
Google Now for Chrome - jaseemabid
http://www.google.com/landing/now/#
======
jtokoph
I've had to disable Google Now in Chrome on my machines.

I check the Chicago weather where my parents live, once. Now I get constant
notifications about the current weather in Chicago.

I looked up a sporting event score for a friend and now Google thinks I need
to know the status of every game for a team I don't follow.

I couldn't find any way to tell Now that I didn't want those specific
notifications and the only way to disable it was to turn it off completely via
chrome://flags

~~~
raldi
There's supposed to be a little menu you can bring up on any card where you
can tweak the settings. You didn't get one?

(Note: I'm not trying to blame the user here -- if the menu isn't
discoverable, that's Google's problem to fix.)

~~~
psbp
It's the standard hamburger style menu found across android. Maybe it would be
difficult if it wasn't in every Google android app.

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jonemo
Is Google Now a useful utility for others? I recently activated it when I
purchased a new phone and am having a hard time understanding how to use it.
It's showing estimates for how long it will take me to get home or to work but
they are always based on locations where I was a while ago and often outright
ridiculous, e.g. 2 hours 30 mins to go from Alcatraz to my home, by bicycle?
The other "cards" seem to show up randomly, like the stock quotes that are
always up top when I want to see the weather and hidden when I want to see
stock quotes. How do others make use of Google Now?

edit for clarification: I have set it up to prefer cycling, but Alcatraz is an
island.

~~~
Andrex
Google Now isn't perfect and does require a bit of tweaking. Assuming you're
on Android, I'd try tapping on the three dot icon on cards to make sure
they're set right (for instance, changing it so that Google knows you prefer
driving to bicycling.) Also be sure to try the "wand" icon at the bottom for
overall settings.

To make sure Google Now is up to date you can pull to refresh. For me it's
never more than 20-30 minutes out of date.

~~~
jonemo
Thanks for the hints. Seems like my Google Now works as expected then, but my
lifestyle isn't (yet) supported...

The fact that it recommends I bicycle from Alcatraz is after informing it
(through the icon with the three dots) I usually cycle, so that works right,
sort of. My commute is bicycle+train, which unfortunately is not a combination
of travel modes supported by Google Maps.

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fved
I always found the whole concept of Google gathering so much data about my
movements, browsing, email etc. creepy.

~~~
chestnut-tree
I'm also uncomfortable with the way Google collects so much user data. I
wouldn't go so far as saying it's creepy though - they don't do anything
sinister or nefarious with your data, but they do have an insatiable appetite
to track and record as much of your online activity as they can.

They can track you across mobile, desktop and tablet devices. They have a
desktop OS (ChromeOS) that potentially tracks _everything_ you do online -
whether you're running apps or browsing the web. You have to sign in to do
anything - even to print to your desktop printer; all print jobs are routed
through their cloud print service. Over the course of a few months or a year,
Google will potentially know more about your online behaviour than you do.

Google's fingerprints reach into every corner of the web - you can't avoid
them even if you're not signed in to a Google account. Google Analytics is
everywhere as are the many Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). In fairness to
Google, they do have an opt-out tool for Google Analytics. And many sites
benefit from using Google's CDNs, although Google obviously benefits too).

What worries me is how easily Google avoids scrutiny on issues of user privacy
and data collection, particuarly from the tech community who give them an easy
ride on such matters.

~~~
danieldk
I am at the point where I am pretty much convinced that it is beneficial for
me to move off Google's services. Evenmore, because the speed of pushing
unwanted products seems to increase rapidly. E.g. even if I have a paid Google
Apps account, I cannot use Hangouts to its fullest without also using Google+,
e.g., I cannot send pictures from my Android phone without Plus (which
apparently creates a conversation-specific Plus album).

Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to find good paid replacements without
sacrificing too much functionality (which is a testament to how good their
products are). For instance:

\- Fastmail: it's fast, has great webmail, but no ActiveSync for mobile
devices. The calendar is still beta and there is no CardDAV syncing yet.
Offers XMPP, but since nobody does federation anymore these days, it's not
that useful anymore. No replacement for Google Docs.

\- Exchange Online/Office 365: provides ActiveSync and EWS works well with
Mail.app. Lync with Skype federation looks like it could be a replacement for
Hangouts. Offers an online version of Office. However, my Android phone does
not seem to work well with their servers, duplicating calendars, etc. Also,
they miss features like sub-addressing, identities where you can relay mails
via another SMTP server. And although they don't do ads, I am not sure how
much they can be trusted.

I am most inclined towards using Fastmail.

Any other ideas/experiences of getting out of the Google infrastructure?

~~~
mitochondrion
Yahoo and Hotmail could be substitutes for Gmail...I guess. Good luck.

Google Search has no reasonable alternatives.

Google Chrome can be replaced with Firefox. Do note that 90% of Mozilla's
revenue comes from Google.

YouTube has no viable alternatives. DailyMotion, Vimeo? Good luck finding what
you searched for.

Google Maps' primary alternative is OpenStreetMap, but only as a repository
for the maps themselves. Implementation like integration into smartphones is
effectively nonexistent.

For Google Reader there's...oh wait.

Google Drive has alternatives, but not price-wise since the recent price drop.
They're now shelling out 1TB of cloud storage for $10/month. Compare to
Dropbox's 100GB.

Android has WinPhone and iOS as alternatives, but WinPhone isn't well-
supported by third-party developers and iOS has almost zero flexibility.

G+ has Facebook as an alternative, but the crown for Most Evil is up for
grabs.

Google Keep has Evernote or Simplenote.

Hangouts has Whatsapp, Skype, or any other chat app. Have fun trying to get
your friends on the same one as you.

Google Docs has Microsoft Office Online, but I haven't used it and I wouldn't
doubt that Microsoft is doing as much data-mining as possible on this
platform.

For Google Wallet, you have Square Wallet, Apple's thing, and I couple of
other services I've never heard of.

Google Voice has no alternatives, and it's about to be integrated into
Hangouts somehow - you've been warned.

And Google Reader has...uh....

Google Calendar...good god. Good luck moving to another service with that one.

Google Translate's competitors aren't even in the same league.

There isn't even another service similar to Google Cloud Print.

And then there are Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdWords, and whatever other
kinds of super-secret proprietary data-mining magic that they use. Good luck
avoiding those.

------
enscr
With the recent push (shove) of Google+ down everyone's throat, I find myself
avoiding the use of Google services that collect & store too much personal
data about me. I've tried Google Now but couldn't convince myself to stick to
it. The negatives outweigh the benefits. Plus I love a tighter control on how
my phone battery is drained. Google Now doesn't let me do that. I see an
additional 20-30% drop per day with Stock Android & Google Now enabled. So
long.

~~~
cloudwalking
Curious what the negatives to Google Now are (aside from battery life, which
seems to be a theme with Android)?

~~~
enscr
Privacy concerns. They accumulate a lot of personal data for customizing your
experience & providing more contextual information. This problem has been
compounded by Google using subtle trickery to get more out of you.

P.S. Android phones do not have a problem with battery life

------
leke
I might have been into this, but google's new aggressive policy about making
people's lives become 'open' has made me steer clear of such things.

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santoriv
Kind of reminds me of.....

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions.
They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." -Eric Schmidt

~~~
PavlovsCat
As deluded as it is, even honestly wishing for that betrays a smallness of
character I find astonishing.

You know how in ancient times people who figured out how to predict an eclipse
went on to play big boy with their oh so advanced, magic knowledge, and had
that go to their head? We still live in those times.

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bgentry
If these things are annoying you to death as they were for me, you can disable
them in Chrome's flags screen:
[http://cl.ly/image/0P393S1m1l17](http://cl.ly/image/0P393S1m1l17)

I had already disabled Chrome's Rich Notifications feature, which hides the
menu bar icon I might have otherwise used to disable Google Now.

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vxNsr
"Before you start using Google Now on your computer, you’ll need to set it up
on iOS or Android first."

Well that's kinda dumb, what if I don't have either one of those?

~~~
k-mcgrady
It's not all that useful if you don't have iOS or Android. They need a way to
track your location + I think they scan your mail locally on the device
instead of on the server (and they can't do this on desktop).

~~~
vxNsr
Yeah, I'm mostly just complaining about their holy war against WP, I was kinda
looking forward to trying out Google Now for myself, so it was something of a
let down to learn Google still had a personal vendetta against me :P

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Terretta
If you're going to make Chrome a dependency for an always on technology to
stay in touch with your users, maybe invest some time stopping Chrome from
costing half their battery life.

~~~
cloudwalking
How does chrome battery use compare to other browsers?

~~~
evilduck
Disasterous on a Mac. Compared to using Safari, you can expect to lose one to
two hours of battery life.

------
micro_cam
I was an early fan of now on android but I think i'll be disabling this as it
provides only useless notifications based on items tangentially related to
things i've had a passing interest in and no longer provides up to date
package tracking etc. Lately it has been giving me basketball scores because I
read a machine learning article on predicting sports results despite having no
interest in organized sports.

Additionally since it first came out I've started working from home in a rural
area with decent but low density cell coverage that slows cellular assisted
gps. This seems to convince it that I work at a cell tower giving totally
meaningless travel time results to random hill tops.

I think this is an example of a tool that was only tested by and is really
only useful for people in the young, urban, travel a lot demographic that most
google employees are in. I know that google considers their culture sacred but
they really need to diversify at least their least their test users it if they
want to make products that the population as a whole benefits from.

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CWIZO
Google Now is broken. I get to work, and there is a "time to home" card, and
vice-versa. It also thinks that I would like to go to work in the middle of
the night on a weekend. It keeps showing me directions to places I've never
been to or never searched for. Or, I arrive somewhere and it immediately shows
me a card for "time to home". Even though I have a calendar entry that has a
location (so it knows I'm where I'm supposed to be) and it knows how long I'm
supposed to be there.

There's also all sort of other idiocies. For instance I only got google now
recently and then I traveled back to my home country for a couple of days. And
what google now did was bombard me (hundreds literally) with cards for
directions to every bloody address I've ever searched for in that country
(months or even years ago). Wtf?

I really appreciate the complexity of a system like now, but as it is it would
be better if they turned it off. It is broken.

~~~
psbp
I've been using it for years and I've either never had these problems or they
haven't been so bad that I would consider it broken. Isn't a time to home card
usually valuable?

~~~
CWIZO
It usually is. But in my case it's not as it shows up when I arrive somewhere.
I mean, if they know I'm at work why would they show me that card immediately
after I get there. It's not like they don't know when I usually go home.

------
pron
I disabled Google Now on my Android phone; it was creeping me out. Government
surveillance is bad, but for some reason Google collecting every bit of
information about my life _and constantly analyzing and using it_ (against
me?) scares me much more than some bits collecting dust in an NSA data
warehouse.

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ScottWhigham
Another "I had to disable it on my phone" here. I love to watch soccer and,
once Google Now learns your favorite teams, it pushes those scores to you on
your notifications tab by default. "Well, damn - I recorded that game so that
I could watch it this afternoon. Thanks, Google, for ruining that for me."

Yes, I know _now_ that you can disable notifications like that but I didn't
realize it until after the 2nd or 3rd weekend this happened.

------
watson
As far as I know, I've only had Google Now in my Dev Channel Chrome for some
months. Has it really already arrived in the Stable Channel? And in that case,
wouldn't that have required the version numbers of all the channels to be
bumped up (the Dev channel have been v35 since late February)? As far as I
know features don't make it down the channels (Dev -> Beta -> Stable)
individually (e.g. by being "cherry-picked") - they instead stay within the
version where they where first added.

~~~
tijs
I got a notification that they were now offering Now in my Chrome browser
about two weeks ago. I run the stable channel version.

~~~
watson
Apparently they must be rolling this feature out differently than other
features which trickle down the channels. Maybe Google Now have been in the
channels for a while without anybody knowing, just disabled unless some flag
was enabled by either the client or a server. This way they can enable it for
only certain users, circumventing the normal Channel release cycle.

I found this interesting quote in a 2014/02/03 blog post[1] on the Google
Chrome blog:

"Update 3/24/2014: Starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks,
Google Now users in all languages will be able to get these notifications in
all channels of Chrome. To enable this feature, simply sign in to Chrome with
the same Google Account you’re using for Google Now on Android or iOS."

This also suggest that they are using a different release approach than just
relying on the release-channels.

[1] [http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/02/get-notifications-from-
go...](http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/02/get-notifications-from-google-now-
in.html)

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verandaguy
This is a rather poorly-capitalized title. I thought OP meant that Google is,
at present, available for the Chrome browser.

~~~
EpicEng
I thought I was being given a command.

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taternuts
This thing just started randomly popping up for me the last couple days
without me asking. I've tried to disable it 2-3 times, but like a virus it
just keeps coming back
([http://i.imgur.com/24QTgaU.png](http://i.imgur.com/24QTgaU.png)). Incredibly
annoying

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mkr-hn
"Before you start using Google Now on your computer, you’ll need to set it up
on iOS or Android first."

So you still need a Google Play or iOS device to get it. I can't set it up on
my Kindle Fire, which does a fine job of running Android applications when
they're made available outside Google Play.

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NPC82
I do many of these functions with just the usual Google voice commands. It's
not as fancy, but making it into a separate app instead of making the features
more accessible seems silly.

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Jamie452
For me, I can't get Google now to do anything..

It doesn't seem to have any useful options and no way to show me anything
other than the weather.

How can I make it show me something else?

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Yuioup
Not working for me. Probably because I'm in Europe.

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abimaelmartell
"Google now" available for Chrome.

~~~
wingerlang
The "Now" is capitalised though, so it makes sense that it is a part of the
product name.

~~~
gkoberger
The title was changed since it was posted.

~~~
wingerlang
Oh, okay.

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lsiebert
So is this windows/OSX only then?

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ananth99
Does it come for Linux Distros too?

~~~
tyleregeto
I had to enable it from chrome://flags for it to work. I'm using Chrome
unstable, it doesn't appear to be in the stable branch on Linux yet.

~~~
ananth99
Ohh,I had too many problems with the unstable distribution. I guess I'll wait
then for the stable build then. Thanks!

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alexvr
The button should just say "Get now"

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jds375
Does anyone else just love the page design?

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jaredmcateer
Ouch sorry was just trying to be helpful

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sferoze
They did a good job with the website.

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finalight
i installed google now for android but the desktop still don't have the bell
icon...

~~~
jaredmcateer
Do you have google sync enabled?

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teemo_cute
Dear Google,

Please don't tell (or at least influence me) on how to live my life. When I
want information I'll ask you, not the other way around.

Regards, Human Being

~~~
lclarkmichalek
You know Google Now is opt in? Because your comment comes across as "Stop
liking things I don't like"

~~~
jkdnupp
Just like the way Google+ was optional when using YouTube?

~~~
ewoodrich
No. It's a one-time prompt when you first configure Android.

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zobzu
surprise! forces you to download Chrome. Of course, that could have been done
as a webpage, but psst!

