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What does Google know about the places you’ve visited recently? What are your interests as determined by Google? Where does Google keep a list of every word that you’ve ever typed in the search box? Where can you get a list of Google ads that were of interest to you?

The 10 Important Google Links

Google stores everything privately and here are the 10 important links (URLs) that will unlock everything Google knows about you. They are hidden somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard and they may reveal interesting details about you that are otherwise only known to Google. Let’s dive in.

1. Google stores a list of useames and passwords that you have typed in Google Chrome or Android for logging into various websites. They even have a website too where you can view all these passwords in plain text.

passwords.google.com

2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, guessing your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads. Use this URL to know how Google sees you on the web.

www.google.com/settings/ads

3. You can easily export all your data out of the Google ecosystem. You can download your Google Photos, contacts, Gmail messages and even your YouTube videos. Head over the the Takeout page to grab the download links.

www.google.com/takeout

4. If you ever find your content appearing on another website, you can raise a DMCA complaint with Google against that site to get the content removed. Google has a simple wizard to help you claim content and the tool can also be used to remove websites from Google search results that are scraping your content.

support.google.com/legal

5. Your Android phone or the Google Maps app on your iPhone is silently reporting your location and velocity (are you moving and if yes, how fast are you moving) back to Google servers. You can find the entire location history on the Google Maps website and you also have the option to export this data as KML files that can be viewed inside Google Earth or even Google Drive.

google.com/maps/timeline

6. Create a new Google Account using your existing email address. The regular sign-up process uses your @gmail.com address as your Google account useame but with this special URL, you can use any other email address as your useame.

accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

7. Google and YouTube record every search term that you’ve ever typed or spoken into their search boxes. They keep a log of every Google ad that you have clicked on various websites, every YouTube video you’ve watched and, if you are a Google Now user, you can also see a log of all your audio search queries. OK Google.

history.google.com (Google searches)
history.google.com/history/audio (Voice searches)
youtube.com/feed/history (YouTube searches and watched videos)

8. You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies. This can be an issue if you have multiple Gmail accounts so as a workaround, you can setup your main Gmail account as the trusted contact for your secondary accounts. Thus Google will keep sending you reminders every few months to login to your other accounts.

www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

9. Worried that someone else is using your Google account or it could be ? Open the activity report to see a log of every device that has recently connected into your Google account. You’ll also get to know the I.P. Addresses and the approximate geographic location. Unfortunately, you can’t remotely log out of a Google session.

myaccount.google.com/security

10. Can’t locate your mobile phone? You can use the Google Device Manager to find your phone provided it is switched on and connected to the Inteet. You can ring the device, see the location or even erase the phone content remotely. You can even find the IMEI Number of the lost phone from your Google Account.

google.com/android/devicemanager

Also see: Secret URLs for Google Drive & Google Docs

It is easy to embed YouTube videos in your website. You grab the default IFRAME embed code, paste it anywhere inside your web page and you’re done. YouTube offers basic customization – you can modify the player dimensions or hide the YouTube branding – but if you would like to exercise more control over the behavior of the embedded player, YouTube Player API is the way to go.

This tutorial explains how you can embed a YouTube video that will automatically play when the web page is loaded but with muted audio.

For instance, a products website may use short screencasts to highlight features and these videos will autoplay when the page is loaded. The volume is however set to 0 and the user can manually click to un-mute the video. Similarly, if you are using YouTube video backgrounds, it makes more sense to embed muted videos that run in a loop.

Embed YouTube Player with Autoplay and Sound Muted

See the demo page to get an idea of what we are trying to do here. The page loads, the video plays but with the audio slide is all the way down.

This is easy. Go the YouTube video page and note down the ID of the video from the URL. For instance, if the YouTube video link is http://youtube.com/watch?v=xyz-123, the video id is xyz-123. Once you have the ID, all you have to do is replace YOUR_VIDEO_ID in the following code with that string.

<div id="muteYouTubeVideoPlayer"></div>
<script async src="https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api"></script>
<script> function onYouTubeIframeAPIReady() { var player; player = new YT.Player('muteYouTubeVideoPlayer', { videoId: 'YOUR_VIDEO_ID', // YouTube Video ID width: 560, // Player width (in px) height: 316, // Player height (in px) playerVars: { autoplay: 1, // Auto-play the video on load controls: 1, // Show pause/play buttons in player showinfo: 0, // Hide the video title modestbranding: 1, // Hide the Youtube Logo loop: 1, // Run the video in a loop fs: 0, // Hide the full screen button cc_load_policty: 0, // Hide closed captions iv_load_policy: 3, // Hide the Video Annotations autohide: 0 // Hide video controls when playing }, events: { onReady: function(e) { e.target.mute(); } } }); } // Written by @labnol
</script>

Next place the edited code in your web page and the embedded video would automatically play but the sound is muted.

You can further customize the player by modifying the various player variables as commented in the code. For instance, if you set loop as 1, the video will play in a loop. Set fs to 1 to show the fullscreen button inside the video player. Inteally, the player is embedded using the YouTube IFRAME API. When the page is loaded, the onReady event runs that mutes the video.

The embedded YouTube video will autoplay, but muted.

The files and folders in your Google Drive are private by default until you decide to share them. You can share your documents with specific people or you can make them public and anyone on the Inteet can view the shared files. Google Apps users have the option to share files and folders within the organization while restricting access to anyone outside the domain.

You can not only control who has access to your Google Drive files but can also assign the level of access they have on the shared files. You can set the access permissions to either view (read only) or edit (read & write). For instance, if you are to send a large file, you can upload the file to Google Drive and share it in view-mode with the recipient.

Who Can View or Edit your Drive Files?

You may have a number of documents, spreadsheets and other files in your Google Drive that are accessible to other users. These users could be your contacts, someone within your Google Apps domain or some of the shared files could be public meaning they are available to anyone on the web who have the link (URL) to the file.

Would you like to know which files and folders in your Google Drive are shared with other users and what kind of access permissions they have on your files? Google Drive, unfortunately, doesn’t offer an easy option for you to figure out who you are sharing the files with either inside or outside your organization.

Meet Permissions Auditor for Google Drive, a new Google add-on that scans your entire Drive and then generates a comprehensive report revealing who has access to your shared files and what kind of permission they have on the files. If you have been collaborating with people for some time, the Drive Auditor is probably is the easiest way to find out what you’ve shared in Google Drive and sanitize it.

Here’s a sample audit report.

Google Drive – File Permissions Report

Getting started is easy. First, install the Google Drive Auditor add-on and authorize it. Inteally, this is a Google Script that runs inside your Google Account, reads the files found in Google Drive and writes their access details in the spreadsheet. Not a single byte of data every leaves your Google Account.

Watch the video tutorial (download) for a more detailed guide.

After the Drive Audit add-on is installed, go to the Add-ons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Drive Permissions Auditor and select Start Audit. It will open a sidebar where you need to specify a query and all matching files that match the query will be analyzed by the add-on.

Some sample Google Drive Search queries include:

• “me” in owners and trashed = false (all files owned by except those in trash)
• modifiedTime > ‘2016-01-01T12:00:00’ (file modified since Jan 2016 UTC)
• mimeType = ‘application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet’ (scan the access permissions of only Google Spreadsheets in my Google Drive)

Once the audit is complete, the report will reveal detailed information of every file including:

• When was a file created and last modified
• What is the file size and MIME type (file extension)
• Who is the owner of the file
• Who has edit, view and comment permissions on the file
• Where is the file located in Google Drive

You can click the File Name in the spreadsheet to directly open the corresponding file in Google Drive. Also, you can use the find function or even filters in Google Spreadsheets to display specific files that match a certain criteria. For instance, if you wish to know about all files that are public, you can apply a filter on the Access column in the spreadsheet.

The Drive Permissions Auditor add-on works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. If you are a domain administrator, you can install the Drive Audit add-on for all users in your domain through the Google Apps Marketplace.

The add-on is free and lets you audit up to 200 files in your Google Drive. If you have more files, please upgrade to the premium edition and analyze every single file and folder in your Google Drive.

Bonus tip: Did you know that you can set an auto-expiry date for your shared links in Google Drive. The shared link will automatically stop working after a certain date or time set by you.

Acme Widgets Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and they have exchanged emails with thousands of customers and suppliers. The email messages are archived neatly in Gmail but most of the email addresses aren’t stored in Google Contacts. The company is now shifting office and they need to inform everyone via email of the office move.

The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the Gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like CSV, that can be easily imported into the Google address book or a mailing list service like MailChimp.

Introducing Email Address Extractor, a Google add-on that sifts through all email messages in your Gmail account, extracts the email addresses and saves them in a Google Spreadsheet. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts.

The Extractor can mine email addresses from a particular Gmail folder (label) or the entire mailbox. You can choose to extract emails of the sender, the recipient(s) and those in the CC list. The add-on can also parse the email‘s subject and message body for email addresses. This is useful for extracting addresses from generic senders, like PayPal emails or contact forms, where the email addresses are contained in the message body.

How to Extract Email Addresses in Gmail

You may follow the step-by-step guide or watch the video tutorial on YouTube (download) to get started:

1. Install the Gmail Extractor add-on and grant the necessary permissions. The add-on needs access to your Gmail and also to Google Drive for saving the email list inside a Google Spreadsheet.
2. Go to the addons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Email Address Extract and click Start to launch the extractor addon.
3. Specify the search criteria and all emails that match the rule will be parsed by the extractor. You may use any of the Gmail Search operators to filter messages.
4. Next select the fields (to, from, cc, bcc) that should be parsed for extracting emails (screenshot). The add-on can also pull names of the sender and recipients if they are available inside the message header.

Click the “Start” button and the extractor will start pulling emails into the spreadsheet. The entire process may take some time depending up on the size of your Gmail mailbox.

Gmail Extractor FAQ

The Google sheet should remain open and the computer should be online during the extraction. If the connection is lost, or if the extraction process is interrupted for some reason, you can simply click the “Resume” button and the extractor will pick from where it left off earlier.

If you go back to Gmail, you’ll find a new label called Extracted. This keeps tracks of the emails that have been processed and can safely delete this label after all the email address have been parsed and extracted.

The Google Spreadsheet created by Email Extractor add-on has two sheets – All Emails & Unique Emails. The first sheet includes every single email found in your Gmail account while the second sheet is a cleaned up list sans any duplicate emails. This is the sheet you should use for building your address book.

The free version of the add-on is fully featured but it would only extract addresses from up to 500 email threads (a thread contains multiple email messages). The premium version (link) imposes no such restriction and it entitles you to 90 days of complimentary support.

Inteally, it is a Google Script that uses the magic of Regular Expressions to pull email addresses from Gmail. The extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that can be used as input for sending personalized email messages through Gmail Mail Merge.

Also see: Schedule Emails in Gmail for Sending Later

Do you ever wonder what is the demographics of people who follow you on Twitter. How many of your Twitter friends are men? Or women? Or random colored eggs, people who are either too lazy to change their default avatar or maybe they are Twitter bots.

The Graph Search of Facebook can provide deep insights into the demographics of people who are connected with you on the social network. For instance, you can write a natural language query like “My friends who are older than 30” or “My female friends who live in Delhi” and the answer will be available instantly. Such granular data is however not available for Twitter users.

Who Follows You? Males, Females or Eggs

How do you programmatically determine the gender of a person on Twitter?

The Twitter API doesn’t provide the gender information but there’s a workaround. You can take the profile picture of a Twitter user, feed it into Siftr’s Vision API and it will detect the gender of the most prominent face in the photograph. You can go a step further and use Microsoft’s Face API and it will even provide the approximate age of the subject in the photo.

Detecting Gender of Twitter users with Image Recognition

Analyze your Twitter Followers

Meet Twitter Analyzer, a web app that analyzes your Twitter network (friends or followers) and logs the details of all user inside a Google Spreadsheet (see screenshot). You get to know their gender, how often they tweet, where are they located, when did they last join Twitter and more.

Getting started is easy. Go to labnol.org/analyzer and sign-in with your Google Account. It requires all these permissions because the underlying Google Script saves everything inside a Google Spreadsheet that will be in your Google Drive. Once the Twitter followers have been analyzed, you’ll get an email notification.

After you’ve granted the necessary permissions, click “Authorize Twitter” to allow the sheet to access your Twitter account. It will never post any tweet to your profile. Next click the scan button and close the page. You’ll get an email once the analysis is complete and this time will vary based on the number of followers you have.

Go to labnol.org/analyzer to scan your Twitter followers

Identifying Humans vs Twitter Bots

Camisani Calzolari wrote a set of rules (PDF) that can help detect real users from bots, inactive accounts and fake Twitter users. Some of the rules are:

• The account has written at least 50 tweets
• the account has at least 30 followers
• the profile contains a URL
• the profile contains an image
• the profile contains a biography
• it has been inserted into other Twitter lists

The Google Spreadsheet that is generated by the Twitter Analyzer app includes most of this information as well. Thus, apart from gender analysis, the Analyzer app may help you figure out how many fake bots and inactive profiles follow you on Twitter.

Adobe Voice has long been my favorite digital storytelling app for making video presentations and photo slideshows on iOS device. All you have to do import your photos, type some text, add your own voice narration and a stunning video is ready for uploading on to YouTube or Facebook.

Here’s a video story that our 10-year old made with Adobe Voice. The background music, transitions and other effects are automatically applied by the Voice app to make your video looks both cinematic and professional.

I have all good things to say about Adobe Voice except that you need an iPad or iPhone to create videos. Well, until now as Adobe has quietly launched a new suite of web apps that, among other things, will let you use Adobe Voice inside your desktop browser. The suite, known as Adobe Spark, includes tools for creating video stories, magazine-style web pages and typography posters (think of Typorama but for the web).

And the price is just right. $0.

To get started, go to spark.adobe.com and sign-in with your Facebook or Google Account. This is mandatory because all your work will be auto-saved under this account and will also be accessible on your iPad and iPhone.

Spark Video offers a PowerPoint style layout. You have a plethora of cinematic themes to choose from and each theme has its own set of background music, transitions and fonts. Changing a theme for your video is as simple as choosing one from the sidebar.

Your slides can have photos and text or both. If you click that little ‘speech’ icon, you can alter the position of the photo on the slide or mark the main point that should be focussed during transitions.

You can either import photos from the computer or there’s a built-in search engine to help you search photos that are in the Creative Commons domain. You can also import photos from Dropbox or Google Photos. Spark Video automatically add the photo sources in the closing-credits of the movie.

Your movies stay forever on the Adobe Spark website and you get a permanent link to share that video with friends. Alteatively, you can download the raw video in MP4 format for uploading to other sites like YouTube or Facebook or publish as an iTunes Podcast.

Adobe claims no copyright over the video or embedded music so you can legally download the video and do anything. For instance, some people may want to remove the Adobe Voice branding that’s added in the last slide and you can easily do with any video editing software.

Adobe Spark will make it easy for anyone to make cinematic quality presentations will little effort. The one feature that you’ll miss though is that there’s no option to import GIFs and video clips into your slides.