Filipino Programmer | Philippines

To get a more relevant result using Google, you can use the Google Cheat Sheet this page contains helpful information on how use basic and advance operator to help you get the right results you are looking every time. You can print it or save it on you desktop for quick reference.

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Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. It allows developers to enhance their AJAX applications to be able to run even when their users are offline. Basically web applications using GEAR’s API will benefit from this feature. To be able to understand fully how this new product will help developer’s enhance their web application here’s a few sample GEAR driven demo sites provided by Google:
Note: You must install Google Gears to use these samples.

• Simple Database Demo
• Simple ResourceStore Demo
• Simple ManagedResourceStore Demo
• Simple WorkerPool Demo

For real world application Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.
LocalServer
- cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
Database
- store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
WorkerPool
- make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously
Currently Google Gear is supported on Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ browsers. A tutorial for enabling static files to work offline using Gears is provided. This will get you started working on how the API works.

Google Reader is one of Google’s Product which already uses Google Gear API, below are screenshots of Google Reader using Gear in action:

1. When signing-in on your Google Reader account, if Google Gear is already installed on your browser, you will see a pop-up screen, just accept it and let your Reader loads.

2. After the page loads a new icon is added on the upper right corner of your page, the small green button. This will enable you to download the articles locally.

3. When you click the green arrow button. It will now download all articles for offline viewing.

4. After downloading all file a screen will tell you all files are downloaded and you can switch to offline mode by turning off your Internet connection.

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Somebody might have heard of Google Calculator, somebody might not have. So for those who have not yet understand what I am talking about, I will give you a short introduction. Google Calculator, is a built-in calculator into the Google’s search engine, basic mathematical computations as well as advance calculations are translated and evaluated, if the expression is mathematically resolvable you will have a result right on top of the search result. There are a lot of ways to input formulas and expression, a basic example is:

49-19
123*200
567/5
79+149

You can also do a monetary conversion as follows:

500 US dollar to php
10000 yen to US dollar

Querying a constant value for example:

speed of light
pi
elementary charge

Those are a few sample of keywords you can use to activate Google Calculator. And see it in action. For a quick in-depth explanation of other expression possible. You can check Google Calculator.

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Wednesday, Google announced a major update of their search engine core, the upgrade boosts the search engine capability by bringing multi-media rich experience for end users and pointing an increased business with advertisers, Google’s top source of income.

Apparently this new update was not a shocker, because since last year a couple of blog sites reported new search result layout on Google. Here are some blog links.

www.baxtr.com/articles/2007/05/02/new-google-search-results-layout
www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/05/google-testing-new-search-results-layout/
beyondteck.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-got-updated.html
blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-01-26-n64.html

This is not new anymore since Google is known for testing new features of their applications on unsuspecting users. Here I will list a few major changes I noticed on Google’s Universal Search.

1. Layout

This is the top result layout

Google added a related link of their added services just below the Google logo. The system will automatically decide which Google service might be of interest based on the search criteria the user is looking for (Google called this bar Universal Navigation). Also notice the “definition” link right beside the search text on the upper right corner which displays the result statistics? It is a link to www.answers.com.

This is a recently screenshot taken (05/17/2007 13:05) Tokyo Time. Looks like Google just added a menu bar on top of their home page representing all of their free services.

This is the bottom result layout

On the bottom part of the search result page, you will easily notice the “Searches related to:” section. Again this is automated by Google to provide you with wider choices of related search criteria.
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Google has announced that they will upgrade Google Analytics (GA) users to the new version. The new interface introduces a neat and informative dashboard which have new graphs, data summaries and improved trending analyses complement navigational clarity and intuitive connections among related data.

Graph points are much easier to click to drill down reports in greater detail. In addition to the new user interface, new key features have been added, such as email reports functionality, exporting into PDF, and geo-map drill down to zoom into certain location.There have been no changes to the amount of data that is tracked by Google Analytics, or to the configuration of your account. This is solely a reporting interface change. Every function currently available in Google Analytics should be available in the new interface. In fact, there will be more features and the new product will be even more powerful, including emailing reports and PDF download.
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