Advanced Uses for Google's Site: Operator

You probably know that Google's site: operator lets you restrict results to a site or domain. Search for [site:cnn.com iran] to restrict the results for "Iran" to CNN's site, search for [site:googlesystem.blogspot.com gmail tips] to find Gmail tips from this blog. You can also use the site: operator for top-level domains and search for [site:fr debussy] or [site:edu ai].

Google's site: operator is a lot more powerful than that. You can leave out some components of the address and replace them with asterisks. For example, you can find results from addresses that match this pattern: maps.*.com. Unfortunately, Google doesn't show all the results that match the pattern.

You can also find results that have URLs which start with "news." like "news.cnet.com" or "news.discovery.com". Just search for [site:news.*].

What if you want to search Amazon's international sites? Instead of typing [site:amazon.com OR site:amazon.co.uk OR site:amazon.ca OR site:amazon.de OR site:amazon.fr], just search for [site:amazon.*].

Google's site: operator also works for directories. For example, you can find last year's posts about Gmail by searching for [site:googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012 gmail].

You can even enter URLs that include parameters and leave out the parameters. Here's a way to search the Google Maps help center: [site:support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py inurl:"hl=en" 3d]. I've used the inurl: operator to restrict the results to English pages, but it's not necessary to do that.

How to restrict the results for [imap] to answers from Google's help centers? Search for: [site:support.google.com/*/answer imap].

These tricks work for image search, as well:

Change Distance Units in Google Maps for iPhone

The latest version of Google Maps for iOS added a small feature that's really useful: manually changing distance units. Just tap the "people" icon next to the search box, tap the "wheel" icon, go to the "distance units" section and select "miles" or "kilometres".

Until now, the application used the unit that corresponded to the country you've selected in the iPhone's settings (General/International/Regional format). If you've picked "United States", Google Maps only displayed distance information in miles.

Unfortunately, the "regional format" setting affects a lot of features, including the Google URL used by Safari's search box. If you select any other country than the United States, you're always sent to the corresponding international domain.

Google Maps 1.1 for iOS also integrates with Google Contacts and adds a feature that lets you "quickly search for local places by selecting popular categories such as restaurants, bars, cafes, gas stations". Right now, the most important missing feature is the lack of native iPad support.

The Trouble With Google Drive

When you can use Google Music to store 20000 songs, Google+ Photos to store an unlimited number of photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes, YouTube to store all your videos, Gmail to store 10GB of messages and attachments and when the files converted to the Google Drive formats don't count towards the Google Drive storage, what are the use cases for the Google Drive storage and why would you buy extra storage?

You could use it to store the original photos, PDF files, store documents/spreadsheets/presentations without importing them into Google Docs, backup all your files, but the most popular file types are already covered. Google wanted to encourage people to use Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Music, Google+ and free storage was an important selling point.

The trouble with Google Drive is that Google has a lot of other services that are better suited for storing your files and Drive doesn't even integrate with those services. When your photos are in Google+ Photos, your videos are uploaded to YouTube and your music is in Google Music, Google Drive feels like an afterthought, not the "go-to place" for uploading your files.

Try Chrome's Data Compression Proxy

The latest version of Chrome Beta for Android added the experimental data compression feature. It's not enabled by default, but here's how you can try this feature:

1. open a new tab, type chrome://flags in the address bar and tap "Go"

2. tap "Enable" next to the "data compression proxy" experiment (it's the first one right now)

3. tap "Relaunch now"

After relaunching the browser, you can see how much data you've saved by opening a new tab, typing chrome://net-internals and selecting the "Bandwidth" section in the left sidebar. Then visit different sites in a different tab and check the stats.

Google's proxy is faster than Opera Mobile's Turbo feature, while saving almost the same amount of data. For example, the savings for AnandTech.com were 48.9%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 50%. The savings for apple.com were 60.3%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 57%. Chrome's major advantage is that the proxy doesn't slow down browsing, unlike Opera Mobile.

	Chrome	Opera Mobile
anandtech.com	48.9%	50%
apple.com	60.3%	57%
amazon.com (mobile)	20%	18%
m.stanford.edu	40%	27%
googleblog.blogspot.com (desktop)	5.4%	28%

Google says that "this feature has been shown to reduce data usage by 50% and speed up page load times on cellular networks. When the Data Compression Proxy feature is enabled, Chrome mobile opens a dedicated SPDY connection between your phone and one of the optimization servers running in Google's datacenters and relays all HTTP requests over this connection. (...) The browser-to-proxy connection runs over SSL, meaning that your browsing session is encrypted between your device and Google's servers." HTTPS connections and pages loaded in the incognito mode don't use the proxy. DNS lookups are performed by the proxy, while the images are converted to WebP and the resulting images are up to 80% smaller. "The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings."

{ via Chromium blog }

Picasa Web Albums Redirects to Google+ Photos

After replacing Picasa Web with Google+ Photos in the navigation bar and redirecting individual albums to the Google+ interface, now Google redirects picasaweb.google.com to the albums section of Google+ Photos. You can still go back to the old Picasa Web interface if you use this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1. Google displays this URL in a message that says: "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums".

When you use that URL, Google also sets a cookie value that prevents the redirect to Google+ Photos even when you enter picasaweb.google.com in the address bar.

Google+ Photos has constantly improved last year, while Picasa Web Albums no longer added new features. It's obvious that Google+ Photos is an upgraded version of Picasa Web Albums, which will be discontinued in the future. There are still a lot of cool Picasa Web features that haven't been added to Google+ Photos (Creative Commons licensing, photo mapping, featured photos, search), so let's hope that Google won't retire Picasa Web Albums until Google+ Photos adds these features.

{ Thanks, Dave and Eric. }

Gmail's Account Activity Reveals More Information

Gmail's account activity is a very useful security feature that offers information about the clients that connected to your email account recently, including the IP addresses and the date.

Until now, Google only displayed generic information about the access type (browser, mobile, POP3). A recent updated added some new details: the browser's name and the user agent. If you click "show details", you can find more information from the user agent: the browser's version and the operating system. Obviously, the browser's user agent can be easily spoofed.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Change the Default Country Code in Gmail

Gmail has a new setting that lets you change the default country code for phone numbers. Google already detected the country, but you can now manually change it.

The default country code is used by Gmail's contact manager. If a phone number doesn't include a country code, Gmail uses the code you've selected.

{ Thanks, Scott and Herin. }