Has it ever happened to you that you need to see multiple accounts at the same time? Usually we open different accounts in different browser or otherwise, to use in the same browser, we first have to sign off and then sign in with new Google Account. This can be very irritating at times, at least for those who are quite unfamiliar with many browsers and use Internet explorer all the time.

Now, you no longer have to perform such actions for opening multiple Google accounts. Google has finally come up with much awaited multiple accounts sign in feature. This can be implemented by going to the Google Accounts page and then enabling multiple sign in option. Once you click on the change, Google notifies that it is an advanced feature and will work on various Google products like calendar, code, Gmail, Reader and Google sites.

After you enable the multiple sign in option, you will see a drop down list with the list of Google Accounts that you must have entered. You can select any one of those and proceed with your work. The account that you will be using for the first time will automatically made as default account.

If you visit Google product that do not support multiple Google accounts, you will automatically be redirected to default account for that particular product. Moreover, if you sign out of any of the Google products while signed in to any account, you will be signed out of all your Google Accounts at once.

To understand the web even better and provide users with richer search experience, Google has acquired yet another startup “Metaweb” to help build smarter and more connected Internet. Today, Google on its blog declared that the acquisition is to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone. With this acquisition, it can quickly deliver you relevant information right on its search page.

Metaweb Technologies was founded in 2005, to make the internet more connected. Let’s hear from the company in their own words about their work.

“We have been building the platform and populating the data for our content integration network, which enables site owners, publishers and developers to easily and intelligently add content from across the Web.

We do this by utilizing our large, open database of things in the world. Metaweb has information on over 11 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. In this way, we provide site owners with a seamless way to access third party content from leading sources like New York Times, Twitter, Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, and a wide range of others. ”

Metaweb Subsidiary Freebase is also now joining Google. Freebase is community-supported open database i.e. it’s the open repository of world’s knowledge. Freebase is quite like Wikipedia, where people can contribute and use data. However, the difference is that Freebase is more like repository of structured data which can also be read by software’s.

At the end, it is quite clear that this move of Google is to further enhance its search. Metaweb’s repository of tagged data will boost the search results of Google. Freebase will be maintained same as free and open database and Google will contribute in its further development to make the web richer. Metaweb will not entertain any new partners but continue to support existing ones.

(Source)

Today, I came across a very interesting thread at Reddit, a social news site in which people who have worked at Google or currently working for Google have shared their experiences of how it feels like working at Google.

If you are curious about knowing how’s life at Googleplex or dreaming of joining Google then you must be aware of what are the pros and cons of being a Googler.

I have cited few thought-provoking excerpts from the thread which you may like to go through:

CinoBoo Said:

“I’ve been there for about 5 years. You can read about the good parts anywhere, so I’ll try to offer a counterpoint based on having worked at other software companies.

A common problem is that it’s easy to become spoiled by all the perks. Several offices have developed distinct cultures of entitlement, and people whine about the quality of the fudge on the free brownies. It’s embarrassing to be around people who’ve become like spoiled children.

An engineering-specific problem there is that there’s a lot of support for operations — that is, lots of people whose job it is to keep the systems running. Engineers don’t habitually carry pagers and are on-call relatively infrequently. The plus side is that they can focus on development, get adequate sleep, and be more productive. The downside is that they can easily lose touch with what’s really going on in the data centers and sometimes even their customers.

Last, the company is big into “generating luck”, which means trying a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off. The practical net effect of this on leaf-node employees is that you can wind up working on three, four, even five or more failed projects in a row.”

GoogleEmployee22k said:

“Google is a great place to work. These are the things I like about my job:

1) Everyone is super smart

2) 18 different cafes

3) Free Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

4) The food is gourmet quality (e.g. omelet bar, chefs that make custom sandwiches for you, sashimi, free drinks 24/7, free snacks of all sorts 24/7.

5) The 7 person conference bicycles

6) Every Friday, Larry, Sergei, or Eric takes questions from us (in person), and we get free beer (e.g. Downtown Brown)

7) Gyms all over, Free Laundry done for us, amazing free automated massage chairs in every building.

8) Free bicycles that we can just get on and ride to different buildings

9) Always pickup soccer games, or basketball games going on.

10) You can bring your dog with you to the office every day (1 out of 4 employees always has their dog with them)

11) Free shuttle to and from work everyday. (The shuttle has wi-fi). It even goes to SF.

The very best part about working for Google is that the campus has a very collegiate feel. There is no dressing up, ever (you will get strange looks if you do), everyone is amazingly smart and nice, we dedicate 20% of our time to whatever project we want, and the food is the best I’ve ever had. It’s all self sustainable. It’s like a glorious hippie engineering commune.”

FormerGoogler said:

“I worked for the company for over four years before leaving. In the beginning the balance was great: I could easily have worked a 9-5 if I didn’t come in a bit early for breakfast and leave a bit late to catch dinner. 9-6:30 is typical for someone in software engineering between releases and outside of pager duty.

It’s a competitive environment, though, and without good personal restraint things can really start to pile up. By the end my typical day was 14 hours long and I was starting to underperform on my primary responsibilities. Of course, this is true for any job to a greater or lesser degree. The fast pace and competitive environment simply make it an easy trap for Googlers to fall into.

Ultimately it comes down to self-restraint. Google was my first job out of college, and having worked other jobs since then I think I’m in a lot better to deal with such challenges in the future.”

Solyanik writes:

“ Worked there in 2007-2008, Kirkland/Seattle, and at Microsoft before and after.

Good things, in no particular order:

1) Young company, lots of energy

2) People are talking about how to build cool things, not about how to beat competition.

3) If you perform well and people want you on their teams, easy to change teams, so you get to learn a lot of cool stuff in a very short period of time (I got to work on Gmail, Maps, and Voice in just over a year)

Not so good things, in no particular order:

Despite free food and fun projects, Google has a very high attrition rate among the engineering. Vast majority of people who I knew at Microsoft throughout my 12 years there still work at Microsoft. Most people who I knew at Google have moved on (startups, etc).”

At the end, whatever people may say about Google but it will still be the dream company for the young software engineers. After all everything in this world has its pros and cons.

In Last January, Google threatened to tug out of China and promised to stop serving censored results to Chinese users. Keeping with their words, back in March, Google finally made the bold decision to effectively end censorship in China and started redirecting all Google.cn users to the uncensored Google.com.hk domain. This action was taken by the company in response to the censorship imposed by the state and the frequent cyber-attacks which reportedly came from China. Here is the page created by Google to list the status of accessibility (due to censorship) of goggle services in china.

As a consequence of this action, the Chinese Government didn’t react to it officially, but they must have privately conveyed their discontent to Google.  As Google’s David Drummond revealed in a blog post that the Chinese Government won’t renew Google’s Internet Content Provider (ICP) License, if Google didn’t stop redirecting users to its Hong Kong site. Google’s ICP License is up for the renewal today and without an ICP license Google’s fate would go dark in China.

Google is differing away from its initial bold stance, it seems that Google has unstiffened its stance now and fears from the prospect of “Shutdown of Google.cn”. In order to satisfy the Chinese Government, Google will stop redirecting its users directly to its Hong Kong site. Instead, Google will direct Chinese users to a new landing page that only has a dummy search box and the whole page prominently links to Google.com.hk, which the users may browse for their Google searches.

It will be exciting to see if this clever tweak of Google is sufficient to satisfy Chinese Government. If it is not then Google’s fate in China may suffer and Google’s strength will be tested to do the right thing and provide secured services according to the law.

Whenever, you receive a word attachment in your Gmail Inbox, to read the document you would either download it, view as HTML or will open as Google document. Most of you will download it as a matter of habit, so that you can easily edit them on your desktop if required.

But, GMAIL has just rolled out a new feature i.e. “View link” which lets you view your GMAIL attachments right from your browser with much ease than ever before.  Now your documents can be viewed and read in just a single click without any downloading of documents required or any installation of additional Office software.

The Clicking on the “view link” opens your attached document in Google document viewer which already allows you to view .pdf, .ppt files. However, from now onwards it also supports .docx and .pptx formats. At first site, it may not appear like any new feature, but the fact is that previously .docx was not supported and the view was HTML too.

With this new feature you can also edit your documents online in Google Docs. This will greatly help users on move to edit and forward documents when they don’t have any Office software installed in their systems.

(Source)

According to a report by TOI, Pakistan is set to block Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Bing and Some other sites as per the orders by the Pakistani Court. The reason behind this order is supposed to be the posting of irreligious and profane materials. Though by the end of the day there was no instruction to the ISP’s to block these sites.

Here are some Excerpts from the report of TOI :

“Media reports said the Bahawalpur bench of the Lahore High Court yesterday directed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to immediately block nine websites, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, Bing and Amazon, for publishing and promoting sacrilegious and blasphemous material. “

“Justice Mazher Iqbal Sidhu issued the order while hearing a petition filed by a man named Muhammad Sidiq who claimed these websites were publishing sacrilegious material. ”

“Aslam Dhakkar, head of a local bar association, was quoted as saying that the court had given a historic decision. He said the legal fraternity in Bahawalpur would observe a strike today to protest the publication of blasphemous material by the websites.”

It is never ever good to hamper the religious beliefs of People of any community in the World. But blocking the sites which are great sources of information and are the integral part of the web, is also not a permanent solution. There should be some alternative way needed to resolve this serious issue.

If you are a great video enthusiasts and one among who regularly uploads video to video sharing sites like YouTube then this is going to be a good News for you. YouTube has already released a new online video editor which lets you do basic editing processes without any download or install of any heavy Software on your machine. The main aim of Google behind introducing this new tool in YouTube is to make video editing easy and fun.

The new YouTube Video editor offers you to combine multiple videos from your own “My Videos” to create a new longer video, to trim the beginning and ending of your videos/movies and also you can add sound tracks from the vast Audio Swap library. An advertisement can appear in your video if it contains soundtracks from the Audio Swap library. However, you can create new videos from your uploaded videos without worrying about file formats and can publish them to YouTube without any hassle. No separate upload is required.

This editor is really very simple and thus ideal for anyone to use. With this you can create a single  ‘video album’ by combining all your videos of your college life or your vacations etc. You can also trim unwanted moments from your video clips and then arrange them in a timeline to get the complete video clip of your like. You can trim your videos from the beginning or the end just from the simple slider available in the editor.

On the technical side, the user interface of YouTube video editor is mostly built in JavaScript. This editor utilizes the capabilities of cloud computing to enable its users with average configuration system to perform nominal video editing.

It is sure that YouTube will enhance this new video editing tool further while maintaining its simplicity for naive and non-technical users.

( SOURCE )

It seems like Google is very much inspired with Bing’s new look and feature of custom backgrounds. Today on Google home page you can browse a gallery consisting of stunning background images. These images are collections from great artists and photographers. There are many incredible images from National Geographic also. Google is offering this to spread more awareness among the people about its recently introduced custom-background feature.

Since, all this effort of Google is to offer you personalization of your home page.  So, you can still choose an image or photo from your computer or your Picasa photo album.

So what have you been waiting for? Google is offering this Gallery only for next 24 hours.

( Source )

Google today announced the completeion of new web indexing system named Caffeine. It took Google around 10 months to start implementing the same from the time it came into picture. Caffeine claims to provide 50 percent fresher results if we compare it to the previous one.

With the web content increasing at an alarming rate and the webpages becoming richer with videos, images and news related content, the concept of new faster indexing system came into picture.
The older indexing system was composed of several layers, of which the main layer was refreshed every 15 day. The newer Caffeine does refreshing of pages on a continuous basis, thus we will see fresher content from now onwards.

If we talk in terms of numbers, then caffeine can process around hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel per second. Its capacity is enourmous, which can take up to 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database. The new information is added at a whopping rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabyte per day.

Well, one thing is for sure, Google searching is going to get faster with more accuracy. There might be not much of a difference if you view the front page, as the earlier indexing mechanism was not bad either.
So, next time if you are going for Google search, expect fresher and much relevant stuff.

Google Doodles are not at all alien for us. For the people who live in dreamland, these are custom-made logos visible on Google search engine`s homepage. The concept of Doodles was started way back in the year 1998. However, at that time the frequency of putting it on the homepage was very less. If we look at the present day scenario, we see these customized logo`s quite often.

There is obviously some reason behind featuring every Doodle. Most commonly, we see the Google Doodle associated with the celebrity birthday, festive events and historical significant days. If you would have noticed carefully, then at times you must have come across some cool India based Google Doodles.

Here is the list of some of my favourite India based Google Doodles.

1) Children`s Day

2) Diwali

3) Gandhi Jayanti

4) Sesame Street (Boombah and Chamki)

5) Holi

6) Independence Day

7) Makar Sankranti (Festival of Kites)

8) Republic Day

9) Rabindra Nath Tagore Birthday

10) Ghoongroo se Google ( Google Doodle India -winner)

11) My India ( Google Doodle India -winner)

12) Unity in Diversity ( Google Doodle India -winner)

13) Happy Holiday ( Indian version)