Technology blogger Amit Agarwal has posted the mysterious keyboard shortcut for deleting messages in Gmail:

If you are reading a message in GMail, press the # key (Shift+3) and that message will instantly move to Trash. Alternatively, select one or more email messages in the GMail list view, press the same # hash key and all the selected GMail conversations will be deleted in one batch.

We've blogged about Gmail keyboard shortcuts before; add this to the list, definitely. Note: make sure you have Shortcuts enabled in your Settings before you try this, or it won't work. — Wendy Boswell

Thanks to the people who e-mailed and asked, but yes, I’m fine. Work has once again swallowed all my time, and when I get home after 16 hours and have to choose between ResearchBuzz and sleep, SLEEP WINS.

But today I’m not going to work. I’m going to stay at home and catch up on my e-mail and do some ResearchBuzz and laundry and perhaps at some point I’ll eat some lunch. ResearchBuzz newsletter will be out Thursday. Thanks for reading.

'Share with everyone:'
'Share with everyone at ' + ph0 + ':'
'Anyone can view this document at:'
'Anyone at ' + ph0 + ' can view this document at:'
'Allow anyone to edit'

Like your Gmail? Of course you do. Techie love site MakeUseOf.com has come up with thirty different Gmail-related tools and hacks, from "seen that already" to "Oh. My. God."

I admit that I haven't put Gmail to work as much as I really could, so this is a good way for me (and anyone else who's looking for some Gmail love) to get up to superhero productivity speed quickly. Well, at least for Gmail, anyway. See anything that should be on this list and isn't? Let us know in the comments. — Wendy Boswell

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Looks like somebody took the cue from a question asked recently on whose going to be the TV guide of online video. And it’s none other than, well, you guess it right, TV Guide, TV viewers most trusted program guide  for 53 years now. Yahoo Tech News reports via AP, says that it’s finally going into the online video business by testing its online video search tool.

But wait, the company is not going to  index/crawl or aggregate all videos available on the web, including user-generated videos. Instead, it will focus on the published videos of 60 media web sites. Only those originally produced by various media companies will be included in TV Guide’s  online video search. Those videos include those produced by ABC, Fox, among other mainstream media companies.So, what’s in this for Gemstar-TV Guide, you asked? How is it going to profit from this venture? Simple. Paid advertising baby. Gemstar-TV Guide is aiming to earn big bucks from online advertising as well as licensing its technology.

Great plan? Right now, yes. But later on, once Google and the other search engine giants set their sight on the same thing and developed their own video search engine, TV guide might find itself concentrating again on its TV guide product.

But then, it  better gets  a head start while the others are still busy with other things. Who knows, Gemstar-TV Guide might actually pull this one off that it would be very hard for the other search giant to catch up.

As I was putting together the latest Search Engine Forums Spotlight, I came across some threads on various search marketing forums discussing Google's new pay-per-action ads. Along with the expected discussions (like one at Webmaster World) of whether it would be good or bad for advertisers and publishers, I also found some people continued to worry that a new ad format included in the program had crossed a line.

I thought Barry Schwartz did a good job of putting the argument to bed in a post at Search Engine Roundtable earlier this week, but it seems that lots of people are up in arms about this new format.

Microsoft has clearly stumbled in implementing its search and online advertising strategies. They were late to the search game, depending on Overture and Inktomi for too long. They seem to have underestimated Google, and have been playing catch-up for the past couple of years. But should we count them out just yet?

I'll admit, even when they made a move, with the Live Search and Windows Live products, they made missteps. There's still massive confusion about how the MSN and Windows Live brands fit together. This month, they saw the departure of Live Search VP Christopher Payne, who was replaced by Satya Nadella who's currently heading the Microsoft Dynamics team in the Microsoft Business Division, marking another setback.

That's all recounted in an early obituary of Microsoft from BusinessWeek, "Where Is Microsoft Search?."

But it's still too early to count Microsoft out, even with a 10-percent share of searches lagging Google's 50-percent-plus share.

We now support GeoRSS as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps. We want to enable users to create data in whatever format is most convenient for them, and feel that by supporting both KML and GeoRSS we can enable a wider variety of people and applications to contribute content to Google Maps. We've built support for the Simple, GML, and W3C Geo encodings of GeoRSS -- all you have to do is enter the full URL of a GeoRSS file into the Maps query box to load the file. (...)

Most importantly, we've extended support for displaying geographic data -- both KML and GeoRSS -- into the Google Maps API. Now in addition to programatically adding content to a Maps API site, you can create your content as KML or GeoRSS and load it into the Map with a simple function call.

Benjamin emailed me this screenshot of his Google search results page:

It shows what appears to be yet another user interface test, this time moving the usual search option links from just above the search box to the top left of the page. Some links to other Google services have been added too. As shown on the Google Operating System blog, it seems this test isn’t just restricted to the results page either.

In my opinion, this could potentially confuse some users. When logged into Google Services – like Gmail, Calendar or Docs & Spreadsheets – there’s already a similar style link bar with links to Mail, Calendar, Photos, Docs and Groups (although different services show different links and some people recently reported other links being displayed there too).

So, will clicking the Images link take me to Google Image Search or Picasa Web Albums? Does the Video link take me to YouTube or Google Video? Will clicking the News link actually search Google News using the query I’ve already entered in the search box (as it does currently) or will it just take me to the Google News homepage?

Many have already suggested that Google should let each user decide which links should be shown in the top-left corner. But should the same links appear consistently across all pages? Is this interface test an improvement on the existing Google homepage and results pages or does it just add more inconsistency and confusion?

Add your comments to the forum...

[Thanks Benjamin and Haochi! Image by Benjamin.]

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post]

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(Thanks to SEW for reminding me that I meant to write about this.)

Google recently introduced another nice piece of flair: a “Blog Bar” that lets you pick keywords, and then rotates through relevant posts by fading new links in and out. You can see it in action over on this post by Mark Lucovsky. You can also get a News bar, which is kind of fun too.

It’s really easy to get your own:

Step 1. Go to http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/wizards.html and click the “Blog Bar Wizard”.
Step 2. Choose the topics and formatting you want. When you click on “Generate code”, you’ll get some HTML that you can copy/paste onto your site. I wanted to keep my HTML clean, so I saved it as a separate file, like this file.
Step 3. If you saved the HTML off in a separate file, edit your website template and add this code wherever you want your blog bar to appear:

<iframe style=”border: 0px none ; width: 90%; height: 60px; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0.5em;” src=”http://www.mattcutts.com/files/matt-blog-bar.html” title=”Blog Bar” frameborder=”0″></iframe>

(Change the path to point to your file, of course.) That’s pretty much it. I’m going to put a blog bar (or maybe a news bar) on my individual posts above the comments for a little while to see how it looks. If you are looking for a way to spruce up a blog without much work, the blog and news bars are pretty easy.

Photo courtesy of Craig Morey/pixelthing.com

Michael Douma from PHP Dev Center has come up with a list of PHP-friendly search engines that will allow you to easily integrate customizable search functions on your server while controlling the indexing process and search results.

If you want your visitors to have “voilá!” moments, consider incorporating an internal search engine into your web site. Search tools not only make your information easily accessible, but they also increase the time visitors spend on your site. An internal search engine may be a necessity if your site has more than 100 pages of content, if it is deeply hierarchical, or if its architecture is weak.

Douma goes into detail about the physical requirements (disk space, processing power) needed for setting up a local search engine, while examining the indexing process and search results list.

Some of the search engines ranked and compared includes iSearch, MnogoSearch, PHPDig and Sphider. Very useful information if you plan to set up a local search engine and happen to be using PHP for your website.

Google’s Custom Search Engine program now allows you to show off your engine’s popular search queries (this is aggregated data, so you need some popular queries to see this). Just login to your CSE control panel, hit the “statistics” link and scroll to the “popular queries” at the bottom – you’ll find some code to show off these stats on your homepage, Google says, though I don’t have a live-CSE yet to reproduce this. The popular queries feature itself is older, but the ability to pass on this data is (apparently) new.

If you’re using the older Google AdSense Site Search program, this is one more reason why you may want to switch to the CSE program. Not only will this allow you to show others your top queries – and have the useful “search web pages” option in results (it’s missing in AdSense Site Search) – but you can connect the CSE to your AdSense account as well to make money from searches. Also, as of lately, you’re not required to provide any keywords to a CSE, so you can do a straight site-search by including a single domain only with no other refinements.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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A little while ago, Ionut noticed that Google Video added a “Blog Buzz” section to its front page. The Blog Buzz shows videos that bloggers have been talking about and linking to recently.

So for example when The Lisa does a Friday Recap and links to this “Zeroes” parody of Heroes, our blogsearch team takes that blog post and other posts from around the web and then computes some buzzworthy videos to highlight. Huzzah!

I’m glad that our Video team added this, but I’m even more happy that the blogsearch folks are computing this data. Why? Google’s user interfaces are great for getting an answer quickly, but sometimes they can be a little.. functional. A little bit of fun flare is stickylicious and gives you more things to browse.

Now if you want, you can burn an extra few minutes getting sucked into watching even more videos. For example, I recently came across this awesome “fat rant” video (hint: it’s a healthy fat person railing against people who care more about weight than health). See also the Health at Every Size approach to life, but the video is a great way to get the basic idea.

Here’s a less serious example. Thanks to the Blog Buzz section on Google Video, I found out about the twirl a squirrel phenomenon and dropped a little cash to get one. It arrived tonight, but it was dark by the time I got it hooked up. I’ll let you know how my twirl-a-squirrel works. Muhahaha!

By the way, Twirl-a-Squirrel is still more humane than these methods of squirrel removal.