Google Chrome 8 available

Google just released version 8 of its web browser Chrome. It fixes 13 security vulnerabilities of which 4 got rated “high”ly critical – the people reporting these all got rewarded with 1.000 US-$ and 500 US-$, respectively. Additionally to these security fixes, the update to Chrome 8.0.552.215 contains more than 800 bugfixes and stability improvements according to the Google developers. ...

December 3, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 151 words Â· Omid Farhang

Link to a YouTube Comment

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that’s really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the “Share” button and copy the link. Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it’s not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled “Linked Comment”. ...

November 30, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 89 words Â· Omid Farhang

Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Google Earth 6 doesn’t have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. “To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available,” explains Google. ...

November 30, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 186 words Â· Omid Farhang

Google Chrome and Multiple Profiles

Google Chrome has always supported multiple profiles, but you had to use a command-line flag (–user-data-dir=”c:\path\to\the\profile”) to associate a profile with a folder where the browser will save its state. At some point, Google added an option that allowed you to open a new window and use a separate profile, but it was quickly removed. According to a design document from Chromium’s site, this feature be available again. “The multiple profiles feature will allow the user to associate a profile with a specific set of browser windows, rather than with an entire running instance of Chrome. Allowing different windows to run as different Chrome identities means that a user can have different open windows associated with different Google accounts, and correspondingly different sets of preferences, apps, bookmarks, and so on — all those elements which are bound to a specific user’s identity.” ...

November 27, 2010 Â· 2 min Â· 256 words Â· Omid Farhang

Wanted: more than 2,000, in Google hiring spree

Reuters: Google Inc plans to hire more than 2,000 people around the globe, bumping up its workforce as it expands into new markets and battles for talent with faster-growing rivals. The world’s largest Internet search engine, whose finance chief told investors in September that the Internet industry was waging a “war for talent,” has job openings listed for 2,076 positions on its website, according to a Reuters tally on Thursday. ...

November 21, 2010 Â· 3 min Â· 457 words Â· Omid Farhang

Google Docs editing comes to Android and iOS

Native Google Docs support has finally arrived for Android and iOS (the mobile version of Google Docs has been available for over three years). Edits show up in near real-time (so they aren’t completely seamless) and Android even lets you insert text using voice recognition. The biggest improvement is the new layout, which makes mobile document editing much easier and allows for collaboration from other Docs users. Currently, Google Docs supports devices with Android 2.2 (codename Froyo) and up, as well as Apple devices with iOS version 3.0 or newer. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t specify if third-party browsers will work with the new Google Docs or whether it plans on adding new platforms such as Windows Phone and webOS. ...

November 17, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 162 words Â· Omid Farhang

Microsoft: Google is a hard habit to break

Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it’s hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company’s search engine, Bing. “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World. Mehdi is referring to users’ tendency to use Google for online searches without a second thought. It’s almost second nature to them. Many people even head to Google as their first webpage when they’re testing to see if they have an Internet connection. ...

November 17, 2010 Â· 2 min Â· 216 words Â· Omid Farhang

Google Cleans Up Messy Data with Refine

Mashable: If you live for data, slave over spreadsheets and constantly find yourself sifting through endless rows and columns of facts and figures, Google’s got a lovely new product just for you — and it’s free and open-source, too. Google Refine is a project born of Freebase Gridworks, a data-cleaning tool Google acquired when it bought Metaweb during the summer. Google has since renamed Gridworks and relaunched it as Refine. ...

November 12, 2010 Â· 2 min Â· 270 words Â· Omid Farhang

Say Hello to the Samsung Nexus S

Mashable: If you didn’t think the Nexus S was real, perhaps these pictures of the purported device will convince you otherwise. Kudos to Engadget, which was the first publication to get pictures of the mythical successor to the Nexus One. As we reported earlier today, the device is built by Samsung and has a lot of similarities to the Galaxy S Android phone. ...

November 12, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 160 words Â· Omid Farhang

Google Now, Enhancing SWF Indexing..!!

This is amazing news indeed. Its has been feature talk with many of clients and colleagues all long for many years. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well. ...

November 12, 2010 Â· 2 min Â· 237 words Â· Omid Farhang