Android users have the benefit of getting a phone that likely comes with turn-by-turn navigation right out of the box, usually in the form of Google Maps Navigation. Even though many Android users will never use anything but Google Navigation to get from point a to point b, we found that Waze is also free and a better option. More »

Now that Google Music is available to everyone (in the US), you have it set up, and you're bobbing your head to music wherever you are, it's time to accent those experiences with better listening tips, from beginner to advanced. More »

Wladimir Palant commenting on some things he found while digging around the Chrome browser:
Don’t get me wrong: Google Chrome is a great browser and it is easy to get excited about it, argue about benchmarks, brand-new standards and such. But sometimes you get a reminder: this is a Google product and it has to benefit Google. It isn’t merely about making the web better, it is also about promoting Google products and giving them an advantage over competing services.
∞

Those who harbor secret online identities may not be as anonymous as they think. Determined snoopers can potentially uncover bloggers with a little legwork and the use of Google Analytics.

For sport, a Wired writer uncovered the names and employers of several anonymous writers, including those who had taken measures to ensure they wouldn't be identified. He writes that those who use the same Google Analytics ID for different sites can unwittingly expose themselves, thanks to free reverse lookup services. Sleuths can identify a blogger who uses the same Analytics ID on anonymous and non-anonymous sites.

The story says reverse lookup services have been available since 2009, but their existence and potential uses aren't widely known among the anonymous blogging community. Those who have something to hide online would do well to investigate their exposure under this opening and cover tracks.

Andy Baio: Think You Can Hide, Anonymous Blogger? Two Words: Google Analytics [Wired]

With Google Music launching out of beta this week, you might be looking into setting up an account and getting your music into the cloud. It's generally a simple process, but that doesn't mean you won't hit a few snags along the way. More »

Jealous of your iOS-carrying companions who have been blasting Asteroids for months on their handsets and tablets? Prepare to quell your rage, as Atari has announced that its Greatest Hits app has launched for Android devices. Surpassing 3.5 million downloads in the iTunes App Store, the company has expanded the offering to Google OS faithful -- and it'll come with Missile Command for free, along with a 100 title catalog looking back on 30 years of gaming. Once you grab that install, you'll have your pick of 25 game packs for a buck each or you can spring for the whole lot for a cool Hamilton. The app is available now for both tablet and smartphone users, should you prefer a larger screen when your Centipede addiction strikes. For a full list of titles, hit the PR button after the break before checking things out for yourself in the Market.Continue reading Atari Greatest Hits app lands in Android Market, Star Raiders awaits your download
Atari Greatest Hits app lands in Android Market, Star Raiders awaits your download originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Nov 2011 08:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Resurrect Google Cache Links:
Restore Google Cache & “Related” links and Hide Instant Preview in Google Search

A Greasemonkey script to rectify Google’s peculiar decision to hide links to cached pages in Instant Preview.

Via @battez.

Be jealous no more Android fans! (OK, maybe a little bit longer.) FL Studio is coming to your mobile OS of choice. No longer will it just be iDevice owners who get to channel their inner 9th Wonder on the go. Soon enough the company will release a version of its loop-based music-creation suite designed to work on both phones and tablets running Google's portable platform. We don't have a price or release date yet but, as a consolation prize, there's a video of the progress being made on the port after the break.Continue reading FL Studio coming to Android, Google fans can make phat beats too
FL Studio coming to Android, Google fans can make phat beats too originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Late last week Google changed the way one of their most useful (but lesser known) search operators works: The + (plus) operator. What's that mean for you? Next time you want to make sure any single word or phrase appears in your search results, wrap it in quotation marks. Here's a bit more detail: More »

Google's Street View has made its way around the world and gone off the beaten path in a few places, but until now it hasn't hitched a ride to capture some scenery by rail. That picturesque view above comes from a section of the Albula / Bernina railway in Switzerland -- a UNESCO World Heritage site -- all 122 kilometers of which were recently mapped out and photographed by Google using its usual Street View camera gear. Unfortunately, while that part of the process is done, the results haven't yet made their way onto the internet -- you can apparently look for that to hit Google Maps in the coming months. In the meantime, you can check out the source link below for some more shots of the capturing in progress.

[Thanks, Hanspeter]Google's Street View takes to the rails in Switzerland originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Chrome: Over the weekend, Google unveiled Chrome Remote Desktop, a new Chrome extension that allows you to remotely control and manage another Mac, Windows, or Linux system through Google Chrome, as long as you have the extension installed on both systems. More »

If you do a lot of traveling, you’re no doubt familiar with services like Kayak and Hipmunk that let you quickly and painlessly book flights on the cheap. This past Tuesday, Google threw it’s hat into yet another ring with a relatively quiet launch of Google Flight Search.

Built right into the search engine (as many Google apps are), Flight Search lets you search using standard terms like “flights from Cincinnati to San Francisco” to access a customizable list of flight results. But how does it stack up to the tried and true competitors in the realm of flight search engines?

Search
Punch your starting location and your destination (or, if you’re feeling adventurous, leave out the destination) into Google and click on the Flights tab on the left side of the page.

In the case of other flight search engines, you might plan on allowing some time here for the service to crawl through the Internet searching for flights and deals for you. Google, however, does it instantly.

Flying from Cincinnati to San Francisco.

And it’s as easy as that. If you see a result you like, simply click on it, select a return flight and book it. But what if you don’t immediately see a satisfactory flight?

Filter
In most cases, you won’t immediately find a flight that is most suitable for your trip. So you bust out the filters that Google provides to refine and sort your search results. Are the travel dates the most important part of your trip? Click on the calendar icon next to the dates field to open the calendar and drag the handles to change the length of your trip. Prices update instantly, and the bar graph shows you how prices change depending on how much wiggle room you give your time frame.

More services these days feature dynamic date changes, but I think this takes the cake.

Flying on a budget? Google Flights Search can put a priority on prices, too. Click the graph icon next to the duration field and use the x/y sliders to find a flight that matches your preferred budget and total trip duration.

Adjust the sliders to tradeoff price for overall hassle.

Finally, in the event that you were feeling adventurous or are generally ambivalent about where you go, you can use Google’s interactive map to choose a destination. Click on the famed pin icon next to the departure and arrival locations field to open the map. Prices displayed next to destination cities allow for you to plan and budget accordingly.

It seems like all of Google's apps rely on each other.

I think this is a really neat feature that other sites like Hipmunk and Kayak lack. Suppose I have a week off work to go on vacation, and I want to travel for less than $500. I can simply input the information I have and Google will match me with flights to places I might like to go.

The Google Advantage
Speed. That’s it, plain and simple. Sure, it helps to have a service like Flight Search built into one of the worlds most visited search engines. But what makes Flight Search stand out among the others is that everything uses the same technology that’s behind Google’s instant search. This means that your initial query for flights between two cities, your filters for price, layover, duration, or timeframe, and your selection of outbound and return flights all happens instantaneously.

Conclusion
Google Flights Search has a way to go before it will become a viable replacement for the more fully featured services like Kayak and Hipmunk. The service currently only supports a handful of cities and major airlines, but as the search giant is wont to do, it’s probably a safe bet that Google will continue rolling out support for more cities and airlines in the coming weeks.

Start Google Plus is a great extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you update Twitter and Facebook from within Google+, also adding feeds from both social networks onto your main page. We mentioned it in our Facebook to Google+ migration guide, but felt it deserved to be highlighted on its own because it's so useful. More »

Say you're just bouncing around on the internet. Suddenly one of your thousand open tabs starts making noise. Now you're annoyed, but you can't find the tab. MuteTab helps you find it before you go crazy and hurt yourself. More »

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If you're stuck on an office computer and forced to use Internet Explorer because your system is locked down, Google has your back. The new version of Chrome Frame brings the features of Google Chrome to IE and doesn't need administrative rights to your PC to install.
The new version runs a helper process in the background that sits quietly, consumes few system resources, and loads the Chrome Frame plugin into Internet Explorer every time you open it. Since you won't need admin rights to install Chrome Frame, anyone in virtually any IT environment, no matter how heavily locked down, can use it.

Update: A few commenters have reported trouble getting this install to work without admin privileges. We've tested and successfully installed without admin privileges using this installation link, but if you're not having any luck, it may be one of those rollout issues that will be resolved with a little time.

Google Chrome frame | via The Chromium Blog

You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on Twitter.

Back in the day, we all used AltaVista or Yahoo! to find everything we needed on the Internet. It was slow and often didn’t find what we were looking for, but hey, it was all we had. Then Google came along, and blew us away at how much faster and better search could really be. We switched, and never looked back.

So isn’t Google good enough? Do we really need another search engine, let alone one named after a game? Let’s take a closer look at today’s search market and what DuckDuckGo has to offer that might make you want to switch.

Searching for a Search Engine
Today, there’s renewed attention on search engines from all sides. Microsoft’s Bing has gained a sizable share of the search market, while Google has released new search features faster than ever. Yahoo! has now bowed out of the search engine race, using Bing to power their search while they focus on their other properties.

And then there’s the new search engines, like DuckDuckGo. This search startup with an unusual name is run by its founder, Gabriel Weinberg, is self-funded, and has already topped 5 million searches on average per month. Rather than focusing on having the absolute most exhaustive index of the web, Weinberg is focusing his search engine on providing the best instant answers with less spam than other search engines. He seems to be doing a pretty good job of it, too!

DuckDuckGo's Main site

Just Duck it!
We’ve all trained ourselves to automatically search whenever we need to find anything online. Many people don’t even type in URLs anymore, opting instead to just search the site name every time. The problem is, for the most part you still don’t get what you’re looking for right on the first page. You’ll either have to click a link to see more about the topic, or search through consecutive pages to keep looking.

DuckDuckGo tries to solve this problem by giving you more information right on your search page. It includes information from Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, and more, and formats the results in such a way that the text preview is actually useful.  It’s easy to figure out what Envato is and where its official site is located in the DuckDuckGo results below, while on Google you’d likely have to click through to a couple sites to find out exactly what it is. Even if you do click through a link, DuckDuckGo maintains your privacy and doesn’t let the site know what you searched to find their site. They’ve worked hard to make sure their search engine is fully private, and even created a special site just to discuss privacy issues with search engines.

DuckDuckGo brings quick answers from WolframAlpha, Wikipedia, and more

These features let you do much more than just simple searches in DuckDuckGo, finding the info you need quickly and privately. You can find President Obama’s age, the square root of 2, a random number between 1 and 10, and much more right from the search box. Some of these features are included especially in DuckDuckGo, while others are made possible through its integration with WolframAlpha and other search tools. Be sure to check out the Goodies page to see more of its unique search features.

DuckDuckGo’s most exciting feature, though, is its !Bang. DuckDuckGo is designed to let you search hundreds of specialized search engines about all types of topics, and you can specify what you want to search with easy to remember bang syntax. Want to find a video on YouTube? Enter !youtube followed by the type of video you want to find. Need to find more info about a certain part of PHP? Enter !php and your quiery, and you’ll find your answers quicker than ever. Often you can just enter a bang you think would work, and it does, which is a great way to find precisely what you need. Check out the Duck Duck !Bang page to see all of the supported bangs together.

Dig deeper and learn more, all on one page

Quacky Clean Search
DuckDuckGo takes Google’s clean interface to the next level, removing absolutely all of the clutter to leave you with just the results you want. It’s even less cluttered with ads, showing only one small, nicely designed ad from Carbon ads, as well as affiliate results from Amazon when applicable. If you’d like, you can tweak the interface further and refine what you see. You can change the header color, chose the default font family, show updates from Twitter on the main page, tweak what content is automatically displayed, and more. And, if you find the default URL, http://duckduckgo.com/, too difficult to remember, you can also use http://ddg.gg/ or http://dukgo.com/, which are much easier to remember and type, especially on mobile devices.

Configure it the way you like

Conclusion
Whether you’re perfectly satisfied with Google or have been frustrated by your search results lately, DuckDuckGo is definitely worth giving a try. It’s exciting to see new innovation in search, and the competition is good for everyone. I really appreciate DuckDuckGo’s stand for privacy, and find it exciting to see how much one developer can do to take on the web’s giants in one of the most competitive areas online: search.

What search engine do you usually use? Have you given DuckDuckGo or another newer search engine a try? Or have Google’s recent changes kept you happy with the world’s most popular search engine? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Like most companies, Google regularly communicates with their business customers via email newsletters, updates on their official blogs, and printed materials. For a change, they’ve decided to publish a short book about data, called Think Quarterly, to a small number of their UK partners and advertisers.

To learn more about the latest experiment by Google and how it can be of use to us – the consumers – do read on.

Availability
Think Quarterly is available to read online at the official website, thinkquarterly.co.uk (also available at m.thinkquarterly.co.uk, if you’re on the move). As the links point out, Google’s UK division is in charge of the publication. EPUB and PDF versions of the book are available for download as well. All editions of the book are free.

Google’s Take
In their words, here is how Google sees their experimentation:

“At Google, we often think that speed is the forgotten ‘killer application’ – the ingredient that can differentiate winners from the rest. We know that the faster we deliver results, the more useful people find our service.

But in a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.”

Sounds very candid, as Google almost always does. And after reading the book, in my opinion Google has succeeded to a great extent in its goal.

The Content
The first issue is dedicated to Data. If you are really looking for them, you can find the magic metrics that will help transform your business. Think Quarterly and the articles are structured to help the reader find inspiration and insights.

Places to see Sexy Data

As for the content, Think Quarterly has got something for everyone – from nerds to casual readers of technology. I enjoyed reading the roundup of 10 online destinations to find sexy data.

Fully Viral

Case studies part of the Fully Viral feature give enough insights to video content creators to successfully run a campaign in YouTube (which could be applied to any other similar service).

Visual History of Data Capture

The Visual History of Data Capture is a fun yet educational read and is quiet comprehensive in showcasing how we have come from capturing data from sticks to the cloud.

How useful could it be?
Well, the usefulness of Think Quarterly largely depends upon your profession and passion. If you are Geek looking to know more about the inner workings of a company like Google, this would be a must read. On the other hand, if you are engaged in a profession or business in a vertical covered by Think Quarterly, you might have treasure of data to mine.

It would be great if Google ventures a bit more into the consumer side of the equation and publish books that help people learn more about technology and Internet. A digital periodical dedicated solely to Internet security would be of immense help to the masses.

Besides that, I don’t see Think Quarterly as a Trojan Horse that might disrupt the publishing industry. Are they testing the waters to see how positive the reaction from the community would be if such a magazine or periodical were to come out? Ofcourse, they do. Large Corporations always have that constant urge to track and mine data, even if they don’t have any real use for them in the near future.

Historically, Google always tries to stay away from the pureplay content business. Take for example Google News or the much touted Google Music service. Think Quarterly could be used as a benchmark for the future of digital publishing and it always helps to be the pioneer of a new format.

Share Your Thoughts!
Will you read Think Quarterly regularly? Did you find the articles and coverage simple enough to understand?

Personal Blocklist: A Chrome extension that lets you block domains from appearing in your Google search results. Your blocking habits are sent to Google, who plan to use the data to improve their ability to keep spammy content farms out of their results.