Google is a ubiquitous search engine and online repository of information. It also offers a suite of other online services, such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs. Chrome is the most popular web browser on the market, used by millions of people every day. With Chrome, you can monitor multiple Google services in one place. To start monitoring your Google services:

  1. Open Chrome and click on the three lines in the top right corner of the browser window (Figure A). Figure A: The three lines in the top right corner of Chrome indicate that it’s open in incognito mode.
  2. Click on “Settings” (Figure B). Figure B: The Settings menu appears when you click on the three lines in the top right corner of Chrome. 2a If you don’t see “Settings” at all, click on “More tools” (the three dots to the right of “Settings”). This will open a new menu with more options (Figure C). 2b If you see “Settings,” but it’s not organized into sections like Figure B, click on “Advanced settings.” This will open a new tab with more options (Figure D).
  3. In the “Privacy & security” section, under “Content settings,” click on “Manage search engines.” This will open a new window that allows you to select which search engines are used by Chrome (Figure E). 4a If you want to use another search engine besides Google for your monitoring purposes, type its name into the text box next to “Google.” For example, if you want to use Yahoo! as your secondary search engine, type yahoo into this text box and press Enter or Return (Figure F). 4b If you want to use only Google as your secondary search engine without any other search engines being used at all, leave this text box blank and press Enter or Return (Figure G ..

Installation & Setup

As you are installing One Number you will need to click on “Install” in the confirmation message window to finish adding it to Chrome.

As soon as the installation has finished you will see your new “Toolbar Button” and a short extension management message. Notice that there is already an “Unread Count Number” visible with the “Toolbar Button”. To make certain that you have the most accurate “Unread Count” you will need to go into the “Options” first thing.

There are two ways to access the “Options” for the extension. The first is in the drop-down window for the “Toolbar Button”…

And the second is through the “Chrome Extensions Page”.

All of the “Options” are shown here in expanded form. The first thing to check for is to see if you would like to change the “Server Query Interval”…

Note: If you decide to change any colors you will need to manually enter the new “Color Code”.

The second thing that you should definitely enable if you use “Filters” in your Gmail account is the “Check for any unread messages, not just in the Inbox” option. This one made an immediate difference in our “Unread Count”.

The same recommendation applies to Google Voice.

One Number in Action

You can see that there were two additional items added to our “Unread Count” (from 75 to 77) after modifying the “Options”. When you open the drop-down window this is how it will look. There is a small toolbar of sorts across the top and each service is nicely stacked in its’ own “section”. You can see the number of unread items and a brief view of the first item(s) for each service.

If you only want to focus on one service at a time click on the link for that service and a new tab will be opened to the appropriate Google webpage.

Want to open tabs for all of the unread items at the same time? Then click on “Open Unread”…

Three services with unread items and three new tabs opened up.

Conclusion

If you are looking for an easy way to monitor your favorite Google services then you will definitely want to try this extension.

Links

Download the One Number extension (Google Chrome Extensions)