Google Chromebook

You Like the Web Don't You? Well you Are Reading this So Most Likely... Don't you Want a Laptop with 3G Support and doesn't have a battery that will die in an hour? Get a Chromebook!

Features:

A Quick Start is what Every Computer Needs, Well Anyway, there is this one that starts up in about Eight seconds. Yeah in that Eight Seconds, it Updates Also.

Samsung Model on Left, Acer on Right

Another one is That Chromebook's are Virus-free. They do not get Viruses.

All your data Is in the Cloud. So lets Say your Chromebook falls out of Your Arms. It breaks. You can just Log in with Another Chromebook, and then all your Data is Back to the Way it Should be.

In my Opinion, the Samsung looks Better than the Acer Chromebook. With the 3G Chromebook you get a Free 100 MB Plan with Verizon for 3G. Not Much Data, but enough to browse the web for a few minutes everyday. The Plan only Lasts for Two Years.

The Samsung Comes in Two Colors, white and black.

The Prices Currently Stand at:
(according to Amazon)
Acer WiFi - $349
Samsung WiFi - $399
Acer 3G - $429
Samsung 3G - $449

More Features of the Chromebook are Web Apps, that Don't Require Installation, No CD's. Some of them even work Offline.

Security is Weaved right into the Motherboard. Yup, those nasty Viruses can't get through the Power of the Chromebook!

You can Have Your own User Account! Keep your Data Safe, and Use the Guest Account for Non-Account Holders. All in a Snap!

Comes with Adobe Flash and Other Essentials in the Box! Those update Too Also. Don't Worry about Update Pop-ups Anymore with The Chromebook

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Google added features ‘Instant Previews’

Google search engine users will be able to enjoy a new feature that allows one to see a preview of search results. People can see the sites in the search results page before the pulled-click.

Features “Instant Preview” Google announced, Tuesday, November 9, 2010. These features are intended to help people see the websites that are relevant or irrelevant to their taste. This feature works for Google web search, and search for news, videos and local business.

After clicking the magnifying glass icon, people will see pictures of sites in the white space on the right of search results within a tenth of a second. Although the preview image will vary in size, as set out Google, the search engine to design the best possible preview of the display so it will not interfere with the overall display. Thus was launched FoxNews.

In addition, when users view images from a website, Google will include a visual preview of search results to another in the background so that users can compare your website with me rolling the cursor over the search results page.

This is a continuation of the Instant Search feature, which Google launched in September last. This feature helps users to get search results even if the user continues to type in the search box. Last week, Google also launched Google Instant for Google’s Android platform.

Google claims that five percent of users ‘Instant Preview of’ more likely to feel satisfied with the website of their choosing. Google will launch this feature in 40 languages over the next few days.

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The X-ray is 115 years old: latest Google Doodle

Google's latest Doodle is celebrating 115 years of X-ish technology. No, we don't mean X-Files or X-Men: we mean X-rays.

Google's Doodle

115 years ago, on Nov. 8, 1895, German physics professor Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays. As with many important discoveries, it was an accident.

Roentgen was experimenting with electron beams in a gas discharge tube when he discovered X-rays. He noticed that a fluorescent screen in his lab started to glow when the electron beam was turned on, which in and itself was surprising, as fluorescent material normally glows in reaction to electromagnetic radiation. However, the tube was surrounded by heavy black cardboard, which Roentgen assumed should have blocked most of the radiation.

Placing various objects between the tube and the fluorescent screen, it still glowed. When he placed his hand in front of the tube, not only did it continue to glow, but he saw the silhouette of his bones projected onto the fluorescent screen, thus producing the first set of skeletal X-ray images in history.

A week later, he took an X-ray photograph of his wife's hand, which clearly showed her wedding ring and her bones. Roentgen called the new radiation "X" to indicate it was an unknown type of radiation. Many of his colleagues suggested calling them Roentgen rays, but the name stuck.

In addition to celebrating 115 years of X-rays, according to Google exec Marissa Mayer, the small "g" in today's Google doodle is an homage to PigeonRank, a 2002 April Fool's joke at the company (look carefully; there's a bird skeleton in there).

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HTC Legend To Get Android 2.2 Update In The ‘Coming Weeks’

When Android 2.2 was released by Google, HTC had promised that most of their phones launched in 2010 will be getting the update. However, after that only the Desire Android 2.2 update was the most talked about. Now since the Desire Android 2.2 update has already been rolled out or is being rolled out in certain regions, the company has moved on to the small brother of the Desire – the Legend.

HTC Legend

HTC has confirmed via their Facebook account that they will be rolling out the Android 2.2 update for the Legend in the ‘coming weeks’. Owners of unbranded/unlocked Legend will be among the first one to get the update with operator locked owners getting the update once it has been approved by their carrier.

It’s nice to see HTC offering Android 2.2 update for the Legend. Being a Legend owner myself, I had almost given up hope of the phone getting the Froyo update.

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Google Voice suffering massive outage?

Our Inbox is flooded with complaints from frustrated Google Voice users who are unable to login to their accounts. Navigating to Google Voice via the browser simply yields a 502 error and trying to access GV from the ; the reports began to flow in about 30 minutes ago. Sound off Google Voice users. Is it working for you?

Google Voice

UPDATE: Google Voice seems to have just come back up. We’re not sure what caused the outage, but we’ve reached out to Google and will update this post with any response.
via bgr

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Google Instant Comes to iPhone and iPod Touch

The idea of Google Instant is simple – Show you the search result as you type. At that time, Google Instance is only available for desktop browser. But today, Google brings the Instant feature to mobile devices including iPhone, iPod touch and Android.

To try out Google Instant on iPhone or iPod touch, you’ll need to have iOS 4.0 or up. Simply point your mobile Safar to google.com and you’ll notice an option below the search box. Click “Turn On” to enable the Instant (beta) feature. Once Google Instant is activated, you’ll see an instant result as you type the search. While you are typing the search keyword, Google predicts your search and shows the possible keywords. You can also select any of the predictions to get the search result. This should save you a few keystokes and speed up your search.

As Google Instant is still in beta, it’s only available in the US. If you do not see the “Instant (beta)” option beneath the search box, make sure you point to the US version of Google.

According to Google, the Instant feature for mobile works best on 3G and WiFi network. So far I tried Google Instant on my home WiFi network and it works pretty good. In case you do not like Google Instant after your trial, you are free to disable it via the same “Instant (beta)” option beneath the search box.

To see Google Instant for Mobile in action, check out the official video (though it’s demonstrated on Android, not iPhone):


What do you think about Google Instant for mobile? Does it improve the speed of your search?

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US Government Sued By Google For Using Microsoft Products

Google has sued the US government for using only Microsoft products. According to Google, the Department of Interior is restricting competition by not considering alternatives like Google Apps. The complaint in this case is regarding a quotation by the department for its messaging needs. The DOI (Department of Interior) said that the solution should be a part of Microsoft’s BPOS suite since it offers unified and consolidated email along with better security.

Google contested these claims but were ignored by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) since they did not have a GSA contract. The GSA (General Services Administration) is an independent organization that helps with the functioning of the federal agencies.

The complaint filed by Google can be read on Scribd.

Google v US Complaint
Source: TechDirt

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How Google tackles Malware-Distribution

Its not easy to run world’s biggest Search engine, and yet make it robust against spams, malware. Everyday, Fabrice Jaubert and his team layouts new plans to conquer and kill malware from the web.

At a security conference, SecTor, Google malware researcher gave a rare peek inside the massive amounts of efforts of Google’s anti-malware and anti-phishing technologies. Google showcased stories of the attackers who make it their business to infect sites and exploit users. And what makes it worse is that users are adapting these blackhat/unethical tactics very quickly and creatively to combat the efforts of Google and other Internet giants.

The search giant has deployed a number of services and technologies recently that are designed to identify phishing sites as well as sites serving malware and prevent users from finding them. Among the biggest tools, the most powerful, yet simple, is Google SafeBrowsing API.

Safebrowsing API enables client applications to check URLs against Google’s constantly updated blacklists of suspected phishing and malware pages. The client application can use the API to download an encrypted table for local, client-side lookups of URLs that everyone would like to check.

• Warn users before clicking on links that appear in site when they lead to malware-infested pages.

• Prevent users from posting links to phishing pages from your site.

• Check a list of pages against Google’s lists of suspected phishing and malware pages.

These services help site owners and network administrators find and eliminate malware and the attendant bugs from their sites.

As Google crawls through the web, it identifies malware-distribution sites as well as legitimate sites that have been compromised with injected malicious code. One of the major reasons of adoption of such methodologies is to gain back-links by infecting relatively higher PageRank websites, in order to gain more traffic from search engines.

Malware-distribution sites are regualrly being watched by Google. Google has invested in a huge number of virtual machines running completely unpatched versions of Windows and Internet Explorer that they point at potentially malicious URLs. The data hence gathered is then tied up with that of automated crawlers which look for “malicious code” on “legitimate Web sites”. The combiantion of the two gives them full confidence in identifying the culprits.

Fabrice Jaubert, of Google’s anti-malware team, said, “the company does pretty well on identifying malware sites, fast enough. Still, about 1.5 percent of all search result pages on Google include links to at least one malware-distribution site”.

“There’s a lot of fluctuation in that over time, and that could be due to a lot of factors. It could be due to a change in the pages, it could be a change in our detection rate and also in the popularity of the infected pages,” Jaubert said. “The biggest factor is that we’ve found a substantial number of malware pages are spammy and have no content. We remove those pages. But it’s a cat-and-mouse game, just like viruses and AV. We go and find bad pages and they get better at hiding them.”

Source of Malware distribution

Its difficult to identify the source of a malware, however prevention helps everyone.

A major cause of this infection and distribution ecosystem is the huge population of unpatched Web servers having known vulnerabilites waiting to be exploited by various code injections.

Malicious code is often hidden in web markup components, and the most favorite one is the iFrames. Such code injections redirects users to another site where malware is installed on the victim’s machine via a drive-by download, or one of the other popular ways.

With time, these malware distributors are getting smarter and have changed their tactics for their own good. Among ewer methods, instead of redirecting, these malicious codes of iframes attempt on loading the malware on the compromised legitimate site and using the same site for malware distribution as well.

On a good front, its relatively easier to identify malware-infected, malware-distribution pages , making web-malware easier to tackle.

But that doesn’t mean that there is an end to web-malware. Despite all the efforts there’s a large set of secrets of web malware that are in the dark even for companies like google. Like Jaubert says ”We don’t understand all the details of this. We focus on the technical. There’s monetization aspects that we don’t have visibility into.”
(source)

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Google Hits a Technical Snag: Stops Updating its Index

It won’t be an exaggeration to claim that Google Search drives most of the world wide web. Look around, and you will see that Google is the biggest (often by a large margin) source of traffic for a majority of the websites. So what will happen if Google breaks? Just the thought alone is enough to scare me as a webmaster.

Thankfully, Google has performed with admirable reliability over the years. However, it’s not easy managing a beast that is Google. Little technical snags are bound to occur. And it appears that Google has just hit one. According to reports, Google has stopped indexing numerous blogs and even popular websites, over the past few days. In other words, new content from several websites have stopped appearing in Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed the there is a technical problem that is preventing Google from efficiently indexing some websites. Here’s the message he posted in one of the Google Webmaster Central discussions.

I just wanted to provide a short update. This issue should be resolved soon, but it will take a several days for everything to catch up and for these changes to be visible. I’ll provide another update after the weekend.

In the meantime, there’s no need to make any changes on your side. Content from your sites will continue to be indexed during this time (though perhaps at the moment not as quickly as before in some cases).

Mueller has also clarified that the problem is entirely technical and not due to a change in Google’s algorithm.

I’ve been in contact with the indexing and diagnostics teams since your initial reports — we are taking your reports seriously and doing what is necessary to resolve this problem as soon as possible. We love sending users to your sites quickly after you have published something too :-).

Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible (it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though). You do not need to change anything on your side and we will continue to crawl and index your content (perhaps not as quickly at the moment, but we hope that will be resolved for all sites soon). I would not recommend changing anything significantly at this moment (unless you spot obvious problems on your side), as these may result in other issues once this problem is resolved on our side.

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A Complete Guide on Getting Your Blog Indexed by Google within 24 Hours

A common problem faced by most of the bloggers is getting their blog indexed in Google or any other major search engines. If you’re blogging on Blogger-hosted blog, then you don’t have to worry about getting indexed in Google as all your entries or posts are shown in Google Search Results immediately at the instant time you hit the “Publish” button. But, it’s really frustrating for Self-hosted WordPress users and especially new blogger s who really have to do everything manually to be indexed in Google.
After creating your blog, just follow these simple steps and you’ll see your website in Search Engine Results within 24 hours for sure. (100% working)

Step #1: Install “All in One SEO pack plugin” for WordPress

This is the first thing that I’ve done immediately after migrating to WordPress. Installing the All in One SEO pack plugin. Although I do not have any basic knowledge/ experience of using WordPress before, I’ve read a lot of articles about the use of this great plugin which is really essential to every WordPress users. This plugin enables you to add post title, description, and keywords for every individual posts for better Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) and hence maximizes the chances of getting organic traffic from Google very soon after blog being launched.

Step #2: Add your site to Google Webmasters Tools

Log into Google Webmasters Tools with your Google account and add your blog/site by clicking the ‘Add a site‘ button. Then, type the domain name you wish to add, and click ‘Continue‘. You will have to verify your site using a META Tag. Copy it go to your WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > and paste the META tag in the ‘Additional Home Headers‘ at the bottom and ‘Update‘ the info. Then, click ‘Verify‘ on Google Webmaster Tools and you are done.

Step #3: Submit your Sitemap to Google

Install Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress. This plugin will generate a XML sitemap which you can submit to Google Webmasters Tools or any other search engines to better index your blog. Once you’ve activated it in your ‘Plugins‘ page, you’ll see a ‘XML-Sitemap‘ link under ‘Settings‘ menu. So, build your XML sitemap for the first time by clicking on “Rebuild Sitemap” button. So, your sitemap URL will be looking like this http://www.yourblogname.com/sitemap.xml or http://www.yourblogname.com/sitemap.xml.gz. So now, go to Google Webmasters > Site Configurations > Sitemaps > Click on ‘Add a sitemap‘ button. Now, type ‘sitemap.xml‘ in the text area box which comes after http://www.yourblogname.com/ and click “Submit” button. This great plugin will automatically update your sitemap every time you publish your post.

Step #4: Adding your site to Google Analytics

First, sign into Google Analytics using your Google Account. Then, you will have to add your Website’s URL, Contact information, accept User Agreements and finally you’ll be provided with a Tracking Code. Copy the code and go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearances > Editor > Footer.php and paste the code right above the tag. This step is important to track your visitors, traffic sources, page views and more.

Google Search in 24 hrs.

Step #5: Site Stats and Valuation sites

This is another simplest way to tell to Google that you page does exist. Usually, most of us have come across site valuation sites which tells you “How Much Does Your Site Worth?” These sites already have good place/rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. So, when you submit your site and check your site’s value there, it will automatically create a special page for your blog/website (like this, this and this ). This will help your site to easily get indexed by Google. Here is a list of such sites:

Alexa, About The Domain, Stat Brain, Stimator, BizInformation, Websiteoutlook, QuarkBase, Whois, Cubestat, BuiltWith, URLfan, SiteValueCheck, Business-Opportunities, NinjaWebsiteAppraiser, MyWebsiteWorth, Estimix  and etc.

Step #6: Social Networking and Bookmarking sites

Register an account with top Social Networking Sites such as Facebook ( Facebook fans page ), Twitter, Orkut and bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Delicious, and etc. As they have a good reputation in Google, they will make Googlebot to have a glance at your site. But, remember to use your site name like this www.facebook.com/yourblogname or twitter.com/yourblogname .

Step #7: Blog directories and communities

Add your blog to top directories such as Technorati, BlogCatalog, Bloggernity, GlobeofBlogs, Blogged, OnTopList and etc. This is the most easiest and effective way to get free quality back links from websites with higher Google page ranks.

Step #8: Link Exchanges

Link exchange is one of the ancient but effective way for people to get exposure to their website and get indexed. But usually, no body wants to exchange link with a blog with zero Google Page rank and no Alexa rank. Though, you can try to exchange link with your friends and peers who already have websites with good rankings or try free link exchange services such as Link Market where you can exchange links with other people.

So, if you’ve followed each and every step that I’ve mentioned above, I bet that your site/blog (at least your homepage if you’ve just started your blog) will be indexed in Google Search Engine results within 24 hours. Try to check for those links by typing “site:www.yourblogname.com” in Google Search. Good luck.

Source: Techbu

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2.3 to be next major Android release from Google?

If you thought you would have to wait until Android 3.0 to see the next major revision of Google’s mobile OS, think again. In an Android support thread, discussing an issue with Android 2.2 and WPA enterprise wireless networks, an anonymous Google employee let out a little bit of a bombshell. As the post reads:

Yes, Android 2.3 is a “major release”, and this patch will be available then.

The “patch” the Google employee is referring to is a fix to allow WPA EAP authentication that was, apparently, broken, committed to the Android repository, and pushed out with Android 2.2. Sounds good to us, but what do you think Android 2.3 is going to be called? Our vote: Pavlova.
[Via Android Central]
Read

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Google Groups Data to Be Made Inaccessible Early Next Year

Google Groups, whether useful or spamful has been used extensively by organizations for their internal communication. Even at our institute, loads of study material is shared on Google Groups and accessing it becomes easy and handy for all of us. Facilities like these have made a large number of people to turn to Google Groups to share content amongst groups.

However, if you have recently tried to make a new page in Google Groups, you might have seen the “notice about files and pages” that appears before you are allowed to proceed. The exact terms of the announcement stand as:

Starting in November 2010, Groups will no longer allow the creation or editing of files and pages; the content will only be available for viewing, and only existing files will be able to be downloaded. If you would like to keep the content currently on the pages and files sections of your group, we highly encourage you to export and migrate it to another product. In February 2011, we will turn off the pages and files features, and you will no longer be able to access that content.

In short, Google is forcing people to use its storage services like Google Docs to upload and maintain files online. The idea is clarified here:

We have decided to stop supporting the pages and files features. Even though we know discontinuing these features may inconvenience some of you in the short term, we believe that this move will improve your experience storing and sharing files as other products, such as Google Docs and Google Sites, are designed specifically for file storage and page creation.

This is a move by Google where it has made two things clear:

1. Google has a kill switch to all its free services.
2. Google wants us to use its services seriously and not find hacks and workarounds to use them in our desired way.

Bruce Eckel was prompt enough to notice this and write on it. Read his views here.
[via Techei-buzz]

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