15 June 2013

Cool Websites and Tools [June 14th 2013]



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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool websites round-ups delivered to your email daily email subscribe here....

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So You Lost Your Best Friend? These Websites Can Help Locate Your Lost Pet



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Having a pet, specifically a dog or a cat, can bring so much joy in your life. Something soft that you can cuddle with. Something you can share your thoughts with. Something that will love you back no matter what. But what happens when your best friend gets lost or runs away?What can you do to get them back as quickly as possible?

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Get More Out Of Pocket With These 6 Tips To Enhance Your Reading Experience



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While Pocket is simple and easy-to-use, there are a few ways you can make the experience of using the service even better. Whether it's finding interesting ways to save content to your Pocket account, or to share that content with others, or even ways that improve how you can consume that content through Pocket, we've got you covered.

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IFTTT Introduces Support For Gmail Attachments [Updates]



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The automation giant IFTTT has just announced that their users can now make their Gmail automations much more powerful and effective by deciding how their email attachments are handled. Now included in the automation list is the ability to have your attachments automatically saved to cloud storage, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, Box, and Evernote. One recipe will even automate sending attachments to a "backup Gmail account".

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Save Yourself The Lines And Buy Great Digital Gifts With These Services



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If a friend's big event has crept up on you, you may have just found yourself in the market for buying a last-minute digital gift, which you know will arrive in time for their celebrations. But what present will you get? And how? These days, buying virtual gifts for your friends and family is actually more common than you might think.

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Google No Longer Mentions Data Sources



There's an entertaining video that shows 2 Google employees (Mike LeBeau and Amanda Rosenberg) finding answers to various questions using Google Glass.







One of the questions is: "who sings that song where the guy goes 'How Bizarre'?" Google Glass provides the right answer (OMC) and lists a few sites that mention this answer. I asked a similar question using the mobile Google Search app and Google displayed the following message below the answer: "mentioned in results below".






It's nice to see that Google understands verbose questions. Unfortunately, Google no longer mentions the sources that provide the answer. For example, a query like [everest height] used to return an answer, followed by a list of sources.






Here's how it looks today, after the upgrade to the Knowledge Graph:






Google extracts facts from various web pages, so listing some of the sources is appropriate and helps users find reputable sources of information. If the answer is wrong or it's no longer accurate, Google can always point to the sources. As Wikipedia says, "verifiability means that people reading and editing the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source".



Google mentions that the "Knowledge Graph isn't just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It's also augmented at a much larger scale because we're focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it's tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web."