How to Add Google Plus Custom Search Engines in Chrome

If you're running the Chrome Web browser, you can delve into the settings and add your own custom search engines to the browser. In this case, we added two search engines: one for searching profiles and the other for searching posts.

Here's how:

• Click the "Wrench" menu in Chrome.
• Click "Preferences"
• In the "Basics" section, click "Manage Search Engines" in the "Search" section.

1. In the first box ("Add a new search engine"), type whatever you want. I chose "Google+."
2. In the second box ("Keyword"), type the word that you will use to call the search engine from the URL bar. In other words, keep it short and simple. I chose "profiles" for the profile search engine and "posts" for the posts search engine.
3. In the last box ("URL with % in place of query") use the following:

• For the Profile search engine: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&tbs=prfl:e
• For the Posts search engine: {google:baseURL}search?q=site:plus.google.com inurl:posts/* %s

To save the engines, just hit "Enter" (Return) on your keyboard.

Now you can search Google+ from Chrome's address bar. To do so, just type in the engine name you want (e.g. posts or profiles) and hit the spacebar. That will call the engine for use. You can then type in your query and press enter as you would normally when searching Google.

Finally, Google Plus search!

Make multiple calls in Gmail.

Remember those old multi-line phones with all the buttons across the bottom? That gave you access to more than one line at a time, a feature now available in Google‘s Gmail.

According to the official Gmail Blog, this new multi-call capability will let you put callers on hold with Gmail’s phone service, picking up another call at the same time. Too bad there’s no music on hold to entertain that first caller.

Also imitating conventional phone systems is call waiting, where you receive a notification of an incoming call, and then it’s up to you whether you’re going to answer it or not. The only limitation with this new capability is that you’re only allowed two outgoing calls to physical phones at the same time.

Best of all, U.S. and Canada calls using the Gmail phone and video system will be free through 2011, and all these new multi-line features work with Gmail’s phone, voice and video calls.

Google Warns Users They May Be Infected By Malware

Google has identified a piece of malware that is redirecting unusual search traffic to its servers, prompting the company to warn affected users.

“Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers,” security engineer Damian Menscher wrote on the company’s blog. “After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software.”

The malware has affected an unspecified number of users, but apparently it was enough for the company to announce that they will be displaying a “prominent notification” at the top of google search results to anybody they believe is infected.

“This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called ‘proxies.’ We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.”

Google has never used its search engine as a massive malware warning system for users, although it did accidentally mark every website on the web as harmful in 2009.

Google's New URL Shortner g.co Exclusively For Google Products Only.

Google has unveiled g.co, a new URL shortener that will link only to Google products and websites.

The search giant already owns goo.gl, a URL shortener it launched in 2009. Unlike g.co, the goo.gl URL shortener can be used for any link on the web via the Google Toolbar.

“We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts,” Google VP of Consumer Marketing Gary Briggs stated on the company’s blog. “That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.”

The tech titan, which has been using the goo.gl URL shortener for its products until now, clearly wants to limit the confusion about where its goo.gl links lead to. Separating Google products from goo.gl should go a long way to solving that problem.

Google isn’t the only company to use .co as its official URL shortener. Twitter obtained t.co last year to improve how links are shared and secured on its platform.