www.google.com/history

While this is part of the Google Account series of posts, it’s probably more likely a feature that many users will wish to disable, especially those with privacy concerns. On the other hand, many people will probably find it interesting and useful at times as well. In a nutshell, Google Web History basically logs all of your Google searches for the past 2 years (you must be logged in to your Google Account) and let’s you look through these logs. It also uses that information to provide you with some extra features such as displaying your search trends and tailoring your future search results according to your tastes. It will even recommend you links it thinks you will like.

For anyone concerned with privacy and security, the above YouTube clip is from Google and shows how you can stop the service, as well as deleting individual search history items or your entire web history if you wish. Although the probably biggest risk of other people seeing your Google Web History is them knowing your log-in details, so always remember to log-out on public computers and use good passwords.

This article is part of a series showing you stuff you can do with your Google Account.

documents.google.com

Google Docs is great. It gives you a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation solution all for free, all online, all from your Google account. It is basically Office on the web, replacing well known Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint with a solution that lets you access your files from anywhere in the world. With a limit of 5,000 stored word docs and presentations & 1,000 spreadsheets, you have plenty of room for all your files and without the worry of a hard drive crash wiping all your important data.

Apart from creating and saving new documents, Google Docs also allows you to import existing files from most popular formats like Microsoft Office, Open Office and .CSV, so you can even use it to backup the documents you already have and transition totally to Google Docs if you want to.

Other great features include;

• Fast & familiar interface, like most Google sites, Docs is designed to download pages fast and each program is set out to be familiar to uses of other Office suites.
• Share your work with others. You can let others access your documents so that they can view your progress or even set them up us a collaborator so files can be created by a group of people. Great for team presentations and projects.
• Just like Gmail, with it’s access-anywhere approach, you can open, edit & export your files from anywhere in the world and they can all be organized into folders/ file type/importance

This article is part of a series showing you stuff you can do with your Google Account.

Gmail.com

Gmail is a webmail service offered by Google and is highly recommended. If you’re looking for your first email service or would like to integrate all your existing accounts into one spot, Gmail is ideal.

Why Webmail? There are many good reasons why you should be using webmail and having access to your email anywhere you have an Internet connection is one of the best. Not to mention the fact that a change in Internet provider or domain name doesn’t mean you have to get a brand new email address and let everyone else know about it.

So why Gmail?

6GB of space
Gmail was the first webmail service to offer such a massive amount of storage space, when Gmail first launched you had 1GB (1,000+ megabytes) and it’s constantly growing, now giving users over 6GB of storage. What this means really is that you never have to delete your emails again… ever!

Conversation view
Emails and all relevant replies are grouped together, making tracking the conversation simple. It may sound odd at first but once you use it, you wont go back.

Spam protection
The junk mail filter on Gmail is excellent and unlike a lot of services that claim to block spam, Gmail is genuinly effective.

POP3 Access
So if you do have an existing email account but would rather read them in Gmail, you can. Sending from these accounts right out of Gmail is just as easy, so you can access all your email accounts in one spot.

Notifier & Extensions
While Google offers it’s own notifier application that lets you know when a new email has arrived, there are also tons of others including Firefox extensions so you can be surfing the net and keeping up to date with your email, without lifting a finger! Some other great extensions even allow you to use your Gmail space as an online hard drive.
The list goes on and other features include;

• Great email searching capabilities
• Complete chat system
• Labelling and archive system (so emails aren’t resticted to one folder or catagory, meaning better organisation)
• Gmail on your mobile
• Free IMAP support
• Full HTML Email
• Virus scanning
• Attachement previewing…

There is more but the bottom line is if you’re not using Gmail yet, check it out now.

This areticle is part of a series showing you stuff you can do with your Google Account.

https://www.google.com/accounts/

Not just a search engine anymore, Google now has a whole heap of services on offer (and most of them are free!). This article is the beginning of a series which will show off some of the different things you can now do with your Google account. So if you already have a Google account (maybe for Gmail or Google Docs), see what else you can do with it. If you don’t have one yet, you can sign up right here.

The first Google Account Stuff to check out is Gmail