Google announced this week the formation of a new parent company, Google Alphabet Inc. This will be akin to a Google holding company, the parent company of such Google businesses as Google Ventures, Google Capital, Google X, Next Labs, and Google Inc. itself.

If you have been on any website that has Adsense ads by Google on it (including this one), you may have noticed that Google is running its own ads for Gmail for Work and Gmail for Business. The ads show small businesses with cute domains, such as “gizmocam.com” and “puppyscrubber.com”. Shockingly, apparently nobody at Google thought to feature only domains registered to them; leading to a windfall for scammers who snapped up the domains and put ad links on them (these sorts of sites are known as ‘link farms’ or ‘linkfarms’).

If you’ve tried to add a ‘Send From’ email address in Gmail recently, you know that Gmail now insists on your providing a non-Gmail SMTP server username and password. Here’s how to get around that.

Gmail almost full? Remember when 5GB seemed like unlimited storage? Now Gmail offers 15GB of storage free, and it barely seems enough! But, there’s a little secret that many don’t know, and that can eat up your Gmail storage! Here’s how to gain back gigabytes of Gmail storage!

Those Google slippy maps (the term for maps that you can pull around and zoom in or out on) are the result of far more effort than you may realize. The Google street view vans (and backpacks) are only a small part of what goes into the Google mapping project Ground Truth. (A list of countries mapped by Google Ground Truth is below.)

You may have thought that Google Glass was dead. And, you would have been wrong. Despite people developing a Google Glass detector to block Google Glass, and despite Google themselves telling Glass wearers to not be ‘glassholes’, Google has launched Google Glass II, although for now it is being made available only to developers and partners, and not the general public.

If you are using a Gmail calendar (actually a Google calendar), but are used to creating your calendar events on your computer rather than directly in the Google calendar interface, you may have gotten used to being able to create a “custom” repeating interval for your events (such as every X days or every other week, instead of every week or every month). Then, when you need to create an event with a custom repeat interval in the Google calendar interface, you may be perplexed at the seeming lack of the ability to create a custom interval. It’s actually easy to do, but like so many other things designed by Google’s engineers – and there’s the problem, they think like engineers, not like mere mortals – it isn’t obvious. Here’s how to do it.

Today Google unveiled the new Google Inbox. While Google’s announcement says that it’s not Gmail, in fact Google Inbox seems to be a layer on top of Gmail, with a bunch of enhanced features such as Bundles, Assists, Reminders, and Highlights. And, oh yes, it’s by invite only, just like Gmail was all those years ago.

Outlets such as the Daily Dot and Life Hacker are reporting the leaking of five million Gmail addresses and passwords on a Russian Bitcoin forum.

It’s fairly trivial to make a playlist on YouTube, whether of your own or others’ videos. And of course, you can make a custom channel URL. But what if you want to make a custom playlist URL – i.e. a custom URL for one of your playlists?

The New York Times recently did a comparison of Google searches originating in areas where, according to the NYT, people have life the easiest to areas where life is the hardest. Here’s what they found.

Google has just announced that it has rolled out a new feature in Gmail. Says Google, “Now when a sender includes an ‘Unsubscribe’ link in a Promotions, Social or Forums message, Gmail will surface it to the top, right next to the sender address.”

It’s true. It’s sad. Google is acquiring song curation service and playlist creator extraordinaire Songza. Why do we say that it’s sad? Because to us Songza was already a nearly perfect service, so while it can do good things for Google, it’s hard to imagine that Google will improve Songza.

Coincident with the Reset the Net effort, in which they are taking part, Google and Yahoo, along with Microsoft and Facebook, and others, are moving at speed to block the NSA’s snooping, and to tighten up their systems to make it more difficult for the NSA, and others, to eavesdrop on their data.

If you are one of the legion who think that Google Glass sucks, at least in terms of privacy invasion, you may also be wondering if it is possible to jam Google Glass. Until now there was no simple way to block Google Glass wearers from taking a video or photos of you, but now there may be. Julian Oliver has written a script, glasshole.sh, with which, says Oliver, you can “Find a Google Glass and kick it from the network.”