Category Archives: Google/Yahoo

My thoughts on search engine giants. I love both Google and Yahoo equally and I also hate them equally.

DocSyncer adds support for Google Apps account

Recently, when I showed you how to automatically backup documents to Google Docs using DocSyncer, I mentioned that it is not possible to backup the documents to your Google Apps account. But today DocSyncer have released an update and now it is possible to backup the documents to your Google Apps account.

You have to go to the Account settings tab and then click disconnect and then connect again. You will be taken to a page where you can select either Google Apps account or standard Gmail account.

DocSyncer

This is very useful to me, since I have started to use my Google Apps account instead of the standard Gmail account. Good job DocSyncer!

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Automatically backing up documents in Google Docs

I was looking for a way to automatically backup my documents in Google Docs from my desktop. After a bit of googling, I found a great service called DocSyncer which worked exactly the same way I wanted it to work. So I thought of sharing the steps which I followed to back up my documents from desktop to Google Docs.

First sign up for the service from its home page.

DocSyncer

Then allow DocSyncer access to your Google Docs, by clicking “Grant Access” in the next screen

DocSyncer

After this download and install the DocSyncer program from the next screen

DocSyncer

By default DocSyncer syncs all documents which are present in your desktop and in your Documents folder. I wanted only a few documents to be synced, so I created a new folder called InSync in my Documents folder and selected only that folder and unchecked all the other folders. If you want to sync all the documents which are present in your Documents folder then you don’t need to edit anything.

DocSyncer

That’s it and now all the documents present in the folder that you have selected will be automatically synced. You can download the current version or the previous version of the document from the web interface.

DocSyncer

You can also directly download the document from the Google Docs page.

You can also associate document files (.doc, .ppt, .xls etc) with DocSyncer so that they are automatically opened in Google Docs instead of opening them from the local desktop. This can be done by changing the file association from the Account Setting tab of the web interface.

DocSyncer

I am using DocSyncer for the past one week and these are my findings based on my experience in the past week.

Pros

  • All previous versions of the file are stored.
  • You can directly open the file in Google Docs from any computer which has access to internet. You don’t need to have Microsoft Office suite installed.
  • Very clean interface and nice desktop Integration.
  • Connection through SSL (but you need to enable it in the Account Settings tab)

Cons

  • Can easily cluster your Google Docs page if the file is changed very frequently.
  • In the current beta version you cannot select any folder apart from the desktop and Documents folder.
  • It can upload only to Google Docs and not to Google Apps Docs. Update (2008-Feb-13): DocSyncer has added support for Google Apps account.

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps

I am one of the early adapters of Gmail and I simply love it. I could still remember how excited I was when I received an invite from my friend Sumod.

A couple of months back I signed up for Google Apps and have set it up in my domain. It’s really cool to have a personalized email address yourname@yourdomain.com which you can have control over instead of having a generic email address like yourname@gmail.com. If you are still not convinced then read this article from lifehacker.

But then I found it very difficult to maintain two different accounts. For some time I was redirecting the mail that I receive in my Google Apps account to my Gmail account and also setup a custom from address to my Google Apps email address. But it was not looking good in some email clients like outlook, which exposed the customized from address. This made me to search for ways to migrate all my emails from Gmail to Google Apps. I have been using my Gmail account for nearly three and half years and have accumulated nearly 2.5 GB of mail.

Finally I found gXFER which actually worked and now all my old emails are backed up in my Google Apps account. So even if you want to move your emails from one Gmail account to another or to a Google Apps account or vice versa then follow these steps.

First, you need to add the Google gadget which is available in gXFER homepage to your Google personalized home page.

Now click the “Start Migration Online” link which is present in the new gadget which you have added to your Google personalized homepage (iGoogle).

Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps

Enter your Gmail account information and Google Apps account information and then click start.

Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps

Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps

If you get this screen then you are done. The migration is started and all your emails from Gmail will start to appear in your Google Apps account, but it might take very long time depending upon your inbox size. For me it took around 3 days for the complete transfer. The transfer rate is around 100 messages per hour.

The following are some of the points which I noted when my emails were migrated.

  • As I said above the transfer rate is very slow, only 100 messages per hour. So it could easily take up days if your inbox size is big.
  • All your contacts will be transferred without any problem.
  • All the labels and filters that you have created will be transferred. If you have set up a filter to automatically assign a label to a message then it will work. But if you have explicitly assigned a label to a message then it will not be transferred.
  • Messages present in the following labels will not be transferred Chats, Spam and trash.
  • Your drafts will not be transferred.
  • Messages will not be stared automatically, which means all your staring will be lost.
  • If any of your attachments is infected with virus then those messages will not be transferred.
  • The process appears to be stopped sometimes but actually it is not stopped and works but very slowly.

Once you have set it up, you can enable mail notification in Google Talk and then sit back and watch it as your messages gets transferred to your Google Apps account.

Happy emailing πŸ™‚

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , | 17 Comments

Yahoo Pipes Team writes about pipesCamp

I was really very surprised when I found that the Yahoo Pipes team has blogged about pipesCamp, which I attended two weeks back.

Even the Yahoo Developer Network carried an article about pipesCamp. The article also mentioned the Yahoo! Pipes hack – ego Search, which I built together with Yuvi and Harish. Very nice feeling to see something which you helped build was featured by big boys like Yahoo. πŸ˜‰

It was really very nice to know that the event which was organized in less than a week was such a success. Imagine how it would have been if we had more time πŸ˜‰

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Get the current time for any city using Google

In addition to fetching fresh results and following cricket scores, you can also now also get the current time for any city by just searching in Google.

All you have to do is just type time followed by the city name

Eg: time Chennai

Google Time Query

You can also search by typing the time zone

Eg: time central

Google Time Query

Next time when I have to send a meeting request to my clients (who are in US), I can save a few seconds by doing a Google search rather than changing the timezone in my computer clock to find their current time.

More details in Google friend’s newsletter. Thanks Phil for finding this.

You can also check out my Google Search syntax complete tutorial or the latest additions to Google Search Syntax.

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Some new additions to Google Search Syntax

Google has added some new search syntax and so here is the update to my Google Search syntax tutorial.

Fetch only Fresh results

First one is to narrow down your search to only the most recent web pages. This is particularly important, since Google has started serving fresh results.

Alex Chitu from the unofficial Google Operating system blog has found that we can use as_qdr query parameter to search only for fresh pages.

In order to use this you have to add a new parameter as_qdr at the end of the url like below
http://www.google.com/search?q=ipod&as_qdr=d

The as_qdr parameter can take the following possible values.

  • d[number] – past number of days (e.g.: d5)
  • w[number] – past number of weeks (e.g: w5)
  • y[number] – past number of years (e.g: y5)

More explanations by Matt Cutts and also at Life hacker.

Cricket

Being born in India, circket is there in my blood and the same for Sadeesh Duraisamy who works in Google. Thanks to him and now we can keep an eye on the latest circket scores by just typing the word cricket in Google’s search box.

Well, it’s time for me to watch the do-or-die match with South Africa for India in the latest twenty20 tournament. πŸ™‚

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Google Search – Combining allinurl with the keyword search

I used to get lot of emails from people asking me to help them with Google search syntax, ever since I dissected Google’s Search syntax and I used to reply them back with the correct search syntax.

Recently I received a mail from a person named Jack and I couldn’t come up with the search syntax for his query. So I am listing it here to get the help from the wisdom of crowd and here is the query.

Find all links that have ‘love‘ in the url (allinurl) AND the word ‘sweet‘ in the content of the page.

Can anyone do this? ❓

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Is Google down?

Is it just me who is not able to access any of the Google sites (Gmail, Google.com, Google.co.in) from India? All Google related sites are returning 404 for me from noon (13-May-07, 7:00 AM GMT, 12:30 PM IST). I could remember this happening to Gmail some time back. But now even Google Talk seems to be down.

Anyone else sharing the same plight like me?

Update: It’s 5 PM (IST) now and all Google sites are working fine.

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Thank You Google and Linux

One big advantage in having a unique name is that people can google and find you. Well, that’s what has happened now. One of my friends at school, (with whom I lost contact) found me after 7 long years through a Google search about Linux which let him to this blog post of mine. Thanks Google and Linux.

So I have found one more reason to blog, to help my old buddies find me through Google search πŸ™‚

Posted in Google/Yahoo, Random/Personal | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Google can eat your email

When I talked about the reliability of user data in the web 2.0 style websites, I asked you to just imagine what might happen if you loose all you email from Gmail. But indeed it has happened to few people. Here are few links from reliable sources

Oh my god! I just cannot imagine this happening to me. More over it seems that Google doesn’t retain a copy of your email once you delete it due to privacy issues. This means that there is very little chance that your email can be restored. All say that the solution is to back up you email. But how to back up my 1.5 GB of email? πŸ™

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , | 7 Comments