How to: search the Internet using Google and find exactly what you're looking for

Welcome to the Tech Digest guide to online search.

This guide will:

Google Basics

Though Google has an incredible array of advanced options (see next section), usually some very basic ideas will get you a long way.

Find all words

Type in two or more words to search for, separated by spaces, to find web pages with all of those words.

Example: apple microsoft finds any page referencing both “apple” and “microsoft”

Star Droid night sky mapping mobile app from Google

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Google is launching a star gazing app for the Android platform that will allow users to identify constellations in the night sky. Star Droid will use the phone’s camera, GPS and compass to pin point exactly which celestial bodies you’re looking at and aims to educate and reignite the world’s passion with the heavens.

It’s a free download which will be launched in the coming weeks and the only practical question is over how well the phone’s viewfinder will be able to pick up the individual stars against the light pollution of Northern Europe. Of course, if you happen to live somewhere well away from the cities, you’re in luck, otherwise you might be better off sticking with Patrick Moore.

(via Telegraph)

RUMOUR: Apple to buy Twitter for $700m

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First Facebook had a go, then the word was that Google made an offer and now the rumour is that Apple plans to buy Twitter and announce it in time for WWDC on 9th June.

The mooted price has jumped a mile from the last supposed offer of $250 million to a far healthier $700 million and according to the quote from an insider, “Apple is in late stage negotiations”.

Hard to know how much truth there is in this one. Last time it was just a meeting about advertising, apparently, so if there even is some talking between the two companies, then it could have been about a whole bunch of things. If it is about a deal, then that represents a very interesting move for what is, essentially, a hardware and software company into the world of services.

Google is fast becoming the giant of the tech world and it’s their take over of the internet that the waning Microsoft covets. Is this Apple’s first steps towards ensuring long term growth or is it just the next big company on the list to be linked with the microblogging darling. A fiver says it’ll be Twitter to buy Yahoo! next.

(via @Zee Tech Crunch)

HTC Magic Video: Hands on with the UK's second Android phone

I met up with Vodafone this morning to take a look at one of the hottest handsets of the summer, the HTC Magic known to some as the G2, known by all as the second Google Android phone available in the UK.

Straight up, it’s obvious that this handset is the looker of the two Android siblings at the moment. It may not be a particularly orginal form with the iPhone two years old now but I like the way they’ve taken “the chin” and turned it from a jutting Jimmy Hill to a more handsome Robert Redford. Take a look.

This missing flash will wind you up if the camera is the most important feature for you but otherwise there’s very little to complain about. It comes loaded with Android 1.5, aka Cupcake, meaning you can take video and upload straight to YouTube and Picasa, and there’s no longer the need for a hard keyboard. The virtual one seems certainly no worse than the iPhone’s.

The battery’s a slight improvement on the G1 with a 1340 mAh capacity which should see you out a a full day of heavy use before it’s time to plug in again.

A single small USB port at the bottom means you’ll have to use the in-box 3.5mm adaptor to fit your preferred headphones in, but it’s good to see they’ve had the issue in mind.

All in all, an A1 phone. Still time to get a fiver off the monthly tariff if you order today. £30 a month for 18 months grabs you a free handset, 600 mins and “unlimited” data and texts to the tune of 500MB per month and around 3,000 messages.

The handset is only available in white in the UK but that’s no bad thing until you dirty it up with your muddy paws.

HTC Magic spec sheet

What happens to your user name when you die?

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User names are starting to become an issue. One’s identity online was never really a problem beyond trying to get the top result in a Google search – not an easy feat if you’re name’s John Smith but as Dan or Daniel Sung, depending upon how I’m feeling, I’ve always enjoyed the luxury of being somewhere near the top.

The trouble is, that my name’s not so rare that I always get my choice of user name on all the big services out there. Most people’s aren’t but, again, that was never really a problem when it was just about e-mail addresses, but now that Google profiles becoming all the rage and services like Twitter actually affect my career, suddenly, my juvenile choices of [email protected] and [email protected] aren’t very useful any more.

I can’t get [email protected]. It’s too late, unless I want to add a bunch of underscores and a three digit number, and because of that I can’t get the vanity URL I’m after. Regardless of whether [email protected] has actually clued up to the possbility of his http://www.google.com/profile/dansung address (and he hasn’t because the link’s dead) the fact is that I can’t have it because I don’t have the [email protected] user name in the first place. Instead, I have to be satisfied in my petty revenge that enough spambots should have picked up his credentials by now and sent a few thousand messages to clog up his account.

So, how do I go about getting my name back, aside paying the guy for it? What if it’s some kid who never uses the account? What if the owner of [email protected] is dead? Any chance then?Well, I seem to remember in the terms and conditions when I signed up to hotmail that if you don’t use your account for 60 days or so, then MSN terminates it, and, in fact, having asked around all the majors – Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Twitter, that does seem to be largely the case. Here’s how it runs.

Gmail

Google was very helpful on the matter, answering my question directly and then pointing me towards the supporting terms and conditions.

Google will terminate your account in accordance with the terms of service if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months is the phrase I was looking for along with the fact that people can actively delete their accounts.

Now, the tricky part is that, although the user names will become freed up, it will only happen after an unspecified time period and I’ve no idea whether that’s a matter of days, months or years. Still, there is some hope for [email protected] to eventually arrive at its rightful owner.

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! was also most accommodating. The answer was very different though. It seems, with their service, that once your name has gone, it’s gone forever. As it stands, inactive accounts are not terminated and will lie idle indefinitely.

On the plus side, they did launch Ymail just last year, so I might be in for a shout at bagging that one while the service is fresh. Yep, all mine. Eat that one [email protected].

MSN

No reply back from MSN as yet but I’ll stick with that 60-day account termination I remember from back in the day. No word on whether they recycle the addresses but I’m infuriated to see that I’ve only got a choice between hotmail.co.uk and live.co.uk with all .coms presumably available to those in the States or behind proxy servers of some sort, or, in fact, those with some other way round which I have, as yet, to work out.

Twitter

Accounts that are inactive for more than 6 months may be removed without further notice

That’s what Twitter has to say about things, but notice the use of “may” rather than “will”. I would assume that Twitter does recycle user names, though, because they’re hot on name squatting. Go and have a look at the whole section dedicated to it if you don’t believe me.

The catch is that I happen to know of a chap desperately trying to get his user name in full knowledge that its current owner has done sod all with the account for well over the six month period. He has petitioned Twitter but they’ve done nought about it. All mouth and no trousers it seems.

The trouble is that the internet is still young; an adolescent really. It’s only now that this kind of thing is becoming an issue and, given the surprise of most of the press officers when I called, it’s something that we the users are realising a lot faster than the big web players.

So, there’s a few ways this can go. Either they get wise to this and realise that they need to start releasing user names or they get wiser and start charging some kind of premium for them. That was Facebooks toe in the water this morning. I wonder how well that would go down if Google tried the same?

So, what happens to your user name when you die? Well, that depends. For now, it’s very possible you can take it with you to the grave. Then, it seems my choices are either begging Google for some kind of alert service for when my name is released or a cash offer to the current owner. If you’re listening [email protected], how does fifty quid grab you?

Google launches "Similar Images" search and News Timeline

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It’s been, ooo, at least a week since we’ve had something new from Google, and the company’s making up for lost time by announcing two new products at once. There’s Similar Images, and News Timeline.

Let’s start with the former. This is a new option for image search that lets you scan for images that look a bit like other images. For example, in the pic above you can see that a search for Jaguar brings up both animals and cars. If you click on ‘similar images’ below the picture, though, then just animals, or just cars, will appear.

News Timeline does pretty much what it says on the tin. It organizes news information chronologically, and allows you to define a date range to search for news within. It could be seen as a response to Twitter’s growing strength in the news market but in reality it’s probably just a rollout of existing search tech over to the news section.

Lastly, Google’s also putting more prominence to its labs features by moving them to their own domain. You can visit www.googlelabs.com to try out all of Google’s latest experiments.

(via Google Blog)

Google Latitude used to track down stolen mobile phone

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Latitude, Google’s stalk-tool that lets you see where your friends are on a map, has saved the day in Silicon Valley after it lead to the successful apprehension of a mobile phone thief.

The perpetrator snatched a woman’s bag and then jumped in a car and sped off, but the lady had installed Latitude as a joke so that she and her sisters could “stalk each other”. Her sister jumped on the service and tracked down the thief, who was immediately caught by the cops.

Nice to hear a positive story about the service, which has come under considerable criticism in the past for violating privacy.

CBS (via TechCrunch)

Street View gets the all clear from the Information Comissioner

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Privacy International’s complaints to the Informational Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about Google’s Street View have been overruled, reports claim.

The introduction of the service to the UK hasn’t been without controversy, but the ICO says that Street View does not break privacy laws – it’s more like a televised football match where obtaining the consent of every attendee is impractical.

To try and quash privacy complaints, Google already blurs faces and number plates from its service, and will take down any pictures on request. The ICO said it would continue to monitor the situation.

(via VNUNet)

Google adds colour filter to image search

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Google’s always tweaking its products, and the latest tweak is to Image Search. It’s added the option to filter search results by colour – offering you 12 options for which hue you’d like to dominate your results – red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, pink, white, grey, black and brown.

The update is still filtering out to data centres worldwide, but in the meantime you can use the filter manually by typing something along the lines of “http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red” in the URL box. The tech comes from Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision, so expect to see a few more updates like this in the near future.

(via Google Operating System)

Village forms human chain to stop Google Street View car

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A small village in Buckinghamshire has thumbed its nose to the world, and refused to allow Google to index its streets. Broughton, which is close to Milton Keynes, has suffered a few burglaries in recent months, so when the Street View car rolled into town, they formed a human chain across the street to stop it going any further.

“My immediate reaction was anger,” said resident Paul Jacobs “how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent?” The villagers called the police and accosted the driver, accusing him of “invasion of privacy”.

Google, for thier part, issued a statement saying that the vehicle was using public roads and wasn’t breaking any laws. They also reminded the public that anyone can remove their house from the service, and they also blur faces and vehicle number plates.

The street view car has recently been spotted in Reading, Preston, Ipswitch and Winchester. The service recently went live in London, but has been available in the USA for years.

(via Telegraph, image via @ruskin147)