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Saturday, November 18
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Posted by Harish on Saturday, November 18, 2006
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I have been using Google Desktop for some time, although not all, I find some of its features really useful. No doubt, when you talk about Google, search comes in first. The advantage with the Google Desktop search is that it lets you search for a phrase all through your computer and it’s real fast. The overall feel is similar to the Google Web search, which we are so much used to. Apart from the robust search, Google Desktop comes with some useful goodies:
1. Quick Search Box
The Quick Search Box lets you search your computer, launch programs in the Start Menu or access control panel applets quickly. For those of you who would like to get things done without taking hands of the keyboard, pressing Ctrl key twice calls the Quick Search Box. I find this feature especially useful, saves you a lot of time. The Quick Search Box also let’s you type in a web page address, it opens a browser window and takes you there.
2. Google Desktop Search Results
The search results are sorted by date by default. This could be changed to Sort by relevance to match the Google Web search results listing. The search results page includes every type of item that Google has found on your desktop relevant to your search: files, emails, web pages, chats, contacts, appointments, tasks, notes and journal entries.
The search has a files link to search for something in a file. The search could be further filtered to search on specific file types.
3. Search on more than one computer
With most of us using more than one computer these days, Google desktop search could be set to retrieve results from all of them. It is required that Google Desktop be installed on your other computers as well and the Search Across Computers preference enabled. The contents of all these computers are synched through a Google Account. The searchable content is transmitted to one of Google’s servers; this lets you search on the other computer even while the other computer is offline.
4. Timeline
How many times have you lost out unable to recollect what you were doing after a weekend’s break? Google Desktop keeps track of all that you have done on your computer. You could simply select a date and get a list of all documents you would have worked on, sites you have visited or even songs you might have been listening to on that day.
5. Content Recovery
Imagine a situation wherein you were looking for an important mail and you find that your mail server has gone down for some reasons and you are unable to retrieve the mail. With Google Desktop around, you could run a search and retrieve the information from the cache. If you accidentally delete an important document, Google Desktop keeps the file contents in its cache; you could take out the contents from there.
Google Desktop lets you add Gadgets to monitor mails in Gmail or keep track of news, weather, stock etc. I personally wouldn’t want use these, as they tend to take too much system resources, utilizing just what you need is a balanced compromise.
Source: http://desktop.google.com/features.html
Download: http://desktop.google.com
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Thursday, November 16
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Posted by Harish on Thursday, November 16, 2006
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This new notebook design from Asustek comes with a small screen on the cover. The "second display" (as its called) lets you check email and access MP3 player functions, without unfolding the notebook.
The idea has evolved from the mobile phones with a sub display; notebooks that come with a second display are considered a special design concept for notebooks featuring the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.
In addition to Asustek, Acer and Mitac Technology have also started developing notebooks with second displays.
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Posted by Harish on Thursday, November 16, 2006
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Google News started as a small program that crawled and aggregated news, written by one of Google’s Engineers. That was a nice idea to have news from various sources collaged on a single page. Soon the idea found many takers inside Google. Google saw opportunity with the new idea and employed people to convert this to a full-fledged service.
A Beta version of Google News made its first public appearance in Dec 2001 sourcing news from about 100 websites. Today, Google News has graduated from a Beta service and scans more than 4,500 different websites in real time. The Google News service is completely automated managed entirely by computer programs.
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Posted by Harish on Thursday, November 16, 2006
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This very popular keyword "Googletestad" is among the most frequently searched words according to Wordtracker and Overture. Although the word doesn’t seem to refer to anything, this word has caught the attention of most of the Googlers.
All this seem to revolve around what is known in the internet marketing business as SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
SEO may be considered as a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. At the moment Google is considered the top search engine, and every site owner aims to be top ranked on Google and this is where people’s interest in Googletestad comes in. Ranking for certain keywords improves the number of site visitors. Rumor has it that Googletestad may be the name of software that might be used to check the search engine ranking of Websites related to specific keywords and phrases and hence improve website rankings. Software called Googletestad is non-existent.
Wikipedia has an entry about Googletestad: Googletestad appears to stand for Google's Test Ad which is used for live testing of their AdWords and AdSense pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system.
Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googletestad
http://www.googletestad.org/
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Posted by Harish on Thursday, November 16, 2006
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Ever wonder why are some parts of the globe blurry, and others crystal clear? Where do Google get their imagery? And how often do they update their image database?
Here is Mark Aubin, one of the founders of Keyhole, which eventually became Google Earth explaining how this is done.
Google collects image information via airplane and satellites, also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth's surface: hot air balloons, model airplanes, even kites. The traditional aerial survey involves mounting a special gyroscopic, stabilized camera in the belly of an airplane and flying it at an elevation of between 15,000 feet and 30,000 feet, depending on the resolution of imagery you're interested in. The movement of the airplane is choreographed to collect enough detail to remove distortions caused by the varying shape of the Earth's surface.
The digital imagery is put through a series of stages such as color balancing and warping to produce the final mosaic for the entire area.
Google then adds layers of information, things like country and state borders and the names of roads, schools, and parks to make it more useful. This information comes from multiple sources: commercial providers, local government agencies, public domain collections, private individuals, national and even international governments.
Google Earth maintains hundreds of terabytes of geographic data, and is continuously updated. The images that we see might have been taken sometime in the last three years.
Source: http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0604_01.html
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