Google wants to help you become a Gmail ninja, and has created a site called Gmail Tips for the purpose. What is a Gmail ninja? It's someone who knows all the ins and outs of the productivity tools that Gmail offers, and can process their email very quickly and efficiently.

Rather than just asking Gmail's team for a list of all of the features Gmail has, the Google Tips page is made up of tips from Google employees working in all different parts of the company. It's a hit list of the best email productivity ideas from the bright minds at Google.

The page is divided up into four sections: White belt, Green belt, Black belt, and Gmail master. Each of these sections describes a level of productivity tip, White belt being the most basic, and Gmail master being the guru-level tips.

Helpfully, the Gmail Tips page also includes a handy printable PDF that gives you one double-sided page full of all of the tips listed on the page.

Now, to be fair, none of the tips are going to be much of a surprise to heavy Gmail users, even the Gmail master level tips. But it's a great resource to point friends and co-workers to if they are struggling to really get the most out of Gmail, or if you're looking for a way to convince someone that Gmail is probably a better solution for them than what they are currently using.

Google's blogging about making the web faster, and they're backing it up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that makes sure your webpages use best practices to load as quickly as possible. Page Speed was quietly launched earlier this month on the Google Code blog, but now it's mentioned on The Official Google Blog, in a post that lays out some factors that slow down the web, and how Google thinks they can be fixed.

The Google plan for a faster web includes stuff like HTML5 support, more performance diagnostic tools like Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow, and greater adoption of broadband. So, what are some of the best practices that Page Speed might suggest? Mostly, minor code tweaks like cleaning up your CSS so you only use each declaration once, or removing unnecessary tags from your HTML. There's some more advanced stuff that gets into PHP and JavaScript as well.

One note: Page Speed also requires the Firebug add-on for Firefox, which is very useful in its own right.

There's some speculation over at the Google Operating System that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will work a lot like Google Blog Search does now. gOS found some text on one of Google's help pages describing the format for a microblog search: entering "recent updates about" in front of a search term will search miroblogging services -- Twitter being the most important of the bunch -- for that term.

This hasn't been implemented yet, but the text that gOS found seems to suggest that it will be. Under the heading "recent updates about QUERY," they found this description: "This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format." This is all the evidence we have to go on so far, and it indicates nothing about which non-Twitter services will be included and what a possible Google MicroBlogsearch results page would look like.

When Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post back in 1801, he probably had no idea that the paper would eventually be turned into a sensationalist tabloid by Rupert Murdoch. Similarly, when Rupert Murdoch purchased the Post in 1976, he probably didn't think the paper would ever try to cover tech news.

The same paper that brings you headlines like "18-YEAR OLD ARRESTED FOR SERIAL CAT MURDERS" and "FOOD CART SCAMMERS RAISE THE DEAD" have decided to cover the ongoing Google v. Bing feud.

Apparently Sergey Brin is shaking in his boots, so worried about the threat Bing! poses that he's hired a group of former Vietnam POWs that escaped a maximum security stockade and sought refuge in the Los Angeles underground...No wait, that's the A-Team.

Brin has put together a team of "top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service." His web service? Which one, Post? Apps? Gmail? No, you mean "to his search engine."

Late last year, Google added the ability to customize search results by promoting or removing items. These "SearchWiki" features also let you share, comment on, and add results to a page. Although the promote and remove buttons appear next to every site in a Google search, most of us either ignore them or are a bit annoyed by them. If you're one of those people, you'll be glad to know there's now an item in Google preferences to turn off SearchWiki with one click.

To do it, just go to http://www.google.com/preferences, or click the preferences link on Google.com, and check "Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment or add your own results." One click, no more arrows and X's next to every search result. If this is the first you're hearing of SearchWiki, check out our original post about it before you decide whether to turn it off.

[via Lifehacker]

Google's automated translation service, Google Translate, is one of the most popular language tools on the web, but Google has other ambitions in the translation field. The recently-launched Translator Toolkit is aimed at helping people create better translations of web pages, Wikipedia articles and Google Knol articles. These improved translations feed back into Google Translate, making it more accurate for everyday users.

If you're a translator, you can upload a file or enter a URL, and use the Translation Toolkit to improve on Google's automated translation results. Available tools include dictionaries and previously-saved user translations. Once you're done working on your translation, you can download it, or - for Wikipedia and Knol articles - publish it back to the source page.

Gmail Mobile just received a couple of updates that bring it even closer to the full Gmail experience: keyboard shortcuts and faster autocompletion for contacts. When Google says "keyboard shortcuts," the emphasis is on the "keyboard" part. You'll need to have an Android phone with a physical keyboard, like the G1, to use them. If you do, Gmail on your phone now supports all the same shortcuts you can use in desktop Gmail, so you can navigate your mailboxes or jump to the next message with a single keypress.

Faster autocompletion can be used by Android and iPhone users alike. Autocompletion has been reported on some blogs as a new feature, but Google's own blog post suggests that addresses just complete faster now, thanks to caching of results from previous address book searches. This means that possible addresses should now come up as you type, making it even quicker than before to send a message from Gmail Mobile.

If you're running Google Apps (Premier or Education editions), but you still use Outlook for email, you're in luck. Google Apps now syncs with Microsoft Outlook, so you can keep right on using it, and get your gmail messages, too. It's not just email that syncs: calendars and contacts do, too.

As you'd expect, syncing works both ways: you can bring your Google Apps data into Outlook, and send your Outlook or Exchange data to Google, and it's apparently only a 2-click process. Google Calendar in Google Apps also now supports the free/busy functionality of Outlook's calendar, so you can schedule meetings with all of your contacts, regardless of whether they're on Google or Outlook. Does this mean more business users are going to be switching to Google Apps?

Google Street View is an amazing tool, and it's fun to use it to take virtual walks around the world's cities, but it's not exactly known for its navigation interface. Fortunately, Google has introduced an entirely revised "pancake" navigation system that relies more on dragging and less on dozens of frustrating clicks just to walk down a street. Now, if you can see where you want to go, you can place the pancake there and jump straight away -- no arrow keys necessary!

Zooming behavior is improved, too. Any time you see magnifying glass inside the pancake, you can click to zoom in on that spot. This even works with individual buildings, allowing you to zoom in for more details than before. Google claims that the new navigation gives Street View's flat images a more 3D feel, and I'm inclined to agree.

When Bing debuted two days ago, there was a flood of activity as people rushed to kick the tires on Microsoft's new search decision engine. Some liked it, some didn't. And some found a feature that made them titter like gaggle of adolescent boys sneaking glances at a dirty magazine.

Yes, Bing's video preview thumbnails display watchable porn. When you search for it. And you have the adult filter turned off. Big blogs, internet personalities like Loic LeMeur, and even Fox News were all over this. Yes, the same Fox News that just proclaimed Apple and Firefox two of the top three search engines.

Wait, why is this a problem?

Bing, like other search engines, tries its best to index content on the Internet. Want in on a little secret? The Internet is full of porn. Full. Think about the fullest thing you can imagine, then fill thirty seven of it. That's how much porn there is on the 'net. Heck, last week (thanks to a 4chan raid) there was even a flood of raunchy videos on YouTube.

You can turn off safe search on Google and the image results will get pretty racy - downright terrifying in some cases. Same with Yahoo - and turning off the filter is WAY easier there. Heck, search Twitter and see what people like Cytherea are tweeting (If you don't know who she is, don't look her up. She's a porn star.).

Google Squared, the new search tool from Google Labs, puts search results into a convenient spreadsheet format designed to help you get the basic facts about whatever you're searching for without clicking through to too many different websites. Search for "horror films," for example, and you'll get a list of movies with info like Author, Director, Cast, and Running Time. It's a great layout that's easy to read at a glance, but the results still need a lot of work.

I tried a search that I thought was right up Google Squared's alley: "current New York Times bestsellers," and the results were a jumble of categories, but no books. "Current box office" returned some recent movies, and some old ones that did really well when they came out. These are the kinds of searches Google Squared could hit a home run with, but it doesn't.

The example searches prove how well Google Squared could really work. Check out some terms like "roller coasters" and "U.S. Presidents" to see some nice glimmers of potential. The ability to customize your own square when no results are returned will also probably lead to much better results.

With all the hype around Twitter as the future of search, it makes sense that someone would put together a search engine that combines Google results with results from social sites around the web. Enter SearchMerge. It's basically just a text entry field and a selection of sites to search, including Twitter, Friendfeed and YouTube, but it has the potential to be very useful. Or, it would, if there were any apparent rhyme or reason to the order of the results.

A search for Download Squad turned up a Last.fm page, our website, a year-old Vimeo video, and a post about netbooks from February, in that order. The results were all relevant, but they could be sorted in a more logical way. SearchMerge is also fairly slow when you're using it to search every available site. The real-time search option is neat, but suffers from the same long wait for results. It's a great idea, but it has a long way to go in the implementation.

Google wants to make it as easy as possible for you to place its content, like news feeds, maps and calendars, on your site. Apparently, using the existing APIs wasn't simple enough, so now there's Google Web Elements, for even easier installation of custom Google widgets. Web Elements is starting with eight different modules: Calendar, Conversation, News, Custom Search, Maps, Presentations, Spreadsheets and YouTube News.

Of the eight, Conversation and Custom Search are the two I see actually gaining large userbases. A lot of sites have comments or shoutboxes, and a lot of them already have custom Google Search boxes. Those aren't going anyway any time soon, and it can't hurt that Google's made them so easy to install. Web Elements doesn't seem to be targeted at major sites, but it does offer some features that beginning -- or just time-crunched -- site owners wouldn't build for themselves.

I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but one of the most moving tributes to fallen American servicemen and women you can see this Memorial Day is a layer on Google Earth. Map the Fallen shows you the hometowns and places of death of the more than 5,000 soldiers lost in Afghanistan and Iraq to date. Rather than being a crass and hollow tribute, Map the Fallen represents each of these people as more than a statistic or an icon on a map.

When you're zoomed out, those clusters of little icons do a good job of visualizing the sheer magnitude of the human sacrifice involved in war. Clicking on each of those icons shows details about each person, aggregated from several different sites that have been documenting the casualties. As a geek, I can't think of a more fitting way to honor each one of these people for their service. It's both educational and emotional.

Google Operating System spotted some code in Gmail that points to an upcoming feature called "Magic Inbox" or "Icebox-Inbox." It's not clear what this mystery feature is going to do, but it looks like it's a new way of prioritizing your incoming mail based on senders you've interacted with frequently. Commenters at gOS have been attacking the feature based on speculation about how it might work, but I'm not jumping to any conclusions.

As evidence for their theory that Magic Inbox is based on some kind of friend priority algorithm, gOS cites a feature called Friend Finder that Google is known to be working on. They explain that "Friend Finder analyzes a user's email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections based on incoming/outgoing traffic and the frequency and speed in which two parties respond to each other," which would be a good way to determine which messages belong at the top of a busy inbox.

As I said, I'm not jumping to conclusions about the exact way this is going to work. There already seems to be a strong reaction both for and against this feature, and we don't even know what it does yet. Any inside tips, readers? Do any anonymous Gmail team members out there want to tell the real story?