Keyboard Shortcuts for Google+ Notifications

The Google+ notifications box has a few keyboard shortcuts you might find helpful. Here are some of them:* up/down arrow keys help you select a notification from the list. Notice the blue line, which shows the currently selected notification. After opening a notification, use the same arrow keys to scroll.* Enter (Return for Mac) opens the notification you've selected. You can also use o* press the down arrow key after the last notification and then...

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Google's Festive Decorations

Google shows a lot of festive doodles, Easter Eggs and special decoration. Here are some of them:- The Thanksgiving doodle is actually a videoHere's the video:"Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year."- Mr. Jingles is hungryHere's the animation:- Hanukkah search resultsHere's the mobile Safari version:... and the...

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Google Health Cards

When you search for [causes of multiple sclerosis], [causes of hiccups], [symptoms of the flu], [how to treat iron deficiency] and other similar health-related queries, Google shows snippets from authoritative sites like WebMD and MayoClinic. Sometimes Google also shows instant answers, but they're not always accurate.{ Thanks, Sunite....

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YouTube Tweaks Experimental Center-Aligned UI

YouTube continues to tweak the center-aligned UI experiment. The latest version includes a new upload button, a refined guide sidebar with new icons and "more" drop-downs for playlists and subscriptions, a list of recommended channels and probably other features.The "guide" sidebar is displayed by default only if there's enough room. If there isn't, the sidebar is hidden and you need to click "guide" to see your playlists, subscriptions, video history...

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YouTube's Player, Back to Simple Buttons?

Back in September, YouTube's player grouped controls for annotations, player size and video quality. A few weeks ago, the "large player" button has been removed from the drop-down and brought back to its original position, next to the "full screen" button.If the video doesn't have annotations and you use the Flash player, you'll even see the video quality drop-down without an additional cli...

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Chromecast Button in Google Play Store

Sometimes you have to go back to basics, create something simple that works and constantly improve it. That's how Google Search, Gmail, Chrome and other Google products became successful. Google TV tried to solve too many problems and ended up with complicated remote controls, buggy software, browsers with blocked content, unhappy partners and disappointed users.Google Cast and Chromecast try to solve fewer problems and are much more limited. Apps...

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New Interface for Google's Account Permissions Page

Google's account permissions page has a new interface which does a better job at listing the permissions, shows bigger thumbnails and the date when you authorized a service."On the Account Permissions tab of your Google Account, you can see a list of third-party sites and applications. These are sites and applications to which you've granted permission to access your Google Account, and you can see on this list to what parts of your account they...

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Move Gmail Attachments to Google Drive, Save Space

Mail services are inefficient when it comes to storing files because of the MIME encoding overhead. "This encoded size is the actual size of the message as it travels over the Internet and is always larger than the raw size because of the MIME overhead and because binary attachments are generally encoded using base64 encoding.  Base64-encoded files are usually about 137% the size of the original files," says Erik Kangas.If you want to use...

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Gmail's Google+ Interstitial

Google works hard to convince people to join Google+. I went to Gmail, signed in using an account that hasn't switched to Google+ and got this interstitial page (the URL starts with "https://plus.google.com/up/accounts/inter"):"Update your account. Create a public Google+ profile and get great new features in Gmail."You only have to check "I understand the changes to Picasa Web Albums when I create a profile" and click "Update and continue to Gmail"....

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Google Image Search's Loading Animation

Google Image Search shows an animation below the search result's thumbnail while the original image is downloaded. As you probably noticed, Google first shows the thumbnail, which is already loaded as part of the search results page, then it replaces the thumbnail with the full-size image when you click a result.Update: This is not a new feature. Thanks, +Sushubh Mittal.The animation is especially useful for large images, since you may...

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OK Google in Desktop Chrome

Google Voice Search works in Chrome for desktop, not only in Android and iOS. Just click the microphone icon from the search box and you can tell Google what do you want to know, assuming that you have a microphone.Now you can bypass the microphone icon and use the hotword "OK Google" when you're using Google search or the new tab page. You need to install this extension first."Chrome will listen for you to say 'Ok Google' and then send the sound...

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Google Knowledge Graph Gets Confused

Google has a lot of clever algorithms that detect so many things automatically. Some of these algorithms extract facts from webpages and add them to the Knowledge Graph.Here's a baffling example which shows that Google's algorithms aren't always so smart. When you search for [Robert Greene], Google shows some information about an American author who was born in 1959 and died in... 1592. Google confused Robert Greene, the American author,...

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Chrome's Predictors Page

Chrome has a lot of fascinating features you'll probably never use. Tony Hirst spotted one: open a new tab, type chrome://predictors in the omnibox and press Enter. This page shows some cool stats about the characters you've typed in the omnibox and the URLs you've selected.For example, if you usually type "y", Chrome autocompletes the URL to youtube.com and you press Enter, you'll find this association in the table. There are also 3 values: hit...

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More About Gmail's New Attachment UI

After more than a week of waiting, I got the new interface for Gmail attachments and it's much better than I expected. Most of the features from the old interface are still available, but there are some new Google Drive features that improve the user experience.Here are some of my favorite features:1. Thumbnails - they're displayed for many files, not just for photos. They help you distinguish between attachments and they're especially useful for...

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Pegman's Return and the Full-Screen Google Maps

I posted about Pegman's return to Google Maps two weeks ago, but I only got the update today. Sometimes it takes a few weeks until Google rolls out new features, sometimes it takes months (Gmail's pay button is an example).While Pegman's return is a good news, the most striking thing about the latest Google Maps update is that the black bar has disappeared and the new navigation is placed on top of the map. The settings and help buttons have been...

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YouTube Easter Egg for Doge Meme

"Doge is a slang term for 'dog' that is primarily associated with pictures of Shiba Inus (nicknamed 'Shibe') and internal monologue captions on Tumblr. These photos may be photoshopped to change the dog's face or captioned with interior monologues in Comic Sans font," informs KnowYourMeme.YouTube has an Easter Egg that changes the search results page for [doge meme]: colorful text, Comic Sans, much wow, so hip, help plz.{ via Phandroid, thanks Sushubh...

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YouTube's Follow Back in Google+

Emanuele Bartolomucci spotted a new YouTube feature: when you're watching a video from a channel associated with a page that follows you in Google+, you get this message: "X added you on Google+. Follow back for exclusive updates!"I wasn't able to trigger this feature, so it's probably an experiment. It's also a sign that YouTube will integrate more with Google+.{ Thanks, Emanuele....

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New Interface for Google+ Notifications

Google+ notifications have a new interface: there's a "previously read" section, just like in the Google+ app for Android, and there are some new transitions that mimic scrolling down.The previously read notifications are no longer displayed below the Jingles icon, so you need to click "previously read" to see them. The notifications box is less cluttered and you can still read all your notifications.Here's a GIF that shows some of the new animations:{...

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