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Chrome Displays “Aw, Snap!” message everytime i log on to a website, and when i refresh the page it does it again.

How do you fix this problem?

Google Chrome forum has a list of possible solutions at:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=177aa65861a141b5&hl=en

I find this happens to me most when I use WordPress 8 (don’t upgrade yet folks) especially when I use the Save Draft option.

Others say that “the “Aw, snap” error occurred when I installed the 64-bit version of PC Tools Spyware Doctor on my 64-bit Windows Vista laptop, and was corrected when I un-installed the software. PC Tools has not acknowledge they have a problem (yet), but only two individuals have posted having this particular issue. If you recently installed the 64-bit version of Spyware Doctor, try removing it from your computer.”

Here is one solution. 

It turns out that when you uninstall Chrome, it doesn’t uninstall all your personal settings in your user profile. So I had to manually delete that directory. After that, I rebooted, installed Chrome, and it worked fine. 

1) Uninstall Chrome

2) Open Windows Explorer

3) If you do not have Show Hidden Files enabled, then in Windows Explorer hit

Tools, Folder Options, View, Select ‘Show Hidden Files and Folders, OK.

4) Navigate to

C:\Documents and Settings\[the user you're using]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google

5) Delete the Chrome folder. 

Some process in this folder locked for me, so I had to navigate into each subdirectory within the folder and delete all files manually.

6) Reboot

7) Install Chrome

Does that work for you?

The entrance of Bing to the search engine market has triggered the predictable Google Killer articles, denouncements of all things Microsoft, and a few insights into what it actually does. This is the first in a series of articles on Bing, where we’ll try to sift the wheat from the chaff, so you can get an idea of where Bing stands in the overall scheme of things.

Let’s get started and see what Wired, CNET, PC Magazine has to say about it.

We’ll also look at what Seth Godin sees at the real problem with Bing and go through an interview with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, who talks about where Bing came from (and where they got the dorky name – even he doesn’t know!) and how Bing differs from Google.

Even though Bing hasn’t been released yet, everyone has an opinion. Here’s what you need to know now.

1. Bing goes live on June 3.

2. Bing stands for But It’s Not Google. This is a joke. Don’t sue me.

3. Bing’s search strategy focuses on 4 categories: shopping, travel, health and local businesses.

4. Bing is designed to keep you on its site; Google sends you off to other sites.

5. $100 million allocated to marketing. Mix of online and offline advertising. Expect to see ads in your national newspaper, TV and even on the side of a truck.

What people are saying about Bing

Wired.com on Bing

 “Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly.

That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap. But the service is far from perfect.

Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features.

Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash.”

Not the greatest start. Here’s CNET.

CNET

To be honest, I was stunned by CNET’s verdict. CNET’s pearls of wisdom includes this extract:

“Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that’s not good for Google. For the moment, Bing’s on top in this game.”

Remember, Bing isn’t live yet!

CNET think it makes Google look complacent and Bing’s on top in this game.

The fact the Google is about to launch WAVE is overlooked.

The fact the Bing hasn’t made a dime yet is also overlooked. So much for CNET.

Seattle Times

Microsoft is based in Seattle, so you can read what you want into this piece.

“Video searches are especially cool on Bing. It returns thumbnail images, just like other search engines. But when you hover over the images, the video starts playing right there, without clicking through.”

A nice feature, I have to admit.

But how’s the copyright issue resolved with content publishers?

Does it include video from rivals like Yahoo and/or Google?

It goes on:  “Travel shopping is another highlight. (read that again -  travel shopping is a highlight in 2009!)

Other Bing standouts include listings of topics, such as local restaurants, which are displayed with maps and ratings. Buttons on the side can be clicked to tailor the search and set price ranges, again adding the sort of controls common on specialized Web sites.”

PC Magazine

I’m not a fan of this magazine but its judgment seems fairly balanced.

It leads by identifying some of the problems Bing tires to resolve and how successful it is in doing this.

“Much of the time users are not really looking for a Web page but for an answer. By providing results that answer users’ questions immediately rather than requiring them to navigate to another page and back if the first one didn’t yield the info they were looking for, Bing brings value and efficiency to Web searches.”

PC Magazine add, “I didn’t run into any cases where Google’s results were more relevant than Bing’s, whether I was looking for a specific site or for general information on a topic.”

While conceding that it’s unlikely that Bing will unseat Google, but it’s a good thing for everyone to have more appealing choices, and some competition, when it comes to Web searching.”

Agreed. Maybe I’ll start reading PC Mag again.

Search Engine Land

SEL puts it case like this: “Bing has to be at least 50 percent better” than Google to start peeling away users loyal to Google. Bing isn’t 50 percent better than Google. However, Bing does offer results that are, across the searches I conducted, highly competitive with Google and in some cases it offers features that are more user-friendly.

Given the strength of Google’s brand and its “ownership” of search Bing may struggle to make market share gains.

But SEL is optimistic and predicts it will ’gain share’.

Those potential gains may come not at Google’s expense but rather from Ask, AOL or even Yahoo.”

It’s true. Maybe against Yahoo which is struggling for direction. Against Google, hardly.

But Steve Wozniak was impressed.

Bing gets an unexpected endorsement from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was impressed.

“That was the most astounding software demo I’ve ever seen,” Wozniak told Tech Ticker after seeing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing at the All Things Digital Conference.

What’s the real problem with Bing?

Seth Godin is always worth reading.

He cuts to the chase and addresses the real problem

“as far as I can tell, (Bing) is trying to be the next Google.

The challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google.

It’s called Google.”

He adds that in times of change, the rule is this:

Don’t try to be the ‘next’.

Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.

Even if Microsoft adds a few features and they prove popular, how long precisely will it take Google to improve on these features?

Google saw what Twitter is achieving. The response – Google Wave. Due out in a few months. This will be Twitter on steroids.

Seth hits the nail on the head: The internet works best when you build a network, not when you buy a brand. In fact, I can’t think of one successful online brand that was built with cash.”

Can you?

What makes Bing different from other search engines?

Shar VanBoskirk on Forrester sees it a little different. She highlights three areas where Bing is different than Google.

1. Bing delivers answers, not Web pages. 

Microsoft research shows (Forrester’s research affirms it) that users increasingly rely on search engines to make decision. Hotel reservations, movie listings, gift ideas etc.

Today it’s not enough to have a directory of Web sites. Bing wants to help you make decisions; it’s more than a database–driven web catalog.

2. Bing organizes content/results by searcher (not algorithm) relevance. 

Based on its research into which result types have proven most relevant to former searchers, Bing’s interface delivers content users are most likely to value – rather than content that matches an algorithmic formula. How accurate the results Bing delivers will be seen only when it goes live.

3. Bing filters out irrelevant results.

Bing doesn’t give you pages of search results. The focus is on relevance. Nothing wrong with that.

My concern is that the results will favor, or be skewered towards, Microsoft’s business partners rather than the most appropriate site. If this is the case, the validity of the results are called into question.

And it that is the case, will users really switch over from Google?

Unlikely.

Otherwise what’s in it for companies who have signed up to be partners?

What Steve Ballmer thinks of Bing and where the name came from?

This leads us to an interview with Steve Ballmer. All Things Digital interviewed Steve Ballmer this week and asked him about Bing, the future of Microsoft as an applications developer, and where he sees Microsoft in the search industry.

Here are the key points.

Referring to poll data, Walt on All Things Digital noted Microsoft’s paltry share of the search market.

“There’s a lot of distance between you and Google,” he says. “Is search the most important thing to you as CEO or are you more concerned with Windows, etc.?”

Ballmer: “Look, we’re obviously where we are in search and we want to do better. We’re hoping to be one of the companies that moves the industry forward. The PC business continues to be big, we’re going through an economic reset, but there’s still vibrance there.”

Why did Microsoft choose the name Bing?

When asked why Microsoft chose the name Bing, Steve Ballmer answered. “We needed a name that says this is all about search. I’m not the creative guy, people like to ‘verb up’…works globally, doesn’t have negative connotations. This is a very important step…it’s not a substitute for innovation, but we need to build brand equity in addition to technology equity.”

Hmmm…. Know you know. Clear as mud, huh!

Bing – How it works

Now, let’s look at how Bing actually works

User Interface

Bing is designed with a box and button format. It has a screensaver type  background. More cluttered than Google, sharper than MSN and Yahoo. Links to some Microsoft web services.

Search

Best Match denotes an official or definitive site, i.e. the site with the most authority. How Microsoft decides who is the authority is another matter and has not been clarified at the time of writing.

Instant Answer

This answers questions that rely on facts. such as: who won the last Oscar?
It returns a result for who won an Academy Award.

• A search for UPS returns a customer service number at the top of the page.
• A search for Microsoft customer service number produced no result.

Data Mining

Bing includes software Microsoft acquired when it purchased Powerset, which lets it “understand” pages and perform data-mining activities.

Video

Video searches generate a page with a row of thumbnails. Click on these and they will play automatically in the search pane.

Weather

Bing gives a 5-day forecast. Google offers 1 day.

City Search

Want to search for a city? Bing will give you info on the weather, events, sports games, and video mentions of the area.

Shopping

If you search for a digital camera, Bing will open a search shopping page displaying:

• Price comparisons
• User reviews
• Cashback rewards you if you’ve made purchases through the site

Flight Search

The flight search feature, Farecast, searches multiple airlines by price, hops, etc.

It offers real-time flight data and shows prices, rates, and cash back incentives. It also tracks flight pricing trends and can predict (i.e. forecast) if your fare is likely to go up or down.

Full interview at All Things Digital

The last word goes to Mr. Ballmer when asked about Ask’s redesign and subsequent fall.

Could the same thing happen to Bing?

“No,” says Ballmer.

“Bing is too tremendous a stride. It differentiates itself from Google. It might not appeal to everyone, but if it appeals to 20 percent of them, that’s a success. Ask wasn’t able to do that.”

So, what’s your thoughts on Bing?

Drop me a line or have your say in the comments box below.

As well as searching Google for webpages, documents and images, you can also use its advanced query types to mine its database and get more advanced information.

cache:                  

Include other words in the query and Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com ibm] will show the cached content with the word “ibm” highlighted.

You can also find this by clicking on the “Cached” link on the main results page.

The cache: query shows the version of the webpage that Google has in its cache. For instance, [cache:www.wordtipsandtricks.com] will show Google’s cache of this page.

Note: make sure there is no space between the “cache:” and the web page url.

link:                       

Use link: to list webpages that link to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www. Wordtipsandtricks.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to wordtipsandtricks.com.

You can also find this in the Advanced Search page, under Page Specific Search > Links.

related:                               

Use related: to list web pages that are “similar” to a specified web page.

You can also find this on the “Similar Pages” link on Google’s main results page, and from the Advanced Search page, under Page Specific Search > Similar.

info:                      

Use info: to show Google’s information about that web page.

You can also find this by typing the web page url directly into a Google search box.

Define:

Use define: to get a definition of the words you enter, for example, define:space.           

stocks:                

Enter a query with the stocks: operator and Google will treat the rest of the query terms as stock ticker symbols, and will link to a page showing stock information for those symbols.

You can also search on the stock symbols (e.g. [stocks:amzn]) and then click on the “Show stock quotes” link on the results page.

site:                      

Enter site: in your query and Google restricts the results to those websites. For instance, [help site:www.intel.com] will find pages about help within www.intel.com.

Enter help site:com to find pages about help within those .com urls. No space between “site:” and domain.

Tip: Also found in the Advanced Search page, under Advanced Web Search > Domains.

allintitle:                             

Enter a query with allintitle: and Google restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: keats poem] will return only documents that have both “keats” and “poem” in the title.

Also available through Advanced Search page, under Advanced Web Search > Occurrences.

intitle:

Use intitle: in your query to restrict the results to documents containing that word in the title.

allinurl:

Search with [allinurl:] and Google will restrict the results to the query words in the url. For instance, [allinurl: java news] will return only documents that have both “java” and “news” in the url.

Tip: allinurl: works on words, not url components and ignores punctuation.

inurl:                     

Search with inurl: in your query and Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the url.

Where does Wolfram Alpha, the new knowledge search engine which is scheduled to launch this month, fit in? It was created by Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica — a spectacular tool to work with, visualize, and even embed complex mathematical functions and scientific data.
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It may be that this project may rival Google as  it goes beyond simple searching of information to computation of useful knowledge.

For example, if you ask it “What is the GDP of France divided by it population?” it will not only get the results, but you can look at the details underneath. (Try that on Google!) I also think it competes Wikipedia because it is a useful reference resource.

Link to Harvard Business

Google Chrome continues to improve with each new release. This list is courtesy of the Google Chrome site which offers a wealth of info on getting the most from the browser.
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Window and tab shortcuts

Address bar shortcuts

Do one of the following actions in the address bar:

Open Google Chrome features

Web page shortcuts

Text shortcuts

I’ve been trying to justify making the switch to Google Chrome – I’m a big fan of Firefox – so this news on the Chrome site interested me. 3D in a browser?

“a team at Google is actually taking a step in that direction by introducing O3D: a shader-based API for 3D graphics in the browser. This API allows for the development of sophisticated 3D applications that rival experiences one would expect in native applications. Technology like this will eventually make launching high quality games as easy as clicking a link in your browser.”

What is O3D?

O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.

• Download the plug-in (Windows and Mac) and explore the samples to see O3D’s capabilities.
• Read the Technical Overview
• Developer’s Guide to learn how to get started.
• Join the O3D developer groups to provide feedback.

Google Chrome Blog: 3D graphics in the browser (no joke)

Did you ever stop to think just how does Google Ads work? Well, the good folk over at Google have put up a simple tutorial on how Google Ads works. It’s very high level but leads to other pages where things get more technical.

Google’s AdSense program tries to show ads as relevant as possible for each visit. The following example explains this new technology step by step:

Mary’s hobby is gardening. With Google’s interest-based advertising technology (i.e. Adwords), Mary will get more relevant gardening ads because she visits gardening websites. Here’s how that works:

1. When Mary visits websites that display ads provided by Google’s AdSense program, Google stores a number in her browser (cookie) to remember her visits. That number could look like this: 114411.

2. As many websites that Mary visits are related to gardening, Google puts her number (114411) in the "gardening enthusiast" interest category.

3. As a result, Google shows more gardening ads to Mary (based on her browser) as she browses websites that use AdSense.

Read more on Interest-based advertising: How it works – Google Ads Preferences

Jeff Leget, Director of Operations, at Clickbank discusses potential security issues on the new IE and Firefox releases. He highlight that the ‘consumer misconception about browser cookies plagues many online retailers. When consumers blindly disable cookies, online retailers have difficulty providing a targeted and personalized experience to the consumer.”

This point is taken up by one of Clickbank’s retailers who asks if “Chrome is able to let the user do private browsing, meaning the cookie in a user’s PC is deleted latest at the end of a session. How will ClickBank track a sale when the same user attempts to purchase an item in another session, perhaps days later, yet the affiliate’s cookie is not on the user’s PC anymore?”

What proprietary methods are used by ClickBank to overcome this problem?

ClickBank’s response is that the default security settings in Google Chrome do NOT inhibit affiliate commission tracking through Hoplinks to the order form. Google Chrome accepts the 1st party cookie that ClickBank sets. Google Chrome does offer security “tweaks” that restrict 3rd party cookies. When affiliates use Hoplinks correctly (meaning the Hoplink is not embedded in an image or frame) these settings do not affect the functionality of the ClickBank 1st party cookies.

Of course, you can setup your browser so that it erases cookies after each session. Clickbank  add that after analyzing millions of Hoplinks it receives, they found that nearly all users complete their purchase within the same browser session within 1 hour. In most cases, even if the user does erase their cookies, ClickBank’s proprietary tracking methods often match the consumer back to the referring affiliate. ClickBank’s proprietary tracking methods are considered a trade secret and cannot be shared here.

However, another raises a potential issue. “I just tested it with FireFox, I clicked on a well formatted hop-link, ended up on a vendor page. Then I removed the cookie from FireFox, closed FireFox, re-started FireFox and went directly to the vendor page, now in a new session. Following the link to the order payment form I noticed this at the bottom:

[affiliate = none]

Hence, it doesn’t appear to be tracked by Clickbank anymore, does it? Or is it still doing a proper tracking but merely doesn’t display the [affiliate = whoever] note at the bottom of the payment form?

Full article: http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2008/09/04/ie8-beta-and-the-attack-on-cookies/

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, found that the Google Chrome web browser was the most likely to be up-to-date due to its ‘silent’ update every five hours.

The report’s authors, Thomas Duebendorfer and Stefan Frei, claimed that after 21 days of releasing Google Chrome 1.0.154.48, a 97 per cent share of active Google Chrome 1.x users were using the latest Google Chrome 1.x version.

This was ‘by far the best update effectiveness measured for any of the four investigated web browsers.’

The report was less complimentary about Safari and Opera.

It states that Safari is updated through Apple’s ‘Software Update’ service integrated in OS X, the user can choose to check for updates daily, weekly, monthly or not at all. When updates are available, the user is prompted to initiate the download and get them installed.

The authors concluded that ‘the the poor update effectiveness of Apple Safari and Opera gives attackers plenty of time to use known exploits to attack users of outdated browsers.’

Read the full article: Google Chrome praised in report as Apple’s Safari and Opera criticised over security updates – SC Magazine UK

Thomas Claburn writes in Information Week,“Prism is a Firefox plug-in, and a stand-alone application, that allows users to generate desktop versions of Web applications. With the plug-in, Firefox users can select the "Convert Website to Application" command from the Tools menu and immediately convert a Web app like Google Docs into a stand-alone application.

The result is a Google Docs icon can be used to launch the application from the quick launch bar or to launch the application automatically at start-up. Generated Web apps of this sort can also be associated Web link actions, thus allowing mailto: links to launch a Prism version of Gmail rather than, say, a traditional desktop app like Outlook.

Link: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/

Adsense users who have downloaded Chrome, Google’s web browser, may find that they cannot log into Adsense. When trying to login, the screen loops on the same page in a foreign language, stopping the user from logging in or changing the page to an English language setting.

You can still log into Adsense on IE and Firefox. Expect Google to fix this error soon. Will keep you posted.