Google Chrome and the Original Google

There are many interesting questions in the Chrome help forum, but some of the requests are quite unusual. Here are some strange questions from users who can't distinguish a browser from a search engine or a mail client.

"I want the old Google search engine, not Google Chrome. How do I go back to regular old Google? I want to change my default search engine from Chrome to Google. The tools don't help me," asks Orville.

"If I change from Outlook Express to Chrome browser does my E Mail address have to be changed to a G Mail address?" wants to know Haljoan.

"I don't like the design of the Google Chrome.page. All of the toolbars I'm familiar with are missing, and I don't even know how i got it. If I uninstall it, will I be able to get just plain Google?" wonders Stellar.

"Should I remove my original Google now that I have installed Google Chrome?" That's a very difficult question and I don't think that Chrome's developers anticipated how difficult is to launch an alternative browser. Maybe Google should first explain users what's a browser.

"The biggest challenge all [browsers] face is that most people don't even know what a browser is or that there's choice," told Wired.com Brian Rakowski, director of product management at Google.

Add Photos to Gmail Messages

Gmail's rich-text editor has never been very powerful, especially if you look at other web applications like Google Docs or Zoho. An important missing feature is inserting images in a message: you can attach photos, but they're usually displayed at the bottom of the message and not all mail clients show thumbnails. One workaround was to upload the images to a website, open it in a different window and then drag it to Gmail's editor.

Now you no longer have to do this since Gmail added inserting images as a Labs feature. After enabling the feature, you'll notice a new photo icon when you compose a message using the rich editor. You can insert images from your computer and images published online, by typing their addresses. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't use the new Flash uploader, so you can't select more than one photo at a time.

"Keep in mind that Gmail doesn't show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you're sending mail to other Gmail users, they'll still have to click Display images below or Always display images from ... to see images you embed," mentions the Gmail blog.


To enable the new feature, go to Gmail Labs, search for "inserting images", select the "Enable" radio button and don't forget to click on "Save changes".

Tip: if the uploaded image is too large, click on it and choose from the available sizes (small, medium, large) or resize the image by dragging one of the corners.

{ Thanks, Niranjan. }

Google Enhances the Snippets for Review Sites

Google started to show additional information for web pages that include reviews: their date and the rating. For now, this is still an experiment and you may not see the change in Google's search results.

Last year, Google enhanced the snippets for discussion boards and scientific papers, while extracting the published date from many web pages. Google is able to recognize the structure of a forum thread, find the number of posts and the date of the last post, detect the author of a scientific paper and extract the ratings from all kinds of web pages.

It's amazing to see how many useful details can be obtain from unstructured web pages without requiring a special markup.

Find the Sender's Local Time in Gmail

Gmail Labs added a very useful feature for those who receive messages from all over the world. "Sender Time Zone" shows a green phone icon if it's appropriate to call the sender and a red phone icon if it's not a good time for calling (the icon is actually an Unicode character). Click on "show details" and you'll also see the local time of the sender.

"Message headers always include the time sent and often include time zone info too. We use that information to show you these icons. If the time zone isn't included for a given message, this Labs feature won't display anything," explains Gmail's blog. Google saves your timezone in your Google Account and it can be changed from this page.


You can also use Google search to find the time in a certain location.

The PDF Printer from Google Docs

If you open the document properties dialog for a PDF produced by Google Docs you'll notice that Google uses Prince 7.0 alpha 16 to convert files to PDF. It seems that Google has an unreleased alpha version of the software, so that might explain some of the errors.


According to the software's website, "Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents. Prince can read many XML formats, including XHTML and SVG. Prince formats documents according to style sheets written in CSS."

Prince is available for free if you want to use it on a single computer, but the server license costs $3800. "Prince is an ideal printing component for server-based software such as web applications and database systems. Using Prince, data in XML can easily be converted to PDF documents that can be printed, archived or downloaded over the web," which is exactly the way it's used in Google Docs.

Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day gave a talk at Google in November 2007 about the software.

{ Thanks, David. }

Google, a Non-Profit Organization?

"PSAs are non-profit organization ads that are served to pages when targeted ads are unavailable, or when Google is unable to gather content from the page. Publishers do not receive earnings for clicks made on PSAs," mentions a page from Google AdSense's help center.

I noticed a Google ad from a Romanian site that promoted Google search. The ad linked to the Google search results for a historical question regarding the Romanian Independence War, but it was labeled as "Public Service Ad". Since when is Google a non-profit organization?


It's not the first time when Google uses public service ads to promote its own services. Last year, Google promoted a special page about the US elections using public service ads.

According to Wikipedia, "public service advertising is the use of commercial advertising techniques for non-commercial purposes. (...) Such advertising is generally produced and distributed on a cooperative basis by governmental agencies or nonprofit organizations acting in concert with private advertising and mass media companies. In most cases, the nonprofit provides the programming that is to be advertised, while the participating advertising agency and media companies provide creative services, media planning, and dissemination services on a pro bono basis."

{ Thanks, Philipp. }

Google Image Search Color Filter

The option that lets you filter images by the predominant color has been added to Google Image Search's interface. Just click on "All colors" above the search results and you can choose one of the 12 available colors.

Until the new feature propagates to all Google data centers, you can still use the image filter manually and even select two predominant colors.



Google Image Search has previously added filters for photos, images that contain faces, clip arts, line drawings and I expect to see even more options that rely on image analysis. The Neven Vision acquisition will certainly bring some interesting visible results. "Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects."

{ Thanks, Chris. }