How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results

Google Alerts, you probably know this, offer an easy way for you to create RSS feeds from the Google search results of any query. This is a good option if you are looking to monitor when new web pages are indexed by Google that match your search query.

If you have never created feeds with Google Alerts earlier, here’s a quick primer. Type your search keyword, expand options, choose “Automatic” for sources, choose “All Results” for “How Many” and set “RSS Feed” as the Delivery Method. Google will create an RSS feed of web search results that you can subscribe in Feedly or another RSS Reader.

Please see the Google Alerts tutorial to write more advanced search queries.

Better RSS Feeds for Google Search

A big limitation with feeds created using the “Google Alerts” approach is that you’ve limited control over the feed and it won’t include search results from all over the web. In fact, the first time you create a feed, it is likely to be empty and results would be added as Google discovers and indexes new content for that search query.

There’s an alternate method for creating RSS feeds for Google Search results and, though the initial setup takes few extra steps, you’ve enough options to fine tune the search query and have more meaniningful search results in the feed. You can even have RSS feeds for Google Images.

1. Go to Google Custom Search and create a new search engine. If you would like to search the entire web, just like Google search, put *.com as the site to search, edit your CSE and under Sites to Search section, select the option that says “Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.”
2. Make a note of the Google CSE id which will be something like xxxx:yyy – click the Search Engine ID button under Details to know your CSE ID.
3. Go to Google Developers Console, sign-in with your Google Account and create a new Project. Give your project any name – like Google Search RSS Feed – and click the Create Project button.
4. Next go to the API & Auth link in the sidebar and click on APIs. Here search for “Custom Search API” and enable the API.
5. Under the same API & Auth group, click Credentials – Add Creditials – Browser Key and click the Create button. You’ll get the API key now.

Now we have all the ingredients required to create our RSS feed for Google Search. The basic feed URL will be something like this:

http://ift.tt/1N7Lf7Wxxx:yyy&key=abc&q=query

Replace xxx:yy with the Search Engine ID, abc with the API key and query with the actual search query. If your query has multiple words, separate them with a + symbol (like Digital+Inspiration). There are tons of other search parameters to the Feed URL. For instance:

• googlehost=google.de (to return results from Google Germany)
• searchType=image (search images only, the default is web pages)
• safe=high (filter adult content from search results)
• dateRestrict = d10 (return results published in the last 10 days)

To give you an example, the following feed URL will fetch family safe pages from Google India, published in the last 2 weeks for a query “Make In India”

http://ift.tt/1KFnez6;cx=xxx:yyy&key=abc&q=Make+In+India&dateRestrict=w2&googlehost=google.in&safe=high

Advanced users can create simple web apps that use the Custom Search API to monitor search results by email or they can scrape Google search in a spreadsheet. The only limitation is that the Search API has a daily quota (100 requests per day) so you should not share the feed or the API key with other users. However, if you enable billing inside the Google API Console, the free limit will be upgraded to 200 search queries per day.

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The story, How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under Google, RSS, Internet.

Android Auto Backup

One of the best features from Android Marshmallow is auto backup for apps. Android used to have a backup feature that only worked for system settings and a few apps that enabled it. Now Google saves the settings and data for all the apps and backs it up to Google Drive, so you can quickly restore it when needed.

I've checked the Android section from Google Dashboard and noticed the difference between Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 and Nexus 5 running Android 6.0. While Nexus 7 only backed up system settings, the wallpaper and some data for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Keyboard, Nexus 5 backed up the data for almost all the apps: from QuickPic Gallery to MyFitnessPal, from Firefox to Opera Mini and Angry Birds 2. There are still some apps that don't support auto backup, but at least the feature is now opt-out instead of opt-in.

The Android section from Google Dashboard shows a lot of useful information about your Android devices (IMEI number, registered date, last activity date, carrier) and it also lets you delete backup data. "Please note that new backup data will be created if backup is enabled on any of your Android devices," informs Google.

The list of apps backed up to Google Drive is also available in the Settings section of the Google Drive app for Android. You can enable or disable the backup feature, automatic restore, reset network settings, add backup accounts. The nice thing is that all this data doesn't use your Google Drive storage quota, but each app is limited to 25MB.

"Apps running on the new backup system aim to save their data every 24 hours, but there are a few requirements for the backup system to trigger automatically. The new backup system uses the JobScheduler API introduced in Lollipop and only triggers a backup if the device is connected to power, on Wi-Fi, and has been idle for at least an hour. The data then gets encrypted and uploaded to Google Drive," reports Ars Technica.

The new backup service is powered by Google Play Services, so it can be improved without updating the operating system. Hopefully, Google will allow users to disable backup for certain apps, remove the 25MB limitation and backup even more data.

Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On

Your WordPress website has a public login page, often found at http://ift.tt/1FGSnly, and it is possible for someone to gain access to your site by guessing your password through repeated trial and error method. To harden your WordPress security, it is therefore recommended that you password-protect the WordPress admin folder and also use 2-factor authentication.

Secure WordPress with Single Sign On

WordPress Single Sign On offers an even more secure option for protecting your website from brute force attacks as you ‘outsource’ the authentication part to WordPress.com. Once enabled, the login screen on your WordPress website is disabled and you are required to sign in to your WordPress.com account in order to access the admin dashboard of your own self-hosted WordPress blog.

There are several advantages here:

1. Since WordPress.com accounts support 2-factor authentication, the the same level of security is now enabled for your blog as well without requiring another plugin.
2. All login requests on your site, including the malicious login attempts, are now automatically redirected to WordPress.com and thus it reduces the load on your server and database.
3. If you manage multiple sites, you can log into them all with a single WordPress.com account and no longer have to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

How to Implement WordPress Single Sign On with Jetpack

Here is a step-by-step guide that explains how you can enable Single Sign On for your WordPress website:

Step 1: Create an account on WordPress.com using this link. Skip this step if you already have an account. You may be required to create a dummy blog on wordpress.com as part of the registration process.

Step 2: Once your account is created, click here to enable two-factor authentication. Specify your phone number, WordPress will send a verification code via SMS and you need to type the same code to verify your number.

Step 3: Go to your WordPress blog, install the Jetpack plugin, activate the plugin and then click the green button that says “Connect to WordPress.com” to link your blog to  your WordPress account.

Step 4: Once the connection is established, go to Jetpack settings and activate the “Single Sign On” module.

Step 5: Go to your WordPress installation folder via FTP or SSH, switch to the current theme folder (wp-content/themes/theme-name) and edit the functions.php file. Here copy-paste the following line of code after the first line:

 add_filter( 'jetpack_sso_bypass_login_forward_wpcom', '__return_true' );

Step 6: Go to Users – Your Profile and, at the bottom of the page, click the button that says “Log in with WordPress.com” – this will essentially link your WordPress.com account to the username that you’ve used to log into the site.

This will completely disable the login form of your WordPress site and instead forwards the user to the login screen on WordPress.com. Once you login through WordPress, you are immediately redirected to the admin dashboard of your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Also see: How to Improve WordPress Security

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The story, Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under WordPress, Internet.

ASUS OnHub Router

For many people, routers are an afterthought. Stuck in a closet, out of sight and out of mind, regular users only think about their routers when something is wrong. Dealing with routers is frustrating: they usually have poor user interfaces, buggy firmware, annoying lights and most people don't know how to change their settings, update firmware or improve their performance.

Google hopes to solve these issues with OnHub, a series of routers designed by Google and manufactured by third-party companies. After launching a TP-LINK router, Google announced a second router with similar specs, this time from ASUS. The new router is even more expensive ($219.99) and can only be preordered in the US.

OnHub routers are designed to be fast, secure, easy to use and to look good. "Like our first router, the ASUS OnHub comes with faster Wi-Fi, easy set-up, and simple management with the Google On app. With the ASUS OnHub, we're also introducing Wave Control, which lets you boost the Wi-Fi speed for a particular device by simply waving your hand over the top of the ASUS OnHub - great for busy houses," informs Google.

It's worth pointing out that OnHub routers run Google's software and they're automatically updated, without having to be restarted. That's an impressive achievement. No other router can be updated without disrupting your Internet connectivity for a few minutes and most users don't bother updating their routers.

Both OnHub routers have powerful specs and they're designed for the future. That's why they only have a single LAN port, they support Bluetooth and Weave and have many other features borrowed from smartphones. They're supposed to be smarter, just like all the other smart devices they enable.

7 Years of Google Chrome

A lot has changed since Google launched Chrome back in September 2008. Chrome's popularity has been growing ever since then and all the other important browsers became more like Chrome. Google focused on the things that mattered and transformed the browser from a simple application into a "modern OS" for web apps.

While there are many services that claim to measure the market share for browsers, I tend to think that StatCounter is the most accurate. StatCounter's stats for 2008-2015 show that Chrome's market share grew from 0% to 53% in 7 years, while IE's share declined from 67% to 15%. According to StatCounter, Chrome is now the dominant browser, while IE and Firefox are continually losing market share.

It's clear that Google did a lot things right when it launched Chrome, but few people anticipated that Google's browser will take over the world. Most people didn't know what's a browser and only knew that they were supposed to click on the blue E icon to go online. Google changed this by promoting a constantly evolving browser, which was faster and more secure.

RankBrain Helps Google Understand Queries

Google's search engine hasn't always been very smart. In its early years, Google only tried to find the pages that matched the words from your query and ranked them. It's hard to answer a question without understanding it, but that's what Google did.

Google constantly improved its algorithms, added personalization options, started to match synonyms and expand abbreviations, but Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird were the greatest leaps that put machine learning to work and made Google smarter. Google started to understand the meaning behind a question, to disambiguate words and to find answers, not just pages that include the words from the query.

Bloomberg reports that Google uses even more artificial intelligence to answer questions and rank results. RankBrain is a new AI system that has been used for the past few months to improve search results. "If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn't familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries."

15% of the queries Google gets every day are new and RankBrain helps Google understand them. Here's an example of complicated query: "What's the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?" RankBrain finds words and phrases that have a similar meaning and highlights them (for example: predators). "In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query."

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, says that "machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing". Machine learning has already helped Google improve image search, automatic translation, speech recognition and deep learning is already showing some promising results: smarter photo search with object recognition.

"In tandem with other researchers at Google, Andrew Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain. This movement seeks to meld computer science with neuroscience — something that never quite happened in the world of artificial intelligence," reports Wired. "Deep Learning is a first step in this new direction. Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like."

Newer Is Not Always Better

With all this talk about Android and software updates, I realized that one of the biggest Android advantages is that you can install custom firmware or downgrade to an old Android version.

My old Nexus 7 tablet from 2012 doesn't support the latest Android release. Instead of installing custom firmware from some independent developers, I decided to go back to the smoothest Android version I can find. Asus skimped on quality storage and Nexus 7 was pretty slow and laggy, especially when using Android 5.x.

Google has a page with factory images for Nexus devices and it's pretty easy to install any Android version that's officially available. You have to backup your data, enable USB debugging and run some scripts.

I've installed Android 4.4.4 and Nexus 7 was much smoother, but there was still room for improvement. Android 4.3 was even better and I decided to keep it. It's like having a completely new device, even if it runs some outdated software released 2 years ago.

It's difficult to optimize new software for old hardware, especially if manufacturers don't care about quality, cut costs and ship poorly made devices with obvious design flaws. On there other hand, Google has its own issues with software optimization, memory leaks, battery draining software and other bugs. When properly optimised, Android runs well and users are happy, but this doesn't happen often. With so many devices to update, manufacturers and even Google take shortcuts when it comes to old phones and tablets. Some stop updating them, others release unfinished software, hoping to encourage users to buy new hardware, while others spend more time improving the software for the latest flagships.

Thankfully, you can downgrade and go back to a software that actually works well. Apple devices rarely allow you to downgrade and usually for a limited time, so you're stuck with phones and tablets that are suddenly slow, laggy and crashy.

This post was written on my Nexus 7 running Android 4.3.

Google Photos Stats

Google has some stats about Google Photos, the online photo sharing service released 5 months ago. Google Photos has 100 million monthly active users. They created more than 15 million animations and collages and their backed-up photos and videos use more than 3,720 TB of storage.

Paris is the top photographed place, followed by New York and Barcelona. Besides people, food and cars are the most photographed things. Sky, beaches and mountains are also included in the top 10 things photographed by Google users. The top 6 events in Google Photos are: wedding, concerts, Christmas, dancing, birthday and clubbing.

The most popular searches are for baby photos, but "me" is also a popular query.

Google's Play

Android started as an open platform that brought together many competing companies. iPhone's launch changed Android's development and was an important reason for Android's success. Phone manufacturers and carriers wanted an "iPhone killer" and Android was a good bet, but it still had a lot of rough edges and there were many missing features. This was a great opportunity for manufactures to fill in the gaps, create their own user interfaces and develop their own apps and widgets that brought value and differentiation.

Here's an image from Android's original SDK emulator:

Why did Google acquire Andy Rubin's company and invested in Android? One of the reasons was to make a better platform for developing mobile apps. Google already had a few mobile apps for feature phones, Symbian, Blackberry and it was very difficult to add new features and to test the applications because of the inconsistent APIs and their implementations. Android seemed like an interesting opportunity, but Google never anticipated that it will take over the world. It's obvious that Android became the dominant mobile OS because so many companies invested in Android, hoping to come up with better phones than Apple's iPhone.

While Android was open source, Google created a few proprietary apps that weren't part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The most important proprietary Google app was Android Market, which is now called Google Play Store, but Google developed other apps as well: Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps etc. Over time, many open source apps were replaced by proprietary Google apps: the music player became Google Play Music, the calendar app became Google Calendar, the browser became Chrome etc.

Android Market/Google Play is Google's own service and it was licensed to phone manufactures subject to confidential terms and conditions. According to the distribution agreements (MADA) revealed by companies like HTC and Motorola, Android Market was bundled with other Google apps and services, including Google Search and Network Location Provider, which had to be the default search and location services. "Devices may only be distributed if all Google Applications [listed elsewhere in the agreement] ... are pre-installed on the Device," mentions one of the distribution agreements.

The list of bundled Google apps increased over the years, as Google released more and more apps. Phone manufacturers were allowed to bundle competing apps from third-party companies and you'll find many phones that include Whatsapp and Hangouts, Microsoft Drive/Dropbox and Google Drive, Facebook and Google+. Here's a screenshot from Samsung Note 4, courtesy of Gsmarena, which shows that Samsung preinstalled Facebook and Google+, Hangouts, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Google Photos.

While many Android users complain that their phones have too much bloatware, some companies aren't happy that Google ties the Google Play Store with other Google apps and some default settings (Google = default search engine, Google Network Location Provider = default location provider).

Deutsche Telekom will file an anti-trust charge against Google, complaining that "Google uses its Android mobile operating system to unfairly promote its own products like Google Maps and online search over those of rivals". According to New York Times, "a number of large tech companies, including Oracle and Nokia, as well as small start-ups like Aptoide, a Portuguese online marketplace for smartphone applications, already have filed complaints to European officials connected to the Android investigation." The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into Google's mobile operating system and the Federal Trade Commission started a similar investigation last month.

Is it fair for Google to bundle the Play Store with other apps and to dictate its own terms and conditions? It's obvious that the Play Store is the most important Android app and few people outside of China would buy an Android device that can't access the Play Store. By now, Google Play Store and the associated Google Play Services are hard to separate from Android, even if they're not technically part of Android. This is Google's play: it's holding the keys to more than 1 million apps and dictates its own terms to phone manufacturers. Many of Google's apps are actually useful and they are hard to beat by competitors (Google Maps, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube), but some of the apps aren't the best in their category and Google uses distribution agreements to promote them (Hangouts, Keep, Play Books).

Back in 2008, Android Market was just another Android app store, but now it's the most important by far and it also comes with APIs that tie Android apps to the Google Play Store. I think it's not fair to tie Play Store licensing with bundling other Google apps and Google should use separate distribution agreements for them, just like Facebook and Microsoft.

YouTube Red

Do you remember Music Key, YouTube's subscription service that allowed you watch ad-free music videos, download them and play music videos in the background? It's now called YouTube Red and it's no longer limited to music videos.

YouTube Red is launching on October 28 in the US and it will bring the features from Music Key to all the YouTube videos. "YouTube Red lets you enjoy videos across all of YouTube without ads, while also letting you save videos to watch offline on your phone or tablet and play videos in the background, all for $9.99 a month. Your membership extends across devices and anywhere you sign into YouTube, including our recently launched Gaming app and a brand new YouTube Music app we're announcing today that will be available soon."

Just like Music Key, YouTube Red will include the Play Music subscription and Play Music subscribers will get access to YouTube Red for free. Of course, YouTube Red will need to be available in your country first.

There's another bonus feature for YouTube Red subscribers: exclusive shows and movies from some of YouTube's biggest stars. Reality shows, drama series, adventure series, scripted comedies, feature-length movies - there's something for everyone.

You can try YouTube Red for free and start a one-month trial. The service launches on October 28 in the US and Google plans to add more countries soon.

How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet

Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for a trending #hashtag, or an old tweet, or your brand name, and all the matching tweets get saved in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. And this archive would just update itself in the background as new tweets arrive.

Meet Twitter Archiver, the simplest tool for saving tweets, forever It is a Google add-on that takes 5-minutes to setup (watch video tutorial) and will easily capture all tweets that match particular search terms in a Google Spreadsheet automatically. You can use the tool to monitor tweets around any conference hashtag, learn what people are saying about your brand, track popular search terms, save tweets from any geographic location and more.

Save all kinds of tweets with the Twitter Archiver

How to Save Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet

To get started, install the Twitter Archiver and it will create a new Google Spreadsheet. Go to the Add-on menu, choose Twitter Archiver and select the Authorize menu. Allow the Google Sheet to access Twitter on your behalf – the app needs this permission to only fetch tweets and will never post anything to your Twitter account.

Once your Twitter account is authorized, go to the Twitter Archiver menu again and create a new Search Rule. If you have every used the advanced search page on Twitter, this search rule screen will be very familiar. You can create rules that mention certain search terms, look for exact phrases, find tweets by #hashtags, tweets that @mention particular Twitter users and so on.

Now that you have created your Twitter search query, click “Start Tracking” button to initialize the Twitter Archiver. Internally, the sheet will connect to Twitter and pull in the historic tweets that match your search term(s). It writes these tweets in a separate sheet inside the Google Spreadsheet. After the initial set is pulled, the archiver will poll Twitter every hour and pull in the matching tweets that have been posted since the last run.

Video Tutorial – Twitter Archiver

In addition to tweets, the Twitter Archiver app will also import other data including the tweet’s retweet & favorite count, the tweeter’s friend & followers count and whether they are verified or not. This data will help you filter out the spam Twitter users or easily surface tweets from the most influential users.

If you would like to stop archiving tweets for a particular search term, go to the Twitter Archiver menu, choose Saved Searches menu and you’ll see a list of your exisitng saved searches. Select the one you wish to delete from the dropdown and hit the Delete button.

Install Twitter Archiver

Isn’t that simple? There’s no need to create any Twitter apps nor do you have to fiddle with Google Scripts.

Twitter Archiver – Frequently Asked Questions

How can I create complex search queries?
The archiver supports all Twitter search operators. For instance, you can put min_retweets:5 in the Advanced Rule box to surface the best tweets for a search term.

Why does Twitter Archiver access to various services?
The Archiver add-on connects to an external service (Twitter API) and saves the tweets to Google Spreadsheet. Also, should a problem arise, you can email the debug logs to the developer and hence it needs permissions to send mail.

What is your Privacy Policy?
The add-on runs inside your Google Account and directly connects to Twitter. It does not share even a single byte of data with anyone, including the developer.

My Twitter Archiver is not pulling all the old tweets. Why?
The Twitter API does not provide all the historical tweets via the API. It will only return tweets that have been posted in the previous 5-7 days or last 1000 tweets. The archiver will however fetch future tweets for any terms that it is tracking.

Do I have to keep the sheet open to save the tweets?
The archiver runs on Google servers and will therefore work even while the Google Sheet is closed. You can close the sheet, turn off your computer and the archiver will continue to work.

What is the difference between free and premium editions?
The free edition of the Twitter add-on lets you track up to 2 search queries. You can track more queries in the same Google Sheet with premium. The free edition polls Twitter every hour while the premium edition pulls tweets every 15 minutes so it is more suitable for tracking terms that are generating lot of tweets (like a conference #hashtag or a live sports event).

How do I upgrade to the Premium Edition of Twitter Archiver
You can use this PayPal link to upgrade to premium. It is $39.99 one-time flat fee and you can use premium for life.

I need help. Who do I contact?
Support is only available with the premium edition. If you have gone premium, use the contact form at ctrlq.org or email amit@labnol.org with your request.

Why user Twitter Archiver when IFTTT or Zapier can also save tweets?
The Twitter Archiver save complete meta-data of the tweets in the spreadsheet, it fetches tweets at a much faster rate and you can visually create and manage search queries from inside a Google Sheet.

I am getting a message from Google saying “The service is using too much computer time for one day”
You can only make a limited number of connections to the Twitter API from your Google Account. If you are tracking too many search terms in the Google Sheet, you might get that error. However, Google will reset the limit every 24 hours so it will resume itself the next day.

How do I save my tweets in other formats like PDF?
Since the tweets are saved in a Google spreadsheet, you can easily export the search results in various formats including PDF, CSV or even publish your data set as an HTML web page (choose File -> Publish to Web inside Google Sheets). Advanced users may try this technique to create JSON or RSS Feeds from Twitter.

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The story, How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 21/10/2015 under Twitter, Internet.

Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation forward, you would like to do some research on the Internet to know more about that person. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Google is the most obvious place for performing reverse email lookups (just Google for the email address) but if that person doesn’t have a website or if they have never used their email address on public forums, Google will be of little help.

No worries. If you only know the email address of a person and nothing more, here are some ways that may help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

How to do Reverse Email Search

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” and are followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the approximate location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has a billion users and the likelihood is therefore high that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the person into the search box and Facebook will instantly tell you if a profile exists with that email address or not.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download the profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the sender is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probability that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

Gmail users can install the Rapportive add-on and find the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles associated with an email address, if any of them exist. For details, see this tutorial on how to guess someone’s email address.

#4. People Search

Finally, if none of the above tricks work, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Also see: How to check if an Email address is valid & exists

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The story, Find the Person Behind an Email Address, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/10/2015 under Email, Internet.

Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes

John is not a professional photographer, the day job keeps him busy, but he’s an enthusiast who loves photography. One fine evening, he got a call from someone in his friend’s network who was willing to hire John for a photo shoot but, before signing the contract, they wanted to see more of his work.

John has captured some stunning and impressive photographs over the years but they are clearly not sorted and arranged in a manner that can be easily shared with a client. His photographs can be found all over the social web – from Facebook to Instagram to Flickr – but, for lack of time and technical know-how, he never considered building a portfolio website to showcase his work.

How to Make a Photography Website

There are WYSIWYG website building tools, Squarespace and WordPress for example, that make it extremely easy for you to build beautiful photography websites but the little downside with these tools is that you’ve manually update them every few weeks or months.

Siftr is a new web app that is trying to tackle the same problem but with a “build it, forget it” approach. The app, created by ex-Adobe employees, monitors your Instagram and other social networks, and automatically makes a portfolio website by pulling your ‘best’ photographs. Unlike other website builders that require you to manually upload photographs, Siftr syncs pictures from your social accounts, where you are actively posting pictures anyway, and puts them in your portfolio website.

Here’s a sample photography website that Siftr created using my Instagram page. It created the website and curated the photos automatically and the total time I spent in the entire exercise is 0 minutes. The website is responsive and looks great on a mobile too. Here are better examples.

Smart Categories, like Google Photos

You may be wondering why would anyone need such a tool when similar functionality can be emulated in WordPress using services like IFTTT. For instance, you can have an IFTTT recipe that will automatically cross-post your pictures to WordPress as soon you put them on Facebook or Flickr.

Well, there’s more to Siftr than just syncing your photos from social networks. The tool uses object recognition techniques to automatically classify your photos in categories. For instance, there are categories like “Nature”, “Buildings”, “People”, etc. and the photos are tagged automatically based on the pixels. So if a prospective client is only interested in the landscape photographs, you can directly point him to the relevant tag.

Siftr offers a host of layout templates and you also have the option to remove pictures that you do not wish to show in your portfolio website. At the time of writing this, Siftr can import your photos from Instagram, Flickr and Facebook but there’re adding support for 500px too, all the popular destinations where you’re more likely to upload photographs.

Siftr.co is completely free at though some of the upcoming features, like custom domains, templates, etc. could only be available to premium users.

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The story, Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 17/10/2015 under Instagram, Photography, Internet.

Chrome Notifications in Google's Navigation Bar

It looks like the Google Notifications section is not only for Google+ and Google Photos. Daniel Fletcher, a reader of this blog, noticed a Chrome notification from a supervised user who sent a permission request.

It's likely that more Google services and products will show notifications in the navigation bar. Google already stacks the notification cards for Google Photos.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Google Families?

Google's password manager available at passwords.google.com has an interesting list of URLs in the source code. Most URLs redirect to Google's My Account page, but there's a new subdomain which returns a 404 error: families.google.com. It's not clear if Google intends to launch a new account manager for families.

Google Chrome already has a feature that lets you add supervised users and setup parental controls. You can block certain websites, review browsing history, change settings. Google Play has a Family section that highlights family-friendly content and Google Play Music will offer a family plan for $14.99. There's also YouTube for Kids.

{ Thanks, PhistucK Productions. ]

Google Shows Other Recordings of a Song

When you're searching Google for a song that has multiple cover versions, Google shows a new section below the video: "other recordings of this song". For example, if you're searching for [Felix Jaehn Ain't Nobody], Google shows the original version of the song from 1983 (Rufus and Chaka Khan) and a recent cover version from 2013 (Jasmine Thompson), which was remixed by Felix Jaehn, a German DJ.

You can click the other recordings to find more about them and watch their videos.