Geek News and Musings

Gmail Search Autocomplete Makes Searching Your Inbox a Breeze [Gmail Labs]

Gmail Labs has released a great new Search Autocomplete feature today that offers search suggestions for all kinds of Gmail searches, from simple search-by-contacts to more advanced search queries—like for specific attachments.

The autocomplete is very smart, too, so when you want to search for a specific attachment type—like photos—you can just choose the has photos autocomplete, and Gmail will generate the much more complicated filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png) search operators. Handy, huh?

Likewise, it’ll autogenerate the before and after date operators for you (before:yyyy/mm/dd), which have always been too complicated to remember all that well. As always, to enable this feature, just point your browser to Gmail Labs, enable Search Autocomplete, save your changes, and enjoy.

Remains of the Day: Gmail’s Mysterious Fifth Birthday Surprise Edition [For What It's Worth]

Gmail turns five next Wednesday, and they’re planning a birthday surprise for us.

• Google Plans Fifth Birthday Present for Gmail Users
  What mysterious birthday present awaits us? Apparently it has nothing to do with dropping the beta tag. [PC World]
• InstallerApp For Mac Installs Jailbreak Apps Without Jailbreaking Your iPhone
  $7 application aims to put jailbreak apps on your iPhone or iPod touch without requiring you to do any jailbreaking. [Gizmodo]
• Android to Get Flash
  Add one more feature to the Android-only category in the iPhone 3.0 vs. Android Showdown. [OS News]
• iGoogle’s got game… themes!
  Google shows off how “cool” they are with the “kids,” adding gaming themes to iGoogle homepages. [Official Google Blog]
• For Whom the .Tel Tolls
  .Tel operators are trying to make it into a “phone book for the internet.” We can’t help but think domains are pretty meaningless to most people at this point, but good luck! [NYT]

Remains of the Day: Gmail’s Mysterious Fifth Birthday Surprise Edition [For What It's Worth]

Gmail turns five next Wednesday, and they’re planning a birthday surprise for us.

• Google Plans Fifth Birthday Present for Gmail Users
  What mysterious birthday present awaits us? Apparently it has nothing to do with dropping the beta tag. [PC World]
• InstallerApp For Mac Installs Jailbreak Apps Without Jailbreaking Your iPhone
  $7 application aims to put jailbreak apps on your iPhone or iPod touch without requiring you to do any jailbreaking. [Gizmodo]
• Android to Get Flash
  Add one more feature to the Android-only category in the iPhone 3.0 vs. Android Showdown. [OS News]
• iGoogle’s got game… themes!
  Google shows off how “cool” they are with the “kids,” adding gaming themes to iGoogle homepages. [Official Google Blog]
• For Whom the .Tel Tolls
  .Tel operators are trying to make it into a “phone book for the internet.” We can’t help but think domains are pretty meaningless to most people at this point, but good luck! [NYT]

Remains of the Day: Gmail’s Mysterious Fifth Birthday Surprise Edition [For What It's Worth]

Gmail turns five next Wednesday, and they’re planning a birthday surprise for us.

• Google Plans Fifth Birthday Present for Gmail Users
  What mysterious birthday present awaits us? Apparently it has nothing to do with dropping the beta tag. [PC World]
• InstallerApp For Mac Installs Jailbreak Apps Without Jailbreaking Your iPhone
  $7 application aims to put jailbreak apps on your iPhone or iPod touch without requiring you to do any jailbreaking. [Gizmodo]
• Android to Get Flash
  Add one more feature to the Android-only category in the iPhone 3.0 vs. Android Showdown. [OS News]
• iGoogle’s got game… themes!
  Google shows off how “cool” they are with the “kids,” adding gaming themes to iGoogle homepages. [Official Google Blog]
• For Whom the .Tel Tolls
  .Tel operators are trying to make it into a “phone book for the internet.” We can’t help but think domains are pretty meaningless to most people at this point, but good luck! [NYT]

Google Docs Gets Full Find & Replace, Drawing Tools [Online Documents]

Google Docs takes another step toward becoming a proper document tool, adding a full-fledged find and replace toolbar, as well as a browser-based SVG drawing tool.

Docs had a kind of low-powered, actually apologetic find and replace tool before that could only do whole-document, every-instance replacements. Now it’s a bit more familiar, with one box for the finding text (or regular expression), one for the replacement, and buttons and shortcuts (Ctrl+F, Ctrl+G for next) that can replace items one-by-one:

That’s just a writing tool, though. The new drawing app, found by hitting “Insert,” then “Drawing” from the top menus, works on text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It’s easy to figure out and doesn’t require any special software (at least on SVG-supporting browsers like Firefox, Chrome, or Opera), but, as Google Operating System points out, you have to “save” the drawing by hitting the “X” in the upper-right, which doesn’t seem like what you want to do.

Google Mobile for Blackberry Adds Search by Voice, My Location [Downloads]

Jealous of the very cool search-by-voice feature available to Google Mobile users on both the iPhone and Android? Well, if you’re a BlackBerry user, today you get to join in the fun.

Not only does the new Google Mobile for BlackBerry feature search-by-voice, but it also adds a My Location feature to search so that you can do local searches for nearby businesses. BlackBerry users, rejoice!

You can grab the latest version from your phone by pointing your mobile browser to http://m.google.com/. Google Mobile is a free download.

Google Adds Longer Snippets, Better Related Terms to Search [Search]

Keeping it short and simple often pays off in Google searches. Starting today, however, any queries three words or longer pay off with longer text snippets in the results, giving you more context for your terms.

It looks like Google will roll down to three or sometimes four lines to present more of your search terms in the sentences they pop up in, which we have to imagine is a pretty good thing for most anyone. Google’s also touting an improved algorithm for the “Searches related to: your terms here” splice that often appears after the second or third item on a results page. No details, really, other than Google understanding more queries, more languages, and being “more relevant.” Speaking of Google search, how do you force Google to understand a possibly confusing search in context? If you’ve got the Google-fu, educate the grasshoppers among us in the comments. Screenshots from Google.