If your efforts to track down long-lost relatives and obscure musicians (or anyone else you’re looking for on the web) stop at Googling their name then you’ve come to the right place. Here’s how to seriously go about searching for people online, including some advice from the professionals who do it for a living, and…

These are troubled times for SoundCloud, with staff lay offs, changing CEOs, and talk of emergency investment securing its future for the time being. As with any service that’s looking shaky, users will be (and should be) worried about getting their stuff out—you may have years of playlists, uploads, and podcasts…

You don’t necessarily need to install a desktop application to get your hands on a decent office suite any more, and the biggest names in tech all have free, online productivity tools you can access from any browser—so which one should you be using? We take a look at the features, strengths, and weaknesses of each.

Big fans of the cloud as we are, there’s no doubt relying solely on keeping your stuff stored remotely is a risky strategy. Accounts get hacked. Companies fold. And if you don’t have backups of your most precious Snapchats and Gmails, then they can disappear in a puff of data center smoke. Here’s how to make sure…

Thanks to the helter-skelter pace of modern living it can be all too easy to sign up for a free trial or a month’s worth of a particular service, and then before you know it, you’re getting billed for a ton of apps you’re not using and don’t really need. Checking up on your subscriptions could save you a serious chunk…

The number of views YouTube videos get in a single day is up to the billions now, with hundreds of hours of new content uploaded every minute, versus the month it would take twelve years ago when YouTube launched. Searching through that deluge of video can be harder than searching the entire web, so here’s a helpful…

Even as our tech gets increasingly sophisticated and intelligent, sometimes it’s falling for the oldest tricks in the book that breach the security walls we’ve put in place—like clicking on dodgy links or shady attachments that we shouldn’t. You don’t have to get tripped up by these simplest of scams though, if you…

Touring around the pages of the web isn’t always the one-way street you might think it is: most sites are eager to leave a calling card or two on your local machine in the form of cookies. Here we’ll lay out what’s being saved in your browser, why it makes a difference, and what you can do about it.

You may have noticed in your travels around the internet that your browser’s address bar occasionally turns green and displays a padlock—that’s HTTPS, or a secure version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, swinging into action. This little green padlock is becoming vitally important as more and more of your online…

Even if you don’t personally use Gmail, someone you know does. The service is perfect for people who need an email address independent of their work one, and a far better alternative than security nightmares like YahooMail. Yet Gmail, despite the name, isn’t just a great platform for email.

Chances are you’ve signed up to at least one streaming service—but are you making the most of the best-quality music on offer? A quick audit of your apps can boost both streaming and downloaded bit-rates, so you’re always assured of the highest fidelity audio flowing through your pricy headphones to your eardrums.…

There’s no doubt Google runs a tight ship as far as security goes, if you’re hacked using Google services its usually (but not always) because of something you did, not Google. If you want to keep your emails on Google’s services more secure you’ll need to do more than just enable two-factor authentication. You need…

The simple HTML websites of old knew their place in your browser, but today’s sites are bursting with video, audio, and notifications that can be a constant distraction.

Sick of Snapchat? Tired of Twitter? Fed up with Facebook? This is a great time to completely eradicate yourself from social media. All of these online services let you scrub out your accounts if you want a cleaner, leaner life online. Even better, plenty of them let you export your data for safekeeping before you do.…

Most of us know the drill of getting an antivirus program up and running or relying on the built-in security protections that come with our computers, but there are some less well-known threats that it’s important to look out for too. Here’s how to stay safe.