The 10 Important URLs That Every Google User Should Know

What does Google know about the places you’ve visited recently? What are your interests as determined by Google? Where does Google keep a list of every word that you’ve ever typed in the search box? Where can you get a list of Google ads that were of interest to you?

The 10 Important Google Links

Google stores everything privately and here are the 10 important links (URLs) that will unlock everything Google knows about you. They are hidden somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard and they may reveal interesting details about you that are otherwise only known to Google. Let’s dive in.

1. Google stores a list of usernames and passwords that you have typed in Google Chrome or Android for logging into various websites. They even have a website too where you can view all these passwords in plain text.

passwords.google.com

2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, guessing your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads. Use this URL to know how Google sees you on the web.

www.google.com/settings/ads

3. You can easily export all your data out of the Google ecosystem. You can download your Google Photos, contacts, Gmail messages and even your YouTube videos. Head over the the Takeout page to grab the download links.

www.google.com/takeout

4. If you ever find your content appearing on another website, you can raise a DMCA complaint with Google against that site to get the content removed. Google has a simple wizard to help you claim content and the tool can also be used to remove websites from Google search results that are scraping your content.

support.google.com/legal

5. Your Android phone or the Google Maps app on your iPhone is silently reporting your location and velocity (are you moving and if yes, how fast are you moving) back to Google servers. You can find the entire location history on the Google Maps website and you also have the option to export this data as KML files that can be viewed inside Google Earth or even Google Drive.

google.com/maps/timeline

6. Create a new Google Account using your existing email address. The regular sign-up process uses your @gmail.com address as your Google account username but with this special URL, you can use any other email address as your username.

accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

7. Google and YouTube record every search term that you’ve ever typed or spoken into their search boxes. They keep a log of every Google ad that you have clicked on various websites, every YouTube video you’ve watched and, if you are a Google Now user, you can also see a log of all your audio search queries. OK Google.

history.google.com (Google searches)
history.google.com/history/audio (Voice searches)
youtube.com/feed/history (YouTube searches and watched videos)

8. You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies. This can be an issue if you have multiple Gmail accounts so as a workaround, you can setup your main Gmail account as the trusted contact for your secondary accounts. Thus Google will keep sending you reminders every few months to login to your other accounts.

www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

9. Worried that someone else is using your Google account or it could behacked? Open the activity report to see a log of every device that has recently connected into your Google account. You’ll also get to know the I.P. Addresses and the approximate geographic location. Unfortunately, you can’t remotely log out of a Google session.

myaccount.google.com/security

10. Can’t locate your mobile phone? You can use the Google Device Manager to find your phone provided it is switched on and connected to the Internet. You can ring the device, see the location or even erase the phone content remotely. You can even find the IMEI Number of the lost phone from your Google Account.
google.com/android/devicemanager

How to Change a Picture’s Date in Google Photos

Casey Smith uploaded a bunch of scanned images on Google Photos but they are showing the date when the scan was made and not when the pictures were captured. She writes: “Do you have any recommendation on how to re-date pictures that are not appropriately dated? I have a ridiculous amount of photos that are dated as of the date I added them to Google Pictures as opposed to the date they were actually taken. It’s driving me nuts. Any advise?”

There are two ways to deal with the problem. You can either change the date of photos before uploading them to Google Photos or do it after the photos are uploaded. The former option is recommended since it will let you modify the date and time of multiple photos in one go while the latter option would allow you to edit the timestamp of one image at a time.

Both Windows Photos Gallery and Apple Photos for Mac OS X allow you to easily edit a photo’s date and time. Open Photo Gallery on Windows, select one or more pictures by holding the CTRL key, click the date in the Info panel and choose the correct date from the calendar. In the case of Apple Photos, select one or more photos and videos from the gallery and choose “Adjust Date and Time” from the Image menu.

Alternatively, you can use a more powerful command like tool like ExifTool(available for both Mac and Windows) that can “shift” the date and time associated with images by a fixed amount. This is useful if you have taken pictures with a digital camera that had an incorrect time when the photos were taken so the dates can be shifted relatively.

If you’ve already uploaded the pictures on Google Photos, you can still edit the timestamp but you can only do that one image at a time. Also, the date editing option is only available on the Google Photos website and not inside their iPhone or Android apps (yet).

Go to photos.google.com and click on any photo. Next click the “i” icon to open the Info page and then click the pencil icon next to the date to modify the date and time of that photo. Tedious but works.

If you are to edit the date of multiple photos that are already on Google Photos, a less time-consuming option would be that you download them all to the desktop, delete the copy from Google Photos, empty the bin, edit the dates of images on the desktop and re-upload them to the Google Photos website.

And you would still need a desktop based photo editing program to add or edit the geolocation data since Google Photos doesn’t support that yet.

Play Clash of kings from google playstore to your PC

In this video i show you how to play clash of kings from play store. and you can play other android games too )))
Download Software from here : http://www.bluestacks.com/

Always Block Google from Accessing your Site’s Search Results

If you are using Google Custom Search or another site search service on your website, make sure that the search results pages – like the one available here– are not accessible to Googlebot. This is necessary else spam domains can create serious problems for your website for no fault of yours.

Few days ago, I got an automatically generated email from Google Webmaster Tools saying that Googlebot is having trouble indexing my website allsoftlearn.blogspot.com as it found a large number of new URLs. The message said:

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site’s URL structure… As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

This was a worrying signal because it meant that tons of new pages have been added to the website without my knowledge. I logged into Webmaster Tools and, as expected, there were thousands of pages that were in the crawling queue of Google.

Here’s what happened.

Some spam domains had suddenly started linking to the search page of my website using search queries in Chinese language that obviously returned no search results. Each search link is technically considered a separate web page – as they they have unique addresses – and hence the Googlebot was trying to crawl them all thinking they are different pages. 

Because thousands of such fake links were generated in a short span of time, Googlebot assumed that these many pages have been suddenly added to the site and hence a warning message was flagged.

There are two solutions to the problem.

I can either get Google to not crawl links found on spam domains, something which is obviously not possible, or I can prevent the Googlebot from indexing these non-existent search pages on my website. The latter is possible so I fired up my VIM editor, opened the robots.txt file and added this line at the top. You’ll find this file in the root folder of your website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Block Search pages from Google with robots.txt

The directive essentially prevents Googlebot, and any other search engine bot, from indexing links that have the “s” parameter the URL query string. If your site uses “q” or “search” or something else for the search variable, you may have to replace “s” with that variable.

The other option is to add the NOINDEX meta tag but that won’t have been an effective solution as Google would still have to crawl the page before deciding not to index it. Also, this is a WordPress specific issue because the Blogger robots.txt already blocks search engines from crawling the results pages.

The Most Popular and Useful Google Scripts

Google Scripts offer programmatic access to most Google products including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Analytics, Google Contacts, Calendar, Maps and Google Analytics. The Google scripts are written in regular JavaScript language and they are hosted on Google’s servers.

Most Useful Google Apps Scripts

Here’s an always-updated collection of Google Scripts that will help you do more with your favorite Google products. And you don’t have to be programmer to use any of these scripts.

1. Files Permissions Explorer – See who has access to your shared files and folders in Google Drive and whether they view or edit permissions.
2. Google Form File Uploads – You can receive files directly in your Google Drive from anyone through HTML forms created with HTMLService.
3. Mail Merge with Gmail – Send personalized email messages to your contacts using the Gmail Merge add-on.
4. Send to Google Drive – You can save your Email and Gmail attachments directly to Google Drive with the Save Emails add-on.
5. Retweet & Favorite Bot – Another Twitter bot written in Google Scripts that will auto-retweet matching tweets.
6. Gmail Autoresponder – Reply to one or more email messages in your Gmail using pre-written email templates.
7. Website Uptime Monitor – Receive instant email and SMS alerts when your websites goes down. You can monitor all your web domains for free.
8. Amazon Price Tracker – Keep track of prices of your favorite products on Amazon and get email alerts when the prices go down or up.
9. Gmail Unsubscriber – Automatically unsubscribe your email address from mailing lists and bulk emails.
10. Read Receipts in Gmail – Use Apps Script and Google Analytics to track your outgoing Gmail messages and get notified when people open and read your email.
11. Advanced Gmail Filters – Have more control over the criteria for sorting incoming messages in your Gmail.
12. Send Google Spreadsheets as PDF – You can setup a recurring task that will convert your spreadsheet to PDF and email to specific recipients as per schedule.
13. Download Tweets Permanently – specify any hashtag and the script will download and save all matching tweets to a spreadsheet.
14. Schedule Gmail Emails – You can write the emails now and send them later at any date and time with Apps Script and Google Sheets.
15. Sell Digital Products Online – Use a combination of PayPal and Google Drive to setup your own digital shop online.
16. Save Google Voicemails as MP3 – The web app will automatically copy the MP3 of your Google voice mail messages from Gmail to Google Drive.
17. Gravity Forms to Google Sheets – Write a Google Script that will save your Gravity WordPress form entries to a Google Spreadsheet without Zapier.
18. Gmail Encrypt – You can encrypt your outgoing Gmail messages using the powerful AES encryption and no one will be able to snoop your private conversations.
19. 1-click Website Hosting – Use this Google Script to host your websites, images, podcasts and other media files on Google Drive with one click.
20. Google Web Scraping – Import Google Search results into a Google Spreadsheet with the ImportXML function for analysis or export them in other formats.
21. Flipkart & Snapdeal Price Tracker – Monitor and compare prices of items listed on Flipkart and Snapdeal and get price alerts via email.
22. Bullk Tweets & DMs – You can send personlized tweets and Direct Messages in bulk to Twitter users from a Google Spreadsheet.
23. Save Gmail Images – The script monitors your Gmail mailbox and will auto-save any image attachments to your Google Drive.
24. Sort Gmail by Size – Is your Gmail mailbox running out of space. The scripts will determine all the bulky messages in your Gmail mailbox.
25. Bulk Forward Gmail – The auto-forward feature in Gmail only works on incoming messages but our bulk forward script can forward even older email to your other email addresses.
26. Update Google Contacts –  See how your friends and family members can directly add or update their own contact information into your Google address book.
27. Google Contacts Map – The Google Script will plot the postal address of your Google Contacts on a Google Map. You can also export this data as a KML file for Google Earth.
28. Email Form Data –  Google Forms are the best tool for creating online polls and surveys. The script will email you the entire form data as soon as someone submits the form.
29. Auto Confirmation Emails – Send confirmation emails to the user’s email address after they submit a Google Form.
30. Schedule Google Forms – Set an expiration date for your Google Form and they’ll close automatically at a certain date.
31. Twitter Bot – Learn how to write your own Twitter bot that auto-responds to tweets. This particular bot queries Wolfram Alpha to answer queries.
32. WordPress Authentication with Google Scripts – Put anything behind a WordPress login be it a link to download a document from Google Drive or a web app created in Google Apps Script.
33. Twitter Out-of-Office –  You can create out-of-office automatic replies for people who are trying to reach you via Twitter and they wouldn’t expect a response from you right away.
34. SMS Alerts for Gmail – You can receive SMS text alerts for important incoming messages in your Gmail by connecting your mailbox with a private Twitter account.
35. Extract Email Addresses – The script scans your mailbox and creates a list of email addresses of people who have previously communicated with you.  Useful for building your email marketing lists.
36. Transfer Gmail – Moving to a different email address? The script will automatically copy all your email messages from your old Gmail inbox to another mailbox that could be on any web service.
37. Reminder for starred messages – Get a daily digest with a list of messages that you have “Starred” in your Gmail mailbox and may want to follow up on them.
38. Advanced Gmail Search – Gmail supports a variety of search commands but now you can also use Regular Expressions for searching messages on Gmail.
39. Twitter RSS Feeds – Twitter no longer provides RSS feeds but you can use Google Apps Script to create your own feeds for Twitter timelines, searches and lists.
40. Google+ RSS Feeds – This Apps Script based Chrome add-on will help you generate RSS feeds for any Google Plus user or even search results. Written by Eric Koleda.
41. Translate RSS – You can translate foreign language RSS feeds into your native language with Google Scripts and subscribe to them in your favorite news reader.
42. Gmail Label Feeder –  Create a RSS feed for any of your Gmail labels that you can later feed into Evernote, Pocket, etc. through IFTTT. Written by Martin Hawksey.
43. Gmail Meter – The script will help you analyze how you use Gmail and generates statistics like how much email you send, average length of messages, turn-around time, etc. Written by Romain Vialard.
44. Gmail Delay Send – While there are browser add-ons that let you schedule emailsin Gmail, the script is easier, safer and your messages will be delivered on a specified date and time. Written by Blair Kutzman.
45. Gmail Snooze – When you snooze an email, it disappears from view but reappears in the inbox at some specified time in the future. Written by Corey Goldfeder.
46. Gmail Auto Purge –  Similar to auto-sweep in Outlook, the script will automatically delete older email messages from specific senders after a certain period of time.
47. Gmail Clean-up – Create time-based filters in Gmail that will automatically move, archive or even delete all messages from any particular Gmail label that are older than “n” days. Written by John E. Day.
48. Save Gmail as PDF – The script will save the body of an email message as a PDF file. You can optionally send the converted PDF to your email address.
49. Instagram Downloads – Download photos belonging to specific tags from Instagram to your Google Drive with Apps Script. Written by Waqar Ahmad.
50. GDocs2MD – The script will convert your Google Drive documents into the popular Markdown (.md) format that can be imported into several publishing platforms. Written by Renato Mangini.
51. Gmail NoResponse – It tracks your email messages in Gmail that are awaiting response and where you may want to send a follow-up mail. Written by Jonathan Kim
52. Force Password Change – If you are an admin of a Google Apps domain, use this script to force all your domain users to change their passwords. Written by Waqar Ahmad.
53. Text Browser – A Lynx-inspired browser that lets you browse the web in text and is written using Apps Script. The browser can also be used as a proxy server for reading web content.
54. Self-destructive Messages – Send confidential messages inside a Google Sheet and the message will disappear after it has been read.
55. Auto-Expire Shared Folders – You can set an expiry date for your shared folders in Google Drive and the shared links will automatically expire at the specified date and time.
56. Reddit Scraper – Use the Reddit API with Google Scripts to download all posts from any Reddit to your Google sheet.

A Lynx-like Text Browser that Runs on Google Servers

Text Browser is a Lynx-inspired browser that lets you read the web in text and strips all JavaScript, images, videos and other rich content that maybe embedded inside a web page. Unlike Lynx that require installation and run locally, Text Browser is a web app and runs in the Google cloud.

To get started, click here and authorize the web app with your Google Account. It requires authorization to sign-in and also for fetching web pages on your behalf. It will neither track your browsing activity nor will have access to any of your Google Account data.

Once a page loads inside the Text Browser, any of the internal links will also open inside the same browser automatically.

Text Browser as a Proxy Server

Why would anyone want a basic text browser? Well, you can also use the Text Browser as a proxy server to access news articles and other text-only content on the Internet that may otherwise be inaccessible at your workplace.

When you request a web page through the app, the underlying Google Apps Script will fetch the page on Google’s servers and then renders the content on your screen using Google Apps Script. Thus, even if a site is restricted, you should be able to view the page indirectly through the Google cloud.

And if a website is down for you, use the Google text browser to confirm if the page is really down for everyone or it is just your Internet connection.

How to Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs

Do you have a website or a blog? Would you like to receive instant alerts as soon as your site goes down or becomes inaccessible to users? Would you like to receive these downtime alerts as email, text messages on your mobile phone, or both?

Most website owners use “freemium” website monitoring services to track the downtime and uptime of their sites.  These services have free plans but your are often required to upgrade to the premium version for unlimited email or SMS alerts or if you would like to monitor a large number of websites. There’s a free alternative though.

Build your own Website Uptime Monitor

You can use Google Spreadsheets to monitor the status your website(s) and, unlike the commercial services, Google imposes no restrictions. You can track any number of websites and it will send email /text alerts in case of any issues. The website monitor is written with Google Scripts and is absolutely free as well.

Here’s how you quickly configure Google Docs to monitor the uptime /downtime of your website(s). This has to done just once and the spreadsheet will continuously monitor all your sites in the background. Let’s get started:

1. Sign-in to your Google account and then click here to copy this Google sheet into your Google Drive. You may use Gmail or your Google Apps account to sign-in.
2. Put your website URLs in cell B2 (comma separated) and your email address in cell B3. If you wish to receive alerts by text messages, put Yes in cell B4.
3. You’ll find a new Website Monitor menu in your Google Sheets toolbar. Click Initialize and you’ll get a pop-up asking for authorization. Grant the necessary access.
4. Go to the Website Monitor menu again and choose “Start Website Monitor” to begin the monitoring process. Close the Google Sheet.

That’s it. The Google sheet will monitor your website in the background at 5-minute intervals and will send alerts whenever it has trouble accessing the website. If the issue is resolved, you’ll get another notification saying “all’s well.”

The uptime and downtime times get logged in the same Google Spreadsheet so you can use that data to analyze the performance of your web hosting company.

How Website Monitor works with Google Docs

Internally, there’s a simple Google Script attached to the Google Sheet that does the monitoring.

The script triggers every 5 minutes and then tries to fetch your website using URLFetchApp.fetch, a Google service similar to wget or curl. If the HTTP response code is anything other than 200, it indicates that there’s an issue with your website and an email alert is sent.

Sending SMS Alerts via Google Docs

Google Apps Script can send email messages but the script employs a workaround for sending text messages.

Save Web Pages to your Google Drive

The Google Docs team has released a new Chrome add-on that will help you save full web pages to your Google Drive with a click.

You can choose to save web pages as HTML files, as Google Documents or as .mht files where the entire page (including the CSS and JavaScript) is packed into a single web archive file that can later be viewed inside Internet Explorer 

Send any Web File to Google Drive

This isn’t just limited to saving web page but works with other types of web content too.

For instance, you can right-click any image on a web page and save it to your online Google Drive account. The add-on can be configured to save a static screenshot image (PNG) of the current web page. It can also be used for saving audio, video, PDFs and even Office files from the Internet to Google Drive though it would fail if the size of the file exceeds 25 MB.

All files are saved in the root folder of Google Drive and there isn’t a way to change the default save location. Also, the add-on will initially save the web pages /images to your local computer and then uploads them to your Google Drive. They aren’t transferring stuff directly in the cloud.

You don’t however need the Google Drive app on your computer for this to work.

Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums

With the help of UnMicD over at LH (disclaimer: {s}he did the majority of the legwork), I put together a bookmarklet for getting music online using the google/mediafire trick.

Here’s the JS:

javascript:var searchterms = escape(prompt('Enter Artist and Album'));var query = searchterms + ' site:mediafire.com';window.location='http://www.google.com/search?q=' + query;
And here’s the simple favicon I whipped up for it (imgur):
http://imgur.com/sXOfp.png
I use the Firefox Add-on “Favicon Picker” to assign Favicons to bookmarklets.

Note:
This came about because UnMicD and I originally talked about creating a bookmarklet for a quick google search by site:[cityname].craigslist.org.
That code is available here:
http://lifehacker.com/comment/19315440/

I would post that JS too but I don’t want to steal all the credit…

Google Photos – The Good Parts

When Google launched Gmail in 2004, it bundled 40x more free storage space than competing web mail services. It seemed to solve all storage woes and there was not even a “delete” button in Gmail because, with a gigabyte available, why would anyone ever delete their emails. They’ve adopted a similar approach with Google Photos but gone a step further.

Google Photos offers unlimited online storage space for your digital photos and videos. The original images are compressed after uploading but the difference is barely noticeable, at least on the computer screen.

I started dumping all my pictures to Google Photos, the day it launched, and couldn’t be happier. The initial purpose was online backup but now Google Photos has become “the” place where I go to explore my photos. The files do not consume a byte of local storage space and yet the entire collection is always available on every device that I own.

Here are essential things that you should know about Google Photos and some tips to help get the most out of this amazing photo backup service.

Upload your pictures to Google Photos

Google Photos has desktop uploaders for both Windows PCs and Mac OS X. Alternatively, you can drag folders from the desktop  to photos.google.com and they’ll be uploaded instantly. Android, iPhone and iPad users can install the Google Photos app and their mobile photo will be backed up automatically.

There’s no support for Windows Phone. Linux users can upload photos from a web browser but it is not a very convenient thing when you have too many folders to upload. And if you are already storing photos in places like iCloud, OneDrive or Dropbox, you’ll have to download them locally first for sending to Google Photos. There’s no cloud-to-cloud transfer option.

Organize your Google Photos

Google Photos will arrange your uploaded pictures by location and by date taken automatically. It can also recognize the subject of photos using machine algorithms so if you search for “food” or “dinner”, you will likely see all your family dinner photos. You can find “selfies” too. The results aren’t always accurate but a useful option nonetheless.

Facial recognition, the most useful feature of Picasa, is also available in Google Photos but not outside the United States. There’s no way to search for photos by date or tags either.

If you have painstakingly organized your photo in albums manually, you’ll be disappointed to know that Google Photos will ignore these albums and instead dump all the photos in one big pool. You can create photo albums inside Google Photos but it will not maintain the local album structure during upload.

Duplicate Files in Google Photos

Google Photos can smartly detect duplicate photos and will skip uploading them if a copy has been uploaded previously. The file names of your photos can be different and they can reside in different folders of your hard disk but the service will still recognize the duplicates and remove them from the upload queue.

There are two kinds of duplicates – exact duplicates and near duplicates. If you take a file and slightly crop it or change the EXIF data, it is a near duplicate of the original file. Google Photos will however treat this is a different photo and upload it as well along with the original image.

If you have too many “near duplicates” on your computer, use a desktop tool like Picasa to remove the duplicates before adding them to the upload queue.

Deleting Files in Google Photos

You can delete a file from Google Photos and it will go to the trash. It sits there for 60 days and is then permanently removed so you have enough opportunity to restore your accidental deletes.

Here’s an important detail you should know though.

Let’s say you have a file holiday.jpg in a local Google Photos folder. If you delete this file from the Google Photos app and also empty your Google Photos’ recycle bin, the local file will get re-uploaded to Google Photos. This will happen on mobile as well. If you delete an item from Photos, the item may get re-uploaded from the phone’s gallery.

Thus, always remove files from the local folder as well after the upload it complete else they’ll be re-uploaded if you ever remove the corresponding files from Google Photos.

Editing & Sharing Google Photos

You can select one or more photos, hit the Share button and Google Photos will create an semi-private album with your selected photos. If you choose to share on WhatsApp or other messaging apps, Google Photos will download and send the actual photos and not just share the link to the album.

Google Photos include a suite of image editing tools that let you perform basic edits and you can also apply Instagram-like filters to your images. I was impressed with the photo editing capabilities of Google+ earlier and the same set of tools are now available in Photos. You can even produce animated GIFs and photo slideshows and send them to YouTube straight from the app.

When you share a photo or album in Google Photos via a link, anyone with that link can view your shared photos. There’s no way to limit sharing to specific email addresses as we have in Google Drive.

Google Photos – Tips & Tricks

• The Google Photos uploader is a one-way client and, unlike Dropbox, it will not sync your photos on multiple computers or mobile devices. You can however use Google Takeout to download all your Google Photos on another computer.
• In Google Drive, go to settings and turn on the option that says “Automatically put your Google Photos into a folder in My Drive.” You can now see all your uploaded photos inside Drive and you can even sync your Google Photos with other computers just like any other Google Drive folder.
• There’s no Google Photos API available but if you want to programmatically access Google Photos, the good old Picasa Web API may do the trick.
• The Google Photos app is not Chromecast compatible but you can cast the entire phone screen to see your photo collection on the TV.
• The desktop uploader for Google Photos may not upload screenshot images.
• If you not sure if the desktop uploader is working, go to this secret link and confirm whether files are getting added or not.
• Google Photos are not available inside Gmail but if you have linked your Photos to Google Drive, you can easily attach any of your Google Photos in email messages.
• Go to the YouTube website, click the upload button and you’ll see a new option that says “Import from Google Photos.” You can pull any video from Photos and send it to YouTube.

The hard disks and CDs, where you are currently storing those precious memories, will go defunct in a few years. With Google Photos now available, there’s no reason not to upload your pictures to the cloud because all you need is a decent internet connection.

How to Train Siri, Cortana, and Google to Understand Your Voice Better

No two people sound exactly alike. Different people have different accents and ways of pronouncing words, and computer voice recognition systems like Siri, Cortana, and Google’s voice search aren’t as good as actual human beings at understanding every voice. Train your voice assistant and it’ll be better at understanding you.

Traditionally, computerized voice recognition systems have required some training before they understood you. Modern voice assistants are designed to “just work,” but you can still make them recognize the words you say more often by training them.

Siri on IOS 9.1

Apple added some voice training features to Siri in iOS 9. Activate the “Hey Siri” feature — which allows you to say “Hey Siri” and start talking to Siri from anywhere — and you’ll be prompted to perform some voice training.

(On most iPhones, this only works while your screen is on or while your phone is plugged in. If you have an iPhone 6s, you can also say “Hey Siri” while your screen is off to start a voice search.)

To activate this feature, open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, tap the “General” category, and tap “Siri.” Activate the “Allow “Hey Siri”” option and you’ll be prompted to train Siri.

Siri will have you say “Hey Siri”, “Hey Siri, how’s the weather today?”, and “Hey Siri, it’s me.” This will improve Siri’s ability to understand you.

Cortana on Windows 10

Cortana includes a voice-training feature so you can help Cortana understand your voice better. Like Google, Cortana will upload your voice activity and store it to help Cortana learn your voice over time and understand you better — that’s what the “Speech, inking, & typing” privacy setting controls. You could disable it and tell Cortana to “Stop getting to know me,” but then it would have a harder time understanding you.

To start training Cortana, click or tap the Cortana bar on the taskbar, click the “Notebook” icon at the left of the Cortana pane, and select “Settings.” Activate the “Let Cortana respond to “Hey Cortana” option and then click the “Learn my voice” button. Cortana will walk you through saying a variety of phrases to learn your voice. All of these are things you can actually do with Cortana

.

Google on Android, Chrome, and Elsewhere

Google doesn’t include a special training process on Android. However, some manufacturers do offer this feature on their devices. For example, the Moto Voice application on Motorola phones will prompt you to train it by saying several things the first time you open the Moto Voice app.

Instead, Google captures and keeps all the voice searches, voice actions, and voice dictation activities you perform on your phone. It stores this with your “Voice and Audio Activity,” which is tied to your Google account and used on Android, in Chrome, and in Google’s apps on iOS. You’re free to delete or halt collection of this information at any time, but leaving it enabled means Google will learn how to recognize your voice and the way you pronounce words over time.

To choose whether or not your Android device reports this information, use the “Activity controls” pane in the Google Settings app.

None of these training processes are mandatory, but they’ll help the service in question understand you better. If you find yourself annoyed that your phone, tablet, or computer doesn’t understand you as well as it should, it may just need some training.

Other similar programs — for example, speech-to-text programs — generally have their own integrated training features, too. For example, the Speech Recognition feature that’s been part of Windows for years can be trained to work better.

How to Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox

Web pages can automatically play audio thanks to HTML5, even if you’ve set Flash and other browser plug-ins to click-to-play. Most modern web browsers include an audio indicator that will show you which tab is playing sound. Most modern browsers also let you mute individual tabs.

This feature was available behind a hidden flag in Chrome for a while, and is now stable. Apple’s Safari was the first web browser that actually enabled it by default, and Mozilla is working on adding it to Firefox.

Google Chrome

This feature is now part of the stable version of Chrome and doesn’t require enabling any hidden flags to use. Just locate a tab playing audio — you’ll see a speaker indicator to the left of the “x” on the tab itself. Right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab.”

The audio indicator will turn to a crossed-out speaker icon, informing you that the tab isn’t allowed to play audio. Right-click it again and select “Unmute Tab” to change your choice.
This feature is now part of the stable version of Chrome and doesn’t require enabling any hidden flags to use. Just locate a tab playing audio — you’ll see a speaker indicator to the left of the “x” on the tab itself. Right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab.”

The audio indicator will turn to a crossed-out speaker icon, informing you that the tab isn’t allowed to play audio. Right-click it again and select “Unmute Tab” to change your choice.

Apple Safari

This is also possible in Safari — Safari was the first browser that made this feature available to all its users.

As in Chrome, you’ll see a speaker icon to the left of the “x” button on an individual browser tab when it’s playing audio. You can click the speaker icon to mute the tab, and click it again to unmute the tab. You can also right-click or Ctrl-click the tab and select “Mute Tab” to mute that individual tab.

Unlike in Chrome, there’s no way to preemptively mute a tab. This option is only available when a tab is already playing audio.

Mozilla Firefox


Firefox is on the verge of adding built-in audio indicators on its tabs and a way to mute them. According to the bug report, this feature should be part of Firefox 42. It’s part of the latest experimental “nightly” builds of Firefox, too.

It works similarly to Safari and Chrome. If a tab is playing audio, you’ll see an audio indicator to the left of the “x” button on the tab. You can click that little speaker icon to mute a tab or right-click the browser tab and select “Mute Tab.”

Like Chrome, Firefox also allows you to preemptively mute tabs before they start playing audio — just right-click a tab and select “Mute Tab.”

If you’re still using an old version of Firefox, you can do this by installing an extension like “Mute Tab.” However, this extension doesn’t work as well — it only works with HTML5 audio. Thankfully, it’s possible to prevent plug-ins from automatically playing by setting them to click-to-play in Firefox.

Microsoft Edge 

Microsoft Edge does at least include audio indicators on its tabs. Unlike all other browsers, however, those audio indicators are located at the left side of each tab.

Edge doesn’t yet offer a built-in way to mute tabs, and it doesn’t support browser extensions. Browser extensions — or Microsoft itself — may one day bring this feature to Edge. For now, Edge is still stuck playing catch-up to the features offered by established browsers.

You can always mute your entire browser to prevent all web pages from playing audio until you change your mind — assuming you’re using Windows or Linux. On Windows, right-click the volume icon in your system tray, select “Open Volume Mixer” and use the mixer to mute the browser or at least lower its volume. On Linux, you’ll usually find this option in your desktop’s sound settings, too — it’s offered by PulseAudio. Mac OS X doesn’t offer this feature.

How to Delete your Google Chrome History Selectively

Would you not like Google Chrome (and Google) to keep a record of websites that you have visited recently? Well you can remove your browsing history from Chrome in two easy steps. Type chrome://history in the browser’s address bar, click the “Clear Browsing Data” button and your history will be deleted permanently.

Remove Chrome History Selectively

Now consider a slightly different scenario. You want to preserve most of the browsing history in Chrome but would like to selectively remove certain items from the history. Maybe you want to remove all traces of visits to a particular website. Or you are trying to remove all web pages from Chrome’s history that contain a particular keyword.

That’s not difficult either. Use the search box in the Chrome history page to find web pages from a particular website, then hover your mouse over the items you wish to remove and select the checkbox. Do this for every page you need to remove and then click the “Remove Selected Items” button.

If you are to remove 50 pages from the history, you will have to select 50 different checkboxes manually. There’s no “Select All” button in Chrome’s history pages.

That can be tedious task so here’s a simple workaround that requires no Chrome extensions.

Select the checkbox against the first item in the history results and then scroll to the bottom of the history page. Now select the checkbox against the last item but keep the SHIFT key down. This will select the entire list and you can now remove them from history with a click.

Host your Podcasts on Google Drive for Free

If you are looking to publish your own audio or video podcasts, you’ll need to rent space on a public web server to host the MP3 or MP4 files of your podcast. When someone subscribes to your podcast feed in iTunes, or another podcasting app, the podcast media files will download from this server to the user’s computer or mobile phone.

Free Podcast Hosting on Google Drive

Google Drive offers web hosting and you can make use of this feature to host to host your own podcast show in two minutes.

Essentially, what we will do is create a new folder in Google Drive to store the podcast files and then make this folder public so anyone on the web can download episode files stored in this Google Drive folder. Any audio or video file that you upload to this Google Drive folder will have a public URL that you can use in your Podcast XML feed for publishing on iTunes.

1. Click here and authorize the Google Script so that it can create a new public folder in your Google Drive for hosting the files.
2. You’ll now be provide a link to the new Google Drive folder. Open the link and upload one or more podcast files
3. Next follow step #2 of the wizard and you should see a list of the uploaded podcast files and their public URLs . Copy-paste the file URLs in your iTunes RSS feed.

The podcasts will be served from googledrive.com.

Other than podcast episodes, you may also upload art work, logos and other image files that may be required for submitting your Podcast into the iTunes store.

Podcasts Files URLs on Google Drive

If you have created a podcast folder in Google Drive already and only need the URLs of the files for adding to your podcast RSS feed, here’s the trick. Make a note of the folder ID of podcast folder in Google Drive and add to the URL below (replace XYZ with your folder ID). Do make sure that privacy of your Google Drive folder is “anyone with a link can view” for people to be able to access your podcasts.