Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just listen to your Google Voice messages right from the email notification in Gmail? Well now you can thanks to Gmail Labs!

Here’s how to enable the Google Voice player in Gmail:

1. Log into your Gmail account and then click on the green Labs icon button at the top right.

2. Now scroll down until you see the Google Voice Player in mail feature option:

3. Go ahead and click on the Enable radio button.

Now when you get an email from Google Voice, you can play the message right in your Gmail window:

Pretty nifty eh!? Google Voice is an excellent service and the integration with other Google services, such as Gmail, is a huge bonus. Enjoy!

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Play Google Voice voicemails in Gmail

There are some keywords that you can use to limit searches.  For example, if you want to search for pages where the <TITLE> meta-tag contains your desired keyword, use the “Intitle” keyword followed by the search string.

“Intitle: computer tips” will show only websites with “computer tips” in the title of the page.

The keyword link, on the other hand, will let you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you’re interested in. For example, try link:http://helpdeskgeek.com

You may mix the keywords to obtain your desired search result.  If you want to search for all pages containing the keyword “Shaq” inside facebook.com, search for intitle:shaq site:facebook.com

The site keyword is used to limit the search on a particular domain.  This comes in handy if the domain or website’s search engine is not as good as Google’s.

Compare the above search result with just searching for “shaq facebook” that contains pages that are not inside facebook.com:

Use the tips mentioned above to get more accurate search results.  I have saved a lot of time on my researches after I have learned this advanced Google syntax utilities.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Google syntax search tricks

It basically consists of a few extra buttons on the search result pages, including a green up arrow, an “x” to remove a result, an “Add a result” button and a comment icon, if you want to add your own comments.

You will see these buttons when you are signed into your Google account. The changes that you make will stick as long as you are logged into Google. Next time you perform that search, the results will be the customized version you created.

This was a cool idea, but frankly I never use it. The whole point of using Google for me is that they give me the best results. If I knew what was supposed to be there or what should be ranked higher, I would have created my own search engine.

It definitely helps to remove some spammy sites, but that’s about it. For me, it’s just annoying and distracting. Here’s how you can turn off the SearchWiki feature in Google:

Step 1: First, go to the Google Preferences page. You can also go to it by going to Google.com and clicking on Preferences to the right of the search box:

Step 2: Now scroll down to the SearchWiki section and check the “Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment or add your own results” box.

Step 3: Now click on the Save Preferences button!

Now when you perform a search, you’ll get the results without all the controls. One major thing to note, though, is that disabling SearchWiki does NOT delete your previous changes.

So any results you moved to the top or deleted will still exist. If you want search results without any modifications, you have to sign out of your Google account before searching. Enjoy!

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Turn off SeachWiki customized search results in Google

Who knows! It usually takes Google a long time to move from their Labs to standard feature, even if people have used those features for years. Anyway, here is my list of ten cool and useful features in Gmail Labs that you should enable.

You can get to Gmail Labs by clicking on the green flask icon at the top right of your Gmail window:

You can also click on Settings and then click on the Labs tab. Either way, you’ll then see a long list of experimental features that you can try out. Here are the 10 I like best:

Offline – Using Google Gears, you can access Gmail while you are offline. Click on the previous link to read my post on how to enable offline access to your Gmail account. You can then read and write emails even if you are not connected to the Internet.

Tasks – Another really useful feature is the to-do task list. You’ll see a new item called Tasks on the left menu and when clicked, a small box will appear in the bottom right.

Canned Responses – If you have a business, you probably write a lot of the same stuff to different clients. You may even do this with your friends and family! Either way, canned responses save time and energy.

Forgotten Attachment Detector – Ever sent an application for a job online and forgot to attach your resume! Happens all the time! If you mention attaching a file and don’t, Gmail will prompt you.

Google Search – Ever need to search for something on Google when you were reading an email? Maybe to look up something or get some more information about a topic? You can do it directly in Gmail now!

Multiple Inboxes – Want to see more emails in one view rather than just the Inbox? You can add starred messages, drafts, or any type of email search as another Inbox in the same window! Very cool!

Undo Send – A perfect option for those who click the Send button too fast. Forgot to write something in the email or wrote too much? Just click Undo Send after sending an email to get it back.

Inserting Images – One thing I had always hated about Gmail was that you could not insert images directly into an email. If you enable this option, you now can! Finally!Just click the Insert Image button.

Gmail Superstars – If you like to categorize your emails with something more than a single yellow star, superstars is for you! You get a bunch more star icons to choose from for marking emails.

Overall, those are my favorites out of the many lab features. You can also try out the rest, such as YouTube previews in mail, Picasa and Flickr previews, Yelp preview, custom label colors and lots more. Enjoy!

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Your subscribed RSS pages are listed on the left side while the right side contains the content of each RSS feed.

To start using Google Reader, go to http://reader.google.com then login using your Google account.  Click the Add a subscription button to add an RSS feed:

Enter the URL of the RSS feed. In the example below I added the RSS feed for Online-Tech-Tips which is http://www.online-tech-tips.com/feed/

You will see the feed entered on the list of RSS subscriptions on the left hand side of the page.  By default it will be untitled so you will need to edit the settings for this feed later to set the title.

Click the Feed settings tab and choose Rename subscription:

Enter the title of the RSS feed then click OK.

You should then see the new title in effect:

You can also see what your contacts in Google are sharing.  To see what they are reading, click the contact’s name:

To share your own subscriptions with others, you can click the share button at the bottom of each feed.  You can also assign a star on the feed to mark it as one of your favorite feed items.  You can also send the feed as an email or add tags to it so you can categorize your feeds using your own tags.

We should be able to see more functionality when Google Gears gets updated.  I read that there is a new widget that could put Google Reader onto the desktop.  We will review that widget here as soon as it gets released.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Google has been working on a product called Google Squared, which is aimed to kill off competition from the likes of Wolfram Alpha. So what is this mysterious new tool from Google?

Google Squared is basically Google’s way to take unstructured data on the web, combine it, manipulate it, and spit it out in a nice spreadsheet format for you to analyze to delights end!

It’s an experimental search engine, but it’s quite powerful and pretty cool. It basically breaks down search results into categories that you can then use to organize the data.

Let me give you a quick example so you can see what Google Squared can do. Type in “Nissan” and this is what you get:

Google searches the Internet and presents you with a table of Nissan cars, such as the Datusn, Pathfinder, Altima, etc. It also includes a couple of columns such as the model year, width and length.

You might find the width and length a little useless, so you can click inside the Add columns text box and choose from other column suggestions such as wheelbase, transmission, and succeeded by.

Pretty sweet eh? But that’s not all! Maybe I don’t care about wheelbase and transmission, but instead want to know about the price! Type in Price into the box and you’ll get a list of suggestions, such as TMV Price, Local Dealer Price, and Market Price! Sweet!

Add all of them to your table and here’s what you get:

Other than the $34.95 price for a Datsun, every other price seems possible. The Altima is between $19K and $27K, the Pathfinder is between $25K and $37K, etc.

But you might be asking yourself, “Well that’s great, but it’s only 10 cars and there are way more Nissan cars!”. True. For some reason, Google Squared does not list out all of the possibilities it finds and I’m not sure why.

Nevertheless, you can click Add next 10 items and it’ll keep adding on more Nissan cars.

Overall, it’s a pretty neat way to get an answer to a question that requires some sort of comparison. Trying to use Google Squared to fix a Windows problem is not going to yield very good results.

However, type in Microsoft Windows and you get a nice little table of the operating systems, Windows programs, etc.

Take it for a spin and see how you like it! The web is changing fast and we’ll soon be able to get more data faster and better organized than ever before. Enjoy!

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Here are screenshots of the visual improvements done in version 2.  To hide the thumbnails when you open a new tab, there is an option to remove the thumbnails on the new tab window.

This is useful if you don’t want to be seen opening embarrassing webpages if someone tries to open a new tab in your browser.  Once you click “remove thumbnails” there will be an X mark for each thumbnail.  Clicking the X mark will remove the thumbnail from the window but not from the browsing history.

Another new feature is the full screen mode which acts like IE and FireFox’s full screen mode.  You can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.  This feature should have been on the first version so Google developers just caught up on this one.

Another catch-up feature is form auto fill which will help users to automatically fill up forms.  Again other browsers already has this feature so Google is just making these features available in Chrome as well.

For the non-visual improvements, the new browser is indeed faster and heavily scripted pages could benefit from it’s new V8 JavaScript engine.

If you want to get the latest Google Chrome browser you can download it from it’s homepage: http://www.google.com/chrome

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Firstly, one change you will see immediately in the search results are the new “search options”. Search options basically is a toolset that lets you filter your search results on the fly.

It’s kind of like advanced search, but without the need to go to advanced search and click lots of radio buttons. The new changes also have some interesting ways to view your search results other than in the normal ten blue text links view.

Source: Dullest

When you perform a search, you will see a link called “Show options”, which will expand to the the left-hand sidebar you see in the above image. Here you can filter you search by genre, such as only videos, only forums, or only reviews.

You can also now quickly choose a time frame for viewing the results. Earlier, you had to do this in Advanced search, which was a pain and took too many clicks. Now you can filter by time period with a single click.

Below that, you have the option of adding images to the search results, which will be pulled off the page that the link refers to. Or you can choose “More text”, which will show more content of the page in the search results.

Further below is the cool stuff that lets you completely change the way you browse search results. Related searches will show you a set of keywords that are closely related to your current search.

The Wonder Wheel is an interesting new view of the search results that basically creates a visual representation of the related search terms. When you click on a bubble, the search results will be updated automatically for the new term. It lets you quickly see a cluster of related topics.

Source: SEOforclients

Finally, the Timeline option lets you see the search results in a chronological order. Note that this is not ordered by the date the articles were written or when the web page were indexed, but instead by the dates mentioned inside of the articles.

For example, if you search for something like cars, you’ll see results in the timeline going back to the 1800s and 1900s. Obviously, those articles just happen to mention those dates, so that’s how they show up in the timeline.

Source: PCWorld

If you actually want to see an article written during a specific time period, then you can use the second option in search results, which lets you choose the time frame ( recent, 24 hours, past week, past year).

Overall, the changes are really useful and make searching for stuff on the Internet even easier. Enjoy!

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After fiddling around with it a bit, I figured it out and it’s not very hard. Of course, it would be cool if Gmail just had a button called Import that let you connect to your old Gmail account and import all the emails, but it’s not that simple.

In order to move emails from one Gmail account to another, you have to follow the steps below:

Step 1: First, log into the old email account (current one you are using) and click on Settings, then Forwarding and POP and choose Enable POP for all mail. Make sure to click Save Changes at the bottom.

Step 2: Now log into the new email account and click on Settings again. Then click on Accounts and click the Add a mail account you own link.

Step 3: Now type in the old Gmail email address into the text box and click Next.

Step 4: Now type in the password for the old email account and choose pop.gmail.com from the POP Server drop down list. Click Add Account.

Step 5: Next you’ll be asked if you want to be able to send email as oldaddress@gmail.com. This is useful if you want the mail to come into the new account, but be able to respond using the old email address.

Step 6: Type in your name for the old email address and choose whether you want the reply address to be the old address or you can optionally change it to the new one, which is a good idea so that people will eventually stop writing to the old address.

Step 7: Finally, you will have to verify that you actually own the old email address by clicking the Send Verification button. You can then log into your old email account and copy the confirmation code in the email. Paste that into the appropriate box. Click Verify.

Step 8: Now just sit back and watch all your emails get imported into the new Gmail account. If you have a lot of emails, it could take several hours, so be patient!

So that’s all the steps required to transfer emails from one Gmail account to another. If you have any questions, post a comment! Enjoy!

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To search for patents using Google’s patent search engine which is now on its beta stage, go to the following site: http://www.google.com/patents

It looks and works like a standard Google search page but it limits its search to only 7 million patents (as claimed on the current beta version). 

You may enter a phrase or name of the patent owner related to the patent filing.

You may use the view as list or view as thumbnails dropdown to show a listed search item or thumbnail of graphical representation of the patent:

If you click a patent it will open the patent document for reading. You will see the main component like claims, abstract, patent number, issue date, inventors, examiners and other information.  You may also download the patent on a PDF format. 

It is interesting to see that the patents’ contents are catalogued and viewable inside Google.  It is very interesting to find out that it doesn’t redirect you to outside sources unlike ordinary Google search. 

If you think your idea is better than the one’s already patented – make sure to claim your patent as that idea could be, say, the next iPod.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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In the settings window click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP

Then click on Enable POP under POP download and Enable IMAP under IMAP Access. Save the changes.

After enabling FORWARDING POP/IMAP option open Windows Mail to create and configure your account.

Click Start > All Programs > Windows Mail

On Windows Mail click Tools > Accounts to launch the Internet Accounts window. On the Internet accounts window click the Add button.

On the select Account Type window select E-mail Account then click next.

On the next window type your desired display name and click next.

Then type your e-mail address from Gmail and click next.

On the next window you have to choose what type of incoming server you want to use. On the incoming server name use POP.GMAIL.COM if your incoming e-mail server type is POP and IMAP.GMAIL.COM for the IMAP incoming e-mail server type. For the SMTP outgoing sever name use SMTP.GMAIL.COM then check the Outgoing server requires authentication then click next.

On the next window enter your Gmail account username and password and check the Remember password button and click next. On the next window uncheck the Do not download my e-mail at this time then click finish to save settings. You will then go back the Internet Accounts window.

On the Internet Accounts window click on properties. On the Properties window click on then General tab you can edit your mail account name to you preference.

Advanced Tab Settings:

You don’t have to modify anything on the Servers, Connection and Security Tabs except on the Advanced tab. On the Advanced tab change the port number of Outgoing mail to 465 , 995 for Incoming mail (POP3) and 993 for Incoming mail (IMAP). Don’t forget to check the option This servers requires a secure connection (SSL) then click OK.

That’s it! You should be able to connect to Gmail using Windows Mail with the given steps above.

Ben shows you how it’s done.

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If you want to permanently delete your Google search history, check out the following video I created a while back and posted to YouTube. I’m going to be experimenting with creating how-to videos and posting them on the site once a week.

Feel free to contact me if you have an idea for a video that you would like to see here on the site.

The video basically talks about deleting your search history from IE, Firefox, any toolbars, Google Desktop, and Google Web History. Enjoy!

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So what steps do we need to do to be able to make this work?  Below are some of the steps I went through for my Gmail account:

Step 1: Make sure you have a GMail account, apply online if you don’t have one yet as the next steps will only work with your GMail account. 

Step 2:    Download the latest gears installer from http://gears.google.com/

Step 3: Restart your web browser to activate the Gears program

You should see Gears as one of the Add-ons in your web browser.  It looks like this in Firefox 3:

Step 4: Go to your Gmail account and enable the offline setting under labs tab:

You’re done! To test it, turn off your network connection and notice how you can still browse your Gmail account’s inbox, sent items, drafts, etc… you can even “send” emails – but of course it will only send and receive messages once you get back online.

Google Gears is truly a great offline gadget.  You can use it to achieve better offline productivity since you don’t have to be online just to process Gmail emails. 

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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Once a web page or website is indexed, it can be found by anyone on the planet with an Internet connection. If you want to hide a page or website from search engines, you can do it in several ways.

I’ll try to walk you through the easier method first because it requires less technical knowledge. Basically, you can add a line of code to your HTML page or you can setup your web server to protect a file or directory.

Luckily, just about all search engines follow a web robots standard while crawling websites called Robots Exclusion Protocol. As a website owner, you can use the robots.txt file to give instructions to a search engine on what to index and what not to index.

So how does this work? It’s actually super simple! First, you create a text file called robots.txt using Notepad or any text editor. Now let’s say you want to block your entire website from being indexed by the search engines, so you would add these lines to your text file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The User-agent refers to the robot that is crawling your website, i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc. * means all robots. Note that a robot, such as a spam robot, can ignore your file altogether if it feels like.

Only use a robots.txt file to block content from being indexed by major search engines, not for hiding information. If someone comes to your website, a robots.txt file will not prevent them from accessing that webpage and viewing it. So just make sure you understand what the file does, it prevents your site from showing up in Google search results pages (Yahoo and MSN also).

You can also block directories or individual pages on your site using a robots.txt file instead of blocking the entire website. To block a directory, you could add the following lines:

Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /~secret/

Note that you only need to add the user-agent line once, unless you want each robot to get a different set of instructions. If you want to block a page, you could use this:

Disallow: /private_file.html

Also, check out the Help section at Google to learn more on how to create a robots.txt file. Once you have finished writing up the file, you just need to upload it to the root of your website so that it can be accessed as follows:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt.

The next time the robot visits your site, it will read the information and follow the instructions. If this seems too complicated, you can also block access to your website or webpage using META tags.

The noindex meta standard is also followed by all of the major search engines. To use it, you have to add a line of code to the HEAD section on the webpage. To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, add this line to the HEAD section:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

When Google or any other search engine sees that line on the page, it will automatically drop the page from the search results, even if other pages link to it.

So those are the two ways you can hide a page from Google and other search engines. If you are not able to get this to work, post a comment and I will try to help you out.

Also, check out my previous post if you are looking for a way to remove your name from search engines like Google, etc that are on other peoples websites. Enjoy!

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If you download the latest release from the nightly builds, you’ll now be happy to know that you can add a command line switch to open the Chrome browser in Incognito Mode. This is nice because to open the browser in Incognito Mode right now, you have to open the normal browser window, click on the Tools icon and then choose New Incognito Mode window, which is a pain.

First, copy the Google Chrome shortcut that you have on your desktop so that there are two icons.

Now right-click on the copy and choose Properties. In the Target box, go all the way to the end and add the following text to the end:

–incognito

Note that there is a space after the end quotation mark and before the two dashes. Now click OK and double-click on your new icon. And viola! An Incognito window pops up!

You can now rename the shortcut to something more appropriate and use Chrome in Incognito Mode directly. Basically, the browser in the mode will not store your browsing history, IP addresses, cached page text, snapshots of the pages you visited, or records of anything downloaded. Enjoy!

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