Personalized Search

While searching for something on the Web, how often have you rephrased your search query, how often have you found exactly what you were looking for?
With such a huge volume of information on the Internet and a plethora of websites sprawling each day, chances are you rephrase your search too often, you may have to spend too much time to find what you are looking for. It is sometimes frustrating to dig through layers of unwanted or at times sponsored content.

Personalized Search is the latest buzz word in the search engine world.
Well, what exactly is Personalized Search, how does it work?
Personalized search could mean different things to different people. Personalization in search is essentially any method that uses understanding of the user to provide better results. Personalized search engines learn from a users behavior, so if you type something in and click around, these search engines record your clicks to determine your area of interest. The next time you do a search, the engine will be able to give you refined and better results. As you use the search more, the better the search engine understands your interest area and thus gives you more relevant results.
The new generation of search services doesn’t just offer personalization to your searches, but also lends the option of customizing the search topics as well as how results are served to you.

A number of new services let you create your very own search engines. Google, for example has personalized search currently in beta. Yahoo search builder also is aimed at personalizing searches. There are other services like a9.com, Eurekster, Ask Jeeves.

Speed Up Your Firefox

Here is a Firefox tip that speeds up browsing if you are connected to the net over a broadband. Normally Firefox makes one request to a web page at a time. By changing these settings you are enabling pipelining so that Firefox makes several request at once, which really speeds up page loading.
1. Type "about:config" into the Firefox address bar and hit return.

2. Search for these settings and change them as follows:
"network.http.pipelining" to "true"
"network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
"network.http.pipelining.marquees" to some number like "10"
With the marquees set to 10, Firefox makes 10 requests at once.





3. Lastly, right-click anywhere in the "about:config" page, and select
New > Integer. Name it "glary.initialization.delay" and set its value to "0".
This is the amount of time Firefox waits before rendering or processing information it has received.
With these tweaks your web pages should load faster now.

Google Earth, What's New?

iTV From Apple

iTV is the latest offering from Apple that will be launched in the first quarter of 2007. iTV is essentially a video streaming set-top box-more like a wireless router that takes content from a Mac, PC or iPod and displays it on a TV set.

The system also allow you to stream movie or TV programs from Apple's online iTunes store. iTV incorporates Dolby surround sound, the quality of the picture is compromised up to some extent for home theater users due to the limitations in the Internet connection bandwidth.