Skidzopedia » Google

Big G (Google) Got a Face Lift – Have you Noticed?

Musab Zain — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:46:54 +0000

Google has got a brand new homepage today, however just before you ask yourself just what new features it has included, the company has truly just structured things further mainly because it aims to speed up getting you to the results.

“Starting today, you might begin paying attention to that things look a little different across Google products. We’re implementing a project to bring you a new and improved Google experience, and over the subsequent few months, you’ll continue to see more updates to our feel and look. Even our classic homepage is getting a bit of a makeover,” says Google in a blog post.

The modern Google homepage how carries a smaller logo and links moved to the top and bottom edges of the browser to get a cleaner look rather than clumped in the center as previously.

That basically means there will be a uniform top navigation to the Google apps portfolio allowing individuals dart between the apps with a navigation option that’s in the same location every time.

For people who come across these things intriguing, Google says the latest design is about three important components: Focus, Elasticity, and Effortless.

It’s a mantra the organization was shouting for a while, therefore we suspect now key to how the company possibly rates websites on the internet within its search engine as it strives to simplify the internet.

“Even simple changes, like using more vivid colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re really needed, can assist you better concentrate on only the thing you need at the time.”

Elasticity is about making the design and style look identical all over various screens such as your desktop, laptop, or mobile, while the final one; Effortlessness, concerns employing new technologies like HTML5, WebGL so while it might look simple it’s still cutting edge tech powering it all.

“Starting today and over the course of the next few months, look for a series of design improvements across all our products, including Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail,” warns Google suggesting that hitting refresh on the Google homepage over and over again, isn’t likely to work right this second.

What do you think about the new look? Did you like it or not?

Image Courtesy: www.mvmediagroup.co.uk

How to Create Adsense Channels? A Complete Walk Through

Musab Zain — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:03:15 +0000

One of the best ways to monetize your blog is by applying ads served by Google Adsense. Why use Google Adsense when you keep on hearing about their low cost per click (CPC) and strict Term of service (TOS)? What I have learnt from my one year experience of blogging is that Google Adsense is by far the best method to earn money online. Not because of their swift service, but also because of their certain features, including ‘Adding Channels‘ to track your Ads.

Another thing that I have observed in the past few months is that not every webmaster know about Channels. They do not realize how important it is to add channels to their blogs ads. Today, we’ll look into detail some of the advantages of Adding Channels, their types and later on how to add them. If you find this post beneficial please spread the word so that other can also benefit from it.

What are channels?

As already described above, Channels lets you track ad units. By tracking we mean that it will display key information about each ad unit, such as, number of impressions, clicks it received in a particular time frame, Click through rate (CTR), effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) and Earnings.

What are the benefits of Adding Channels?

With channels, you can track how well each ad unit is performing. This makes it easier for you to decide whether you want to retain that position or change places of the ads or the size of ad unit. For instance, you can monitor which ad units/sizes works well under ‘Post Title‘ or at the ‘Sidebar‘.

If you keep track of your ads performance for a period of time, you could easily figure out which ad units are performing well and which ones are not. This will boost up your earnings drastically.

Are there any types of Channels?

Yes, there are two types of Channels, namely;

Custom Channels
URL Channels

Custom Channels will only keep track of ads that are on your domain(s) and will not work for revenue sharing sites such as Hubpages, Squidoo etc. With custom channels you can monitor which ad units works best on your site, by changing their size, position and color.

URL Channels on the other hand will work for revenue sharing sites (listed above). For instance if you are hub user, you can set up whether you want one channel to track all your hubs or separate channels for each hub.

How to Create a Custom Channel?

Once you know what are channels, their types and advantages. We’ll help you set up channels in an easy, step by step procedure. Follow the procedure described below:

1. First up, sign-in to your Google Adsense account.

2. Inside your dashboard, click on ‘Adsense Setup‘, second option from the top.

3. On the page that opens, click on the ‘Channels‘ tab (Fourth option from the left, right below ‘My Account‘ tab),

4. This will bring you to a new page, where all your custom channels are displayed. If you haven’t created any channel yet or want to add another channel, click on ‘+ Add new custom channel‘ option.

5. The new page will display the total URL and Custom channels remaining. Please note that you have a total of 200 channels, so use them wisely! Now enter the name of the channel, for instance, name Under Title or Right Sidebar, for Ads displaying under title of post or/and at the right sidebar of your blog, respectively. Click on Add Channel button when your done.

How to Create a URL Channel?

Once you have followed your way till step #3. Instead of ‘Custom channel‘, click on URL Channels link, which is right next to Custom Channels link. Then follow the same procedure from step #4.

Congratulations! You have successfully created channels for tracking Adsense performance. Now if you want to add the channels to your existing ad units, follow the procedure describe below:

How to add channels to existing Ad units?

1. Go to Manage Ads, under Adsense Setup tab,

2. Here you’ll see a list of ad units that you have been using over time,

3. Select any ad unit that you want to track by clicking, Edit Ad Settings link at the right side of each ad unit,

4. Scroll down and under All channel, you’ll see either a list of channels or a single channel depending upon how many you have created. Simply choose one from the list by clicking on the Add link next to it, or you can create a new one from Add new channel, and follow the same procedure described above.

5. Once you have done, click on Save settings button at the bottom of the page.

And there you have it. You will now be able to track your ad units and will know how good or bad each ad unit is doing right from the Adsense dashboard. If you have any queries or if I have missed any point, let me know.

Tip: After tracking your ad(s) for several months, you can further get an insight of your ad performance by analyzing the data from the Advanced Report section under the Reports tab. Click on channels data, select the required channel and click on display report to analyze the performance and earnings of that ad unit.

How To Enable ‘Undo Send’ Feature in Gmail?

Musab Zain — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:35:07 +0000

There are moments in your life when you feel very angry at some one, may be because he or she has hurt your feelings or any other reason. If you are in a bad mood and don’t want to face that person and still want to express yourself, you would probably send him/her email, expressing all your angry and telling him how much you hate him/her after that incident.

But once you click that ‘Send‘ button, you realize that you were too hard/rude to that person and wished that you shouldn’t have sent that mail earlier. Moreover there is nothing you can do to prevent it.

Not any more! With Gmail’s Undo feature you can take back everything that you said. With just a push of a ‘Undo’ button (see screen shot), the mail that you sent couple of moments ago can be retrieved back to your inbox!

(Credit: Google)

In the past couple of months, many new features have been added to Gmail, such as Voice and Video feature, Smileys and Gmail themes etc, but Undo Sent is something out of the box. There are so many other instances where this feature can be very helpful, for instance, if you have mistakenly sent an email to the wrong person or you have misspelled something in the context etc. etc.

However, this feature doesn’t come by default, you’ll need to set it yourself manually. In order to activate the Undo Send option;

1. Log-in to your Gmail account

2. Click on “Settings” in Gmail and then the “Labs” tab.

3. You will find the ‘Undo Send’ feature somewhere at the bottom of the page.

4. Enable it and click on ‘Save Changes’.

Voila! Now you won’t have to regret about it any more. But remember that you have only 5 seconds take make the decision, or else that mail will be delivered to its destination and then there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. Although, Gmail have plans to extend this ‘delay time’ to 10 seconds, however nothing can be said about the future at this moment.

Download Google Books with Google Books Downloader

hammad — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:42:39 +0000

Google Books archive is the best thing available for students on the Internet which also fades the charm of Wikipedia with a lead. These books are not only worth millions but are available for free reading.

These books are no doubt available for readers with their copyright and because of this reason Google Books are available in read only status and you can’t download any of them.

But now thanks to an open source project which will help you to attain this task. Yes, it allows you to download Google Books for free. This is small application and saves the books in PDF format.

What to Do?

After Installation, simply run the application,
Paste the code of the desired book to download,
Press ‘Check‘ button to check the availability of that book. It will retrieve all the pages from that book,
As soon as Download button appears, click to start downloading your Google Book absolutely free.
Enjoy!

Download Google Book Downloader

How to Enable Multiple Inbox Feature for Gmail

Musab Zain — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:00:29 +0000

Recently, Google uncovered a new Gmail Lab feature that allows users to have more than one inbox in their default Gmail view. The new feature – called Multiple Inboxes – allows users to have multiple viewing panes open simultaneously without having to open another browser window.

The upgrade gives users a quick view at important labels as well as saved searches. Just head to the Labs tab in your Gmail account to enable the new feature. Once enabled, you’ll get a new Multiple inboxes tab in your Gmail settings.

A more detailed over view to enabled this feature is shown below:

1. Sign-in to Gmail account and enable Multiple in boxes in labs tab.

2. For user who wants to view email from other email account in ‘another’ Inbox, continue with these steps. Log in to the additional account you want to view from your primary Gmail account and open up the settings menu.

3. Go into Forwarding and POP/IMAP and set forwarding to on, and have it send a copy to your primary Gmail address. If you want to add another account into it then you can repeat this step.

4. Go back into the settings menu of your primary Gmail account and open the Multiple in-boxes menu. In each of the panes simply type in “to:” followed by the e-mail address of one of the forwarding accounts.

5. At this point your multiple in-boxes are up and running, but you’re still going to get these messages in your primary in-box too. To keep this from happening we’re going to create a filter. Head back to settings in your main account, then click on filters. Create a new one. In the “to” field enter the e-mail address you’re forwarding from, click next, then pick the “skip the in-box” option.

6. It’s also using any search results as ‘additional’ Inbox, by simply typing a search query into one of the text box of the pane. By default, you should have “is:draft” and “is:star” to display all draft messages and all starred (important) emails on two separate Inboxes.

Find How Many Pages of Your Site has Google Indexed?

Musab Zain — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:00:03 +0000

Recently, many people some of them being my friends have asked me whether there is a way to find out the number of pages Google has indexed on their blog? Therefore; I decided to answer this question here, so that others may also take benefit of it.

Although, you may find a number of sites over the internet, such a Website Grader; being one of my top favorites, as it rates your site by evaluating certain parameters such as, Inbound Links, Page Rank, Technorati and Alexa Rank and especially Google Index Rate.

You may also follow the chart available inside Google Webmaster Tool, by going to Statistics -> Crawl stats. The First graph shows you how much google has indexed your site.

Besides, you can enter the following address shown below, inside the Google Search box.

site: www.DomainName.com

where DomainName will be the domain name of your blog/site. Once you hit the enter button you will see on the right the exact figure of Google Indexing.

All these methods will help you not only to determine how many pages your own site have, but you can also check to see how many pages your competitors also have in the Google search engine index.

Convert Gmail messages to Google Docs in a Click | How To

Musab Zain — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:26:41 +0000

As the title suggests, today we will teach you how to convert a mail into Google Docs; therefore we won’t go into details. This is how you convert Gmail messages/emails into Google Docs in just a single click.

Here’s how you activate it

1. Log-in to your Gmail

2. On the top right you will find the ‘Settings’ option. Click on it.

3. In the page that opens, click on ‘Labs‘.

4. Scroll down till you find an item like as shown in the screen-shot.

5. By default it is set to ‘Disable‘, change it to ‘Enable’

6. Scroll futher down the page to click ‘Save‘ button.

Now when ever you will open your email messages on Gmail, you will find a ‘Create a Document‘ option on the right hand side.

Got any suggestions/comments/critisism? Feel free to share with us.

Google Earth browser plug-in Arrives for Mac

Musab Zain — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:01:38 +0000

Its been quite a time since the release of Google Earth browser plug-in for Windows. But now Mac OS users should brace themselves for Google Earth plug-in that has been released by Google, for Mac OS X version, that enables users to use its Google Earth software as a browser plug-in.

Although the file size is quite large; a 47MB download which can be taken from the Google Earth API page. The sole reason for such a large file size is that Google has provided a universal binary file that runs on both PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs.

A Google representative said in a forum posting about the availability of the Mac version.

“There are also some other space-saving changes that we may look into later on,” he said, adding that Google plans to mention the software in a forthcoming blog post.

Having the Google Earth API available for the Mac will most likely result in more widespread support of the plug-in for some serious applications.

Embellish your Inbox with Gmail Themes

Musab Zain — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:18:10 +0000

Unlike other web mail services, Gmail has never provided too many customization options and users had to rely on themes created for third-party extensions like Google redesigned which usually slowed down Gmail and weren’t resilient to code changes.

After rolling out several other features this year, including, Addition of Smiley, ability to send text messages from your Gmail account and incorporation of Voice and Video chat feature in Gmail.

Google has launched yet another feature, this time is “Gmail Themes“. Now you will be able to customize your homepage by using these themes.

In order to apply the theme, go to settings page inside your Gmail Account and look for a themes tab on the right and choose the desired theme that you would like to apply.

At the moment only 30 themes are available to choose from. Since this feature is been rolling out slowing, some of you might not be able to see this option just yet.

Embedded ads in Youtube Videos

Musab Zain — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:07:03 +0000

Google AdSense program is one the best programs for money making, and suits both publishers and advertisers.

Recently, Google has decided to further extend their ads and to allow more exposure for the publishers, by running/displaying ads on YouTube videos.

You will now be able to see textual based ads on all YouTube videos, independent of their location.

One could assume that all the videos on YouTube will now be embedded with Google AdSense ads. Take a look at the screen shots, that have Google ads embedded in them.

Google Launches Voice and Video Chat Inside Gmail

Musab Zain — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:01:18 +0000

I love using Gmail, since it allows me to switch between email and chat as required, all within the same application.

Not every one can type fast, and even by adding emotions to your chat, you still can’t express your feelings. Some things are better communicated face to face.

Yesterday, Google launched an exciting video and voice chat feature, directly within your Gmail account. They have made it as perfect as possible, with easy to use functionality and high quality video.

In order to start this cool feature, you will have to download and install the voice and video plugin, and leave the rest for Google to handle.

Once the plugin is installed onto your system, restart you browser, open gmail, look for “Video and more” at the bottom of your Gmail chat window, and pick “Start video chat“.

Here’s a nice video that tells you how to get started.

I think its a good step taken by Google by using their already available communication channel; Gmail, and thought not to waste type and effort in developing another GTalk application, for this purpose.

Send Text Messages from Gmail

Musab Zain — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:07:22 +0000

Although Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Messenger and AOL AIM services had the SMS messaging facility for quite some time.

Now with Gmail also you can send text messages to any of your friends in your Gmail Account just by typing his or her number from the Gmail website.

In order to activate this service, go to Gmail Lab settings, and enable the “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat” feature.

You can send (and receive) text messages via the embedded chat in Gmail website but not from the standalone Google Talk client.

Please note, that this facility is currently available for US phone numbers.

[Via]

Connection between Microsoft Windows & Google Chrome Logo

Musab Zain — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:01:11 +0000

A funny visual implementation of how Google Chrome was thought and developed. One could speculate that may be Windows logo could have played a role in Designing Google Chrome’s Logo. Maybe the color scheme.

What do you think on this one? Share you funny thoughts and ideas with us.

Image Credits: OneComics

Smileys for your Gmail Messages

Musab Zain — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:01:11 +0000

A picture worth a thousand words. Gmail now supports emoticon/Smileys provided you compose email messages in rich HTML mode.

Those yellow smiley faces (aka emoticons) are quite popular among young Internet users because they help convey emotion without writing a single word of text.

The smiley feature is now available in Gmail accounts, though the emotions are not good when compared with Hotmail or Yahoo! smileys. Here is a screenshot; you can also test them inside your Gmail Account.

What do you feel or think about Gmails new feature. Do you think they will make your Gmail experience more fun?

Google Analytics Gets AdSense Integration (Custom Reports, API, Bubble Charts)

Musab Zain — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:01:55 +0000

Great news for all the webmasters out there! Finally, Google has rolled out one of their greatest features; the integration of Google adsense with Google Analytics.

It had already been rumoured about the release, and now bloggers can take a sigh of relief. Google is slowing rolling out this feature to its users, so in case you don’t see the option, there is no need to panic, hopefully you will get it in the upcoming weeks.

Not only will this give Webmasters more insight towards their site traffic and revenue, but also Google Analytics has added 5 new enterprise-class features that will make Google Analytics more usable.

Integrated Reporting with AdSense: AdSense publishers can see their revenue and impression data alongside their site traffic data in Analytics.

The Data Export API: This will enables you to create software programs and applications using all read-only report level data from Analytics.

Advanced Segmentation: It will enables you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic. It is true on-the-fly segmentation of visits so that you can create powerful filters with a few mouse-clicks.

Custom Reports:Lets you create, save, and edit reports to give you a specific view of your data. You can choose the information and metrics you want to see, organized in the way you want to see it, by using a drag and drop interface to populate an Analytics report.

Motion Charts: It adds sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how they interact over time.

User Interface Tweaks: You will notice some new subtle shading and highlighting. Now, if you track more than one Website with Google Analytics, you will be able to see trends across all of them at once.

Here is a video of the new “motion charts,” that lets you track data across time.

For more news, visit

Skidzopedia » Google

Big G (Google) Got a Face Lift – Have you Noticed?

Related Posts:

How to Create Adsense Channels? A Complete Walk Through

What are channels?

What are the benefits of Adding Channels?

Are there any types of Channels?

How to Create a Custom Channel?

How to Create a URL Channel?

How to add channels to existing Ad units?

Related Posts:

How To Enable ‘Undo Send’ Feature in Gmail?

Related Posts:

Download Google Books with Google Books Downloader

Download Google Book Downloader

Related Posts:

How to Enable Multiple Inbox Feature for Gmail

Related Posts:

Find How Many Pages of Your Site has Google Indexed?

Related Posts:

Convert Gmail messages to Google Docs in a Click | How To

Here’s how you activate it

Related Posts:

Google Earth browser plug-in Arrives for Mac

Related Posts:

Embellish your Inbox with Gmail Themes

Related Posts:

Embedded ads in Youtube Videos

Related Posts:

Google Launches Voice and Video Chat Inside Gmail

Related Posts:

Send Text Messages from Gmail

Related Posts:

Connection between Microsoft Windows & Google Chrome Logo

Related Posts:

Smileys for your Gmail Messages

Related Posts:

Google Analytics Gets AdSense Integration (Custom Reports, API, Bubble Charts)

Related Posts: