If you're using the Save to Google Chrome extension, here are a few tips:


1. Select some text from the page before clicking the star icon to use this text as a note. You can change it later.


2. You can change the title of the page you save in the small box that's displayed after clicking the star icon. Just click the title and it becomes editable.


3. Pick an image to illustrate the page. From the same box, you can click the arrow icons to choose an image from the page.

4. If you don't like the images, there's a default thumbnail that uses the first character from the title. Click the right arrow icon until you reach the end of the list.


5. Add a tag to group similar pages.



6. If you clicked the star icon by mistake, click the delete icon to remove the page from your list of saved pages.

7. Use the Google Save site to manage your saved pages. You can select multiple pages to add tags or delete the pages. If this link doesn't work for you: google.com/save, then try google.com/save?gl=us.

8. The search feature is very powerful because it searches the entire text of your saved pages, not just the title and description.


9. The only keyboard shortcuts I could find are the left and right arrow keys, which allow you to navigate between your saved pages, just like in Google Image Search.

10. How to save pages without using the extension? Use Google Image Search and search for site:URL, where URL is the address of the page. Pick one of the images you like and click "save". Please note that this only works for pages that include images and only if the pages and images are indexed by Google.

Back in 2014, I found a way to loop YouTube videos using a feature of the HTML5 player. It looks like YouTube added "loop" as a standard feature. Just right click inside the HTML5 player and click "loop". This way, you can watch a video on repeat until you pause it or uncheck "loop" from the contextual menu.


It also works for embedded videos. Here's a short video you can use to test the loop feature:

Are you missing the zoom controls from the old Google Maps interface for the desktop? Mouse over the "-" or "+" button at the bottom of the Google Maps page and click "show slider". You'll get the old zoom slider which allows you to quickly control the zoom level of the map.



If you want to go back to the default interface, mouse over the "-" or "+" button and click "hide slider". The nice thing is that Google remembers your preference.

How to export all your notes from Google Keep? I found two ways to do this.

One option is to use a feature that converts one or more notes to a Google Docs document.

1. Select all your notes: go to Google Keep and press Ctrl+A (or Cmd-A for Mac).

Important: This only selects the notes from the current view, so archived notes aren't included. You can repeat these steps for archived notes or select all your archived notes and unarchive them.


2. Click the 3-dot icon from the top of the page and pick "Copy to Google Doc".

3. Wait a few seconds and you should see a link at the bottom of the page that says: "Open doc". Click that link to open the document that includes all your notes.


Another option is to use Google Takeout and export all your notes as HTML files. Google Takeout exports all your notes, including archived notes and notes from the Trash.


You'll get a ZIP archive with HTML files for each note. The archive may also includes image and audio files. If a note doesn't have a title, the exported HTML file will use the date in the filename.

Google+ Photos has a few search filters that are pretty useful. You can find them if you click the small arrow from the search box: Auto Backup, Hangouts, Google Drive, Posts, Auto Awesome, Videos and more. The nice thing is that most of them are also available in Google Photos.


Google Photos has a search page that shows a few filters: Creations (replaces Auto Awesome), Google Drive, Video, Recently Added. Here are some searches you can use to bring back the filters from Google+ Photos:

#AutoBackup - shows all the photos automatically backed up from your mobile devices and desktop computers

#Desktop - shows the photos automatically backed up from your desktop computers

#Posts - shows the photos added to your Google+ posts

#All - shows all your photos

#PhotosOfYou - photos you've been tagged in

#CAMERANAME - replace CAMERANAME with the your camera's model or brand to see all the photos taken with that camera. Some examples: #Nexus5, #Canon, #iPhone.

For some reason, when you search YouTube for [site:youtube.com], you're actually requesting a list of all the YouTube videos, playlists and channels. If you combine this query with YouTube's filters, you can obtain a lot of interesting results:

1. Most viewed videos of all time. Use these filters from the dropdown: type:video, sort by: view count.


To add a filter, click the Filters dropdown and select one of the filters from the 5 columns. You can add multiple filters, but you can only pick a single filter from a column. To remove a filter, click the "x" next to the filter. There's also an option that lets you "clear all filters".


2. Most viewed videos uploaded in the past 30 days. Use these filters: type:video, upload date: this month, sort by: view count.

3. Most viewed videos uploaded in the past 12 months. Use these filters: type:video, upload date: this year, sort by: view count.

4. Most viewed videos uploaded in the past 24 hours. Use these filters: type:video, upload date: today, sort by: view count.

5. Most viewed HD videos of all time. Use these filters: type:video, features: HD, sort by: view count.

6. Most viewed 4K videos of all time. Use these filters: type:video, features: 4K, sort by: view count.

7. Most viewed 3D videos of all time. Use these filters: type:video, features: 3D, sort by: view count.

8. Most viewed playlist. Use these filters: type:playlist, sort by: view count.

9. Random videos with no dislikes. Enable these filters: type:video, sort by: rating.

10. Random popular videos. Enable these filters: type:video, sort by: relevance.

If you're using the new Google Contacts UI, you probably noticed that Google shows both your contacts and the people from your Google+ circles in one place. The "all contacts" section now also shows Google+ contacts and there's no option to only show non-Google+ contacts.

Fortunately, there's a way to hide the people from your Google+ circles. Google+ has a feature called "your circles" which lets you select which circles you share with. For example, you can add the "Friends" and "Family" circles and quickly share your posts with your favorite circles without having to select them all the time.

"When you share posts, photos, profile data, and other things with 'Your circles,' you're sharing with all of your circles, except the ones you're just following (they're unchecked in this list)," explains Google.


The good news is that Google Contacts only includes the people from "your circles", so you can customize "your circles" and uncheck all of them. This way, the "all contacts" section will only include your contacts. The downside is that the "your circles" option from Google+ will no longer be useful, but you can always manually select your circles.

I was checking some old Gmail messages and I noticed this warning: "Anti-virus warning - 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled." It turns out that the .rar archive was "blocked for security reasons" and I can't download it.

There are some file types that are blocked by Gmail, but .rar is not one of them. Here's the list: ".ade, .adp, .bat, .chm, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .exe, .hta, .ins, .isp, .jse, .lib, .lnk, .mde, .msc, .msp, .mst, .pif, .scr, .sct, .shb, .sys, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .vxd, .wsc, .wsf, .wsh". It turns out that the archive included a few .bat files inside a .zip archive and "Gmail won't accept these file types even if they're sent in a zipped format".

Anti-virus warning in Gmail's web interface

How to download the blocked attachment? I couldn't find a way to do this from the web interface. Gmail disabled the download button and the "save to Drive" button. Not even the "basic HTML" Gmail interface lets you download the file and the "download all" link only lets you download all safe attachments.

Fortunately, you can use other mail clients: Outlook, Thunderbird, KMail, Apple Mail. Surprisingly, Gmail's Android app lets you download blocked files or save them to Google Drive. Gmail's iOS app doesn't let you download blocked attachments, but you can save them to Google Drive. I also checked the built-in mail clients from iOS and Mac OS X and it's easy to download all attachments. To open archives in iOS, install an app like iZip first.

Gmail's Android app

Now that custom Google Maps are available in Google Drive, you may wonder how to find them. "My maps" is not included in the list of file types from the advanced search, but you can use the "opens with" feature that was added in the new Google Drive interface. Just click the arrow from the search box, select "Google My Maps" from the "opens with" list and click the search button. Google Drive will display all the maps you've created in Google My Maps. Another option is to search for app:"google my maps".


You can add some keywords to the query to find a map.

Sometimes you want to find more about a topic and you find a lot of superficial news articles and blog posts that keep rehashing the same information. Google shows a list of in-depth articles for some queries, but this feature seems to be restricted to the US and it's only displayed for some queries.

How to manually trigger Google's in-depth section? Just add &tbs=ida:1&gl=us to a Google search URL and you'll see a list of 10 in-depth articles from sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times‎, Wired, New Yorker, Slate and more. Some examples: [Google], [Daft Punk], [robots], [Russia], [happy].

Last year, Google updated the dictionary card and added a lot of useful features, including etymological information, a translation box and a graph that shows the use of a word over time. If you only want to find the origin of a word like "basilica", you don't have to search for [define basilica], expand the card and scroll to the word origin section. You can search for [basilica origin] or [basilica word origin] and Google shows a special version of the dictionary card that highlights etymological information.

YouTube doesn't offer yet an audio-only version for the desktop, but there's a simple way to save bandwidth when playing a YouTube video in a different tab or in the background.

Let's say you're listening to a 2-hour concert while reading a book. Since you only care about the audio, YouTube wastes bandwidth by streaming the entire video. YouTube now uses adaptive streaming (DASH) and there are separate streams for audio and video.

I mentioned in a recent post that the mobile YouTube app for Android downloads only the audio files when playing music videos in the background. The desktop site doesn't do this, but you can save bandwidth by switching to the lowest quality option that's available: 144p. Click the player's settings button (the wheel icon) and pick 144p from the "quality" dropdown.

It may not seem obvious, but YouTube uses exactly the same audio stream, whether you're watching 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p or 1080p videos. You can check this by right clicking the player, selecting "stats for nerds" and watching the DASH section when switching to other resolutions. The first numerical value is the ID (itag) of the video stream, while the second one is the ID of the audio stream.  You'll notice that the audio ID is the same: 140.


Here's an example: the 2-hour David Gilmour concert from the screenshot above uses 237MB for the 360p stream and 94MB for 144p stream, while the audio stream uses 111MB. That means you can save more than 140MB by switching from 360p to 144p.

Please note that this only works if you're using the Flash player or you're using YouTube's HTML5 player in a browser that supports Media Source Extensions (Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE11).

I've checked to see what happens when you play a YouTube music video in the background when using the YouTube app for Android, while YouTube Music Key is enabled (it's bundled with the Play Music All Access subscription). I played U2's Beautiful Day on my Nexus 5 and opened the app data usage section to see how much data is used by the YouTube app.

When playing the video in the background, the YouTube app used about 4MB.


When playing the same video in the foreground, the YouTube app used about 24MB.


By default, YouTube selected the highest video quality that was available for this video: 480p.


This means that you can save bandwidth by playing music videos in the background. YouTube uses separate chunked streams for audio and video, so it can download only audio files when playing videos in the background.

Gmail automatically categorizes messages. Right now, there are only 4 categories available: social, promotions, updates, forums and they match Gmail's inbox tabs. Even if you disable Gmail's inbox tabs from the settings, you'll still see the list of categories in the right sidebar.


When you click the 4 categories, Gmail adds the following queries to the search box: [category:social], [category:promotions], [category:updates], [category:forums].

If you used the new Google Inbox app, you probably noticed some other categories: travel, purchases, finance.


They're also available in Gmail if you search for: [category:travel], [category:purchases], [category:finance]. Travel groups email confirmations from sites like Booking.com or Expedia, the purchases category shows order receipts from sites like Amazon or eBay, while the finance category shows bills, PayPal payment updates and more.


You can add the 3 categories to Gmail's interface by enabling the Smartlabels feature in Gmail Labs. The 3 smartlabels were added back in January.


If you want to see these categories in Gmail's mobile apps, you can add some filters that automatically label messages. How to create a Purchases label?

1. Go to Gmail's inbox in the desktop site
2. Click the small arrow from the search box that shows advanced search options
3. Type category:purchases in the "Has the words" box
4. Click "Create filter with this search"
5. Check "Apply the label", pick "New label" from the list and type "Purchases"
6. Check "Also apply filter to matching conversations"
7. Click "Create filter".


Use the same steps to create labels for Travel and Finance, but replace Purchases with Travel or Finance in step 3 and 5.

{ Thanks, Greg Bullock. }

Google uses confirmation messages from Gmail to show helpful information about your purchases in Google Now, Google Search and other Google services. That's not a new feature, but there are some ways to make it even more useful.

If you're signed in to your Google account, you can search for [my purchases] and Google shows your latest purchases from sites like Amazon, eBay, Google Play and more. Click one of the items to find more details, including tracking links, prices and links to email receipts. Click "show 10 more results" to see more orders.


You can filter your purchases. For example, you can search for [my purchases amazon de] to find your amazon.de orders.


You can also search for [my purchases from June 2013], [my purchases from last month], [my purchases from yesterday] and more.


This also works for searching purchases by name: [my purchases led], [my purchases shirt], [my purchases Samsung].


How to find your receipts from Gmail? Just search Gmail for [category:purchases] and you'll find all the confirmation messages detected by Gmail. It's interesting to notice that not all of them are used by Google Now and Google Search.

YouTube's HTML5 player uses some tricks to hide the standard menu that's displayed when you right click a HTML5 video. This menu includes features like looping videos, enabling browser controls or saving videos.

I've found a way to enable this menu in Chrome: just right click the video twice in the same place. The first right click will trigger YouTube's contextual menu, while the second right click will display browser's menu. Features like "save video as", "copy video URL" don't work, but you can use this trick to watch videos on repeat. Just click "loop" and you can watch your favorite YouTube video over and over again. To deactivate repeat, right click the video twice and click "loop" once again.


Obviously, this only works for YouTube's HTML5 player, but it's enabled by default in Chrome and most YouTube videos use it. It doesn't work for embedded videos.

There are other ways to loop YouTube videos: from adding videos to playlists to using the "loop" parameter, installing extensions or using sites like Infinite Looper.

To enable the menu in Firefox, you can Shift click the YouTube player. There's no loop option, but you can find features like "save snapshot as", "view video" and more.

Here's a simple way to use Google's unit conversion feature, while typing shorter queries. Instead of searching Google for [6 lbs to kg], you can use [6 lbs =]. Just add the equal sign to the value you want to convert and Google will use the right measurement unit most of the time.


Here's another example: [68 f =]. The query is shorter than [68 f to c] or [6 fahrenheit to celsius]. Unfortunately, [20 c =] doesn't convert temperature, since c is the speed of light, so you'll have to use [20 c to f].


You can use Google's dropdown to pick other measurement units or you can edit the value and the result will change as yo type.

This trick also works in Chrome's omnibox, Firefox's search box, Safari's address bar:

This isn't some new Google Search feature, but I thought it's worth sharing. Google has some smart algorithms that process your queries and can determine what you intended to type even if it's not properly formatted.

1. You can separate all the characters of your query by space. For example: [h o t e l c a l i f o r n i a l y r i c s].


2. You can separate all the characters of your query using dots. For example: [h o t e l c a l i f o r n i a l y r i c s].

3. You can type your query without using space to separate words. For example: [hotelcalifornialyrics].


4. You can separate the words from your query using various characters like "+", "*", "&", "^" and more. Here's an example: [hotel^california^lyrics].

The Google+ integration managed to improve the quality of YouTube comments (or at least the top comments). Sometimes you find YouTube videos with interesting comments, but it's not that easy to read all of them.

YouTube only displays 20 comments or threads and you have to click "more" to read 20 other comments. There's also a page that only displays comments: click "all comments" below the video description and you'll be able to read the top 100 comments.


When you click "more", YouTube fetches 100 other comments. For example, the page lets you read 300 comments with only 2 clicks on "more", while the standard YouTube video page requires 14 clicks.


Here's an example of comment page that shows the top 100 comments. You can click the drop-down below "all comments" to sort comments by date. Another example here.

You can find a list of all the Android apps you've ever installed from the Play Store using your current Google account in both the Google Play Store app (My Apps > All) and the Play Store site. For some reason, the site doesn't use pagination and doesn't load content as you scroll, so you need to wait until Google displays a long list of apps.


Google doesn't offer a way to filter the list of apps you've installed or downloaded, but you can use your browser's find-in-page feature (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F for Mac). The list is sorted alphabetically in the Play Store site, while the Play Store app displays recently installed apps first.

Google Play doesn't even show the number of Play Store apps you've installed on your Android devices over the years. If you're curious to find the actual number, go to Google Dashboard and scroll to Play Store.


The Play Store app lets you remove apps from the list, but the Dashboard number is still accurate.