I spotted this infographic today and thought I’d share it with you. There’s a lot more to Google than just typing what you are looking for into the search box. This infographic is worth studying for a few minutes to get an insight into what’s possible. This is also worth printing out as a useful Google Cheat Sheet.
Teachers might want to print this out and use as a lesson when teaching about searching on the web. If you have a great Google tip that’s not covered by this inforgraphic I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Google has launched their new, News Reader called Fast Flip. This presents the news stories from the news.google.com section as a series of images which you can quickly flip through using the left and right next / previous page buttons. This means that you can flick through all the news stories to see what you are interested in, whereas normally you just see the headline and might click on the link. The service only shows the first page of a story and there is a button to take you to the full story. The service is also available on the Android mobile platform where the touch interface allows you to quickly flip from one story to another.
We all love the Google Chrome browser but today I discovered one of its lesser known features – version 1.0 caches DNS locally and never seems to refresh its cache.
Normally the host operating system is responsible for turning symbolic domain names into IP addresses by querying the DNS across the Internet. This typically adds a few milliseconds when you call up a website for the first time. On subsequent visits, the operating systems DNS cache should have remembered the IP address and it will avoid the overhead.
The designers of Chrome are clever. While you are reading a web page Chrome scans the page for domain names and performs DNS lookup’s in the background caching these in its own DNS cache. This means that by the time you’ve read the page and clicked on a link, the DNS cache will already be populated.
Today I discovered this feature after moving a website I’ve been working on over to another web server. I updated the DNS left it a few minutes and then did the old IPCONFIG /flushdns command and then checked the site using various browsers to make sure the site was working properly. No problems in Firefox, IE and Safari but then I tried Chrome and found that it was still pointing to the old server.
After doing some research I found the Options > Under the hood menu and disabled “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve performance”. After doing this you have to close down all your Chrome windows and then start it up again. This seems to clear its DNS cache.
It looks like the current version 1.0 of Chrome does not refresh DNS entries once cached. Hopefully, Google will fix this or add an obvious “Flush DNS cache” option to the menu where you normally delete the browser’s history.
