Posted 10/14/09 at 09:06:10 AM by Paul Lilly

The gurus at Google Labs have developed a new feature they say will eliminate those times where you inadvertently fire off an email message to the wrong Bob (or Jim or Tracy or Wendell or...you get the idea).

The feature will also let you know which of your friends are the most popular (to you), because that's basically how it works. Start typing in an email addy or contact name and the "Got the wrong Bob?" add-on will alert you if it thinks you've accidentally included someone you don't usually email as part of the group.

"If you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but this time you added Bob Jones instead, we'll warn you that it might be a mistake," Google explain in a blog post. "Note that this only works if you're emailing more than two people at once."

Perhaps going overboard with the whole "Bob" thing, Google Labs also said it has changed the name of "Suggest more recipients" to "Don't forget Bob."

You'll find both of these under the Labs tab under Gmail settings.

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Posted 07/06/09 at 04:00:00 PM by Florence Ion

With its market share-dominating search engine, the eggheads at Google have no doubt made it easier for new users to acclimate to the harsh tangling webs of the Internet. But Google’s not just about search. Within the laboratories of Google’s Mountain View campus, computer science wizards are busy brewing up innovative services that will enhance your Google experience. So far, they’ve given us a spam-killing email service, a collaborative work space for all of our time sensitive documents, and an image search engine that takes the time out of having to search individual pages for something as simple as a company logo. There are also plenty of functional Google Lab projects still in public beta; we pick nine of our favorites that you absolutely must give a try!

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Posted 04/22/09 at 07:19:37 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Google Labs has launched a new service called Google News Timeline that charts the manner in which a news story develops. Stories are laid out neatly in columns, where each column displays the top news stories for a particular day, week, month or decade depending on what the user opts for. Users can search for a particular news story within a specified timeframe and trace its course through history. A button, which bears the ambiguous title “Add More Queries”, lets you specify additional news sources to go with the default sources, Time Magazine and Wikipedia Events. It can become a handy research tool for online scribes.

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