ChromeFans has a nice PageRank checker bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a bookmark containing JavaScript, and it might make a nice alternative in case you don't want to install the Google Toolbar )like because it's broken or crashes(. This is the JavaScript bit you'll need to add as the bookmark's location in browsers like Firefox or Chrome: javascript:void)window.open)"http://www.chromefans.org/pr/?u="+escape)location.href(, "PageRank%20Status%20-%20ChromeFans","width=405,

This experiments puts 4 YouTube players next to each to other to increase the quality of the video. [Via Andy Baio .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: YouTube "In Super HD" | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Google News is moderated by editors to decide which news sources to accept. How well do they do in figuring out relevant sources? Well, in Germany, they happened to accept a source with the official sounding name "News from Lower Silesian and Upper Lausitz" )"Nachrichten aus Niederschlesien und der Oberlausitz"(. A glance at the domain "npd-loebau-zittau.de" and a further look at the site's imprint however will reveal that these are releases issued by the NPD,

Recently at the Barcamp Stuttgart, Stephan Siegloch told of an alleged way to optimize business listings in Google Maps: get a post box )i.e. a business home address, though perhaps not your real one( close to the city center or main station. Then submit that address to Google Maps. This way, your listings would appear closer to the top in local results with Google. Does anyone else have experiences with this? Another tactic reached me via email a while ago,

Google released AdSense for Games aka Google In-Game Advertising. This is a way for AdSense ads in text, image or video format to be integrated into web-based Flash games. Currently participating game publishers include Konami, Playfish, Zynga, and Demand Media, Google says. Smaller web game creators need not apply, this is a short tail thing for the moment: applying is restricted to those receiving a minimum of "500,

A new peculiar Gmail labs feature - opt in via Settings -> Labs -> Mail Goggles -> Enable - lets you solve some math problems at certain times of the day and week before a mail gets send out. Gmail developer Jon Perlow writes : <<Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. )...( When you enable Mail Goggles,

Google released a classified ads search site for Russia a while ago. Ionut in the forum points to an auto-translated Google blog post from August: <<We launched a new beta product - search ads. Users of the service can search for private ads, collected from the top sites Runet. Google search ads ... finds anything - from budgerigar [?] to factories, from tractors to refrigerators, from programmers to tutors - all this with a simple and user-friendly interface. To date,

A new book by Randall Stross is out; it's called " Planet Google " and covers Google's beginnings but also their latest actions and troubles. It's a very good, highly readable, well-researched and up-to-date introduction to the subject and will also offer bits and pieces of interest to those following Google more closely for longer.

In AdSense ads Google serves to websites, they don't always disclaim the ads as such; arguably, this job could be left to webmasters )though they sometimes do show the disclosure, which causes redundancy for those webmasters adding their own disclosure(. However, even Google at their own site doesn't always add a disclosure, apparently.

Google has rolled out their new interface design to the last of the Google Docs trio, Spreadsheets )presentations and Documents already had this new style(. The tabs are replaced by an application menu. Google had announced this change last week; in the announcement they said that these changes would also allow them to have room to add more features and that users should "Stay tuned." [Thanks Hebbet and Avrohom Eliezer Friedman!

Xujun Eberlein at NewAmericaMedia.org earlier this year writes about "human flesh searching" - rénròu sMusuò, 人肉搜索* -, a kind of research mob of the digital world )this is a smaller excerpt, the article contains more details and examples( : <<The first time I noticed the term "ren rou sou sou" on a Chinese website, I was taken aback. "Human flesh hunting" is a literal translation, but the term, applied to the Internet,

Google's photo storing app Picasa Web Albums had a bit of a privacy vulnerability. When you create an unlisted album to send to friends, you'll usually not expect the URL to get out to non-friends - that's why Google included an authentication key parameter in the URL so it's not possible to quickly guess the address )they didn't in the beginning, which allowed you to e.g. see Larry Page's unlisted album, but Google were later convinced it makes sense(. However,

You can check the upcoming )Google( Android phone by T-Mobile in a rotateable view as well as in an emulator that lets you click through the menus . The emulator is rather incomplete though, so on a lot of screens you'll be seeing dysfunctional mockups. [Thanks WebSonic.nl !

Google added text-to-speech capabilities to some Knol articles, like the one titled " File Formats in Digital Photography ". You can download the MP3 as well as hit a Listen button in the top right. The quality of the speech output - I strongly suppose it's all a software reading indeed, but asked Google for more background info in any case - is amazing. Macbeach in the comments at Google Operating System writes, "This is the best text-to-speech I've ever heard.

Right now, Google wants to promote their desktop photo app Picasa 3 on the google.com homepage, but the link is dead... at least for some of us, me included.* "This is very wrong. 40 minutes, and still 404," Jérôme Flipo comments. [Thanks David Hetfield!] *In one browser, I'm getting a link to picasa.google.com/learn_more.html, in another to picasa.google.com/download_promo.html, but both show a "not found" message.

Colin Colehour in the forum spotted a couple of image ads in Google image search . In previous times image search was ad-free, but Google had already announced they're experimenting with ads there. I can't reproduce these here from Germany, but Colin saw the following light-yellow box titled "Sponsored Links" in a search for canon camera : Colin writes: <<Here's what I found out so far,

Google has removed the dictionary link in search results for at least a portion of users, or perhaps all users )who of you is still seeing it? I'm not seeing it on computers in two different locations tested(. Before, when you searched for a word in the dictionary - e.g. "house" - there would be a link leading to a definition in the top blue bar. Some years ago this was linked to dictionary.com and afterwards, to answers.com. Answers.

Why hasn't Microsoft already made their office tools available as online versions? It could set them up in a good position against Google's online office efforts - the shift to the so-called computing cloud, the buzzword of recent times. I once heard someone argue they don't move to the cloud because it would cannibalize their own desktop office suite. But times are changing, and now Google boss Steve Ballmer said some interesting things,

As of recently the Google Blog Search homepage consisted of a simple search box, but now it looks more like Google News or Techmeme: it groups related stories into groups. To the left side of each cluster, you'll see how many blogs discussed this story recently, and the way this is formatted it may remind you of sites like social news Digg. It would be interesting to know if Google gives more weight to popular or high-PageRanked blogs here.

Google recently rolled out a search engine accessing their 2001 index, though the design of that one isn't quite like it was back then. Above actual screenshot from 2001 comes courtesy of Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land . [Thanks Danny and Tony!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: What a Google Result in 2001 Really Looked Li ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.