Google in Your Life

When you search for a topic on Google, you will likely see several search results showing "rich snippets" - profile image, name and number of followers on Google+ - for people who have set up Google Authorship for their content: A neat feature of authorship is that you can filter your search and see everything a particular author has written about the topic you search for by clicking on the author's name: Unless you go back to standard Google search, every search you do will be a search within that author's posts - which means that you can look around further in the writings of the author in question.  Update: Apparently, this feature only works, if you search via google.com. You probably won't be able to use this feature, if you are using a local version of Google search

What is Google Authorship - and why should you use it? One of the most fundamental reasons for the phenomenal success of Google, is that they give us relevant search results. Unfortunately, it is not entirely easy to define “relevant” and Google has long been battling low quality content which is masked as relevant content. To that end Google is now laser focused on personal authority and because of that they have introduced Google Authorship. If you want to make sure that your content gets optimal visibility and ranking in search results, you should implement Google Authorship for your site or blog right now. At the heart of Google Authorship is the connection between an author's content on the web and his or her profile on Google+. Once this connection is established, content will show up far more visible and with much greater authority in search results on Google, since both profile image, name and number of followers on Google+ will be shown along with the link to the c

In September 2011 Google introduced  so-called Dynamic Views to their blogging platform, Blogger. A lot of people still think of the dynamic views as just another set of pretty templates. However, as Google wrote back then, they are much more: "Dynamic Views is much more than just new templates. With just a couple clicks, you’ll get infinite scrolling (say goodbye to the “Older posts” link), images that load as you browse, integrated search, sorting by date, label and author, lightbox-style posts for easy viewing, keyboard shortcuts for quickly flipping through posts, and one-click sharing to Google+ and other social sites on every post". In this post, I would like to show you what Google meant by "integrated search". Try for example, to type "drive" in the search field in the top right corner of your screen right now. You should see something like the following: As you can see, two things are happening real time as you search: post which are rele

You can now join Hangouts on Air from your iPad or iPhone. Download the new app here

Every time Google pull the plug on one of their products, a lot of Google users get very uncertain about the soundness of their commitment to Google. Google's enemies are quick to take advantage of that uncertainty and, together, frustrated fans and eager enemies develop a strange vision of a company who will pull the plug on even the most healthy and beloved products if it will even remotely benefit its twisted schemes. Interestingly, this view of Google is a reaction to an equally unrealistic view of Google as a through and through altruistic organisation which basically exists to give consumers for free what other companies want to charge them for. Google is indeed a very unusual company - not least because it does in fact provide tons of value for free. But it is still a company and what goes on at Google is almost certainly much less dramatic than the worn out caricature I mentioned above. Like any other clever company in a very competitive field of business they have to f

You have probably heard by now that the YouTube app for Android can be used as a remote control for watching videos on a larger screen. What you possibly didn't  know is that this should work on every device with a browser and an internet connection. Which means, for example, that you can pair a laptop with the Android-app, connect that laptop to your TV - and watch YouTube-videos using the Android app as a remote. All you need to do is: 1. Go to  youtube.com/tv  (on your laptop, TV or other "large screen") 2. Navigate to Sign In & Settings and then to "Pair device" 3. Follow the instructions! Obviously, if your TV has a browser and an internet connection, you should be set to go. Mine don't, so I have paired my Chromebook with the YouTube app instead and stream to my TV via HDMI. That setup works perfectly and I now have a fully YouTube-enabled TV with a great remote :-)