The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
It all started with a seemingly innocent Google blog post earlier this month, in which Google announced that their ‘Hey Google’ Google Assistant was ready to go live on Nest Secure Nest Guard home security devices. Then people started having that ‘waaaait a minute…’ moment: this meant that there had to be a microphone in that Nest Guard device.
If you run any sort of website at all, it’s likely that you have at least dabbled with Adsense. And if so, you may also have decided to give Adsense Auto Ads a try. And if you did try Adsense Auto Ads it may be that you regret it, and want to get rid of the damned things. Which turns out to be easier said than done. Here’s how to stop Adsense Auto Ads and get rid of them for good.
Google Maps has just been implicated in a divorce, its Street View having captured an image of a woman undeniably cheating on her husband. In the past we have written about various Google Maps oopsies, including it causing the wrong house to be demolished, and Google Street View capturing the image of a woman urinating in public. But to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Google Maps has led to divorce.
Hundreds of thousands of would-be video watchers found that YouTube was down for them Tuesday night – in fact it’s still down for some people – because of an oopsie by the Pakistan government, trying to block its own people from accessing YouTube. Instead, Pakistan accidentally ended up blocking as much as 2/3rs of YouTube users around the world from accessing YouTube.
Gmail recently ‘updated’ its interface, meaning that Gmail has a new user interface (UI). But not everybody loves, or even likes, the new Gmail look and feel. For one thing, it spaces out the content, taking up too much real estate with too little content.
If you’re reading this article, the odds are that you are a Google Adsense publisher, and you’ve seen a line item on your Adsense report reading “Web caches and other” and are wondering just what the hell it means. So, here’s what that “Web caches and others” refers to.
In recent months you may have heard the term “FANG stocks” to refer to a particular group of stocks. More specifically, a particular group of high tech, high performing stocks. Those stocks are Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (hence F-A-N-G). Of course, the parent company for Google is now Alphabet, so these really should be called FANA stocks.
News of Google Shopping’s censoring (i.e. not allowing) searches containing the search term ‘gun’ are greatly exaggerated. Earlier this week Business Insider reported, and we quote, that “Google Shopping bans searches for ‘water guns’ and ‘Guns N Roses'”
We’ve been saying for ages that the Gmail spam filters are excellent. However there has never been a (easily found) way to have Gmail automatically mark something as spam and send it to the Gmail spam folder, by which we mean something that you have defined as spam, even though the Gmail spam filters may not have. But we’ve figured it out, so here is how to have Gmail automatically tag as spam something you define as spam, and send it to the spam folder.
Gmail automatically puts all of your email threads in “conversation view” mode, meaning that every reply and subsequent email with the same subject line will be stacked (threaded) under the original email in the thread. Here’s what you need to do to turn threading off and have Gmail display your email individually, in a list, rather than threaded in conversation mode, on your iOS or Android device as well as in the Gmail web interface.
Even though the ability to use tagged Gmail addresses has been around for ages, very few people seem to know about this option. Using tagged email addresses is one of the very best ways to discover whether someone or some company is sharing your email address, whether intentionally or through a data leak. Here’s how to do it (it’s very easy!)
There is an evil new phishing spam going around that is using Google Docs to do its dirty work. The subject is along the lines of “(Someone) has shared a document on Google Docs with you” – in many of the samples it is ‘Brett Schager has shared a document on Google Docs with you.” Many of the samples are also sent “to” hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh@mailinator.com (you receive it because you are in the bcc: field).
If you are reading this article, it’s probably because you want to know how to disable Google AMP and turn AMP off for your Google searches. And you probably want to get rid of AMP because it’s annoying as hell, especially if you like to share links, and want to share the actual source link, not Google’s AMP link. The thing is, you can’t technically disable Google AMP, but you can get around it. So, here’s how to get rid of Google AMP.