Word definition gets better in Google Now and in Google search

I check definitions of words constantly to make sure it conveys the right meaning, Google has been of great help. A word search of "define: impeccable" in Google Now in smartphones or in Google search gives a succinct summary of the word and it just got better with Google’s updates as shown in the picture above. The new definition page shows, synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation, usage, adjectives, word origin, a graph showing the usage of that particular word over the years. 

Here’s another example: "define: right".

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Google removes asteroid doodle after the meteor incident in Russia

Google removed this special doodle (dedicated for the Asteroid 2012 DA14 passing very close to Earth), after it posted because of the recent meteor incident in Russia according to Cnet.com. Google said the following to ABC News:

“Out of respect for those injured in the extraordinary meteor shower in Russia earlier today, we have removed today's doodle from the Google home page.”

Click the image to see the GIF Doodle.

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How to be more productive or do more tasks with Google Now in Android?

The videos below give a good summary of how many different things you can do with Google Now feature in Android phones and Tablets. Even if you do an efficient search with Google Now, watch the videos, it gives you new ways to use Google search.

You can also do bar code scan to find more information about the products and find out the song that is playing the background etc., and more features are being added to it and can get only more powerful with time.

Besides this, Google Now has Cards to update most of the information just below the Google Search window.

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Download Free Episodes of favorite TV shows from Google Play

Download TV episodes of The Walking Dead, Revenge, Psych, Downtown Abbey Christmas, Deception etc for free from Google Play link for a limited time. For US users and Android users only.

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Save Images, Links with 'Save to Google Drive' Chrome Extension

With this new "Save to Google Drive" extension, we can now save images, links directly in Google Drive. It is similar to "Pocket (formerly Read It Later)" but instead of storing in Pocket website, it saves in our Google Drive account.

This extension allow you to save web content directly to Google Drive through a browser action or context menu. You can save documents, images, and HTML5 audio and video all by right clicking and selecting 'Save to Google Drive'. You can save the currently viewed page using the 'Save to Google Drive' browser action. The format of saved HTML pages can be controlled with the options page (Choice of Entire image (default), Visible image, Raw HTML, MHTML, or Google Doc). You can automatically convert Microsoft Office files or comma separated files to Google docs format.

With "Save to Google Drive" extension we can save in two ways, with right-click you can save the image as shown above and by clicking the extension button installed in the menu bar we can save links. Go to chrome://extensions/ and open the options of this extension to choose what format you want to save the article, in image format or in HTML version as shown below). We can also save audio and video files with this extension.

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Snapseed Photo App now available in Android

One of the best photo editing apps in iOS, Snapseed is now available in Android. It is has good filters and can get pictures like Instagram photos with much improved quality.  Snapseed, which was a premium app before is now available free in Android after Google purchased it recently.

Snapseed is the only photo app you’ll want to use every day. It makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips.

Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease using incredibly advanced features from the leader in digital photography software. Built-in Google+ capabilities make it even more powerful to share your images with your friends and family.

BENEFITS:
• Easily adjust your photos with a single tap using Auto Correct
• Tweak your photo to perfection with Tune Image
• Use Selective Adjust to enhance specific objects or areas in your photos
• Experiment with fun & innovative filters like Drama, Vintage, Grunge, and Tilt-Shift
• Add Image Borders for a finishing touch
• Share your creations via Google+, email, and any other service you have installed.

SUPPORTS:
• Android OS 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or later
• Phone or Tablet
• JPEG and TIFF photos
• Language support: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Arabic


FEATURES:
== Basic Adjustments ==
• Auto Correct - Automatically analyzes your photo and adjusts color and exposure to perfection.
• Selective Adjust - Make precise selections and enhancements to specific areas of your photos in seconds with Nik Software’s revolutionary U Point technology.
• Tune Image - Use Ambience to create depth and vibrancy that uniquely adapts to colors and textures. Adjust White Balance, Saturation, Contrast, more.
• Straighten & Rotate - Rotate 90° and/or straighten photos with simple gesture controls.
• Crop - Easily crop images to remove distracting parts of your photo with standard aspect ratios, or a free crop.

== Creative Enhancements ==
• Black & White - Get that classic Black and White look with this darkroom-inspired filter.
• Vintage Films - Make any photo look like a vintage color film photo from the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s.
• Drama - Add style with a custom effect specifically tailored to your photos, ranging from subtle textures to wildly artistic effects.
• Grunge - Give your photos a totally unique, hip, and dingy look.
• Tilt-Shift - Create a narrow in-focus area designed to simulate depth of field, common in a Miniature Scene look.
• Details - Enhance details with traditional sharpening or the unique Structure control found in the Nik Software professional products.
• Center Focus - Draw attention to the subject of your photo by blurring and adjusting the brightness of the surrounding background.
• Organic Frames - Add stylized borders to photos for the perfect finishing touch.

Google Play Download Link.

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Get Stunning Instant Map Results with Instant Google Street View

This is stunning, just like Instant Search, the Instant Google Street View works like a charm. Just start typing for example "White House" you will see a good Street View version of the White House like the above picture. It works even for the local street addresses. The site is an independent site not owned by Google.

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Flight Search in Google gets better

Nice update if you search for the flight status in your mobile phone. A search in mobile for Delta Flight 1262 gives the above results. It gives the scheduled time of arrival, departure and your scheduled time of your destination point. Besides that they have added the flight's progress path, how far it is from the destination point. 

Frustrated when your flight schedule is up in the air? When you're traveling on your own or waiting for family and friends to arrive at the airport, getting the most up to date flight information on your mobile device is easy when you enter the flight number on Google Search. You'll see if the flight is on-time, its departure and slated arrival times, and the terminals and gates. There's even a visualization of the plane's progress from departure to destination.

I checked Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7, I see all the details except the flight's path, hopefully it will be updated in the mobile platform soon.

Via Google+.

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Google introduces New Chromebook laptop for $249

The new Chromebook laptop from Google will become available next week at a great starting price of $249.

From Google Chrome blog:

The new Chromebook is a great computer at any price, but it’s an incredible computer at $249. It’s one of the lightest laptops on the market. You can easily carry it around all day—it’s 2.5 pounds, a mere 0.8 inches thick, with more than 6 hours of battery life for the typical user. And with 100 GB of free storage on Google Drive*, you can get to all of your stuff anytime, anywhere.

Even with its compact design, it’s packed with performance—it boots up in less than 10 seconds and resumes instantly. High-resolution videos (in 1080p) are beautiful to watch and when using the touchpad, you’ll notice smooth scrolling due to a hardware-accelerated user interface. And as you‘d expect from a Chromebook, it’s easy to share with others. Everyone—mom, dad, grandparents, tech lovers, tech haters—can have separate accounts where all of their stuff is kept safe. Finally, if you’re an active Google user of products like Gmail, Drive, Search, Maps, YouTube, Play or Google+ Hangouts, everything just works seamlessly.

Starting today, the new Samsung Chromebook is available for pre-order online from Amazon, Best Buy, PC World and other retailers. Next week it will be available for sale from these same online retailers as well as the Google Play store. You can also buy them at over 500 Best Buy stores across the U.S and over 30 PC World and Currys stores in the U.K.

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Locate authors or artists of images with 'Search By Image' Google Chrome Extension

In the internet, you see the same photo across multiple sites but they never mention the source. I always try to give credit to the images posted in blogs and sites but sometimes it is hard to find out which artist produced that image or photo. Google's "Search by Image" Chrome browser extension helps narrow the search in most of the cases. 

After you install the extension, when you look at a photo in any website or even this site, you will see the blue camera icon at the bottom part of the image as shown above, just click once to see the source of the image. Google will post results in a separate page.

There is another way you can do the search also as shown below. Right click as you hover over the image, you will see the "Search Google with this image" option.

I have tried it several times, Google usually highlights the author in the first results. In some cases, Google can identify more information about the images as well. 

"Search by Image" extension is a good one to have for Google Chrome browser.

Images from Google.

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New Outdoors Android app 'Field Trip' from Google

Nice app from Google to have when we venture out to new towns and new places. Currently "Field Trip" is available only for Android OS, for others including iOS, it will be released soon.

Field Trip is your guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you. It can help you learn about everything from local history to the latest and best places to shop, eat, and have fun. You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically, as you walk next to those places. Get Field Trip on Android for free.

Download here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticproject.scout

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Android Apps $0.25 each in Google Play - Live now

You can download any of the above apps for $0.25 each only for today at this Google Play link. This is for 25 billion apps sales promotion.

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Google Translate makes it easy to translate languages with OCR

Google Translate has improved tremendously over the years, and with this new update you will see that it can translate languages from board signs, books, menus etc easily using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology:

Point, tap, brush and listen - Google Translate Blog: With our latest update to our Google Translate app for Android, we’re aiming to get one step closer to the Babel fish. By integrating Google Goggles’ optical character recognition (OCR) technology, we’ve made it possible for you to use the camera of your Android smartphone to input text without typing. This makes Google Translate for Android one of our most intelligent and machine learning-intensive apps. Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, OCR, and machine translation all rely on powerful statistical models built on billions of samples of data.

How to use Google Translate OCR feature?

1. Click the camera icon in Google Translate App.



2. Point the camera to the text you want to translate and either click the camera icon one more time or tap the screen.



3. Translate app will then ask you to brush the text portions you want to translate (before that choose the language pair, you can also choose them later).



4. The selected text portions are translated to the language you chose before. To change language, click the dropdown menu at the end of the languages shown.



Currently the following languages are available: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

More languages will become available soon to use this OCR feature.

Google Translate has become an invaluable tool to have when traveling abroad.

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More movies and TV shows from Twentieth Century Fox coming to Google Play and YouTube | Official Google Blog

Today Google announced that it is partnering with Twentieth Century Fox and adding more than 600 titles. You can watch these YouTube movies in Android Phones, Tablets and in Google TV. Above trailer of the movie "The Cabin In The Woods".

We’re happy to share that Stewie, “Family Guy,” and more than 600 other titles from Twentieth Century Fox will soon be joining the catalog for you to rent or buy on Google Play and YouTube. 

Today you can buy Fox’s new release Prometheus in HD, available three weeks ahead of the Blu-ray, DVD and video-on-demand release. And over the next few weeks you’ll be able to rent or buy your favorite Fox movies like X-Men, Ice Age and Black Swan, and TV shows like “Glee,” “Modern Family,” “New Girl” and many more.
These new titles will be available first in the U.S., and we’ll be bringing them to more countries soon. We’re now working with all six of the major film studios and many independent studios to bring you the best new releases and your favorite classics to rent or own. 

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Handwrite, a new way to search on Google

To enable this feature, go to Google.com in your mobile browser and do the following and refresh the browser:


"Go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on “Settings” at the bottom of the screen and enable “Handwrite.”

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Google Docs adds New Research Tool Feature for Citations and References

Now you can add Wikipedia links or cite any web page in your document with the new Research Tool from Google.


To begin select the word you want to add a reference link and then click "Ctrl + Alt + R" in PC or "Cmd + Opt + R" in Mac to open the research tool. You will the research tool as shown above on the right side of the document you are editing. You can also alternatively open the Research Tool from the Tools menu.


Under each link, when you hover over the link, you will see "insert link" as shown below, click the insert link to make the reference selection. 


You will see two other features, one to preview each of those links before adding, the second is to use the link as a citation and it will appear at the end of the page as footnotes. 

You can search every page in the internet or search images or search quotes based on the drop down menu at the top of the research tool. 


The research tool is a valuable tool for students and writers alike and now you can do all this without leaving the page.

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G.co short URL links for Google Services or Products Only

If you see any g.co short URL links on the web then you can be rest assured it is either a Google product or service only. Only Google products will have the g.co short links. 

“You’ve arrived at this page because you typed or linked to “g.co”, Google’s official URL shortcut just for Google websites. 

Whenever you see a short “g.co” link, you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service.”

An example for the above is the Google maps link here: http://g.co/maps/hyqeg 


This is not to be confused with Google’s other product Goo.gl where the public can shorten long URLs. In goo.gl, if Google automatically creates g.co links for its Google related links, then it will be even better. Also, it can verify whether the link is safe before it gives the short URL otherwise it can block the corrupt link in the first place.

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Advertisement: Google Chrome - Coffee

Nice ad from Google for its Chrome browser. A man tries to get back with his girlfriend and uses Chrome tools for it.

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Stylist Lilliana Vazquez Gets the Most Beauty into Her Day with Google Wallet "Tap and Pay"

See how stylist Lilliana Vazquez is able to use Google Wallet with ease when she does shopping. Before she had to pull up her credit card from her wallet, sign the receipt, now she does that without the card via Google Wallet.


Google Wallet is currently available in limited basis either in the number of merchants offering them as a pay option or in the number of phones this feature is available. Hopefully they will extend it to more phones and available in most shopping places. 

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Shop & Share with Google Offers Chrome Extension

Google Offers is no way near Groupon but it is slowly expanding to a number of cities in the US, hopefully it will go worldwide soon after.


This extension not only shows Google Offers near your area but also offers from Gilt City, kgbdeals and zozi according to Google Blog.


Maybe they will open source it for others like Groupon, Amazon Local Deals etc., to share their deals in the near future. 


Once you find a deal, you can either view it and buy it or share it with your Google+, Facebook and Twitter friends.


You can install it for your Chrome browser from this Chrome Webstore link.


If you want to add your offers in Google Offers visit, http://www.google.com/offers/business/. 

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