Custom Date Range Tips for Google Search

Google's search engine has a cool feature that lets you restrict the results to a certain time range. It's mostly used to find recent results, so the default options are: past hour, past 24 hours, past week/month/year, but you can customize the time range. Just click "search tools" below the search box, then click "any time" and select "custom range" from the list.

You can use Google's calendar widget to pick the dates, but there are some tricks that help you enter dates faster:

1. Enter "2011" in the "from" field, instead of "1/1/2011". Obviously, you can use any other year.

2. Enter "3/2011" or "March 2011" in the "from" field, instead of "3/1/2011" (or "1/3/2011", depending on your country).

3. Enter "2011" in the "to" field, instead of "12/31/2011" (or "31/12/2011", depending on your country). Obviously, you can use any other year.

4. Enter "3/2011" or "March 2011" in the "to" field, instead of "3/31/2011" (or "31/3/2011", depending on your country).

5. To restrict the results to pages from 2011, enter "2011" in the "from" and "to" fields.

6. To restrict the results to pages from March 2011, enter "3/2011" in the "from" and "to" fields.

7. Leave the "to" field empty instead of entering today's date.

8. Leave the "from" field empty to find pages created before the day entered in the "to" field.

Offline Google Slides

Google Slides is just another name for Google Presentations, but that's not actually new. The big news is that you can now use Google Slides offline to create, edit and run presentations. "Any new presentations or changes you make will be automatically updated when you get back online. So you can continue polishing slides on your next flight, and head to your upcoming presentation without worrying about whether there's going to be wifi."

The offline functionality is still limited to Chrome and requires the Google Drive app from the Chrome Web Store. If you've already enabled the offline support and use it for documents and spreadsheets, you don't need to do anything.

This table shows which Google Drive features are available when you're offline and you use Chrome for desktop or the mobile apps for iOS and Android. You can sync any file when you use the mobile apps, but the editing support is better in the desktop Chrome. You can also install the Google Drive app for Windows and Mac to sync the files that can't be edited online using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings.

Quickly Switch to the Basic Google Image Search

If you don't like the new Google Image Search interface, you can't go back to the previous interface. Fortunately, Google still includes a link to a much older interface without infinite scrolling, but with useful information like the file size and a page snippet.

Infinite scrolling makes it difficult to get to the bottom of the page because Google continuously loads new image results as you scroll down. The best way to find the link that switches to the old interface is to press "End" on your keyboard (Fn + Right Arrow if you have a Mac) and click "switch to basic version". Google doesn't remember your setting, so the switch is not persistent.

New Google Image Search Interface

Long time, no see. After a long vacation, it's time to get back to the latest news from the Google world. Last month, Google tested a new image search interface and now it's been rolled out. It's the first desktop interface that drops the landing page and no longer loads the web pages that included the image results. The previous interfaces loaded these pages using iframes more like a courtesy to the third-party websites than to improve the user experience.

Google started to make the iframes less important when it moved them to the background. Then the mobile interfaces for smartphones and tablets came out and they didn't even load the original web pages. The new desktop interface is closer to the tablet interface: click an image result and use the left/right keyboard arrows to check the other results.

Here's the old interface (you may still see it):

"Instead of sending you over to a whole new page to preview an image, you'll see a preview of the image in your search results. Once you click on a image, you can quickly flip through the whole set of image previews using your keyboard. Your search results stay in the panel so you don't lose track of what you were doing; if you want to go back to looking at other search results, you can just scroll down and pick up right where you left off. If you want to check out the website where the image is hosted, you can click on the photo or use the tools available," explains Google.

Obviously, the traffic from Google Image Search will drop dramatically and webmasters will complain that Google uses their images and doesn't give anything in return. Google only hosts image thumbnails and loads the original images when you click the thumbnails, so it's now an image leecher that hotlinks to other people's images, using their bandwidth without generating page views or ad revenue. It's better for users, but expect to see many sites that stop displaying images when loaded from Google Image Search or use other anti-leech tricks.

Finding the right balance between user experience and webmasters' interests is a hard thing to do. Google now includes 4 links to the original web page, so you can click the image, the page title, the domain name and the "visit page" button, but I bet most people will click "view original image". Unfortunately, Google no longer displays two very important things: the image title and a short snippet from the page related to the image. Showing only the title of the page and the domain name is not enough to determine if the image is relevant. Other missing information: the EXIF data and the image size.

Google Sync, Discontinued for Gmail Accounts

After dropping support for the free Google Apps edition, Google continues to disappoint non-paying users. The sync service powered by Exchange ActiveSync will no longer be available for Gmail users and for free Google Apps users, but the existing connections will continue to work.

"Google Sync was designed to allow access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. With the recent launch of CardDAV, Google now offers similar access via IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV, making it possible to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols. Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won't be able to set up new devices using Google Sync; however, existing Google Sync connections will continue to function. Google Sync will continue to be fully supported for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education," informs Google.

Three other services and apps will no longer be available: Google Calendar Sync (the download link has been removed, but the app continues to work for existing users), Google Sync for Nokia S60 (no longer supported from January 30, 2013) and SyncML (will stop syncing on January 30, 2013).

While Android owners aren't affected, those who use iPhones, Windows Phones and other mobile devices will have to rely on IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV. Sure, they are standard protocols, Google doesn't have to pay licensing fees, but Google's implementation doesn't support push. If Apple's iCloud, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail have push support, why can't Google add it? The Gmail app for iOS has push notifications, but some people might like to use the standard mail client.

If you've already enabled Google Sync on a device, it will continue to work. Unfortunately, you won't be able to enable Google Sync on a new device starting from January 30.

Chromebooks, Best-Selling Laptops

Who said that Chromebooks aren't popular? If you look at Amazon's list of the best sellers in the "Laptop computers" category, you'll find 4 Chromebooks in the top 11:

#1: Samsung Chromebook (57 days in the top 100) - out of stock
#5: Samsung Chromebook 3G (57 days in the top 100) - out of stock
#9: Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook (199 days in the top 100)
#11: Acer C7 Chromebook (6 days in the top 100)

What other notebooks are constantly in the top 10? Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, which are also the top-rated laptops. Samsung's ARM Chromebooks are the #9 and #10 top-rated laptops, after a long list of MacBook models.

Samsung's ARM Chromebook is also the best-selling laptop at Amazon UK:

What about France, Germany, Spain, Italy? Google says that "Chromebooks are currently sold out. We are working on getting more devices available for you soon."

New SafeSearch Settings for Google Image Search

Google tried to simplify a feature using some clever algorithms, but made some people unhappy. Google's SafeSearch settings have always been difficult to understand and Google replaced the three options that were available (strict filtering, moderate filtering - default, no filtering) with only two options (filter explicit results, don't filter explicit results - default).

Here are the old filtering options:

- "Strict filtering filters sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content."

- "Moderate filtering excludes sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, but does not filter results that might link to explicit content. This is the default SafeSearch setting."

- "No filtering turns off SafeSearch filtering completely."

The new filtering options are even more difficult to understand. The default option is supposed to disable filtering, but it's actually a combination of "moderate filtering" and "no filtering", depending of the query. For innocent queries like [sherilyn fenn movies] Google switches to moderate filtering since it's not very likely that you're asking for explicit content. If you add some unambiguous keywords like "xxx" to the query, Google actually disables filtering.

Here's how Google describes the new settings: "In the SafeSearch Filtering section, click the checkbox to filter sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content. If you choose to leave it unchecked, we will provide the most relevant results for your query and may serve explicit content when you search for it." So Google may show explicit images, but only if it's obvious that you're searching for it. No algorithm is perfect, so you'll probably find many examples when this doesn't work as intended.

A Google representative told CNet: "We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for - but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting - you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search."

For now, Google only changed how SafeSearch works for google.com, so the old settings are still available at google.co.uk and other country-specific Google sites.