Some people noticed Knol articles are already sometimes ranking very well in Google results, even though Google promised Knol articles wouldn't get any artificial boost. Until further evidence comes in I don't think we've much reason to distrust Google's statement, and yet, the site does get a major boost all the same simply because it's in the vicinity of the superbly ranking network of Google websites )not yet on the PageRank 10 homepage,

Google added a new feature to Gmail to always use a secure )https( connection. Switch to the settings/ general tab and scroll down to "Browser connection" to see if you got it already )if not, it may still be rolled out for you(. While safer, Google in their blog announcement of this also notes it may slow down your Gmail a bit. [Thanks Mrrix32!

According to the Colorblind Web Page Filter , above is what Google.com looks like for users with protanopia )red/ green color blindness(. Perhaps Google should run this as their logo one day to raise awareness of color blindness. Out of interest, does that logo look normal to anyone here/ is there anyone who's colorblind here? The Colorblind Filter site is a bit slow at the moment but if you created a website and you're not color blind,

Date: August 7, 2032 From: The Bureau of Public Anomaly Screenings Subject: A notice Dear citizen, As you may know, under the Public Screening Act of 2030, all citizens are undergoing routine checks for anomalies. We do so through the use of public sources only, aggregating and mining your digital traces. According to our findings, which are accurate in 99.

Domains using the full character spectrum aren't really supported well in browsers, partly due to security issues... so entering something like bücherei.com )the German word for library( will resolve into what is called a punycode address, namely xn-bcherei-n2a.com. This kinda ruins it for serious uses, but still, there's domains out there using more than just ASCII letters.

Nope, this is not the title of a children's book )though it would be great as that!(. Quote Google: <<Chubby is a fault-tolerant system at Google that provides a distributed locking mechanism and stores small files. Typically there is one Chubby instance, or "cell", per data center. Several Google systems - such as the Google Filesystem )GFS( and Bigtable - use Chubby for distributed coordination and to store a small amount of metadata.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Can You Guess What This Cartoon Is? | Comments ] [Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.

Knol is a publishing tool but unlike some other such tools by Google, this time all your article's outgoing links will be "nofollowed." The nofollow attribute is a mechanism to disable the juice a link is sending to another site. So while you can link to Knol pages to give them more authority in the eyes of Googlebot and others, Knol pages do not pass this authority measure back to other sites. In a Knol article, at first glance,

Google's new publishing platform Knol has an interesting feature to offer: authors are allowed to use one cartoon from The New Yorker magazine per article*. The New Yorker started in the mid-1920s and collectively there's lots of cartoon content.

Earlier this week, I received a greetings card from someone called Shelia who was using "Orkut Greetings" )supposedly a service offered by Orkut , Google's social network(. Or at least that's what the sender of this email wanted me to believe: Those extra details are usually hidden by default, but I expanded them to verify that the email genuinely came from Google. It appears to have been sent from an Orkut email address and was even signed by the google.com domain.

Google went live with Knol , a platform to read and write articles on all kinds of subject. Knol was being tested privately since some time and had been pre-announced back in 2007. The address is knol.google.com, but notably not knol.com or knol.org or even googleknol.com. This project is somewhat reminiscent of Wikipedia, though there are many differences as well.

The Google App Engine currently supports Python, but now Google employee and creator of blogging community LiveJournal Brad Fitzpatrick posts this bit: <<I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support.

Google Maps walking directions had been spotted by some users before, and now they're being rolled out for everyone, as Search Engine Roundtable reports. Try this directions search in New York , for instance, and you'll see the "Walking" link on top activated )though this isn't just restricted to US locations, as a test search in Germany showed(. Google has the following disclaimer following their "beta" notice: "Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas.

You can emulate selection boxes using HTML layers, but you may also want to provide a traditional HTML form selection box using the <select> element. If you do so, how can you spice up that form element anyway? There's a couple of things you can do. The <optgroup> element groups together and labels as set of items. A style applied to an <option> can add colors. And then there's some nice Unicode symbols, like stars )★( or checkmarks )✓(,

Before Google's 3D chat world Lively was released , the product was called Google Rooms. Here are some left-over screenshots that we discovered on Google's servers shortly after Lively was launched: The Google Rooms logo used in the rooms directory, showing a palm tree from the island room Selecting an avatar from the directory,

Pixelisation in the forum and Ionut at the Google Operating System blog mentioned the Google Docs documents editor now has a full-screen mode )not to be confused with the older full-width page view(. You'll find it in the menu View -> Full-screen mode , and hitting escape switches back to the default view. Does anyone know how to bookmark a Google Docs document so that it always opens in full-screen mode though?

Google announced they're aquiring Russian ads service ZAO Begun from Rambler Media for $140 million. [Thanks Pavel !] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Acquiring Begun | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

RedWine.com, one of those ads-only websites potentially profiting through Google. Google pays domain parkers by allowing them to run a special AdSense program. Titled " Google AdSense for domains ", this program now reportedly triggered a class-action lawsuit which alleges "that Google committed fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment by selling ads that were unlikely to generate conversions".

Google released a layout templates directory for Google Docs *, the application suite consisting of Google Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations )Google's kind of web-based light-weight Word, Excel and PowerPoint(. You can sort templates by target application, like Spreadsheets, or by category, like "Resumes" or "Personal Finance". Then you can look at a preview and if you like a style, hit the "Use this template" button to fill it with your own content.

Here's something that made the frontpage of popular social news site Reddit.com yesterday... a submission titled "A 15 year old from South Wales used his new Visa debit card to order cigarettes, alcohol )etc.( ", pointing to a page at money.co.uk allegedly from July 15th, 2008, by author Charlotte Cardingham. This sounds oddly familiar to the last "hoax news to attract backlinks" story. However,