Remove Software Preinstalled with New PCs

It's really hard to buy a computer preinstalled with Windows that doesn't have all kinds of bundled software. From anti-virus software like Norton AntiVirus, music players to DVD burners, links to affiliated services, these programs occupy a lot of space and memory, and you may not be aware of their existence.

Even Google has a three-year agreement with Dell to install Google Toolbar and Google Desktop on new PCs. "Google has reportedly sealed an anticipated deal with Dell to pre-install some of its software on PCs before shipment, partially closing an advantage Microsoft has long held on users automatically defaulting to its products," Forbes wrote last year.

If you don't like to let others choose for you and want an easy way to uninstall the software that comes with your new computer, PC Decrapifier could be a solution. It's like Google Pack in reverse: uninstall everything in just a few clicks.

So, you're the proud owner of a new PC. You anxiously open the box, dumping out the contents, casting the instructions aside. You feverishly push your old PC off the desk and get the new one set up. On the floor lies a pile of plastic wrap and twist ties. Your brand spanking new PC boots up only to greet you with a plethora of pop up advertisements pestering you to pay for anti-virus software or sign up for a music service. Your desktop is littered with website links for 'special offers.' The system tray is already full of programs that continuously use your internet connection to make sure that you're 'up to date.' (...) All of this stuff is placed on your new PC because the big companies like Dell, HP and others sell advertising space on your PC to put more money in their pockets at the expense of your time and frustration.

Creative Commons-licensed by Google Blogoscoped.

Google News Integrates with Google Finance

Google found a way to promote the not very popular Google Finance: link to it everytime it may be useful to find more about a company. After adding a Plus Box in the search results, Google News shows the tickers for companies mentioned in news articles.

In a recent Q&A, the product manager of Google Finance said that "Google Finance is most different from others in its approach to search. We've tried to make searching for financial information as easy as possible so you can search by public or private company by name or ticker, mutual funds, etf's, even by product or management name. We do other things differently, too, but I think search is the biggest differentiator."

Google Finance seems more like an add-on for search results than a destination for financial information.

Video Ads on YouTube

Red Herring announces that in a few months YouTube will include video ads. Most likely, you'll see ads only for the premium content, and the revenue will be shared with the content owners. This program should synchronize with "Claim your content", a feature that will automatically identify copyrighted material, assuming that content owners share some information about their videos.

It's not yet clear if anyone who uploads videos to YouTube can choose to have ads and to split revenue with Google, but one thing is sure: the format of the ads. "We're looking at executions like a very quick little intro preceding a video, then the video, then a commercial execution on the backside of the content", said YouTube's Suzie Reider.

While many people will say that those who visit YouTube don't like ads and they'll move to other video sites, Google's main priority is to create a model that works well for advertisers, but doesn't disrupt the user experience.

Google Desktop's Profiles

Google Desktop added so many independent features that the application should include some profiles you can select when you install the application.

1. Desktop search
If you don't want the sidebar, gadgets and other distractions, just right-click on system tray icon and select "Deskbar", "Floating deskbar", or "None", depending on the position of the search box.

2. Sidebar
If you only want the sidebar, but not the desktop search functionality, go to settings and check "Disable indexing of new items".

3. Application launcher
Google Desktop indexes the shortcuts from the Start Menu, the services from Control Panel. To use Google Desktop only as a searchable Start Menu, disable all the options from "Search types". You should also select "Launch programs/files by default" in the "Quick find" section. Then press Ctrl twice and enter the first letters of the program in the quick search box.

4. Web history search
Google Desktop indexes all the web pages you visit with Internet Explorer and Firefox. By itself, this is a very useful feature, so if you only want an enhanced web history, unselect everything except "web history" in the "search types" sections from the preferences page.

Another way to disable indexing, the sidebar or both is to go to Start Menu and click on "Uninstall Google Desktop" (or press Ctrl+Ctrl and type "Uninstall Google Desktop"). This works only if you have the latest version (Google Desktop 5), which is now out of beta and available in 29 languages.

Ranking Web Pages Based on Their History

A new Google patent describes some scores that could be used for ranking search results. These scores use information about a document, from the moment when Google first finds it to the present. The history of a web page could help Google determine if the content is fresh, still useful or outdated.

"Search engine may use the inception date of a document for scoring of the document. For example, it may be assumed that a document with a fairly recent inception date will not have a significant number of links from other documents (i.e., back links). For existing link-based scoring techniques that score based on the number of links to/from a document, this recent document may be scored lower than an older document that has a larger number of links (e.g., back links)."

"For some queries, documents with content that has not recently changed may be more favorable than documents with content that has recently changed. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference from the average date-of-change of the result set. In other words, search engine may determine a date when the content of each of the documents in a result set last changed, determine the average date of change for the documents, and modify the scores of the documents (either positively or negatively) based on a difference between the documents' date-of-change and the average date-of-change. "

"Documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high. The amount of change may also be a factor in this scoring."

"Using this date as a reference, search engine may then monitor the time-varying behavior of links to the document, such as when links appear or disappear, the rate at which links appear or disappear over time, how many links appear or disappear during a given time period, whether there is trend toward appearance of new links versus disappearance of existing links to the document, etc. (...) By analyzing the change in the number or rate of increase/decrease of back links to a document (or page) over time, search engine may derive a valuable signal of how fresh the document is."

If a page still gets links one year after it was created, Google might assume it's still useful. If a page is constantly updated (like Wikipedia pages), the content could be more relevant to the reader. These are some simple rules that could remove outdated pages from the top results.

{ via Russel Shaw. }

Fresh News Become Standard Search Results

As promised last week, Google's web search results integrate results from Google News. The standard news OneBox that was displayed at the top of the page for queries related to recent news was replaced with a list of links to news articles, displayed anywhere in the top results.

The important news will rank higher than less important ones and they become a standard search result. This is the first step in Google's big plan of integrating every type of content in one index: an universal search engine that mixes web pages, images, videos, books, scholar papers, news articles and more.

It will still take some time until the change propagates to all Google's data centers, so you may not see results from Google News displayed as standard results (try to search for news-related queries like Bush, Iraq).

Creative Commons-licensed by rustybrick. More screenshots.

Homeless Internet Citizens

So you open the door, you step inside and you discover that your house is empty: no furniture, no books, no family, no pets. Your home became empty and nobody bothered to explain why.

That's what happened to Google Personalized Homepage for some users today. Says Michael M.:

Today, I logged on at college and all was fine on my homepage. When I got home, I turned on my laptop and my homepage had reverted to the default, with all of the default gadgets and the default theme. I tried to re-add my gadgets, but it keeps going back to the default style. I've tried clearing my cookies/history and signing in/out.

The personalized homepage is the page I visit most on the internet, it tracks all my news and weather and lets me keep track of my schedule and chat to my friends on Google Talk.

My homepage looks the same, but there's a big thread at Google Groups with people who lost their homepages. Google's answer is so endearing:

We're now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon. For now, we're not entirely sure of this, but it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice. The big question I know you'll all want answered is whether you'll get your homepage back once we sort things out... and the really honest answer is that I hope so, but I just don't know yet.

Update: A day later, everything was back to normal in the Google land.

{ Thank you, Thomas, Redmar, Yasar, Michael, Joe. }

Blogger Widgets

Kirk, my favorite Blogger tweaker, wrote a very simple yet elegant code that sends you to a random post from a Blogger blog. It uses Blogger's JSON API and it's available as a widget if you upgraded to layouts or as a JavaScript code easy to paste in your template. I placed a link that uses this code in the right sidebar and it's addictive. Because it can send you to any post from the entire archive, it's a cool way to (re)discover a blog.

I wouldn't have thought many people would think something like this would be useful, but a recent post on Techcrunch goes ape over Wordpress having a 'random post' widget now. I figured if Wordpress has one, New Blogger should as well.

Kirk wrote even more complicated widgets for Blogger, like Picasa Web slideshow, archive calendar and the spectacular tag cloud. If only someone could build an automatic way to upgrade the classic templates to Blogger's new layouts.

Update: Blogger's API has difficulties, so you won't see a "random post" link in the sidebar. The error returned is: "Too many instances of callback".

Google Search Recognizes Open Office Documents

In addition to HTML files, Google indexes other file types like: PDFs, Microsoft Office files, Shockwave Flash files and more. Google offers you the option to read the HTML (or text) version of the cached file, in case you don't have an application that opens the file.

Google added OpenDocument format to the list of supported documents. OpenDocument is supported by important office suites like OpenOffice.org, Star Office, KOffice, but also by Google Docs & Spreadsheets. OpenDocument can be used to store many kinds of files, including documents (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods) and presentations (.odp).


Google's filetype: operator allows you to restrict the search results to files that have a specific extension. This table shows the number of files from Google's index for Open Office and Microsoft Office:

File types	Open Office	Microsoft Office
documents	88,200	42,300,000
spreadsheets	19,700	15,600,000
presentations	42,300	13,800,000

Google Transit Expands to Japan

Google's experimental trip planner is now available for Japan. Unlike Google Maps that shows driving directions, Google Transit is useful if you want to use public transportation, but the number of places where you can use it is really small (10 cities in the US and now Japan).

Google Transit is also available for mobile phones.

Gadgets and Personal Data

User-generated gadgets made personalized homepages a better place because users can choose from a wider variety of content and even create their own gadget if they have programming skills. But just because you see a gadget in Google's directory or elsewhere doesn't mean you have to trust it and handover personal information or credentials.

Jason wrote a popular gadget that showed your MySpace alerts. Of course, the gadget required you to enter your MySpace username and password (ideally, MySpace should have an API for authentication and data).

"A few months back, a flaw was discovered whereby usernames were being passed in clear-text as a querystring parameter when using the gadget. As a result of Google's mechanism that caches web-content, a list of usernames on a phishing watchlist website was cached in Google's search index, thus making them publicly accessible. Once Google was alerted of the issue, they contacted me immediately. Google took action and removed the cached content from their search index, and I took numerous steps to strengthen the security of the gadget - and to mitigate any future risks. Google even went as far as to work with the operators of the phishing watchlist to remove my name and IP addresses from the suspected phishers list."

But people thought that the flaw was intentional and accused him of phishing. "Due to a common misconception that the Gadget was actually being used to facilitate phishing activity, I have decided to remove it permanently. This is a particularly difficult decision because of the large number of users and the popularity of this gadget."

Google shows a warning everytime you add third-party gadgets, so you should be careful when you add gadgets from unknown sources. You should be even more careful when you enter personal data.

Try Google's Next Design Before It Goes Live

Google's latest design test for the search results pages and homepage is clever and has big chances of replacing the current one. The big change is that Google adds a navigation menu for its services placed at the top of the page. The list of services includes Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs (the last two are hidden under "more"). Under the search box, you'll see links to other specialized search engines that provide useful results for that search. For "Bush", there are many services listed, including news, news archives and blog search, but for most queries you'll see few services listed (for "Google", you'll see only news search; for "flowers", image search; for "c++", code search, blog search and groups).


Courtesy of Webbsnack, here's how you can test this new design.

Copy this code:

javascript:document.cookie= "PREF=ID=fddb01133a87d314:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1177334998:LM=1177334998:GM=1:S=OOg0FEVzpPplxe9J; path=/; domain=.google.com";void(0);

go to google.com/ncr, paste it in the address bar, press enter, then search for something clever. I absolutely love the new design, but if you don't like it, clear your Google cookie and it'll go away.


Small observation: the number of results should be at the top of the page. I sometimes search for things on Google just to see the number of results (this is my primitive grammar checker).

Update: There's an alternative version for this new layout.


The code for the second design (via Blogoscoped):

javascript:document.cookie= "PREF=ID=9d04e374b01fd77c:TM=1177187296:LM=1178229339:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=Iiqx5SsQA0p79zvy; path=/; domain=.google.com";void(0);

Google Ads Used as Malware Warnings

TorrentFreak found a clever way to advise the potential users three BitTorrent clients that they include malware.

"Well, we started to run Google Adwords campaigns on the Bitroll, Torrent101 and Torrentq websites. In just four days the ads were shown 20,000 times, the clickthrough rate was impressive, and the ads probably prevented more than one thousand people installing these malware-laden BitTorrent clients."

But the authors of those BitTorrent clients didn't lose money because a lot of people were advised to try other software: the ad-warnings paid off.

{ via Digg. }

Gmail Attachments

While Gmail is a great web mail service, the way it treats attachments might confuse some people.

In Gmail, you can't send executable files (.exe, .cmd) or ZIP archives that contain executables. To bypass this limitation, you need to rename the file and change its extension (don't forget to mention this to the person that receives your mail).

Although Google says you can't send attachments larger than 10 MB, Gmail is quite forgiving and lets you send files up to 13-14 MB, so you don't have to worry about size. [Update (May 2007): Gmail has increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB. ] If you need to send bigger attachments or you send your files to a lot of people, consider uploading them to a file hosting site (like DivShare, mihd or QuickSharing) and including the URL in the mail. For documents that require collaboration and reviews, Google Docs is a good solution, while Picasa Web and Google Video are better options if you need to share photos and videos.

It's a good idea to select the files you want to attach before writing your email, because Gmail starts to upload them immediately, saving you precious time. If you want to be reminded to attach a file if you talk about attachments in your email, this Greasemonkey script is fairly good. To upload the files using drag and drop, install this Firefox extension.

Now that you sent your message, you may wonder how to retrieve it in the future. To search for emails that contain attachments, use: has:attachment. If you know some words from the title of an attachment or its extension, add them: has:attachment filename:pdf or has:attachment filename:author filename:review. Unfortunately, the only searchable attachments are text files, so you may want to upload a plain text version of your documents if you need to search their content later.

Google offers you the option to view online a lot of file types: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint files, PDF, RTF and even edit Word and Excel files using Google Docs. This is a simple way to convert all these file types to HTML. You can also listen to MP3 files directly from Gmail.

While Gmail offers plenty of space (almost 3 GB), it's not a very good idea to use it for storing files. There are tools that make it easy to upload files to Gmail (the most well-known are the Firefox extension Gspace and the Windows application Gmail Drive), but Gmail was not created for this purpose, so they're just clever hacks. If you upload too many files, Google could even lock your account for 24 hours.

Suggestions for Google Services

Most Google services have feedback forms where you can suggest new features or improvements, but some of them even list frequent suggestions and let you vote your favorites. The lists also give you hints about the future updates.

• Gmail


• Picasa


• Picasa Web Albums


• Google Talk


• Google Calendar


• Google Apps


• Google Groups


• Google Pack


• Google Desktop