What on earth do they think they've done?! When doing the usual lazy 100-tabs-in-one-browser surfing session, the Poorhouse was befuddled to see that there seemed to be no Google-icon-clad tab open in the browser despite the fact that at least 10 different resource-sapping results pages should surely be open.

It turned out that no, it was not some magic anti-Google fairy closing things, but rather that Google have changed their "favicon" – that little image that sits in your Favourites and tab corners. Below, courtesy of Google Operating System, is what the old one looked like compared to the new one. Poorhouse verdict on the change? Lame.

Well, for a while, the lovely email solution that is Gmail> (aka Googlemail), and the custom-domain Google Apps variant, didn’t seem to be getting much in the way of new features, despite big upgrades by its main competitors. Recently though, things have changed. We can look forward to a faster interface, a better contacts management solution, more storage space and, perhaps most excitingly in the eyes of the Poorhouse, IMAP.

IMAP, the Internet Message Access Protocol, is a technology allowing offline mail programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird et al. to read and manipulate their mail. Yes, Gmail has had an alternative technology, POP3, for a long, long while, albeit a rather dodgy implementation in some ways, but IMAP has the bonus of being able to keep in sync with the web-based Gmail proper. For instance, unlike POP3, if you read a message through an IMAP client then it will appear as read when you access Gmail or Google Apps over the web. You can move the messages between labels (usually termed folders under IMAP), delete them, star them and so on.

Update: Google have now released a version of the Gmail Mobile App for Google Apps accounts on devices other than Blackberries, so the information in this article is largely out of date. Visit http://m.google.com/a from your phone to download it.

Google Apps is a lovely way to get your email, combining the loveliness of the normal Gmail interface with the ability to use your own domain names properly, without any of this Outlook "poorhouse@company.com on behalf of poorhouse123@gmail.com" nonsense. And it's free! They also recently upgraded the email storage you get for free to that of a normal Gmail account, currently 3805 MB.

But there is one super-useful feature missing from the Google Apps product that you do get with standard Gmail - support for the Gmail Mobile App, a much nicer way to interact with your email from your (Java-enabled) phone or PDA than the standard web interface. Sadly it doesn't support Google Apps mail - but with a little trickery, it can.

Geeks! Who doesn't love their RSS fix of the day? Web-based aggregators are clearly the way to go, allowing you browse the inane jibber of the blogosphere from the confines of your wifi-enabled bed and during skive-time at work without getting all de-synchronised. Google Reader is one of the Poorhouse's favourite examples of this, and it just gets even better if you add on the Google Reader Preview Enhanced script.

Google Maps is not only rude; it's demanding as well.

The big G is of course so mega-global these days that you can plot journeys pretty much anywhere with the Maps product, and it is more than happy to draw you lovely maps, satellite views and textual instructions. So, say you are wanting to have a nice trip from New York to visit the land of the Poorhouse - England. Go to the directions section and type in New York to London (or whichever cities interest you most) and press the Search Maps button.

Excuse the forthcoming bad language, but really it isn't the Poorhouse's fault. Blame Google. Kiddies stop reading this article here.

Another dreary day at work was transpiring until all of a sudden the wonderful resources of Google maps were required for some vaguely work-related reason. Being the lazy employee as ever, we used the Google search bar to search for "google maps" rather than type in "maps.google.co.uk". Imagine the Poorhouse's surprise (and delight) when the first result returned from Google Maps UK had a big fat cuss-word in it!

Gmail (aka Googlemail) is beauteous in many, many ways - but its POP access is not one of them. Sure enough, it does have it, and for free, which is an improvement on many webmail services, but it's a bit weird. This isn't normally a problem because most often you might as well use the website rather than drag your email down to your computer using Outlook et al.

One such exception is if you have a mobile device that can't handle either the mobile website or the Gmail mobile application (which doesn't work on the Google Apps version of Gmail anyway) or can't always be online.

Fed up of the day-to-day mostly miserable and upsetting mass media reporting the human race has to endure? Well at last, we have some good news to enjoy.

It's good to know the ins and outs of those people who rule our world. George Bush's catastrophic - but somehow still ongoing - reign is well documented in many ways (for instance, his achievements [1] or [2]), but until now we did not know about his search engine preferences.

This being the key question of our time, you will be pleased to hear that in a recent interview Bush did indeed declare that he used "the Google".

Tagging (or in more conventional English - labelling) images, all very Web 2.0 but not always so interesting to do. It is however important for search engine semantics because as yet they tend not to be able to actually identify what the content of a picture is. Google image search et. al. tend to look at the text on the page with the image on, inbound links, its filename and so on. When you search for a "house", you're actually searching for a picture on a page with a lot of house-content on, which likely will be a house but on the other hand it could be, well, anything. What you really want is for a human to hand-label each image with "house" if it itself is a house and "donkey" if actually it is a image of a donkey on a page about houses.