Tag Archives: Community

What is “Sort by Magic” in Google Reader?

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If you are a Google reader addict, then you must have observed “sort by magic” setting for individual feeds or folders. And if you haven’t, then it is time to find out. This magical option lets you discover new items and personalize your reading habits. You can find it under “feed settings” at the top of any feed.

What does this “Sort by magic” actually do?

Option to sort magically in feed settings

In simple terms, it ranks the feed items according to your likeness. The more prominent question here is – how does it know your likeness?

The answer is your past activities inside reader.

Over a long period of time, if you have allowed Google to collect your history, it knows what fields you are interested in and recommends you the same in explore section. (Delete Google history)

Find whats traling on internet of your interest.

Similarly, your activities like which feeds you check the most and which you haven’t touched help reader decide feed rankings when sorted by magic.

Sometimes the results aren’t aren’t up to expectations. To utilize full power of Google’s magic algorithm, you will have to Like and Share few posts. Then only it will understand your likeness and interests.

When to use “Sort by magic”?

This option can be used in situations with strict time restrictions or for a gazing over your favourite feeds. Alternatively, its very useful for finding your loved feed items from mammoth “All items” view . Magical sorting will predicatively show items of your interest. Finally, the like button has a purpose in GReader.

Sort by magic is not based on date/freshness of feeds but on your interest. The list is automatically sorted with your best feed items at top and dull ones at bottom.

Related: Delete Google search History from browser, toolbar and desktop search.

How to Remove Websites from Tabs in Chrome Homepage

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Gtricks mobile interface beta is live at http://m.gtricks.com. Its about 7kb size page, so you can easily check of any updates through mobile conveniently.

Recently, when we covered 5 tab extensions to fancify chrome some readers mailed me, asking how to open blank tabs for privacy concerns? That is, they wanted to remove or hide most visited or recently closed websites from chrome’s new tab page.

Normally, when we open new tab in Google chrome, home page speed dial similar to opera displays most visited sites. Under normal circumstances, this is pretty useful as it provides facility to go to our favorite site with a single click. But sometimes, this is not at all favourable, especially when you want to hide your activities. At office or in home there are some situations when you don’t want to publicly display your recent visits for privacy reasons.

Possible solutions for this problem include - using incognito mode or removing website thumbnail from list. But this isn’t permanent solution for this recurring problem. Let’s discuss 2 potential solutions for this:

Temporary Hide Frequently Top Visited Web Pages

This one is simple, infact inbuilt in Chrome so you don’t have to download anything. All you need to do is click on Change Page Layout button and uncheck most visited and recently closed sites. Check out below image for instructions.

Permanently hide Thumbnails from New Tab

You can remove site thumbnails/images from chrome new page by clearing all your history. For this go to Options > Under the hood > Clear browsing data. Now to permanently stop these thumbnails from coming back, install Blank New Tab Extension. This extension forces chrome to open about:blank in new tab i.e. blank page.

Now you can easily hide all those commonly visiting sites by above two methods. Here is a short video for the same:

Turn Off ‘People You Follow’ or Your Buzz Followers in Google Reader

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Google Reader provides a nifty feature for sharing content with your friends or your buzz followers. All you need to do is click on share button, and it gets automatically posted to Buzz and to your shared Greader page.

google-reader-no-people-you-follow

So far it’s good, but sometimes this social feature may seem superfluous. It can distract you and can put you in unnecessary conversations. Also, for a better looking Greader, you can easily turn this off.

Turn Off “People You Follow”

To disable this social feature, go to Google reader and type the below JavaScript code in your address bar :

javascript:antisocial ('true')

Hit Enter key and you are done. Greader will reload with no ‘People You Follow’ section.

If you want this back, simply copy-paste the below JavaScript and hit enter –

javascript:antisocial('false')

Once turned-off, the setting will be saved in your account. That means until you enable it again, there will be no more social features in your Google Reader account.

(via GOS)

How to Add Your Name or Image in Google Search

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Many of us often search for our own names in Google search. This is called as ego surfing i.e. searching for yourself. But, there is nothing more disappointing than finding other people or irrelevant results on searching for our name.

If you want your name and other information in Google results, then there are several ways to do it. The question is, why one would want his name in Google? Well, so that when someone searches for your name, they find correct person and not the wrong information that can damage your reputation. Let’s us looks at some of ways to get your name in Google:

The Sure Shot Way to Be on Google’s First Page

Google is all about quality searching. So, for securing first spot in Google search results for your name, all you have to do is create a quality website or blog. Ensure that the website is original, has quality and relevant content that involves your name or relate to you. A website/blog with your name or atleast your name in title is a guaranteed way to get in Google results.

Once, you are done with your website, submit it to Google. So that whenever someone searches for you, they get only the information that you want to reveal via your website.

Though, making website by your name can prove to be a costly affair, there are several services that gives you this facility for free. You can make free blogs or sites using following services:

Get Social Media profiles on Google Results
If you want a profile listing that lists your activities, communities and friends, then you can use Social Media Profiles. They are easy to make plus it’s free. With following ways you can publicly list your profiles or accounts:

  • Create Google Profiles – The easiest way to get yourself known on internet is via Google profiles. Create one, get it verified, open it for search engines and hurray, your name is on internet. Check out mine here; You can also follow if you like.
  • Make Twitter Account – By default, twitter is public i.e. Google shows Twitter accounts in search results. So, all you need to do is make a twitter profile with your real name as user name. Now, others can gather little information about you from Google search. For example, When I search for my name – Abhishek Mandloi on Google, twitter makes the first result. (Follow Gtricks at Twitter)
  • Make Facebook Profile public – You can open your facebook profile so that it could list in Google search results. You can also set whether, anonymous user can view your full profile or limited one from settings page. For example, When I search for my full name – Abhishek Singh Mandloi on Google, facebook makes the first result.
  • Allow Orkut to appear in Google results – Even though this feature is not yet active, but Google can open Orkut profiles to appear in Google search listing in future. You can set this preference from Orkut settings page.

So, this is it folks. I am sure, with some hard work you can easily get your name on Google.

Google Script Converter: When You Can Speak But Not Read

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Google Labs have come up with new tool – the script converter. With this tool you can read text in any script you want. That means, if you can understand spoken Hindi but not read it, this tool will convert text or website of Hindi web-pages in English (Roman) script. For example, the hindibaat blog, when converted with this tool makes a fine English script or Roman Hindi blog.

Script Converter Logo

In other words, this tool changes web pages phonetically. So, it doesn’t translate the text, but only script gets changed. Script Converter supports Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. Along with these Indian scripts, it also support English, Greek, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu.

How to use Google’s Script Converter

Simply head over to http://scriptconv.googlelabs.com/ and enter the text or website address you want to convert. Select your desired language and click convert. Keep in mind that it might not work with all websites. Mainly the ones that requires cookies or uses complex JavaScript.

Since, it is an online tool; you don’t have to download anything. With its help you can start reading many new blogs of your interest. Try it now here.

Google India Product Shopping Tool for Finding Latest Prices

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Google India has come up with a new shopping tool, which finds the best deals and latest prices for Indian consumer products. This can be looked and Indian version of unpopular Google Product Search Engine.

This tool will search 30,000+ Indian internet sites before presenting you the required information. Typically, it will show price, images and brief description about the searched product. It’s difficult to understand the ranking of products. Probably, products are listed on basis of site authority and freshness that means this tool can be used to find lowest and latest price.

google-india-product-tool

How to Find Latest Prices from Google Shopping Tool
*Note: This tool works only for Google India.

Step 1: Type any electronic, consumer or household product name. More specific you are, the better are the results.
Step 2: Go to ‘Show Options’ and select ‘Shopping’ from results section.
Step 3: To find latest price of product, include brand name along with device name. For example Nokia N97.
Step 4: To find products between specific price range, enter the INR amount in ‘From’ and ‘To’ Boxes.

5 Advantages of this Shopping Tool :
- To find latest price.
- To get price comparisons between different sellers or sites.
- For superficial description and comparisons between different brands.
- To find suitable items within a definite price range.
- And use it as the starting point of your shopping research.

So, whenever in doubt or just wanted to enquire the fresh and latest price, head over to this amazing tool. And its pretty good for basic shopping research too.

Google India Essay Competition ‘Hain Baaton Mein Dum’ Winner Announced

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This week, Google India had announced winners for its essay competition ‘Hain Baaton Mein Dum’ held in association with LiveHisdustan.com. Applicants had to write essays/poems in hindi between 100-1000 words under 5 different categories. The contest has ended on 15th February 2010.

Google Essay Competition

The winners with their entries under various categories are :

CategoryWinnerEntry
Entertainment, culture and literatureVineet Shuklaराम और बाली संवाद
TravelMayank Aroraमेट्रो – मंज़िल अब दूर नहीं |
SportsHarsh Vardhan Harsh“खेल-क्रान्ति” के इन्तजार में हमारा भारत देश।
HealthArvind Dubeyखतरे में हैं आधी दुनिया के हकदार
Social, economic and political issuesDileep tiwariसड़क..



Congratulations to all the winners. They will be receiving laptops gift vouchers, free internet connections and Google t-shirts soon.

PS: Dileep Tiwari is my colleague from Infosys and he had already received his HP laptop. Best wishes to him for his sensitive poem.

Youtube for HTML5 Videos

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Now since every modern browser is supporting HTML5, YouTube has started to deliver experimental videos with HTML5 player. Speciality of HTML5 player is that you won’t need any adobe flash player plugin to view these videos. Let us look at some of pros and cons of HTML5 Videos:

Pros with HTML5 videos:

  • The biggest advantage is that you don’t need to install adobe flash player or Microsoft Silverlight plugin. That means faster and light-weighted browser with less crashes.
  • Videos will act like animated images. That means you can style them just like images.
  • Videos loads quickly than traditional flash videos.
  • Watch videos with h.264 encoding

Pros with HTML5 videos:

  • Not every browser is supported. Only Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame supports this latest format.
  • It doesn’t work with videos that have advertising, captions, or annotations.

Great news is that Firefox 3.6 is launched today with major updates. Unfortunately, Firefox 3.6 doesn’t currently work with the experimental HTML5 video player.

You can start viewing HTML5 videos by joining this experiment. If you have already joined any other testtube experiments, you may not get the HTML5 player, though it works perfectly with light-weight Feather.

Disable HTML5 on Youtube
HTML5 is disabled by default in Youtube. However, if you have accidently turned it ON, then you can disable it by going to Youtube.com/html5 page. Here, you need to leave the experiment, which will then instruct youtube to show only flash based videos and not the HTML5 ones.