Google plus is getting popular in the social world. But, unfortunately, to fully use its functionality we need to have more friends in it. That is where it will be difficult to migrate from facebook to Google +. However, you can use the following tricks to make this easy.

How to update your Facebook status from Google Plus:

Add your facebook update email address to any circle provided that you don’t mind sharing your updates to the circle with the world via facebook. Or you can manually add it to the share box, whenever you wish to share.

This only works for status updates and will not work if you want to share photos.

How to transfer your Photos from facebook to Google +

You can use move2picasa for this purpose.

How to find your Facebook friends:

To find out if your Facebook friends are on Google+

• Create a Yahoo! Mail account
• Import your Facebook contacts
• Export your Yahoo! Mail contact list
• Import it into your Gmail account
• The imported contacts will now show up under the “Find and Invite” section of the Circles page, the ones who already have Google+ will be listed first.
• You can invite the rest.

Profiles of Google Plus users are being displayed in the search results. Google + is the new social network launched by the Internet giant Google.

It consists of photo, short description,links to other social networking site mentioned by you in your plus profile.

It will be intresting to see if Google makes public posts of users searchable as it has been hailed as a good blogging platform. Kevin Rose has even redirected his blog http://kevinrose.com to his Google+ profile.

Update: Google is indeed showing public posts in its search result. Though I had to put in an entire sentence from Scoble’s public post in the search box to find his post, it wouldn’t be long before Google gives G+ posts more weightage for short keywords.

With Google giving importance to Google Plus posts, it seems we won’t be quiting Google plus soon. I mean, who can give up the urge of commenting on some juicy posts? Google might have other failed products like Knol which it tried to resucitate by displaying it in search results, but in this case it is social+information.

Google has been granted a patent to a technology that will track mouse movements to deliver relevant results. The title is “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring”. Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

It means that if a user quickly moves his mouse towards a result, Google will know that it is relevant to him.  If a user hovers over a result or an ad then it means that the user found the result or ad interesting.

Using Google App Inventor now anyone can create an android app. Google says that App Inventor is built on the idea that you do not need to be a developer to build great mobile applications. Instead of code, App Inventor allows you to visually design applications and use blocks to specify application logic.

Now many have a genuine worries that this might lead to a flurry of crap apps in the marketplace. For one thing registration costs $25 and that will be a hindrance for many. Plus, I think, Google might charge more from such developers. Google is in a win-win situation over here. It can get lots of apps in its marketplace and all it has to do is sort out the good ones for users.

Further, many non-geeky iPhone loving youngsters might be attracted in buying android phones once they start creating their own apps. It is like watching a crap television show on TV just because you have featured in it

Apply for it over here. You can watch the video hereon youtube. Its is an unlisted video, ie. only those with the link can view it. Wonder why Google does not want to make it viral?

It has been quite a while since Google have started displaying related searches for the keywords you have searched.

I just noticed that they are showing related ads (Sponsored Links) for the keywords you searched. It is a interesting feature for Adwords advertisers who can target users searching Google using related keywords

This might be old news, but I noticed this feature today.

Shown on the left is the screenshot of the search result page of  “World cup”

As you know HTTPS sites are secure sites and your transaction with them is safe from eavesdropping. Google recently launched Google ssl for this purpose hwre your search is secure.

Now Electronic Search Frontier has developed an add on for firefox browser that will help you surf the web in HTTPS.  Sites like the New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter and Facebook,  Google services and a good many popular and semi-obscure sites are covered.

On installation, your browser automatically goes for the HTTPS/SSL connection option, or uses TOR’s resources to make it encrypted.

However , remember that unless Firefox displays a colored address bar and a complete lock in the status bar the  connection is not secure. This is because the webpage may contain third-party elements like advertisements which can be exploited.

Please note that surfing the web in HTTPS is comparatively slower than surfing without it.

Download the addon at EFF

According to advertising network Chitika, when Googlers fail to find what they are searching for , they move on to yahoo, Ask.com to search for it.

The interesting part is that Googlers  prefer Ask more than much fancied Microsoft’s Bing. Yahoo grabs nearly 50% of the share while ask.com 30%. Bing manages only 16%. However, we don’t know what the trend is as Bing was launched only a year ago. We don’t know whose share is going up and whose share is going down.

We all Google. You very well know that Google collects search keywords anonymously to give search suggestions to a particular region or worldwide. More than that they use it to help advertisers using adwords to get the list of keywords they can advertise on.  Well this is acceptable.

But due you know (via Datamation) that google uses your brain to help develop its own technology.

As you probably know, Google is in the book-scanning business. The company works with libraries and publications (including the New York Times) to scan and digitize book collections. It then posts these texts on the Internet and sells advertising against it. Scanning books is like printing money.

he challenge is that computers aren’t as good as humans at recognizing words. Fortunately, optical character recognition (OCR) systems nowadays are at least smart enough to know what they don’t know — they can identify words that they can’t read, or can’t recognize with certainty.

But what should Google do with those unrecognizable mystery words?

You know those squiggly or otherwise deliberately warped or obscured words you have to type in to “prove you’re human”? They’re called CAPTCHA systems, and they make the world a better place by thwarting software robots that would hack, exploit and abuse various software services if they could.

Less than a year ago, Google bought an interesting variant of CAPTCHA called reCAPTCHA. When you “prove you’re human” at a site using reCAPTCHA, one of the words you identify for access is actually one of those mystery words Google’s OCR computers can’t read. (The other word is known by the system, and used for actually proving you’re human.)

They’re sending the same word to other users, and use the general consensus to identify the word. The results are fed back to the scanning effort, bringing word recognition very close to 100%.

Nice work! Thanks to your brain’s amazing ability to recognize words, Google is making a fortune in the book scanning racket!

Datamation have also written about how Google uses your home.

However, these is acceptable if you look what Facebook does. It uses your private data , what you ‘Like’, etc and shares it with advertisers and third party websites to target you with offers.

Free blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress have been a boon to many people who had little or no knowledge about web designing an programming. It was just add gadgets/widgets or search Google to find minor hacks or tweaks for things these platforms didn’t provide any direct help.

However, this is going to change. The search engine giant Google has announced that Website’s Page Speed will be a factor in its search ranking. It is currently applicable for English searches from Google.com only and that it only carries little weight in comparison with relevancy. Knowing Google, it wouldn’t be long before they make page speed a significant part of the algorithm for ranking websites.

This means that every serious blogger will have to learn basics for web designing and programming in order to make his site outrank others. There are many tools for help. They have been mentioned on the google blog post like Firefox addon Page Speed, Yahoo’s ySlow, etc.

These tools will only help you find out issues with your site and give suggestions. You will have to make the suitable changes yourself and for that you will need learn the basics at least .

Some suggestions for improving site speed is that serve images from your own server to minimise DNS look ups, remove unused codes and use ads from networks that load quickly.

Many professional web developers are going to gain from this as many people would want their services.

More people visited Facebook  than Google, gaining the No 1 spot in the US the previous week, according to hitwise. Google does not minds that as long as these people are using Chrome to visit the site.

Google whose revenues comes from advertising dollars by means of cpc and cpm ads from its search results and publisher sites cannot match the viral nature of facebook.

Google has been trying hard to push its web browser Google Chrome. Though initially it did well in getting users its growth has been stagnant. It is still far, far behind the much hated and obsolete IE6.

With facebook advertising, it might get lot of people recommending chrome to others by means of share and like buttons. And hopefully more users.