Mar 31, 2013 at 3:17pm ET by Matt McGee

April Fool's Day is pretty much like a national ... err, international holiday for everyone that works for Google. It seems that nobody else on the Web takes the tradition of pranks and jokes as seriously as Google does -- just see our coverage from the last few April Fool's Days for proof: Google's Gags Go Worldwide For April Fool's Day 2012 It's Over: Google Has Already Won April Fools Day 2011 Google Books, Google Maps Get 3D View – But Only For April Fool's Day April Fools' Day 2009: Google CADIE & More From Search Industry It may still be March 31st for me, and maybe [...]

Google Widens Gmail Search Field Trial, Includes Google Drive In Search Results

Oct 15, 2012 at 7:50pm ET by Matt McGee

Here's another small step in Google's effort to centralize your Google search activity: The company is expanding a field trial to include Google Drive documents in search results. At the same time, the existing trial that includes Gmail information in search results is being expanded to work not only from Google.com, but also within Gmail itself. Users who opt-in to the trial will be shown a prompt from Gmail and/or Google Drive in the right column of Google's search results, as shown in this Google screenshot: For privacy reasons, the actual results don't show by default; the use [...]

Turnabout Is Fair Play: Google Sues The Feds For Not Considering Its Office Alternative

Nov 1, 2010 at 2:04pm ET by Greg Sterling

Google has been on the receiving end of several investigations and complaints from US government agencies. Now Google is taking the offensive and is suing one of them, the Department of Interior in this case, for reportedly not considering Google Apps and only considering Microsoft software in a recent agency procurement round for its 88,000 employees. The complaint alleges that Google unsuccessfully tried to engage the Interior Department in discussions surrounding consideration of Google Apps. However, the agency later put at a request for quote (RFQ) that apparently specified only the Mi [...]

Search Old Scanned Documents By Uploading Them To Google Docs

Jun 23, 2010 at 9:12am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Docs Blog announced you can now upload old scanned documents into Google Docs and Google will OCR the documents. OCR will convert the text scans from a picture into selectable and searchable text within Google Docs, which you can then export to a multitude of file types. Back in October, Google would OCR web documents that were scans and make those searchable. But there was no easy way for a normal user to scan in their own document and have Google OCR it outside of using the Google API. Now anyone can go to Google Docs, click upload and have Google convert the scans to text f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Docs & Spreadsheets

Google Reportedly Not Allowing Windows OS On Computers

Jun 1, 2010 at 8:41am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google ditches Windows on security concerns from the Financial Times reports that Google is no longer installing Windows on Google owned computers. In fact, the report says that no desktop is allowed to have Windows and only under special circumstances will Google allow Windows OS on a laptop. The report cites security as the main reason for Google banning Windows. The migration off of Windows reportedly started in January, after the Google was hacked by China. Google has not yet confirmed these reports. One Google employee told the Financial Times, "getting a new Windows machine now [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Docs & Spreadsheets

Google Apps Marketplace Opens For B2Business

Mar 10, 2010 at 5:29am ET by Greg Sterling

Taking a page from Salesforce.com, last night Google formally launched the anticipated Google Apps Marketplace at its "Campfire One" developer event. In short it allows companies and developers to gain access and sell into Google's "2 million businesses and 25 million Google Apps users." The marketplace launches with 50 partners including Intuit and competitor Zoho. Google controls billing for paid apps and gets a 20 percent cut of the revenue. All of the apps will potentially integrate with existing Google tools and services. According to the Google Blog: Once installed to a company's dom [...]

Can Google Kill Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6?

Feb 1, 2010 at 8:42am ET by Barry Schwartz

On Friday afternoon, Google announced they will be discontinuing their support for "very old browsers." They said, they will stop supporting Internet Explorer 6, commonly referred to as IE6, on many of their applications. Starting on March 1st, Google Docs and Google Sites will no longer be officially supported on IE6. Google said: Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google [...]

After The Hack, Should I Still Trust Google & The Cloud With My Data?

Jan 14, 2010 at 5:54am ET by Danny Sullivan

Over the past year, I've moved more and more of my data over to the cloud -- in particular, to being stored with Google. I'm rethinking that, in the wake of Google's statement that it was the target of a sophisticated hacking attack. Further, I'm wondering if this entire episode -- GoogleHack, for want of a better name -- will develop into a major reversal for the growth of cloud computing. Living In The Cloud For those not up on the term, "cloud computing" is a reference to the idea that your programs and data live on the internet rather than on your computer. Need to write a letter? Yo [...]

Google Docs Adds Files Storage, AKA GDrive

Jan 12, 2010 at 3:19pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Docs blog announced a new feature that allows you to upload files and share those files with friends, co-workers and colleagues. Google is limiting the file upload to 250 MB per file, with a maximum total of 1 GB of free storage. Of course, you can always buy more storage at any time, if needed. Over the years, there have been many rumors of the GDrive. We actually covered these rumors several times in 2007, but nothing really came about on this topic back then. For more details on how to use this new feature, see the help section at the Google Docs site. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Docs & Spreadsheets

Liveblogging The Google Chrome OS Press Conference

Nov 19, 2009 at 12:52pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Something's up with Google's Chrome operating system. Don't know what, but we'll all know soon as a press conference begins at 10AM Pacific. I'm coming at your live from the Googleplex. Buckle up, and we'll see what's happening. You can also watch from home. Webcast info is here. There will also be related coverage developing at Techmeme, including news the Chrome OS source code is now apparently live. as Google's Matt Cutts has tweeted. And we start. Sundar Pichai says not launching today. A year away from that but have made constant progress and will show demo of what they've got s [...]

Google Search’s View PDF Link May Go To Google Docs

Jul 8, 2009 at 9:36am ET by Barry Schwartz

Typically, when Google shows a PDF document in the Google search results, you see a link to "view as HTML," in the snippet. Here is a picture of what you see most of the time: Now, it appears Google is showing a link that reads just "View" and links you to the PDF within a Google Docs view. Please note that this happens on some PDFs and not all. Here is a picture of that: When you click on "View" it takes you to Google Docs. For example, for the search [triangle heights concurrency] you can see the View link and when you click on it, you are taken here, to Google Docs. Hat [...]

Google Wants The Web To Go Faster

Jun 23, 2009 at 7:37pm ET by Greg Sterling

Google wants to make the internet faster. By speeding up the "most important computing platform of our time," Google believes that consumers and businesses will experience a wide range of benefits, many of which we can imagine, some of which might be revealed over time. There's no product or specific consumer offering here. Rather Google is trying to advocate multiple initiatives in parallel that the company believes are important to usher in a better, faster internet (including for mobile devices). This Google Code Blog post lays out the arguments and suggestions as does the video below: [...]

New Privacy Complaint Filed Against Google (And The Cloud)

Mar 18, 2009 at 7:13am ET by Greg Sterling

Yet another privacy complaint has been filed against Google with the FTC, this time by the Electronic Privacy Information Center over Google's cloud computing services and related privacy and data security issues. While Google is the named party, the company is basically the stand-in for "the cloud" as a whole. (If you want to read the complaint, you can download it here [.pdf].) Here's the thrust of the complaint: EPIC hereby petitions the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google’s Cloud Computing Services, to determine the adequacy of the privacy and security safeg [...]

Google Docs Bug Shares Your Documents Without Permission

Mar 9, 2009 at 9:21am ET by Barry Schwartz

Over the weekend a confirmed Google Docs bug may have shared your private Google Documents with others, without your permission. Google said this "affected less than 0.05% of all documents." What exactly happened? "The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document," Google said. Google then unshared those documents automatically and then "emailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them." In the mean time, data that could have been sha [...]

Google’s Recent Bugs: SMS Spam, Safe Filter Stuck, News Fonts & Google Docs Spam

Feb 3, 2009 at 9:53am ET by Barry Schwartz

In the past day or so, I have spotted at least four somewhat major bugs with Google's various products. They include Google sending dozens of unwanted SMS messages to thousands of users, Google's safe filter not working properly, Google News using an unusually large font size and Google Docs has a major spam issue as well. Besides all of these issues, don't forget about the huge malware issue with Google over the weekend. Last night, for a period of four hours, Google was sending dozens and dozens of SMS messages to users over and over again. There are hundreds of complaints in the Googl [...]

Google Ends Google Video Uploads, Shutters Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball & Jaiku

Jan 14, 2009 at 9:41pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google's announced they're closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor. Google's written officially about the closures and changes in these posts: Turning Down Uploads at Google Video Farewell, Google Catalog Search Stopping development on Google Notebook Changes for Jaiku and Farewell [...]

Google’s Hal Varian Expounds The Virtues Of ‘Data Democratization’

Sep 22, 2008 at 6:36pm ET by Greg Sterling

Hal Varian is a UC Berkeley economics professor now on leave at Google as its Chief Economist. In that latter capacity Varian waxes poetic on the Google Blog about the "democratization of data" in the internet era. The essence of his post is that volumes of relevant data, and tools to analyze and make sense of it, were historically available only to large enterprises at great cost. Now small businesses can get in on the act -- and for little or nothing -- because of the Internet and a range of Google services. He's absolutely correct at one level. But if the post was less a pitch there migh [...]

Google Sites Launches: Replaces Jotspot With Team Sharing Software

Feb 28, 2008 at 10:27am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google launched Google Sites, basically a relaunch of Jotspot but with many more features. In short, this new software allows teams to share much like you could with Microsoft's SharePoint. Google sites offers users five templates, as TechCrunch explains: Standard WikiDashboard where Google Gadgets can be embeddedBlog-like template for announcementsA file cabinet for file uploadsA page for lists of items Google Sites is free for all users, with a limited space of 10GB and limited support. Upgrading to Google Apps Premium gives you more support, storage, and administrative features. Goog [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Docs & Spreadsheets

Google Docs Releases New Presentation Features

Jan 5, 2008 at 11:19pm ET by Vanessa Fox

The Google Docs blog has announced new features for the Google Docs suite of tools. You can now create subfolders to more easily organize your documents and can rename documents and folders from the toolbar (previously, you could only do this from the File menu). The toolbar has also been spiffed up. In addition, Google has launched several new features for Google Presentations, including the ability to embed presentations into a page of any site. More details on the Presentations features below. With this launch, Google Presentations has gotten a number of new features. Embed a presen [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Docs & Spreadsheets

If You Know About Google Docs, You’re In The Minority

Dec 18, 2007 at 9:03am ET by Greg Sterling

According to a new survey of 600 "PC users" (and see here) by the NPD Group, 73 percent of Americans have "never heard of, never tried" web-based productivity software replacements for Microsoft Office. Roughly 21 percent have heard of but still never tried these alternatives, which include Google Docs and Zoho. A tiny minority comprising 2.5 percent have tried and used these tools to varying degrees. It would thus seem that Microsoft Office has nothing to worry about for the time being. (New York Times writer Damon Darlin tried Google Docs for a month and writes favorably about the experien [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Docs & Spreadsheets

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 7-8 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014
SMX Toronto - March 2014

EMEA

SMX London - May 15-16, 2013
SMX Paris - June 6-7, 2013
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Novemeber 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - January 2014
SMX Munich - April 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.