Google Chrome

A good first browser. This is not revolutionary(expect for looks) but a excellent start by google. In terms of looks it's Firefox on steroids. in terms of features it has a long way to go.

On the up side it looks great. The best thing is that the address bar acts as search bar. it has a stealth mode that prevents what you visited from being stored/recorded. It has a task manager too.No menu bar instead 2 icons on status bar. It has a auto hide status bar. "Page cannot be displayed" has  a link to google cache and also displas the correct error with the page.The start up page just shows the bookmarks and commonly visited pages and recently closed tabs.

On the downside the status bar just says connecting and does not shows the progress. 



click on inage for a larger view

Great browser from Google with the coming versions it will be excellent. Although i must admit it cant compete with Firefox on features. Even in reach/size i will take lot of marketing effort to reach even 50% of Microsoft. just look at Google backed Firefox has just 19% of the market share despite google paying users who promote it.And the 19 % is because of it's features and not because of google.

I am sure with in a year it will be the third most used windows browser and second on apple

GOOGLE Games

Do you know google has developed some games and puzzles too. Though the games are silly you might still try them out . But as far as puzzles re comcerned they are too tough to crack . just check out the links

• http://www.google.com/puzzles/
• http://www.google.com/Easter/feature_easter.html
• http://www.google.com/heart/heart01.html
• http://www.google.com/indiacodejam/

Googel changes it's favicon

 was just wisting Google when i saw their favicon has changed. so did some research to find the reason.  You too might have noticed that Google has a new favicon. . a favicon is a  small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list.


It seams they wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices

Thats' not it i found a whole set of icons that has recently developed for it's use.

Google now search flash

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files. They have been working with Flash indexing algorithm . Earlier it was not possible to index flash files content.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that they have launched our Flash indexing algorithm for web designers via google webmaster central Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

Google translate in 10 more language

Yes Google now translates in 10 more languages.. This  brings the total to 23 languages. The newly added languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish..


Of this i feel Hindi is probably the toughest to translate as the script is completely different.. So now you can use Google to translate all these languages. This is i think now the biggest translate service. Most of these were in lab and after months of testing were released. These translation have not been done by Google but by people like you and me . You too can participate Google in your language program..


i have tried the hindi translation service as a part of the lab offering and it was quiet fine not good though. This seams to be a bit better.I cannot comment on any other languages.

Most relavant search result

Ok Google is the most used search engine with 2/3rd of the market share in most countries expect countries like Russia, china and japan where local search engines are either far bigger or are as good as Google. But how relevantis Google .


According to a test by webmasterbrain.com Google seams to be the most relevant too . they asked user to perform search on their site for any keyword of their choice. It showed up results from the 3 search engine and people decided which one is the best or most relevant .

43 % voted for Google
32%  voted for Yahoo
25%  voted MSN

Google may not be really good but its the best available. And one more thing i think the people who voted for msn surely have searched for a Microsoft product otherwise who on the earth would vote for it.

Fun with google

Imagine if you could see what others click. That's not all imagine if i tell you can see which was the first pic they clicked to the last in correct order and also the camera manufacturer. That too if i say you can get all this info using just Google image search. I know most of you will either laugh or think it's impossible.

No this is fully true. If you have a camera then you will know that the photos are numbered in proper order from the first pic to the last. S when you upload it online it stil has the same name something like xxx001.jpg. Now when the pic gets cached by google you can search .
it.

Just try this link for first images shot by people from their cannon camera
images.google.com/images?q="IMG_0001.JPG"

Here are the format of most camera manufactures
Canon cameras name their pics as "IMG_0001.JPG"
Sony cameras save pics as "DSC00001.JPG"
Nikons do as "DSCN0001.JPG"
Konica.it's "PICT0001.JPG"
HP cameras it's "IM000001.jpg "
Toshiba cameras it's "PDRM0001.JPG"

Google indexes pasword protected pages

Sometime back Google had brought a company called Transformic inc. which worked on  indexing password protected pages..They have been working with Google engineers  in unifing their development with google. And google can now index password protected pages.

It works something like this when it finds forms < form > it seams it performs a.small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, it automatically choose words from the site and for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons it chooses from  the values of the HTML.

Does this spell doom?  Not actually. This is a great thing . There are a lot of forum that have great content but are password protected hence we never get those sites in our search result. now with this we will be able to visit those sites . we still may not be able to read the content without actually logging in but get some ideausing cache pages

Search in title

Google has a lot of cool feature like the one that allows you to search titile. it's called intitle: . This allows one to search for a certain word in the title.

If you include [intitle:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the < title > < /titile > tag. For instance, [intitle:orkut tricks] will return word "orkut" in their title and mention the word "tricks" anywhere in the document (url or no).

This means there can be there can be no space between the "intitle:" and the following word.

If you want to search for more than one keyword use "allinurl" If you start a query with [allintitle:] Google will search only those pages with all of the query words with in the < title > tag. For instance, [allinurl: orkut tricks] will return only documents that have both "orkut" and "tricks" in the url.

Search url

Google has a great feature that allows you to search url. it's called inurl: . It is a useful search option which allows one to search for a certain word in the url.

If you include [inurl:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the url. For instance, [inurl:orkut] will return documents that mention the word "orkut" in their url. but if you search for [inurl:orkut tricks] will return word "orkut" in their url and mention the word "tricks" anywhere in the document (url or no).

This means there can be there can be no space between the "inurl:" and the following word.. Most sites employ %20 for space or a - or _.

If you start a query with [allinurl:], Google will search only those pages with all of the query words in the url. For instance, [allinurl: orkut tricks] will return only documents that have both "orkut" and "tricks" in the url.

Access blocked sites via google

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Google hitting on paid posts

Google is taking the matter of paid post seriously. Google has primarily targeted PayPerPost member blogs and blogs related to other such sites.

It has reduced their Page ranks. If you are owning a blog that has paid posts then you need to careful. To prevent any future loss of page rank due to this issue you can take the following steps:

1. If google cant see it's a paid post then your rank wont decrease. What i mean is dont carry tags like "Paid posts" "sponsored post " "sponsored review" . Google can follow these tags to determine if you are being paid for posts.

2. Remove all sponsored post and PayPerPost tags on each of your posts.

Any affiliate banners are fine. If want your visitors to know that this is a paid post then include them in the post itself. You can use innovative ways like "wondering why am i writing about them coz they paid me".

Follow these methods as they say prevention is better than cure

Google search from mobile

There is a very simple procedure to use google search directly from your mobile phone.

Follow the step by step procedure to search for anything via a sms without any web application.


1. Open the messaging in your phone.

2. Go for new text message and type your search query.

3. Send to 466453 (Google sms server).

4. Thats it. Done! as you will receive the result as sms again.

For sports scores
* Type the name of the sports team
* Examples: “arsenal”.

For weather conditions
* Type the word “weather” followed by the zip or city and state
For more info send help to 466453

Google store's green initiative

Google Store has gone green. They have launched what they call as the "GREEN INITIATIVE".


"The Google Store is going green. We only have one Earth and we want to do our best to take care of her, so we've worked hard to make our store more eco-friendly....... And where we used to use plastic polybagging, now we use more environmentally sound recycled wraps and stickers when shipping your order. "

Most Google products are now made of recycled material from organic cotton T-shirts to pencils made of recycled blue jeans. You'll find that most (though not all) products are made from eco freiendly products.

You will find the following icons as a part of their green initiative

Made from materials grown in a way that sustains natural resources.

Made from materials grown without the use of harmful synthetic chemicals.

Made out of high-quality recycled materials.

Made in a way that contributes little or no impurity to our air, water or soil.

Googel Sky

Google earth launches Google Sky. No ,this is not a separate product but a new feature in Google Earth that now allows you to explore the sky(space). The product is really great but has some minor problems. This is in beta and will be out of beta once these problems are solved.

Google Sky has been created with the help of

• NASA/Space Telescope Institute
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Digital Sky Survey Consortium

This new addition to exploring places on Earth it enables viewers to check out different areas in the universe, from distant galaxies light years away, to constellations and planets. You must download the new version of Google Earth to get the features, then you're on your way to checking out planets in motions and supernova explosions .

This is nothing new several such products already exist and are better than Google Earth like SkyMap , Stellarium . Once some more development and updates takes place it will be better than the others.





You can soom in on any star to get more info about it. This gives a brief info on a star and gives more info online.The info contains the name of the star and a pic of it.

Google launches Chinese SocialNetwork Site

Google has launched 2 new sites in Chinese with the help of Tianya . The 2 sites are Laiba and Wenda. Strictly speaking the sites are just hosted on Google's server and google is providing tech support. They are Tianya sites. But there are rumours that Google has taken controlling stake in Tianya.

Laiba is a social networking site. It stands for "come here".This includes several features like search, hot topics, community forum etc. You can search for anyone based on their age, location ,sex. It has one more coll feature you can rank a person . These are visible on homepage. This seems to be like Orkut with url having UID=1234567890123456789 (19-digit no) and community having cmm. The head of Google China, KAI FU, has a profile. An complete analysis of this site will be published in week.sos come back to know more about this site.

Wenda is the second website. It means ask and answer.This looks like a replica of the newly released russian verson of their discontinued service Google Answers Otvety . It's basically a question and answer website where you ask and you get a answer.

Google apps goes Gobal

Google Apps is a service from Google for using custom domain names with several Google products. It features several known Web applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Page Creator, and Docs & Spreadsheets.

Click on image for larger view.

Google Apps has added in six more languages. Now it is in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Hungarian, UK English and US English.

This includes Google Apps Premier Edition , Google Apps Partner Edition , Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

It has added a more user-friendly control panel interface for administrators. Thare is also a Mail migration tools for administrators using Premier and Education Editions.

Google's New report In adwords

Goohle recently introduced a new report in the AdWords Report Center. The Search Query Performance report .This shows for what qurie was you add shown and clicked.


click on image for larger view

It has 4 important fields

1. Search query- This shows what the user searched for.
2. Search query type - This tells type of query as in weather it was a exacyly related to your site or broadly or other. It shows them as "BROAD", "EXACT", "PHRASE".
3. Impressions - this tells you how may times your ads was shown.
4. Clicks - howmany people clicked on those ads.

Lets' look at Search query type in detail
Say you have a site related to Gmail if some one types "Mail" your ads are visible but that's not the your offering .Now if some one types "Gmail" and your ads are visible then it's a exact match.

This tells you for what keyword you got the maximum click. Say you have been bidding on "Gmail" but you got a max visitors for "Filters" or "Contacts" and very less for "Gmail" you can stop bidding for "gmail" and start bidding for "Filters".

To see this report

• Log in to your AdWords account
• Click the 'Reports' tab at the top of the page.
• Click 'Create Report.'
• Select 'Search Query Performance' as your Report Type

You need to select the add (text ads, image ads, video ads, etc.) for which you want this report.

Google Ads in Full trottle

Google Adwords and Adsense are in Full throttle. Adsense recently launched 2 new languages.Adwords has launched a new tool called campaign optimiser.

Google Adsense now supports two new languages Bulgarian and Serbian . That takes the tslly to languages.It icludes

English
French
Arabic
Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)
Japanese
Korean
Hungarian
Bulgarian
Italian
Croatian
Norwegian
Russian
Finnish
Serbian
Swedish
Hebrew
Czech
Polish
Danish
Portuguese
Dutch
Romanian
Slovak
German
Spanish
Greek
Turkish

Google Adwords launches of a new ad performance tool called Campaign Optimizer. It's an on-demand AdWords tool that provides personalized campaign ideas in just minutes. Campaign Optimizer is more effective on campaigns that have been running for at least two weeks

This helps in improving and optimization your performance . To start, click on the 'Optimize Campaign' link on the 'Campaign Summary' page, as shown in this screenshot below.

Here's how Campaign Optimizer works: first, the tool analyzes your campaign. Next, it generates a customized proposal of ideas for your campaign . Finally, you'll be able to review each proposed change and apply the ones you like directly to your campaign. As you can see in the screenshot below, it's easy to evaluate each change

Google Pranks/April Fool

Google is not only famous for it's search or ads it ahs also been famous for one more stuff. It's the Fool's day Pranks. It is known to play prank it's user on April 1. Sice 2000 they have been doing this expect 2001 and 2003. Some of them really look convincing.

2000: Google MentalPlex

In the year 2000 Google announced a new search technology called "MentalPlex" . It supposedly read the user's mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the step of actually typing in the search query. All that the user had to do was remove his Hat and Glasses and stare at the above image. It said that it worked for all languages.

There was even a elaborate FAQ page. It even gave some troubleshooting tips

Problem: MentalPlex keeps taking me to sites featuring rubber toys, nipples and diapering.
Answer: Your infant is too close to the monitor. If you have no children, you may want to consider counseling.

Problem: I am unable to visualize clicking and have to use my finger to activate the mouse.
Answer: Click visualization takes practice. Try pushing the mouse button with your eyebrow, then gradually increase the distance between your eye and the mouse.

They even gave illustrations as in to how to go about

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First two was said to be the wrong way to do it as the user had wore hat and glasses in the first one and in the second one he didn't stare at the monitor.

Try out Google Mentalplex



2002: Pigeon Rank

Google claimed reveals the technology behind its Search System . They called it PigeonRank actual name of their technology was Page Rank.

They said Larry Page and Sergey Brin,the Google founders developed this technology at Satndford university based on breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner(probably a scientist). Google touts the benefits of this cost-effective and efficient means of ranking pages and reassures readers that there is no animal cruelty involved in the process.


The article makes many humorous references and puns based on computer terminology and how Google PageRank really works.They even mentioned that that the birds were kept in good condition and where fed the best food. They even offered newsletter for readers to know more on their technology " Google Friends newsletter. "

View the actual page


2004: Google Lunar/Copernicus Center


Google claims to give Jobs to 35 engineers at their Googlunaplex. It is GooglePlex in Moon i.e you work at Google office located at moon. It claimed to contain 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.

It was called G-CHEESE (Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering) Google's initial base, a spherical structure containing living quarters and a small data center, will take two and a half years to construct. first G.C.H.E.E.S.E ball has been christened the Googlunaplex.

Google also said that they would release version 10.0 of an operating system that has been optimized for the demands of extra-terrestrial computation. Known as Luna/X, the new command architecture i was said to be impervious to radiation, low gravity, absolute zero temperatures and airless environments.

Those interested had to contact Google at lunarjobs@google.com. They had to be at least 18 years of age by April 1, 2007 and have proof of earth residency.


Work at Google Lunar


2005: Google Gulp



Google Gulp, a fictitious drink, was announced by Google in 2005. They claimed that this was develiped by one of their employee VP of operations Urs Hoelzle . He used to collect floral plants from tropical rain forest in his 20% time. They said that the Flowers contained nothing special – bag of future steroids, muscle relaxants, long-shot cancer drugs. But one day the flowers contained a special chemical.That led to creation of this juice/drink.

According to the company, this beverage would optimize one's use of the Google search engine by increasing the drinker's intelligence. It was claimed this boost was achieved through real-time analysis of the user's DNA and carefully tailored adjustments to neurotransmitters in the brain (a patented technology termed Auto-Drink).

The drink was said to come in "4 great flavors": Glutamate Grape (glutamic acid), Sugar-Free Radical (free radicals), Beta Carroty (beta carotene), and Sero-Tonic Water (serotonin).



This hoax was likely intended as a parody of Google's invite-only email service called Gmail. Although ostensibly free, the company claimed the beverage could only be obtained by returning the cap of a Google Gulp bottle to a local grocery store: a causal loop. In the Google Gulp FAQ, Google replies to the observation "I mean, isn't this whole invite-only thing kind of bogus?" by saying "Dude, it's like you've never even heard of viral marketing."

Take a sip

2006: Google Romance

On April Fool's Day 2006, Google Romance was announced on the main Google search page with the introduction, "Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance." It pretends to offer a "Soulmate Search" to send users on a "Contextual Date". A parody of online dating, it amusingly had a link for "those who generally favor the 'throw enough stuff at the wall' approach to online dating" to Post multiple profiles with a bulk upload file, you sleaze in addition to Post your Google Romance profile. Clicking on either of these gave an error page, which explained that it was an April Fool's joke and included links to previous April Fool's Jokes for nostalgia.


Find a Google Date

2007: Gmail Paper & Google TiSP

Gmail Paper

At about 10:00 PM Pacific time (where Google has its headquarters) the day before April 1, 2007, Google changed the login page for Gmail to announce a new service called Gmail Paper. The service offered to allow users of Google's free webmail service to add e-mails to a "Paper Archive," which Google would print (on "96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum") and mail via traditional post. The service would be free, supported by bold, red advertisements printed on the back of the printed messages. Image attachments would also be printed on high-quality glossy paper and be postmarked with their message, though MP3 and WAV files would not be printed.

The page detailing more information about the service features photographs of Ian Spiro and Carrie Kemper, current employees of Google. Also featured are Product Marketing Managers of Gmail Anna-Christina Douglas, and Kevin Systrom.

Google TiSP

Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider) was a fictitious free broadband service supposedly released by Google. This service would make use of a standard toilet and sewage lines to provide free Internet connectivity at a speed of 8 Mbit/s (2 Mbit/s Upload) (or up to 32 Mbit/s with a paid plan). A user drops a weighted end of a long, Google-supplied fiber-optic cable in their toilet and flushes it. Around 60 minutes later, the end would be recovered and connected to the Internet by a "Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)." The user then connects their end to a Google-supplied wireless router and run the Google-supplied installation media on a Windows XP or Vista computer ("Mac and Linux support coming soon").



Alternatively, a user could request a professional installation, where Google would deploy nanobots through the plumbing to complete the process. The free service would be supported by "discreet DNA sequencing" of "personal bodily output" to display online ads that relate to culinary preferences and personal health. Google also references the Diet Coke and Mentos reaction in their FAQ, "If you're still experiencing problems, drop eight mints into the bowl and add a two-liter bottle of diet soda."

Go Wireless

Non-hoaxes

Google has also anounced some of their actual products on Fools day. On April Fool's Day 2004 (or rather, very shortly before midnight on March 31), Google announced the launch of Gmail, making some believe it was a hoax as web-based e-mail with one gigabyte of storage was unheard of at the time but later turned out to be real. This marketing strategy is used to make people think that the product is a hoax and then to surprise them .