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TumblrCreated by Philip Norton
Welcome back!
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Google’s advanced search page contrasts with the simplicity of the homepage and the search results pages. Most people don’t even notice the small link placed next to the search box and those who click on it find the page too confusing. Google’s Daniel Russell said that 50% of the people who open the advanced search page leave it without completing the search. This is not surprising if you look at the page: you can choose the language of the search results, the formats, the usage rights, but also add numeric ranges and negative keywords to a query. The most useful features can also be accessed using operators, while the others aren’t grouped intuitively. Other issues with Google’s advanced search page: the search button is not placed at the bottom and the generated URL is unnecessarily long as it contains all the parameters.
According to some reports, the page has been redesigned and it now hides some of the obscure features inside a plusbox, while offering tips and a preview of the query:
The update is still being tested and it’s likely you don’t see it yet at: google.com/advanced_search.
For the time being, I suggest to use the advanced search for the option hidden in the expandable box (date, keyword location), while using the search operators for the other options. Some example of queries that use operators:
* paris -hilton site:edu (all the pages that contain Paris, but not Hilton and are from .edu sites)
* “women’s rights” site:en.wikipedia.org (all the pages from Wikipedia that contain the exact text “women’s rights”)
* shakespeare inurl:hamlet filetype:pdf (all PDF results that contain Shakespeare and have Hamlet in the URL)
For the average user, the new page is more approachable, but Google’s challenge is to provide good results even if you don’t refine the query using operators and advanced operators.
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One of the most popular requests for Google Calendar was synchronization with mobile devices and Outlook. After launching a sync tool for Blackberries, Google Calendar now offers a small utility for synchronizing events with Outlook.
By default the synchronization is bi-directional, but you can change this when you install the utility or from the options dialog. The only significant drawback is that you can only synchronize your main Google Calendar, but a future update should remove this limitation.
Google installs a small program that loads at start-up and sits on your system tray, while waiting for the next synchronization (the default sync interval is 2 hours). After synchronizing your calendar with Outlook, you can access it offline and synchronize it with your mobile phone.
It’s worth noting that Google’s new tool works with Google Apps accounts and it’s another step towards making Google Apps more business-friendly.
{ spotted by Google Blogoscoped }
Labels: Google Calendar
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by
Google Docs updated the toolbar in the word processing and the presentation apps,
removing some of the buttons (copy/cut/paste), adding buttons for
saving, printing, spell checking and showing the font name and its
size. The updated toolbar is closer to the one from Writely and from
office suites like Microsoft Office.
Some explanations directly from the source:
There is no longer “Save”, “Save & close” and “Discard changes” on the
far right of your doc. We’ve removed “Save & close” and “Discard
changes” and moved “Save” to the far left on the editor toolbar as an
icon. The icon is a floppy disk. Writely does auto save, so it’s not
necessary to save manually.Spell check is now located on the
right side of your toolbar as an “abc” icon with a check mark through
it. Also, when you’re spell checking a doc and you want to stop, you
can just simply click on the icon.As you create your docs, you
may use different text sizes, fonts and colors as well as different
highlight colors throughout. You’ll notice now that when navigating to
different parts of your doc, you’ll be shown exactly which text size,
etc. that particular part of the doc is in, by referring to the
different menus on the toolbar. This functionality allows you to easily
identify the properties of the text within your doc.
It’sstrange to see Google removing the buttons for some of the most
frequently used commands (copy/cut/paste). Due to some security
restrictions, Firefox doesn’t allow web sites to read your system’s
clipboard or to overwrite it, so you had to make an exception for Google Docs.
Hopefully,the new toolbar will be added to all the apps that use a rich text
editor (Gmail, Google Spreadsheets etc.) to create a consistent user
interface.
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