks on that link, the owners of www.example.com will be able to see that the user came from http://sites.google.com/support/. This is great information for site owners, and works well for public sites.

While this isn't a problem for public sites, it can be an issue for private intranets. Let's say instead of our help site, the link to example.com was from your private intranet, http://sites.google.com/site/intranet/super-secret-project-name. You probably wouldn't want that link visible to the administrators of example.com, so for Google Sites that are set as private, we automatically perform what is called "referrer scrubbing" by sending outbound links through an anonymous redirector. The result is that anonymous information, not the URL of your intranet, is passed as referral information. We assume your private site is private for a reason and this includes your URLs as well as your content.

Just one of the many features in Google Sites which allow you to focus on your content, not your infrastructure.


New enhancements on the Google content network

Today we're announcing some key enhancements on the Google content network (partner sites for which we provide advertising) that will offer a better experience for users and better value for advertisers and publishers. These enhancements are the latest result of our integration with DoubleClick and our commitment to making advertising on the Google content network more efficient and accountable. When we purchased DoubleClick, we talked about how we would empower agencies, advertisers and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, and provide a better experience for our users. We are happy that we have been able to deliver on this promise already, like support for third party vendors on the Google content network.

The new enhancements that we are announcing today and that will be available in the coming months are the next step in our integration and in enabling standard industry functionality on the Google content network:
  • Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
  • Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
  • Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
  • View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.
We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers don't have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements. This also means that with one click, users can opt out of a single cookie for both DoubleClick ad serving and the Google content network. (If a user has already opted out of the DoubleClick cookie, that opt-out will also automatically apply to the Google content network.)

To learn more, you can check out our updated main privacy policy and a new advertising-specific privacy policy that reflects our integration with the DoubleClick ad serving cookie, and you can visit a section in our Privacy Center devoted to advertising and privacy.

We're excited about our integration of DoubleClick and the improvements we're making to the Google content network. And I am personally excited about seeing more relevant ads, especially if I don't have to see the same ads over and over!