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I haven't noticed it before, but you can add an as_qdr parameter to the end of a URL in Google to get a drop-down menu (next to the search box) that lets you search by date. For example: http://www.google.com/search?&q=macosxhints&as_qdr=d So I wrote this bookmarklet that does that automatically:

javascript:window.open(document.URL + "&as_qdr=d")

You can customize it as you please:

• d[number]: past number of days (e.g.: d10)
• w[number]: past number of weeks
• y[number]: past number of years

More info on this can be found in this post on the Google Operating System site.

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo I decided to walk the exhibition floor. Niall Kennedy and I checked out the inflatable Google booth, we gave feedback to the WordPress folks, and we came to rest in the Yahoo booth, where it was nice to see Jeremy Zawodny and catch up a little bit. After a few minutes of talking, I noticed the O’Reilly booth just a few yards away. I’m a sucker for O’Reilly books, so I moseyed over to check out the selection. Lo and behold, they had the new Google Apps Hacks book by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped! I had pre-ordered the book on Amazon a while ago and it still hadn’t arrived at that point. I’d like to think that the O’Reilly folks carried the books straight from the printing presses right to the booth. If so, I was one of the first people in the U.S. to buy a copy last Thursday. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve had a while to read the book. My verdict? It’s really good. Part of my job is to know obscure things about Google, yet several of the hacks in this book discussed tricks that I didn’t know. Google Docs lets you do find-and-replace and use regular expressions?! Yup, and hack 13 gives several handy expressions to use. Very few people know (hack 26) that Google Spreadsheets can magically take cell values such as “red,” “yellow” and “blue” and fill in more colors. Even fewer people know that this “MagicFill” feature is powered by Google Sets. The net effect is that you can start with two words like “seo” and “sem” and get this back: Search engine optimizers will love hack 27, which tells how to import data from a web page into Google Spreadsheets automatically. The list of tricks goes on and on, from creating new scratch Gmail addresses in two different ways (hack 53) to configuring things so that a right-click with your mouse lets you access either the browser menu or the context menu from an application like Google Docs (hack 125). What’s especially good about this book? - A lot of these tips are very fresh, e.g. discussing how to get a Google Site, which just launched a couple months or so ago. - Search engine optimizers and bloggers will enjoy chapter 12, which includes tips on SEO, using Google Analytics, and how to follow discussions online. - Most chapters end with a discussion of alternatives to Google products. These hacks serve the reader well by intelligently discussing the pros and cons of other products (e.g. Flickr or Mint). What’s bad? - The usage of margins is a little strange. Most pages have a wide blank margin. On some pages, tips and extra tricks appear in the margin. But some pages also have figures in the margin. I’m not sure why figures sometimes appear in the margin and sometimes don’t. - You always wish for more coverage of your favorite things. The Google Chart API gets half a tip when it really is quite worthy of a tip or two in its own right. But the book has to stop at some point. One interesting tidbit is that the working title of this book was Google Office Hacks. It rang up with that title on my O’Reilly receipt and that’s the title I see when I enter the ISBN number into Google Books: But I think the name “Google Apps Hacks” is not only more accurate but more fun, so I’m glad they changed the title. Another interesting tidbit is that Philipp Lenssen wrote this book using Google Docs. Should you buy this book? If you read my blog on a regular basis, you’d probably like it. This book would be an especially good match for: - people that want to run a small business or startup more productively for less money - hackers and people that like to tinker with web services - people that enjoyed the original Google Hacks book - power users or webmasters that want to learn about Google’s products and how to get more out of them If you’re looking to get a gift for a non-savvy to less savvy user, I’d recommend Rule the Web. But if you’re looking for a gift for a savvy user, anyone with an interest in Google, or someone that uses Gmail/Google Calendar/Google Docs/Google Spreadsheets, then I’d definitely recommend this book. One of my pet peeves is when a “Hacks” book turns out to be more like a user manual. That’s not an issue with this book — it really does show you lots of cool ways to hack, mod, tune, and tweak Google Apps. Google Apps Hacks is packed full of ideas that can keep you busy for quite a while. I expect this book to be a hot seller at the O’Reilly store during Maker Faire this weekend.

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager When I add a new friend to Gmail chat, sometimes my friend's email address is added as their contact name, such as hikingfan@gmail.com. I personally like to have the name of all my chat friends in my chat list so I don't get too confused as to who's who. To change this, I used to go into contacts, select the contact profile, add the name of my friend, and then save it. But now with the new version of Gmail (launched for Firefox 2 and IE7) you can make edits to Gmail contacts directly from the chat list. I find it to be a great time saver. All you have to do is hover your mouse over one of your contacts to prompt a pop-up with contact details. If you just click on the contact name, it will automatically become an editable field. Simply type in the desired name and hit "enter." Your changes will save the name in your chat list as well as in your contacts.

While in London this week, Jason Billingsley spotted something different in Google search results. If you look closely, you’ll notice the display URL in Adwords ads are above the ad copy, not below. Ad copy also appears on the same line as the display URL in some cases. I did a quick search in Google Blogs (search within only blogs) to see if anyone has blogged about this yet or may know what’s going on. Over here in Vancouver, I still see the traditional ad display so all I can do is speculate that Google is shakin’ things up and testing the impact of different ad structure.

Jason also observed that the text appears larger than usual which indicates Google may be testing out new formatting of not only paid search but also organic. Of course it could be handywork of an internal prankster at Google, or the equivalent to Jason’s computer trying to drive on the opposite side of the road while across the pond. (PS, if you’re wondering what the stars are, that’s a feature of StumbleUpon - you can see which pages have been reviewed and rated by Stumblers, and if one of your friends gave it a “thumb,” that will show up too.) Anyone have more information on this? The Key to PPC for Online Retailers Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group Register to Attend

Thanks for all the feedback you have sent us about Google Calendar Sync. We're rolling out an update that should make it a lot more useful. Previously, your Google Calendar email address needed to be the organizer or an attendee of your Microsoft Outlook events for the Outlook events to sync to your Google Calendar. Now, when you choose to do a 2-way sync or a 1-way sync from Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, all of your Outlook events will be synced to your Google Calendar. If you haven't been auto-updated to Google Calendar Sync 0.9.3.2 and you don't want to wait for the update, you can download it here.

Posted by Kathryn McGarr, Online Operations Associate We hear reports that many users don't archive their email. If you don't regularly click on the "archive" button or never even thought about it, here are some reasons you might want to get in the habit. Archiving just means moving mail out of your inbox and storing it for safekeeping. Your messages will be waiting for you when you click All Mail or search for them. 9. Phone numbers and addresses You never know when you'll need a phone number someone emailed you or an address that was in a signature. 8. Procrastination Sometimes you want to get a message out of your inbox, but you don't want to deal with organization, and you don't want to trash it. 7. Posterity Just because you’re not famous now doesn’t mean that in forty years (or fifteen minutes) you won’t want to write your memoir. 6. Winning arguments “But on May 5, 2005 at 8:43pm EDT you said….” 5. Mailing lists Do you really need to know what Clintobamccain is doing every day? Auto-archive* their messages until you want to donate again. 4. Birthdays Search for “grandma birthday” and voila, find the message you sent her last April. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted? 3. That guy Remember that guy you thought you’d never need to get in touch with ever again? 2. Because you can May as well use the free storage space. Plus, clean inbox = clean mind. 1. Fate-tempting is bad. You just never know Thirty-one days after you send that message to the Trash and it gets permanently deleted, you're going to need it. Don't tempt the fates. *To auto-archive, create a filter with the action "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)."

When I switched to Gmail more than a year ago, I still had a significant amount of old email stored with my old address. Because I keep messages for a long time and like to frequently search them, I wanted to move my old email to Gmail so it would all be in one place and I could access it on any device, including my mobile phone. In the end, the move went smoothly, but I picked up a couple of tips along the way that I thought were worth sharing.

Setup First, you need to tell Gmail how to retrieve your mail from old accounts using POP. Go to Settings > Accounts > Get mail from other accounts > Add another mail account. A new window will pop-up asking you for the email address you're going to import mail from. Fill this in and click on "Next Step."  I found it useful to label incoming messages with "Imported" (use any thoughtful label you can think of), so I could easily identify imported mail later on. Then, validate with "Add Account" and finally, select "Yes, I want to be able to send mail as yourname@gmail.com." I'm a big fan of using the "from:me" search in Gmail that lets me look for email I sent using any name or address by simply searching "from:me." I wanted to make sure I could continue to find everything I’ve sent under all my old addresses and aliases, and this last step makes that work. Sending mail from your old address If you would still like to have the option of sending mail from Gmail that appears to recipients as if it were sent from your old email address, you can set up a custom "From:" by going to Settings > Accounts > Send mail as: > Add another email address. Click on "Next Step" and then "Send Verification." You'll receive an email with instructions on how to validate your old address. Once it's set up, you can select this address in the "From" field when replying or forwarding.

It might take a while for Gmail to fetch everything from your old account, but the end result was definitely worth it for me.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager Since Google's applications are "in the cloud," we can act on feedback and release new features very rapidly. Sometimes, though, we like to listen and learn from users before launching updates to businesses, schools and organizations that use Google Apps. Gmail's revamped codebase was one such case, and we're happy to mention this update is now rolling out to Google Apps users who haven't already opted in to get the latest improvements. Employees, students and other Google Apps users will soon start seeing useful features like these:

• even faster interface
• group chat from the browser
• streamlined contact manager
• colored message labels
• improved keyboard shortcuts
• bookmarkable messages and searches

And if you want to stay up to date on the latest Google Apps improvements, our new RSS feed can help you learn about changes to Google Apps as they happen. To subscribe to this feed, click this "Add to Google" button: If you're a Google Apps administrator and you'd rather start getting new features right away instead of waiting, you can change a setting in the control panel to automatically get future features as they're released.

Yesterday, we launched Google Calendar Sync, a tool that lets users sync Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook calendar. Using it, you can access your Google Calendar information offline, access your Outlook calendar information online from any computer, and sync your Outlook calendars across multiple computers. Check out Shirin's post on the Google Blog for more information.