Table of contents for 6th Edition in Google Tips & Tricks

When you think of Google, search engines and emails may come to mind, but there is a lot more to the company than just these runaway successes. It is true that Google dominates search and email, but did you know that YouTube is owned and powered by Google and so are many other online services that you may already be aware of. Over time, Google has grown from a company that provides the best search engine on the internet to one that can power almost every aspect of our computing lives. Google now provides the most popular email service in the world and enables people to store billions of documents online. It provides ultra-fast broadband and the operating system for the most popular smartphones – it sometimes feels that everything…

Whether it’s sending basic messages through Gmail, uploading videos to YouTube, sharing photos or hooking up for a face-to-face video chat through Hangouts in Google+, communicating is made easy through Google’s numerous free services. Later in this book, we will be taking a look at some of the main apps for communicating in more detail, but for now we thought it important for you to get accustomed with some of the respective services’ lesser-known features, which can make using them even more intuitive and speed up your productivity no end. Since Gmail is used by people at work and at home on a massive scale, we have focused mainly on cool tips for getting the most out of that service – such as interesting ways to manage your inbox and…

Google is a search engine giant, but it is not only concerned with helping you to discover what is available on the world wide web or what is contained within your emails. It wants you to discover things in the real world, work out how to get there and find out more about them when you do. It wants you to explore outer space too, and get a general understanding of Earth along with the other planets and moons in our solar_system. And it keeps improving. Google has rolled out a new Maps app for Android and it has recently revamped its desktop offering. Both combine to help you get more than just simple maps, and they draw on a social element with reviews, photographs and tours that all combine…

Google isn’t just a search engine any more. Although search remains its core business, and the primary way that users interact with the software giant, behind the scenes there are a whole host of additional products and services offered by the company – many of which you’ll probably encounter on a daily basis. The most well known of these are YouTube and Google Maps – check out our tutorial on page 184 to see how to integrate Maps – but there are many others that provide services to help you improve your website, and your users’ experience. Google has also been acquiring services in recent years so that Blogger is now owned and operated by the firm, providing integration options that didn’t previously exist. Not to mention that it produces…

It’s becoming increasingly rare for people to operate on just one email account. We all tend to have separate accounts for work and personal, and maybe more on the go as well. So how time-consuming is it to have to switch between accounts in order to check all of our inboxes? Mercifully, Gmail comes with the built-in option to link Gmail accounts together so that all of the new emails are streamed into one place, making it simple to check them on the fly and easy to reply to them from whichever email address you choose. There is much more to Gmail than meets the eye too, because you can then really start to explore the main options available to you through the Settings screen (accessible by clicking on the…

Breaking into the music business is a lifelong dream for many people. And in this digital age, we’re glad to say it’s never been easier to get your music out there. There are plenty of sites and services that can help with this, but Google Play’s Artist Hub is easily one of the most userfriendly we’ve come across. There are no hidden costs, and after the one-off sign-up fee of $25, you’re free to upload and sell as much of your music as you like. Artists even get to take home a surprisingly generous cut of the revenue from each purchase – up to 70 per cent, which puts some comparable services to shame. So whether you’re a solo artist or an established group, a bedroom songwriter with big dreams…

Although eBooks are best suited to mobile devices that you can carry around with you at all times just like real books, Google’s desktop book service is just as feature-packed and can be a real asset, whether you just want to sit at your computer and read or carry out important research. Any books purchased from the Google Play store can be accessed on your computer through your web browser and some may prefer the larger reading interface that its monitor affords. All of the features that are available in the Play Books mobile app are on hand, too. You can search for keywords to jump to a particular page, make notes and apply them to passages of text – making this a handy tool for research purposes – and…

If you have ever had to search for an old newspaper article or clipping, then you will remember how difficult it used to be. With the launch of Google News Archive back in 2011, finding articles became much easier. It is a particularly useful service that provides users with free access to both online and scanned newspaper articles over 30 days old. With so many articles available online now, the only issue you may face is that it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what you are looking for. However, recent changes from Google mean that you can search for content directly through the Google homepage. In this tutorial we will guide you through the process of searching for both online and print articles via the Google homepage and Google…

Simply put, Google Docs is a free web app that runs on Chrome, offering you an office suite to create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more. As of April 2012 Google Docs now runs within the Google Drive online storage solution. There are three apps available: Google Docs (word processor), Google Sheets (spreadsheet); and Google Slides (presentation). If familiar with any standard office software, you’ll have no trouble getting your head around these three apps. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are available for installation through the Chrome Store. Another great web app that is currently available in Beta format only when running Chrome in Windows is Chrome Office Viewer. With Chrome Office Viewer you can open Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents found anywhere online; you can’t currently convert…

Google Drive is an incredibly useful service that, first and foremost, is a cloud storage facility that allows you to back up your important files and images so that you can access them anywhere. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that Google Drive can be used as a means to share your files with other people and invite them to edit and make changes to the files as they see fit. In practical terms, this means that you can work remotely on projects and then relay them back to your colleagues at the office. These colleagues can then view and edit the files accordingly, meaning you never need set foot in the office again! The process is quick and easy and any file in your Drive can be…

For many people, at the centre of a well organised going on – – life is a well organised calendar. Some people prefer sticking to a pen-and-paper diary, but if you have a lot in work, home, hobbies, projects and activities it can be really beneficial to bring all of your different events, tasks and jobs together into one master calendar, and that is where Google’s calendar comes in. With Google Calendar you can combine all of your different calendars into one, by creating calendar categories within one single calendar. Y . You can also share different categories within that calendar with different people. Say if you are working on a project with multiple people, and you all need to have set events and tasks noted down in your calendars,…

When you’re first starting out with a website, it can be difficult to know where to turn, what kind of layout you might want, and how your content – text, images and video – will fit into the website. This is true whether you are paying a professional to create a website for you or you’re simply using a service such as Google Sites. Fortunately, there are a lot of templates available that can get you up and running with a ‘ready-made’ website design from the_get-go. While this is a tremendous time-saver, it does tend to mean that your website isn’t unique and doesn’t necessarily reflect all the values and messages you might have hoped to convey. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could start with a template, then customise…

The key to a successful advertising campaign is to properly understand the people you’re targeting. Traditionally advertising agencies used personas to build a profile of a typical consumer within the broader market segment they were appealing to. This enabled the copywriters and artists to tailor their work to appeal to these avatars, in the knowledge that they represented the market segment as a whole. These days the same general approach is still used, but instead of purely working with hypothesis ahead of your advert, you can now also get near real-time analysis of your actual customers and how potential ones are interacting with your advertising. This allows you to make changes in response to these usage patterns, with the aim of increasing your conversion, sign-up or sales rates. Helpfully, Google’s…

Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your Google account. Designed to offer you transparency and control, Google Dashboard summarises the data associated with each product that you use when signed into your account and provides links to control your personal settings. Dashboard covers more than 20 Google products and services – including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Alerts and YouTube – and they can all be accessed easily by scrolling down through_the list. If you want to see more detail as you scroll down through the various services, then click on the ‘Expand all’ button at the top of the list and you’ll be able to digest more info. The way Dashboard is arranged means that you can easily see each service and the numbers…

MAPS Travel anywhere Google Maps offers some of the most accurate and complete online maps in the world. The coverage has improved over the years thanks to a huge investment by Google and you can also use it to navigate anywhere. Current traffic conditions are a feature and so it can also be used in place of a commercial navigation solution. The level of detail for each establishment you locate is impressive, thanks to the connection to Google Search, and the Street View feature adds even more realism to the experience. No matter what type of mapping requirement you have, this is the ultimate solution for any occasion. It is quite brilliant. Gmail Stay connected If you use Gmail, you will want to download the associated app. It includes all…

Drones are currently receiving a lot of attention and much of it is quite negative, but the potential future uses for this technology are actually very positive. Google has already started testing drones in Project Wing to deliver goods to customers, which would potentially greatly speed up receipt and also cut a lot of waste out of the traditional delivery systems we still use today. It sounds bizarre, but Google has tested delivering a package using a drone, which lowers the package by a type of fishing line from 150 feet in the air. This type of technology would be ideal for so many of the items that we purchase currently and will likely be more environmentally friendly and safer as well. Concerns remain over safety and the privacy implications…

When you’re a Google customer, music, movies, books and games are all within easy reach and can be yours in just a single click. Modern living often means that many of us have to make do with accommodation that is too small for our needs, which means that having truckloads of stuff that takes up space isn’t the best situation. So why not download music instead of buying CDs? Why not compile an online library of movies instead of cluttering up the place with DVDs? And why lose premium shelf space to physical books when you can get all of the latest bestsellers to read on your mobile phone? Google Play is an online store that stocks music, movies, books, magazines and Android apps. By setting up a secure payment…

Information is a word that means many things to different people, depending on their exact needs. Google, however, has created a selection of services that offer almost everything you need if you are prepared to learn how they all work. Each service is designed to be easy to use and in many cases little instruction is required. But, as with everything, some useful tips and guides will help speed up the process, and open your eyes to what is possible with a group of services that are all free and extremely well implemented. In this section, we have tutorials which will show you how to communicate in multiple languages, how to view your entire web history and how to research information using the most focused tools available. Discounted goods and…

Over the course of this book we have discovered how Google offers an email service, an online shopping centre, a social network, a cloud storage system, a picture editor and more, all accessible via one main account. And as there is so much to control across your account, you can access one main control terminal and manage everything in one fell swoop. You can access your Accounts screen at any time simply by clicking on your profile picture in the top-right corner of any Google service interface. This will bring up a menu in which you will see an Account link that you can click on. Your Accounts screen consists of a main screen – where you can manage aspects of your general Google account, such as your email address,…

Situated in the top-right corner of every Google page you’re logged into is the ‘Share’ button. Clicking on this provides various options for sharing content from wherever you are quickly and easily. When you click on the button you will be presented with a standard status update window, into which you can write text and accompanying links to add photos, weblinks, videos and calendar events. The beauty of the Google+ service is that you can also be specific about who you share your files and status updates with as, unlike other social networks, you can tailor your audience so that all of your friends and family don’t necessarily have to see all of your posts all of the time. Included at the bottom of the main sharing window is a…

The modern age of the smartphone, which doubles up as a very adept video recording device, means that everything in life can be documented and shared with the world. The ever-surging popularity of the YouTube web video service means that it is often people’s first stop for entertainment as you can find pretty much anything you want, within reason, uploaded and ready for you to enjoy. Uploading your own videos is a quick and easy task and you have full control over who sees the videos that you uploaded and the promotional process to get them seen by as many people as possible, which could also mean an unexpected source of revenue for yourself as a result. When you upload a video, you must give it a title and a…

If you’re finding the stress of work a little too heavy going, want to listen to some of your favourite chill-out music and have forgotten your MP3 player then help is at hand thanks to the Play Music service. You can upload up to 20,000 songs to your own personal cloud, so they will be within easy reach wherever you are – simply log into your Google account on any computer and you’ll be playing them in seconds. That’s not all. Play Music also provides a wide range of cool features to help you get the most out of your music, such as Instant Mixes. Play Music will examine and scrutinise your uploaded music and group similarsounding songs together into playlists for you to enjoy. You can also instantly shop…

Google Offers is designed to open your eyes to some of the discounts that retailers offer from time to time and it is a service that is growing very quickly. If you are in possession of a Google account, you will have a dedicated Offers page where you can save each offer you see, and you can then redeem them by accessing each on a smartphone and presenting them in person. The entire process is as simple as you could hope for and makes a mockery of the old days of cutting out coupons from magazines. The service is still in a fairly early stage, however, so you may need to search a little harder than expected to find the offers you want and not all countries are supported at…

We all have interests and we all have an in-built need to talk about them with other people who share these interests. Creating your own group page is a quick and easy way of doing this and thanks to Google’s intuitive Groups service, you can set up as many as you want and monitor them with ease through a simple interface. When setting up a new group, you have full freedom to decide the content and style of the group. For example, will it be a mailing list, will it be a web forum or will it be a collaborative inbox style of group whereby visitors can freely provide their own topics for discussion and content. With your groups set up, you can easily add posts and then go to…

The new Google Maps is much improved on the old version. For a start, Earth has been fully integrated to replace the satellite view and searches and clicks are tailored for your needs. Traffic, for instance, gives real-time updates and it looks much better in this version. But you can also see alternative routes, whether by car or public transport. You even get an indication of how long, under the current conditions, it will take you to get there. Google Maps is also hot on images. There are thousands of photographs which help to form an overall image of an area and give you a better flavour of what is around. You can also leave ratings for places and see what other people think. All of this has been made…

Google is in the perfect position to offer real-time information on what are the most popular searches of the moment thanks to its domination of the web search market, you don’t just search the web, you ‘Google it’. This enables it to scour all of the searches that are being undertaken at any time and present them for you to check during the day, using Google Trends. At any point, the top trends are of course changing every second and this is reflected in a variety of ways, but Google has also helpfully broken the trends down into categories if you are interested in a particular topic. The Top Charts section shows what is popular over a period of your choosing and will also be broken down by country. Hot…

Feedly is a news feed reader, which has become the popular replacement for Google Reader. Since the announcement that Google Reader was shutting down, Feedly has amassed 12 million users, and with good reason too. If you were using Google Reader previously then you will be happy to hear that Feedly, who are not a part of Google, offers a similar but improved service. For those of you who are new to RSS news feeds, here is how it works: rather than visiting each of your favourite websites and browsing through its pages for new content, you can add your favourite sites to your Feedly news feed (as well as categories for them), putting all your favourite and most up-to-date news feeds in one manageable space. You can even add…

Google Keep is one of the lesserknown web apps available from the Chrome Store, but it may well be what tips you over the edge in becoming a full-on Google-head. Keep is a very simple note and list-making service. That’s about all there is to it. If you are using multiple computers and devices through your day, perhaps you have experimented with note making apps and software before. Apple offers Reminders and Notes, Samsung has S Memo, and there are independent companies such as Wundershare, but with Google Keep (as with any of Google’s apps) it transcends all computers, operating systems and devices, making it universally compatible with just about all of your devices. The app has undergone something of a redevelopment in recent times and is now a stand…

If you have a busy day, week, month or lifetime coming up then it’s going to help to plan for it, right down to the minutes in the day. By using your Google Calendar to focus on one day at a time, you can create an incredibly detailed and concise agenda (appointment diary) for yourself, with event details, participants, times and locations. You can also integrate Google Tasks with your daily agenda, meaning that you can set up a primary task which will feature in your agenda and within that task you can add as many secondary tasks as you like, which will be displayed in the Google Tasks window next to your calendar. Once you have compiled your agenda for the day, week or month, you can view it,…

Most websites have at least two or three pages – individual screens that are linked together to form a cohesive whole – and many sites feature hundreds or even thousands! One of the key things to consider when creating your website is how to accommodate both the pages you’d like immediately, which may well be limited in scope, but also those you may decide to add in the future. Google Sites has a useful function that makes organising pages a simple case of dragging and dropping. This handy feature not only allows you to move pages around, but also to set up a hierarchy so that some pages are ‘children’ of others. This is especially useful if you have a situation where some of your content follows a specific theme,…

With so much personal information being entered into computers and bandied around various places, we have every right to feel slightly paranoid about it falling into the wrong hands. We often hear of various online accounts getting hijacked as well, which can lead to all kinds of problems. Fortunately, Google comes with mutliple security settings to allow you to tighten the security of your account and the various services you use to help ensure that your private data is safe and secure, should it fall into the wrong hands. By going to the Accounts screen (accessible by clicking on your profile picture in the top-right corner of the screen and then clicking on the Account link), you can click on the Security link in the left-hand column and get a…

You will likely know the most popular apps and services that Google runs, but there are other apps that the company has either acquired or developed over time that may surprise you. Some of these apps offer no obvious indication at all that Google is involved, but you can be assured that they will work flawlessly and bear all of the hallmarks of the Google system behind the scenes. Reliability, accuracy and speed are obvious throughout. From communitybased navigation to image editing, Google’s reach extends way beyond the obvious and into a variety of areas, but ones that remain eminently useful. The company is now even delving in to the world of home automation, too, but no matter what unusual Google app you use, chances are that it will work…

What a difference a year makes in the world of technology. Last year Google gave away its Cardboard virtual reality headset as a free gift to developers at the end of the Google I/O conference. This year, the product was firmly placed in centre stage during the conference keynote. One million Cardboard viewers have been shipped worldwide and over 500 compatible apps are available on the Play store. But Google is not going to stop there. With a new-look Cardboard viewer and an ambitious vision to make sharing virtual reality experiences accessible to everyone, the tech giant is pushing the envelope of virtual reality. VR for everyone If you’re not familiar with Cardboard, it’s similar to the Samsung Gear VR that was also launched last year. If that still doesn’t…

How often do you catch the headlines at the start of a major daily news bulletin, only to find that the story you were interested in is crudely tacked onto the end after you have endured half an hour of stories that don’t matter to you? Google News eradicates this problem by only delivering the news that you are interested in. In fact, your news content is devised through various means, including your region and previous stories that you have clicked on. The more you use Google News, the better it gets at narrowing down your content and ensuring that superfluous stories are nowhere to be found. In developing its News service, Google has strived to get the balance right between its algorithmic search efficiency and the needs of its…

Getting organised with Google’s huge array of web, mobile and tablet apps goes way beyond syncing your emails and calendars and setting up a few bookmarks for your favourite sites. It is now possible to shift you entire life onto Google, utilising its free services to better manage everything from everyday tasks, to the running of your business, to keeping up to date with your stocks. The key is how you implement these tools into your life. A lot of what’s available through Google’s web browser, Chrome, is not always hugely advertised. There are a lot of great unknown tricks and tips for speeding up your workflow and streamlining the way you and your devices communicate with Google. In the following tutorials you will learn how to make the most…

The Gmail service has undergone a major makeover of late – and we’re impressed with the results. The most startling new feature revolves around tabs, though strangely this new addition isn’t instantly apparent. To access it you have to open the Settings menu (via cog icon) – here you’ll find the option to ‘Configure inbox’, which is where the magic happens. You can add various categories of tabs to the top of your primary inbox and all the emails relating to these will be automatically filtered into their respective tabbed inbox, instantly de-cluttering your primary inbox. This makes it far easier to find certain emails and never miss the important ones. You can also move messages between tabs if you find something filed incorrectly and the system is intelligent enough…

Uploading your images to Google+ is beneficial in so many ways. Not only is it a great way to keep your images safe in a cloud environment, but it also brings a wealth of options to help you organise and share your images with other people. Uploading your images to Google+ is a quick and easy process that can be done by going to the Photos section and then clicking on the ‘Upload photos’ link at the top of the page. You can then drag images into the web browser window or navigate to them on your computer and choose which ones to upload manually. You can also download additional software to make the whole process automatic, if you wish. Once your images have been uploaded, you can then go…

It has never been easier to shop online, and Google is making strides to ensure that it gets easier by the minute. If you have ever bought anything from the Google Play store, such as an app or music track, then you will have already put your payment details in place when setting up your account. Google Wallet provides you with a useful platform to carefully monitor your online transactions so that you can scrutinise every outgoing payment and know exactly what you bought and on which date (we wouldn’t want small children buying on our behalf, after all…) Through Google Wallet you can also change certain aspects of your payment details, including the default billing address and registering extra debit or credit cards to use through your account. If…

When trawling the various news sites on the internet, we spend hours of our lives scrolling past stories that we have no interest in just to find the stuff that we do. Well, the Google News service gets around any unnecessary news sidestepping by delivering only the news that you want to read. You have full control over how you set up your personal news page. You can select the category of news you want relayed to you (politics, entertainment, sport etc) and the providers of the news – so if you don’t like the style of one particular source, you simply don’t include it. You can then tailor your feeds so that more news comes from a particular source and less news comes from other sources. You can also…

Google Alerts works by allowing you to set up web searches for articles of interest and then getting emails that are automatically sent to you by Google when items that match your search criteria develop. These could be webpages, newspaper articles or blogs – anything that matches your search terms – making Google Alerts a very useful service for monitoring things on the web. To start using Google Alerts, just enter a search query and then Google Alerts will check regularly to see if there are new results that match it. If there are then Google Alerts will send them to you in an email. It’s incredibly easy to use and has many benefits, such as helping you find out what is being said about a particular company or product,…

As well as manually hopping from destination to destination in Google Earth and viewing the environment around you at each location, you are able to sit back and enjoy some tours, complete with information that helps you to get more out of what you are seeing. There are some built-in tours that take you around some of the world’s most popular destinations, but you can also become very creative and produce your own. There are a couple of ways of doing this. You could insert a route and have Google Earth fly over it so you can see where you are going or you can produce a bespoke tour that you control, taking viewers on a journey. This can be narrated if you wish. Both are easy to do, as…

Specify exactly what you need to find and narrow down your results by using advanced search tools Most people use Google Search every day and accept the results that are presented. This is perfectly reasonable because the results are almost always accurate and fit the search term that has been inputted, but there are ways to improve your results. Google offers many tools that will let you search for images, locations and other nontext references with ease and even these can be expanded upon to let you find exact image sizes and the type of images you require. The Advanced Search option lets you specify more than one term and you can choose what to include and what to avoid, which should bring results that are as near to your…

It is easy and natural to use the default Google Search method when researching topics, but to do so would be missing out on one of the most useful Google offerings. Scholar is designed specifically for researching academic literature and journals and includes a number of simple features that come together to create a powerful solution that will save you a lot of time and improve the accuracy of your searching enormously. Each search result is presented with options below it that will automate the citation of each article and you can also then import them into your bibliography using your chosen referencing style with just a couple of clicks. Stats are available showing the number of citations and many of the results link directly to full articles which can…

We’ve been using folder systems for storing our images, music, videos and documents for about as long as it’s been possible to own a personal computer. Now we’re moving into a time where we need the content of our computers to be stored in the cloud, making it accessible from multiple devices. Google Drive allows us to access and edit a variety of files all through the Chrome browsing software, meaning it doesn’t matter what device you are on or what software is installed on the computer. However, it can still feel a little foreign to be opening an internet browser to access our computer’s files. With Google Drive’s desktop software we can keep our files in a nice and familiar file format, while also storing them in the cloud.…

The Google Finance web app is one of the most world’s up to complex, in-depths apps available from Google. It brings the international stock market to your web browser, detailing market summaries, a news feed of top financial stories and a completely customisable portfolio to view and manage your ventures as well as overviews of the s markets, currencies and industries – keeping you date with everything that is happening. It can certainly be a little overwhelming when you first visit Google Finance, but as long as you have a basic understanding of the market it won’t take you long to build your own portfolio, integrate it with your Google calendar, and keep yourself up to date with the market as a whole and your own personal ventures. It’s through…

Once you’ve created a website, either with Google Sites or via another service, it’s tempting to think that your work is done and you can relax. The notion that if you ‘build it they will come’ is true to a certain extent, especially if you’re offering niche content that readers won’t find elsewhere on the web, but almost every website owner spends a considerable amount of time trying to encourage visitors to their site. This might be because you’ve got a product or service to sell, because you’re keen to share some specific information, or simply for the kudos of a successful and busy website. One of the most difficult aspects of attracting people to your website is understanding what your visitors are doing when they arrive at the site,…

Over the years Google has experimented with many different online products and services. Some have fallen by the wayside, while others have flourished. Many of these services are intended as augmentations to a website, making it easier to integrate specific functionality such as on-the-fly generation of charts and infographics, maps or website analysis. One of the issues with having a wide-ranging set of services that are mature and developed is that these can become quite complex due to the myriad options they offer. Luckily, Google is quite adept at unifying services under an API approach that makes it, if not straightforward, logical to implement and integrate its services. An application pplication programming interface (API) provides a method for your website to request the dynamic content from Google’s servers. And rather…