Cool GooDies

News courtesy CNN

CNN) -- Gmail experienced problems on Thursday, with some users reporting slowdowns and service outages.

The popular Web-based e-mail service from Google Inc. has crashed several times in recent months. That's led to a bit of anger and sarcastic sighs of despair on tech blogs and on the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Google posted a note Thursday morning saying it is aware that some people are experiencing an e-mail outage. The Mountain View, California, company said all e-mail service was working by 11 a.m. ET, and that the problems caused e-mail to slow down but did not crash the site.

"A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today," the company said in a statement. "We're sorry for the inconvenience. As usual, we'll provide an incident report on the Apps Status Dashboard, where we also gave ongoing status updates as this issue progressed."
Gmail lets Internet users write e-mail messages, archive documents, chat online and store contact lists. Millions of people around the world use the free service.

As with previous service problems, the online community is complaining the service break disrupts office work and personal lives. As more computing power moves "into the cloud," storing information online rather than on home computers, online applications like Gmail become important parts of people's lives.
The most recent Gmail outage occurred September 1. Some tech writers seemed genuinely disturbed by the crash. Others mocked how addicted some people have become to online-only forms of communication.
Mashable, a blog that covers social media, posted a list of five things to do while Gmail is down.
One of the recommendations:
"Go outside! There's nothing left for it. Our cozy technosphere bubble has been burst by this point. Go look for someone to harass on the street in person and ask them what URL shortener they use."
Another recent Gmail crash occurred in February.
At the time, blogger Ron Schenone wrote that people put a lot of faith in big tech companies like Google.
"It seems to me that people want to believe that Google is infallible," he wrote on the Lockergnome blog network. "Though Google may be the king of search, their equipment is man made and their technicians are human."
Check out these Tweets from Google 

Finally your days of seeing that wait icon on your computer running Microsoft windows are over, if reports are to be believed Google Chrome Netbooks will soon be launched by the end of 2010. Check out the article from official Google blog below:

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Google has rolled out two new improvements to its search.

The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions - both of which help guide users more effectively to the information they need.

Google is deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to searches, and one of its first applications offers users more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], Google's algorithms understand that "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic" are related terms that could help you find what you need.

With this Google can target more queries, more languages, and make their suggestions more relevant to what users actually need to know.

They are also offering refinements for longer queries.

The new related searches will feature starting today in 37 languages all around the world.

The second change is when users do a search on Google, each result starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text ("snippet"), which gives you an idea of what each page is about. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of the query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.

When a long query with more than three words is entered, Google will increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words typed in the context of the page.