Entropy

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Google has a hidden feature which allows you to sort its results by the date they were indexed, descending, allowing much more powerful search.

Just add this string &as_qdr=d to the address bar and hit enter. You’ll get a custom drop-down box that lets you re-order results based on date.

You’ll recognise it from the blog search - for more, read the article at LifeHacker

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With the slew of free mail solutions around, often you might find yourself in your GMail account looking for a contact on Hotmail; or on Yahoo looking for a GMail contact. Keepm solves that problem.

Keepm imports your contacts from popular applications like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, Linked In, as well as from vCards or Outlook. When you need to search for a contact, you can go straight to Keepm and be comfortable knowing that the information you need is there regardless of where you originally created that contact. You can also export your contacts from Keepm at any time as vCards or a CSV file, which means it would at the very least work well to consolidate and export your contacts.

Keepm on LifeHacker…

iGoogle has allowed Gadget sharing for a while; but now it allows the content inside to be shared. For example, a sticky note can be shared with friends as read-only or as editable - allowing you to leave notes for each other.

For more information, check out the Official Google Blog, or LifeHacker.

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You may have noticed that you can’t change the order of the tabs on your iGoogle homepage; well now you can with a nifty little trick picked up from LifeHacker –

Google doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop method of reordering the tabs on your personalized iGoogle page, but you can manually move the tabs using an XML backup tool provided on the settings page.

For more information see Blogoscoped’s full guide.

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The latest twist that is the share killing saga of the Microsoft Yahoo buyout hit us today - with news that Yahoo is close on closing a deal to merge with AOL.

“The latest twist: The WSJ is reporting that Yahoo is close to signing a deal to combine with AOL.

This at the same time that Yahoo is doing a limited test to place Google ads in its search results. Meanwhile, News Corp, which Yahoo once hoped would be its white knight, is said to be turning on Yahoo and talking to Microsoft about joining its bid. Obviously a lot of balls are up in the air right now, and anything is possible.”

Continue at TechCrunch…

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Most people know Google Analytics; Google’s free web site statistics tool they made available after buying up another company - but Yahoo Analytics? Looks like its on the way.

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo has is busy buying out IndexTools; a company that does just that. Yahoo has made an official statement according to TechCrunch –

Yahoo said in a statement that upon completion of the acquisition, IndexTools’ assets well be used to expand Yahoo’s set of online marketing services, with additional capabilities enabling third-party developers to monitor and optimize the traffic performance of their applications to follow later in the year.

Follow the article at TechCrunch.

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The Amazon suite of web services has been available for some time with an impressive uptake. The S3 product went down for a while earlier this year and made more obvious the role that they are playing in the newer generation web when looking at the amount of users that complained about the outage.

Google is now jumping on the bandwagon with an offering that may not be as flexible as the services offered by Amazon, but solid none the less.

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

You can read the rest of the article over at TechCrunch. It’s going to be interesting to see what comes next as both Google and Amazon try and differenciate their services from the disconcerning user.

UPDATE

TechCrunch have a new article covering the creation of their first app using the Google App Engine.

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CNET has a guide on how to GMail search like a real professional, with advanced parameters and a full explanation of how it works and what options there are. Check it out here.

The first app I open and the last one I close each workday is Gmail. Even though I use the service’s labels and filters to sort my mail, I often found myself scrolling through the 600-plus messages in my Gmail inbox to find the one I need. Then I discovered Gmail’s search operators, and my scrolling days were over.

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Ever wanted to run GMail but had too many mails on your current client? Now you can Import (technically, export to GMail) your mails into your GMail account with Google Email Uploader!

LifeHacker has a great post on setting it up with screenshots and more, or go straight to Google to get their Google Email Uploader.

Source: FlickrA black Google background would save 750 Megawatt-hours per year. This topic has been raised before and has even resulted in Blackle. Now Google Ireland has taken this to the max changing their homepage to use the energy efficient #000000 background, you can see this for yourself by visiting the site.

This is more than likely not a permanent change and is being used to raise awareness of Earth Hour. You can read more about it here

Thanks to iMod for bringing this to my attention.