CustomizeGoogle

CustomizeGoogle and Kiva.org

2007-08-06T07:27:00.000+00:00

The donations to CustomizeGoogle has become loans to several businesses in the developing world using a website called Kiva.org.

You can go to Kiva's website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business - like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent - and you get updates letting you know how the business is going. Kiva's loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

More info:
http://www.kiva.org
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=FEEDROOM186917
http://www.kiva.org/lender/customizegoogle

Sticky Google Preferences

2007-05-21T07:18:00.000+00:00

CustomizeGoogle 0.60 is now available from the CustomizeGoogle homepage.

This release has a new feature called "Sticky Google Preferences". Use this feature

if you clear your cookies often
if you want to make sure that your children won't find explicit text and images
if you want to propagate your preferences to several Google domains

The feature Stream Google search result pages is now also compatible with most (but not all) extensions and userscripts. Instructions for making a extension/userscript compatible with this feature can be found here.

CustomizeGoogle 0.59

2007-04-26T13:35:00.000+00:00

These are some of the new features in CustomizeGoogle 0.59:

A new option to secure the new Google History (including Bookmarks) was added.

It's now possible to add favicons to the web search result.

CustomizeGoogle is now compliant with the new Google design.

URL previews on sponsored links are now visible in the status bar when hovering them. Why, you ask? Some advertisers masquerades as legit sites. Previously, if you moused-over a sponsored result, no URL preview was shown! This means that users didn't have a clue where he/she was about to navigate to. Read more here and here.

The URL will look something like this:

http://www.google.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=BjfYdy6CAAQAR gBILZUKAM4BV&adurl=http://WWW.TARGET.COM

If you choose to enable the CustomizeGoogle option to "remove click tracking", then the target URL will look something like this:

http://WWW.TARGET.COM

No more next page in Google web search results

2007-04-18T10:26:00.000+00:00

CustomizeGoogle got a new timesaving feature that automatically streams Google search result pages. An average Googler would probably spend some time navigating through pages in Google, but not anymore!

New features in CustomizeGoogle 0.56

2007-04-05T06:56:00.000+00:00

Please upgrade to CustomizeGoogle 0.56, it comes with two new features and a lot of updates:

Now, when you select "Remove click tracking" in CustomizeGoogle Options -> Web, the click tracking found in ads are also removed.

This means

Google will not know which ads you click
The advertiser doesn't have to pay Google any money

This is good news if you're worried about your privacy. And if you are an advertiser, this is an easy way to check out your own, and competitors, ads without anyone being charged.

Google Video Search now have links to other video search sites (YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, IFILM, Revver, Dailymotion).

For those of you who had problems browsing Google Book Search and Google Patents, these issues should now be fixed.

I've also added three new languages, Frisian (Netherlands), Albanian (Albania) and Romanian (Romania). Thanks to moZes, Besmir Godole and ultravioletu from Babelzilla! CustomizeGoogle is now translated into 43 languages/countries. A complete list can be found at the CustomizeGoogle homepage.

Google is wrong about CustomizeGoogle

2006-10-09T07:06:00.000+00:00

Are you unable to edit your Google personalized homepage? In the Google Help you can read about different solutions to this problem.

Solution number four is to "TURN OFF FIREFOX EXTENSIONS". Quote: '...Other users have noted problems with a third-party extension titled "CustomizeGoogle."'

This is not correct. CustomizeGoogle is not causing any problems with the Google personalized homepage.

Facts: The CustomizeGoogle extension only adds Google Suggest functionality to the personalized homepage. The Google Suggest code is developed by Google.

Update: Anonymizing your Google ID using CustomizeGoogle should not be breaking the personalized homepage. But please note that you will not be anonymous when logging into a Google account.

Firefox extension CustomizeGoogle surpasses 5 million downloads

2006-08-23T07:04:00.000+00:00

According to Mozilla.org, the Firefox extension CustomizeGoogle has now been downloaded more than 5 million times since its introduction in july 2005. Translators from all over the world has made CustomizeGoogle available in 34 languages.

One of the most popular features of CustomizeGoogle is the ability to remove ads from the Google search results. CustomizeGoogle also makes searching easier and blocks out spam from the Google search results. It also address some of the privacy concerns that some people have with Google.

Some of the features are presented in the short introduction video.

This graph shows some user statistics. It is based on analyzing the downloads from CustomizeGoogle.com.

CustomizeGoogle is Free Software, released under the GPL license.

CustomizeGoogle T-shirts

2006-07-12T11:42:00.000+00:00

CustomizeGoogle T-shirts are now available! Sean Barr created the design - a red fox print.

Front says
"Too Cool for IE"

Back says
"Improve Your Google Experience, www.customizegoogle.com"

Buy: Europe, USA, and rest of the world.

CustomizeGoogle for Internet Explorer

2006-07-05T06:43:00.000+00:00

Ran Geva has created CustomizeGoogle for Internet Explorer, an open source project based on the extension for Firefox. Some of the features from the CustomzieGoogle Firefox extension are available, but not all. Ad blocking, for instance, is not available. Also, Ran Geva, is using his extension to promote his own search engine.

But aside from that, CustomizeGoogle for IE seems to be working great. If you are using Internet Explorer (why, why, why?), you should really try this extension!

CustomizeGoogle for IE can be downloaded here. The current version 0.1 is only available for Windows in english. The source code is included in the install.

CustomizeGoogle adds more Gmail features

2006-04-19T14:58:00.000+00:00

Two new features for Gmail are included in the latest release of the CustomizeGoogle extension. Now you can easily hide the Gmail spam counter and use a fixed font when reading your mail. Follow the links for more information.

This CustomizeGoogle update also includes an option to secure the new Google Calendar (force https).

All new features are disabled by default. You can find more information at http://www.customizegoogle.com. Feel free to discuss the new features.

Blocking Gmail ads with CustomizeGoogle

2006-02-22T08:09:00.000+00:00

As some of you might have noticed, CustomizeGoogle has been updated a lot recently. The reason is that when Google update their source code - sometimes CustomizeGoogle needs to be updated as well.

The last three CustomizeGoogle updates has been focused at blocking Gmail ads. I've been trying to remove the ads for a while, with different results for different users. A lot of CustomizeGoogle users has reported that Gmail ads are still visible. So my guess is that this is a popular CustomizeGoogle feature.

As a result, I've now released CustomizeGoogle 0.44 that should remove all Gmail ads/related pages. I hope that this update will work for everyone and that Gmail doesn't change their code in a while.

In any case, I'll try to keep up with future Google updates!

Gmail's new chat feature doesn't work with https

2006-02-08T15:08:00.000+00:00

A popular CustomizeGoogle feature is the ability to ensure that Gmail uses a secure connection by redirecting http://gmail.google.com/ to https://gmail.google.com/.

If you have enabled this option (CustomizeGoogle > Gmail > Secure) you might have noticed that the new Gmail chat feature will not work.

From the Gmail help center:

Make sure you're using http:// when you log in -- chat in Gmail doesn't work in https:// quite yet, but it will soon.

In other words: If you want to use the Gmail chat feature you need to uncheck the Secure Gmail option in CustomizeGoogle.

Block Google Analytics cookies

2005-11-28T17:43:00.000+00:00

CustomizeGoogle 0.39 has a new optional feature that blocks all Google Analytics cookies, on any website.

Using this feature makes you more anonymous. But your visit on a single webpage can still be logged. This way, both Google and the owner of the website knows that someone visited the webpage, but it's difficult to track all pages you're visiting. Also, it's really really hard for Google to know that you visited both Website A and Website B.

You can read more about the feature at CustomizeGoogle.com.

Remove image copying restrictions in Google Book Search

2005-11-18T09:14:00.000+00:00

CustomizeGoogle 0.38 makes it easy to removes image copying restrictions in Google Book Search.

Google links to your bookmark manager

2005-11-15T08:39:00.000+00:00

With this new CustomizeGoogle feature it's really easy to bookmark web pages you find in Google using digg, or any other bookmark manager.