“The world changes this week“! This is what Jonathan Schwartz — President and COO of Sun Microsystems said in his personal blog couple of days back (oct 01, 2005)!
If I were a betting man, I’d bet the world was about to change. And that what just happened in Massachusetts, when a state government made what was to me a very rational statement - we will pick an open standard to protect the right of our citizens to access data and services; we will then buy from vendors that support standards - will be a shot heard ’round the world.
And today, Google Inc’s Eric Schmidt and Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy are giving a news conference, announcing some form of collaboration between their companies! [Web Cast Link]
Its going to be a very exciting day!
Microsoft office 12 suddenly seems to be in deep trouble.
According to slashdot, we can expect it to be an AJAX version of OpenOffice.. wow!. I am super excited!
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October 4th, 2005 at 10:09pm
Was reading some Google related forums today. Seeing the seriousness of the postings made on the various forums, I began to wonder, what would happen to the world if… Google disappeared all of a sudden from this planet, just like that… Say like in the TV series ‘The 4400‘?
Well, here are some serious as well as funny stuff that I can think of…
- Google being the best friend of developers, developers around the world would go crazy. Searching for any information would be much more difficult. Tons of projects all around the world be be delayed.
- Searching for images of *you know who* would be much more difficult.
- Labor would be much cheaper in the silicon valley.
- C|Net would be happy to note that no one is boycotting them.
- AdSense publishers around the world would go into deep shock/depression.
- No more G.A.S.S
- Advertising world would go for a spin. But, we would soon have MSNSense!
- There would be less of Spam blogs. No AdSense would mean No mesothelioma, No
asbestos cancer and No Lawyers/attorneys.
- Windows Vista would take few more years to arrive (off course, with WinFS).
- Yahoo mail would be back to 6 MB, and hotmail back to 2 MB.
- People around Steve Ballmer cabin at Microsoft wont have to wear protective helmets (to prevent the chairs from hitting them). :D
Ofcourse, the world would move on!
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September 27th, 2005 at 01:48pm
I was searching for information on the movie ‘The Island’, and i keyed in the terms in google, and the results were a bit unusual. Well, I am not sure if this is old one, but I am noticing this for the first time… Check out the screen shot :
Click on the above image to see the full screen shot
Right in between the search results, there is a section which reads …
‘See results for: The island movie’
Has anyone else seen this sort of results?
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September 17th, 2005 at 11:56pm
Google is moving towards single sign-on. I had written about it sometime back, and its slowly becoming a reality now. Recently, when I logged onto to Orkut, I was prompted to link my Orkut account to my Google Account. So, from now now, I just need to log-on to my Google Account. No more remembering multiple passwords.
List of google services currently under single sign-on:
Waiting for AdSense to get linked too!
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September 15th, 2005 at 12:26pm
I guess someone just pressed the F5 button at Google. In the last couple of weeks we have seen some major changes in the services that Google offers. And more importantly, some new services too!
Quality of Search Results
Let me begin with the Quality of the search result. No doubt the quality is much much better now. I had cribbed about it sometime back, but now, I guess my cribs have been answered. The much talked about ‘trust rank‘ paper/algorithm seems to be working. Kudos ! :)
Google Talk
The biggest talk of this week has been the launch of Google talk instant messenger!. Wow. They have done a neat job here.
- Its based on open standards.
- Works out of the box with other clients that support the jabber protocol
- Is got a very clean UI, zero clutter. Full points here. Windows neatly arrange/dock.
- People say that even the voice quality is cool. I am yet to check it out.
- Very good integration with gmail.
- Oh.. yes.. Its still in beta :) So, we can expect a few more cool additions.
The major point here is, Google’s entry into VOIP scene. What next ? Video chat ? or a Google becoming a ISP ?? Rumors all around the net.
You can read more about Google talk over the Google blog.
Google Desktop 2
Other major release in the past week was the Google Desktop 2. Notice that its Google Desktop, and not Google Desktop Search. Clearly, it does a lot more than searching. This software too is a clear winner. Installed it over my home PC. The best part of this is its extensible, i.e., you can use plugins to add functionality to it!. Check out the huge plugins library here. If you are using AdSense, there is this cool plugin which shows your AdSene earnings right on your desktop. One more point to note here is, this software clearly portrays Google’s expertise in writing desktop application. It clearly shows that they are not just a web-based company. The UI is cool, and very intuitive.
A detailed review of Google Desktop is available here.
Making Sense of AdSense?
The best news here is Section Targeting. This comes as a major relief to many bloggers. Normally, the navigation text mess-up with the AdSense bot, and as a result, irrelevant Adsare shown on many blogs. It takes lot of tweaking for proper Ads to show up. But this feature is a major blessing. Section targeting allows us to suggest sections of our text and HTML content that we’d like Google to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to our site’s content. You can read more about this here.
The AdSense reporting too has been improved. We can also know the top search queries too. Btw, did you know that the Adsense Team has a blog called Inside AdSense?.
GMail
Did you that by the end of this year, GMail would be offering 3GB storage space?. Its growing by the day. One cool feature that was introduced recently was the “Send as” feature. Now you can send mail using some other From id. This is a neat and useful feature. And, finally, gmail is open to all.
Blogger
On the blogger front, they have introduced Word Verification for Comments, this would be a weclome addition for most bloggers to fight comment spam. Recently, they also launched a Word Plugin for blogger. So, you can directly blog from Word!
Google Sitemap
After using Sitemaps, I have noticed that my pages are indexed faster, and the traffic too has increased. Also, the AdSense performance is better. So, do use Sitemaps if you haven’t yet used it.
Google Blogs
Here is a list of official Google blogs.
So, this is google refresh ? .. if so, what would happen at the next google refresh ?
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August 25th, 2005 at 11:18pm
Finally, google news has RSS/atom Feeds. Cool. Was waiting for it for quite some time now.
Google news home page feed : RSS | Atom
Feeds for different sections/More Info : Here.
You can also have customized feeds, for e.g., for all news on Infosys, you can use this link : http://news.google.com/news?q=infosys&output=rss
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August 10th, 2005 at 02:01pm
According to this post the official Google ToolBar is coming to firefox!.
According to a message at the Googlebar mailing list archive, Google is preparing to release a Firefox version of its popular toolbar.
The posting says the Firefox version of the Google toolbar will be released on July 7th. The toolbar will work with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, as well as MacOS X 10.2, and Linux 8.0+. With the exception of a pop-up blocker, it’s expected the Firefox version will have the same features as the IE version.
This is good news! Hope its true.
The googleBar from mozdev.org is pretty good as of now, and serves the purpose, but a toolbar from Google itself would be great!
Waiting for 7th of July!
More info/discussion at : Neowin.net
Update - July 8th: Its available at : http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/index.html
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July 5th, 2005 at 11:42pm
Google Earth is awesome. Freaked out with it over the weekend. Its a fine piece of software, and works like a charm even on a 128 kbps connection! Mostly looks like they use XML over HTTP to talk to the server. (similar to google maps).
The places in US are in a very good resolution, and the building in major cities (in US) are in 3D. So, you can kind of do a fly through!.
Places that I saw over the weekend….. Atlanta, Norcross (my wife used to work here when she had been to US on an assignment), Hoover Dam (has good 3d-terrain), Grand Canyon, SFO and the bay area - Cupertino (apple office), Mountain View (Google), Infosys office at Kaiser Drive, Golden gate bridge, Detroit Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson airport at Atlanta, Niagara Falls, NY - Manhattan Area, Liberty island…… Saw Dubai too!
When it comes to India, the resolution is not that great. But New Delhi has good resolution, specially the Rashtrapathi Bhavan, Lok Sabha, India Gate area etc. May be, because its the capital. Bombay/Mumbai resolution is pretty bad. Couldn’t find gateway of India. Agra - Taj Mahal is not that clearly visible, but you can see it (bcoz its so huge!).
One funny thing I noticed was the names that are given to the cities, specially in south India. For e.g., Mangalore is named as ‘Mangaluru’, as if its pronounced in Kannada!. Mysore is named ‘Maisuru’ and so on…
Could get a nice view of Mangalore. Never knew Mangalore looked like that!!. Saw Hyderabad, Mysore, KRS dam, Kabini Dam, Goa etc. All the airports are clearly visible, including Mangalore, Goa, Bangalore etc!.
Its really addictive, and fun. You can sit with it for hours together. It will be more fun when the image resolutions of the Indian Subcontinent improves!
Updates (Sep-18-2005) : Resolution of some indian cities better now. Read More…
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July 4th, 2005 at 09:47am
Talking about AdSense, i am wondering how it actually works!. Yes., its contextual advertising. i.e, the Ad’s that are displayed are purely based on the contents that are present on the page. And context is the King!
AdSense works like a charm for some. For others, AdSense doesn’t just work. The rest are not at all bothered about it!.
So, what is this post all about ?
For some of my pages, the Ads that are displayed are not relevant at all! No matter what the content is, the Ad’s displayed are about ‘blogging’ etc, which are not at all relevant to the topic or the content of the page. That too after filtering lot of blog related site!
Let me explain with and example.
Say URL #1:
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
virus-hits-instant-messengers/
URL #2:
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
Basically both #1 and #2 have the same content.
#1 is the permalink to the posting, and #2 is the archive for the day.
If you notice, the Ads for URL #2 are very relevant but not for URL #1. The content is pretty old, and the google-bot has visited it for sometime now. I also did a google search, and URL #1 has a PR 2, and URL #2 has a PR 0. So, that would mean that #1 is known by google much better then #2.
I was wondering about this, and posted this question on one of the forums, but still haven’t got a satisfactory answer. Further, from one of the replies that i got on the forum, I figured out that the Ad’s would be relevant if we append a querystring to the URL as shown below
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
virus-hits-instant-messengers/?t=1
Isn’t it strange ? Its clear that google mediabot indexes the page based on the URL. But what about the content?
So, what I am wondering is..
1. If the page is brand new (or the URL at-least is new), then the Ads displayed are very relevant
2. After media bot visits this new URL … the relevancy goes for a toss!!!
Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round ?
So, does that mean that the algorithm to display Ads for the first few times (realtime), is much better then the algorithm used later-on ?
Just curious!
Other Examples:
#1 http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2004/06/24/
microsoft-hotmail-joins-the-storage-club/
#2 http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2004/06/24/
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June 21st, 2005 at 07:42pm
Came across this : Google Introduces Site Targeting to Google AdWords on Search Engine Journal
Its good news and bad news!. Good news for advertisers and the entire internet community! bcoz now advertisers can target specific sites, and avoid link farms or pages/sites that are specifically designed to game google.
On the other hand, this may be a bad news for lot of bloggers on a long run. Interesting. Will have to keep a watch! Offcourse, advertisers would like put up their ads on popular blogs, but not sure what happens to the smaller not so known blogs, which manage their yearly hosting fees!
More info about the program can be found here.
BTW, for the past couple of days, i am seeing more and more Yahoo ads! too!
You can see them occasionally over Russell’s blog (yahoo employee) and flickr (owned by yahoo, flickr shows both google/yahoo ads randomly!) too!
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June 17th, 2005 at 10:24pm
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