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My life is owned by Google.  Seriously.  I use Gmail as my only email program and their calendar as my only calendar.  I’ve also recently decided to use their documents software instead of Word/Excel.  Having Google maintain my digital life has made things a lot easier.

So when I got my new iPhone a few weeks ago I was eager to setup my Gmail account.  Just as I expected it was painless and easy.

Then I moved on to my calendar which I thought would be just as easy.  Unfortunately it wasn’t.  I was hoping that the iPhone would support a pull architecture for iCal synchronization — basically allowing me to tell the iPhone that it’s time to sync between the iPhone and my Google calendar.  A lot of calendar software packages support the iCal standard, and Google calendar allows you to export your calendar in this format.  Naturally I thought this would be supported on the iPhone, but it wasn’t.

I then searched online to find what I was looking for.  I found a syncing program that works with the iCal standard, but only with the iCalendar application in OSX.  Since I run XP on my machine this wasn’t any help.  I then found an application that said it could do what I needed, called NemuSync, but it required that I jailbreak my iPhone — something I wasn’t looking to do.

Just as I was about to give up I found the answer to all of my problems.  It was called NuevaSync and it has been the best thing I’ve ever setup for my iPhone.  NuevaSync is free, and allows you to setup an account with them that bridges information on your iPhone with Google’s calendar without ever having to install an app.  On a more technical level, they offer a Microsoft Exchange layer to push syncing between your iPhone and Google’s calendar.

Because Exchange is a push architecture you never have to worry about activating a sync request — it’s done automatically when you add a new event in your calendar either on your iPhone or on your Calendar webpage.  So let’s say you’re on the road and enter an event on your iPhone.  By the time you get home and log on to your Google calendar it will already be there.  NuevaSync is a real-time ongoing syncing of your iPhone calendar and Google calendar.

I was so happy when I found this out that I emailed their staff to thank them for the service.  They could easily charge $99 a year for this service and I would have paid.  It’s so seamless and translucent that I literally had to write a blog article singing its praises.

If you’re an iPhone person and use Google calendar you must setup an account today.

If you have a Gmail/Google account you MUST go login now.  Then open another window and do a normal Google search.  See anything different in the result listing?

There are a couple of new icons along each search result that allow YOU to vote/score/rank results higher/lower, remove results that you’ll never care about or need, and to comment on results.  You can also add a link that you always want to appear for the phrase you searched for.  Want “cats.com” to come up as your second result when you search for dogs?  You can make it happen now!

AWESOME!

I have thought for a long time how great it would be to simply remove a result listing you know you’ll never need, but they go even further.  These features make it easy to find repetitive information very quickly and to tailor it to your needs.

You also know Google’s taking all that feedback and making their system even smarter.  If a thousand people hide a result, or a thousand people promote a result to a higher rank, that will have an effect on future searches for everyone.  It’s ingenious!

While the commenting feature is very much like the old “Note This” feature which was bulky and mostly unusable, the commenting feature is super easy and intuitive.  I WISH they kept the “Note This” feature, however, for personal use so you can maintain individual notes on a website that don’t become public.

Anyway, I felt the need to let more people know about it because it’s slick.  And of course Google integrate these new features in an unobtrusive way — they’re known for that.

Kudos to Google!

Doing a Google image search? Want to only show images with faces in them?

Add “&imgtype=face” to the end of your URL and hit enter. 

The results will now be filtered by images only containing faces.

American Google Image Search for “tiananmen square tank”
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=tiananmen%20square%20tank

Chinese Google Image Search for “tiananmen square tank”
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen%20square%20tank