Create Google Calendar Events in Google Search

You can now create events from Google Search. Type create event, add event, new event, add meeting or schedule appointment and Google shows the details for a generic Meeting event that starts in a few minutes. You can add the event to your calendar or click the time to go to Google Calendar.

A better idea is to enter something more specific: create event for Monday at 10am: write the report. This way, you can create the event directly from Google Search and you don't even have to open Google Calendar. It's similar to the "quick add" feature from Google Calendar, except that you need to add some text like "new event" or "create event" and detection doesn't work that well.

You can click "edit event" to open Google Calendar and make some changes.

This also works when you use voice input.



{ via Search Engine Land }

The New Google Alerts UI, Now Available

As previously anticipated, Google Alerts has a new interface inspired by Material Design. For some reason, Google only shows the new UI when you are logged in, while displaying the old interface if you don't log in to a Google account.



The new UI is a lot simpler and focuses on managing alerts and creating alerts with one click. The old Google Alerts homepage exposed a lot of advanced options, which are now hidden. There's a long list of alert suggestions: companies, people, countries, musical artists, industries, places, athletes, as well as your name and email address (the "me on the web" section).

For example, you can type "Google" in the huge input box at the top of the page, click "Create alert" and that's it. Google shows a preview, so you can see what results you may get.

There's a "show options" link that shows the advanced options, so you can choose sources, language and region, how often to send alerts, how many results to include and the delivery option: email or feed. The nice thing is that Google remembers your options and it uses them the next time you create a new alert.

Google Alerts lets you edit or delete alerts and shows a special icon for feed alerts.

The New Google Drive for Desktop

I just got the new Google Drive desktop interface. Google shows a small box that asks you to try the new Drive. You need to go to the Settings drop-down and click "Experience the new Drive".

Here's the welcome page with a small accessibility icon:

The new interface has a lot in common with the new desktop home screens for Docs, Slides and Sheets. All of them use the new Material Design.

Here's the contextual menu:

When you click a file, it's selected and the info pane shows more information about the file. There are no more checkboxes: click to select, double click to open.

There's an updated "new" button that lets you upload files and files, but also create new documents.

Chrome App Launcher for Linux

In Chrome 36, the app launcher also works in Linux. Now this feature is available for all major desktop operating systems: Windows, Mac OS, Chrome OS and Linux.



To add the app launcher icon, Google suggests to "search your computer for Chrome App Launcher and

pin it to your system's launcher or panel for easy access." You first need to enable the App Launcher by adding a Chrome app from this page.



Here's a screenshot from Ubuntu 14.04:

Gmail's Special Phishing Warning

For some reason, Gmail displayed this phishing warning when opening an email newsletter: "Be careful with this message. It contains content that's typically used to steal personal information." There are two links that allow you to "Report this suspicious message" or "Ignore, I trust this message".

A help center article explains that Gmail "shows you a warning above any message that looks like a phishing scam but comes from an address in your Gmail contacts list. When a suspicious message like this is sent from an email address of someone on your contact list, it's possible that the person's email account was compromised and used without their permission to send a malicious message."



Google advises you to "read the message and decide if it seems like it was written by the sender. Consider whether it sounds like the person you know, contains suspicious links or content, or asks you to do unusual things like send money or provide personal details. If it seems like your contact's email account was compromised and used to send this message, please click Report this suspicious message within the warning. The message will be marked as 'sent from a compromised account,' and you'll send a report to the Gmail team to help us improve our detection of compromised accounts."



You may be wondering why Gmail doesn't flag the message as spam. Messages from your contacts are never moved to spam. In fact, that's one way to make sure that you receive messages from someone and they're not added to the spam folder: add the email address to your contacts.



I checked to see if the messages was sent by one of my contacts and the answer is no. That's strange, maybe this is a Gmail bug.

Redesigned Incognito Page in Chrome 36

Chrome 36 brings a redesigned incognito page with a bigger icon, a heading, shorter text and card interface. There are some changes to the text: Google removed "however, you aren't invisible" and "[going incognito doesn't hide your browsing from your] governments and other sophisticated attackers", but kept "your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit". Google also removed the text which informed users that extensions are disabled by default in the incognito mode.

Here's the old page (screenshot from Chrome 35):

Google Tests a Search Card for Live Events

There's a Help Center article about a Google experiment that shows relevant Hangouts on Air in Google Search. "We're rolling out an experiment where you can easily find YouTube live events or Hangouts on Air to watch by searching for the event on Google.com. For example, if an author is answering questions about their latest book in a Hangout on Air, you can search the author’s name to find and watch the event," informs Google.

Apparently, a live event will start to show up in search up to 3 hours before it starts. You can find a list of Hangouts on Air and YouTube live events.



"If the event is happening now, you can touch the play on the video to watch the event live. If the event is happening later in the day, click Yes under 'Are you going to watch?' to add the event to your Google Calendar."

Flash Warnings in Google Mobile Search

I still remember when Flash support was an important selling point for Android. While you can install Flash and use it even in Android KitKat, Adobe no longer updates it and Chrome doesn't support it.



Now Google decided to show warnings next to search results that use a lot of Flash content, but only for iOS and Android 4.1+ devices. "Starting today, we will indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted like this:"

The warning says: "Uses Flash. May not work on your device." You can tap "try anyway" or "learn more". The reason? "A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page's contents."



Google recommends developers to create modern multi-device websites using HTML5. For example, Google's Web Starter Kit is a simple framework that supports the Web Fundamentals best practices out of the box.

Google Forum Search, No Longer Available

Back in March, I posted some URLs that allowed you to get back some search features that were removed by Google from the search interface: forum search, recipe search and more. It looks like forum search is no longer available. "Google completely disabled it so now you can no longer filter Google search results by discussion forums," reports Barry Schwartz.

It's sad to see that Google removed a very useful feature that allowed you restrict results to forum threads, while keeping the app search feature, which mostly returns mobile apps and Chrome extensions.



As a workaround, you can add "forum" or "forum (topic OR thread)" to your queries.

Google Adds Support for Bitcoin Conversion

Google's currency conversion added support for bitcoin, a virtual currency introduced in 2009. If you search for [1 bitcoin to usd], [1 BTC in USD], [bitcoin eur], [convert 1000 gbp to bitcoin] and other similar queries, Google shows the interactive currency conversion card that also includes a historical chart.



Last month, "Google Finance partnered with Coinbase to launch a bitcoin price tracker that enabled BTC-to-fiat price conversions across a wide range of global currencies." This update uses the same data.

"Bitcoin is often referred to as a currency, but it does not conform to widely used definitions of money," suggests Wikipedia. "Economists generally agree that to qualify as money, something must be a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. Bitcoin has some way to go if it wants to meet these criteria. It does best as a medium of exchange."



{ via Search Engine Land }

YouTube Tests Simpler Buttons

Here's a new version of the YouTube experiment that changes buttons. This time, YouTube only shows icons for "add to playlist", "share", "more" and it no longer includes labels.

New Google Alerts Interface

Anjo Cerdeña, a reader of this blog, found a new interface for Google Alerts when opening the site. It uses Material Design and it has a few new features: a "me on the web" section and a list of suggestions for companies, people. countries, places, industries and more. It also shows your alerts and a simple box for creating a new alert.

I don't see the new Google Alerts UI, so it's probably still tested by Google. I expect to see more and more Material-inspired design refreshes.



The classic Google Alerts homepage is only focused on creating new alerts and it shows a lot of advanced options, as well as some information about Google Alerts. To see your alerts, you need to click "manage your alerts".

YouTube Tests New Buttons

YouTube tests a new desktop interface with a different look for buttons. The like and dislike buttons merged with the number of likes and dislikes, YouTube no longer uses tabs, "add to" opens a drop-down menu and there's a "more" menu for features like "report", "transcript" and "statistics".

Since the "about" tab is no longer displayed, you need to click a small "x" icon to go back to the video's description.

Monetize your YouTube Videos that contain Someone Else’s Music

YouTube has fairly strict guidelines for your videos to be eligible for monetization. For instance, if you have recorded a video of the crowd at a music event, the video clip cannot be monetized on YouTube as you do not have the rights to the audio. Similarly, if you create a photo slideshow using music purchased from iTunes, the video is not monetizable either as you own the photographs but do not have commercial rights for the audio.

When you upload such a video to YouTube, it may either be removed for copyright infringement or YouTube may continue to host the video but all the advertising revenue is shared with the music owner and not the video uploader. Read this interesting story about how Sony successfully monetized an amateur YouTube video after it went viral on the Internet.

If there are any videos on your YouTube channel that cannot be monetized since you don’t own the music, there’s now an easy workaround. You can swap the background music of these videos with a royalty-free music track from the YouTube audio library and republish the video. As soon as you do this, the video will become eligible for monetization.

Here’re the steps involved.

Step 1: Go to the Video Manager inside YouTube and select “Unclaimed” videos from the drop-down. Alternatively, you may visit this link to directly view all your uploaded videos that are pending monetization.

Step 2: The gray icon indicates that the video is non-monetized. If it is an audio issue, the fix is simple. We’ll replace the background music with another song that can be monetized. To do so, click the “Edit” button and select “Audio” from the drop-down.

Step 3: On the next screen, choose any song from the YouTube audio library that is listed as “ad-free and eligible for monetization” and position the audio such that it occupies the entire video. Click the Save button to replace the original music in your video with the selected song.

We aren’t done yet as YouTube may take some time to mix the new track with your existing video. Once that is done, go back to the YouTube video manager and choose the Edit option for that video. Switch to the Monetization tab and select Usage Policy. Save the changes and you can now monetize that video just like your other YouTube videos.

The only limitation is that you can only choose from the track available inside the YouTube audio library, you cannot upload your own music or voice narration for the video.

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This story, Monetize your YouTube Videos that contain Someone Else’s Music, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 11/07/2014 under Google AdSense, Music, YouTube, Internet