A new search engine has been set up. It's called 'Cuil' (pronounced 'cool'), has $33m in backing and it doesn't collect information about the surfing tendencies of users. Stories about it point out pluses like the size of its massive index (120 billion Web pages) and minuses like fewer total hits than what Google turns up when searching the same thing.
Formed by ex-Googlers, Cuil has been in development for the last three years and has attracted a huge amount of interest, coverage and upon launch - searches.
"Anybody who thought Cuil was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.
Cuil's distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site's content. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry's leaders, and even for that matter, of many startups.
Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory — after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food — but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results.
"Obviously, there's a lot of interest in any stealth startup that's going to be a search engine. ... Everyone wants to know, 'Who's the next Google?'" said Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of Silicon Valley tech blog TechCrunch. "There's no way any startup in the world can outperform Google. The question really is whether or not Cuil can produce better results than Google can."
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cuil is not cool
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Google SMS (The Vacationeers)
Another eerie Google tale from The Vacationeers. A young man uses Google SMS and gets more than just movie times.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Yahoo! rejects Microsoft's latest offer
Yahoo!’s board met over the weekend and rejected a new proposal from Microsoft that would have seen the Internet company broken up.
The proposal, which the board of Yahoo rejected at a meeting Saturday, would have given Microsoft Yahoo's search business, with the rest of the company going to investor Carl Icahn.
The search giant said it had received the joint proposal from Microsoft and Mr Icahn late on Friday and was given less than 24 hours to accept. It said Microsoft and Mr Icahn made clear they were unwilling to negotiate the fundamental terms, which included the immediate replacement of Yahoo!'s board and removal of top management.
"This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo!'s stockholders in mind," Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock said.
"Clearly Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets, on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders," Mr Bostock said.
The move comes a few weeks before Yahoo!'s annual meeting on August 1, when Mr Icahn, who owns nearly 5 percent of Yahoo!, is seeking to oust chief executive Jerry Yang and replace the nine-member board with his own slate of directors.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Major internet security flaw disclosed
A security researcher Tuesday revealed a flaw that makes it possible for hackers to take control of the Internet.
The flaw is in the design of the Internet's Domain Name System(DNS), a fundamental feature of the Internet that makes it possible for computers to find Web sites.
Details of how the flaw works were not revealed, but it allows Internet users to be redirected anywhere an attacker chooses, said Dan Kaminsky, the director of penetration testing for IOActive, who discovered the flaw by accident six months ago.
According to a bulletin from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the vulnerability (VU#800113) could allow cache poisoning and misdirection of Web requests, sending users to unknown Web sites.
Web poisoning exploits are well-known, but because the new vulnerability lies in the basic design of the protocol, it is potentially more dangerous than previous problems. If the vulnerability is exploited, “you would have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect,” Kaminsky said.
A group of 16 security researchers met on Microsoft’s campus in March to coordinate a response.
Major vendors of Domain Name System (DNS) servers are making an unprecedented coordinated release of patches.
By withholding details and using a patch that does not directly fix the vulnerability, the researchers hope to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to find the vulnerability.
Friday, June 27, 2008
ICANN and IANA sites hacked by Turkish group
"You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"
Two of the world's most important internet regulatory web sites – ICANN and IANA - were hijacked by a Turkish group called "Netdevilz" and briefly redirected to another site which screamed the above message, according to researchers at Zone-h.
IANA is the organization responsible for managing the DNS (domain name system) root zone and assigning the DNS operators for the Internet's top-level domains. DNS, which translates the domains and URLs into IP addresses, is a critical component of the Web's traffic-guiding infrastructure.
ICANN, which oversees IANA, also allocates IP address space and manages the Web's top-level domain naming system.
The zone-h researchers said the redirected domains included icann.com, icann.net, iana.com and iana-servers.com. They were hijacked to atspace.com, according to zone-h.
"We reached the defacers by e-mail but they refused to tell us how they changed the DNS records, however a cross-site scripting or cross-site request forgery vulnerability might have been exploited," zone-h said.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Firefox 3 released
Mozilla Firefox 3 has been released. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in approximately 50 languages , the new version has over 15,000 improvements.
What’s New in Firefox 3:
The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.
User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.
Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.
Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security. The new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.
Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.
Download Firefox 3
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Internet Explorer 8 Sneak Peek
Another new feature, automatic crash recovery does a good job of isolating instances of the IE browser -- or separate tabs within the same browser -- so that one stalled browser or tab can be terminated without affecting any other. If a crash does bring down the entire browser, automatic crash recovery will attempt to restore the browser to its previous state -- including all open tabs -- the next time you open it.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Top 3 online meeting tools
1) Dimdim
'Dimdim' is a free web-based conferencing service. Here you can start the meeting and invite others via e-mail, directly from the browser. Apart from offering collaboration tools such as whiteboard, chat (text/audio/video), ‘dimdim’ has some additional unique features.
An advantage of ‘dimdim’ is the desktop sharing facility by the presenter to share her desktop with the attendees.
Once the presenter shares her desktop (using the ‘Screen’ option), the desktop screen will immediately be visible to all the participants. This could be useful in product demonstration and co-browsing.
Another feature of ‘dimdim’ is the facility to make live presentations with PowerPoint and PDF files.
2) Twiddla
To start an online meeting with a couple of mouse clicks, try out Twiddla. To initiate a meeting, go through the one-time registration process and click on the ‘Start meeting’ button.
You can make the meeting public or password-protected invite-only. When you initiate a meeting, you get a meeting URL for sharing with potential attendees. The service offers facilities for co-browsing, text/audio chatting and the like.
While browsing with others you can insert comments, and place coloured marks on the page being viewed. In addition, it provides a whiteboard that enables the participants to collaboratively write, and draw pictures.
3) Palbee
It allows you to conduct unlimited videoconference (with five people) sessions.
To enliven the video session, the service lets you run slideshows along with a whiteboard.
A great advantage of this service is the facility to record the sessions for sharing them with others later.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Microsoft to fight Google with Live Search Cashback
Microsoft has announced Live Search Cashback that rewards users with cash rebates when they search for and purchase products from partnering online stores. Microsoft collects money from its partners, the advertisers on a CPA (Cost Per Action) basis. So this product shifts search advertising from CPC (Cost Per Click) to CPA and gives a lot of revenue back to the users. This is a desperate move by Microsoft to challenge Google which has 61.6% of the US search market share. Microsoft is third with under 9.1% of the total pie.
According to industry data, online retail in the United States is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2010. Today, 68 per cent of all those retail transactions begin at a search engine.
The Live Search cashback program features more than 10 million products from more than 700 merchants, including top U.S. retailers, Microsoft said.
Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chairman announced the initiative at the group’s advance08 conference in Redmond, Washington and said that the new program "will help advertisers drive more online sales while giving consumers a new way to stretch their dollars."
The technology is based on a system used by Jellyfish, the shopping and auction service, which Microsoft acquired in September 2007.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Google helps Indian authorities arrest Orkut political defamer
An obscene message about Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi on Orkut has landed an Indian man in prison. The message was allegedly posted on a community called "I hate Sonia Gandhi."
Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid, a 22 year-old IT consultant, was arrested after google handed over his personal data to police.
Vaid was arrested after a police raid on his house on May 16 and has been charged with breaking section 292 of the Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act.
If found guilty he faces a possible five years in prison as well as a fine.
A Congress activist from Pune, Amol Bhokare had lodged a complaint in December 2007, against the unknown person. According to the police the person who formed this community is not guilty as per the law, as hating anyone is a personal opinion but posting derogatory content in a vulgar language is indeed a crime.
The cyber crime cell of Pune then got in touch with Google. It was informed that the message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated from an email address rahulvaidindia@gmail.com
A team was dispatched by the deputy commissioner of police to arrest the accused who had posted the messages against Sonia Gandhi. The accused, a commerce graduate, was produced before the court on May 17 in Pune. Vaid accepted that he had posted the messages. He has been remanded to police custody till May 21.
During interrogations, Rahul told the police that he hated Sonia Gandhi and so posted the message but had no idea that it would land him in jail.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Microsoft considers fresh Yahoo deal
Microsoft is set to challenge Google again. Microsoft Corp. said that it has made a new, downsized offer to cooperate with Yahoo while leaving the door open to a merger down the road.
Details of the proposal were vague. But the offer raises the possibility of everything from buying a part of Yahoo to an advertising partnership in which Microsoft would place its ads on Yahoo.
Another potential is a joint venture in search, an area where the two companies have lagged far behind industry dominator Google Inc.
The announcement comes on the heels of Yahoo shareholder and billionaire investor Carl Icahn launching a proxy fight to wrest control of the Yahoo board at the upcoming July three annual shareholders meeting.
Microsoft withdrew its unsolicited USD 33-a-share buyout bid on May three, after the two sides failed to agree on a price.
Icahn has called the Yahoo board's decision to reject Microsoft offer as irrational and wants to force Yahoo to return to the bargaining table with Microsoft.
Monday, May 5, 2008
BBC exposes facebook security flaw
The BBC's technology programme Click has exposed a security flaw in the social networking site Facebook which could compromise privacy. It has been found that applications can be created to mine data from Facebook users.
Watch Video
Report
Friday, April 25, 2008
Ubuntu 8.04 - Who needs Windows?
Ubuntu has released the latest version of its Linux operating system, nicknamed "Hardy Heron." The new release includes Long Term Support, which lasts for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.
Ubuntu LTS releases come out every two years. The last Ubuntu LTS, Dapper Drake (6.06.2), came out in May 2006, and has one more year of support left. The previous version, Gutsy Gibbon, or Ubuntu 7.10, was released in October 2007 but wasn't LTS.
With the release, Ubuntu and its commercial sponsor Canonical aim to dispel the myth that there isn't a market for the Linux desktop and that it can compete against Microsoft. The Ubuntu 8.04 release also aims to make it easier for users to try out Linux.
"The key areas of focus for 8.04 are stability and also ease of installation and a focus on removing barriers to testing the platform," Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said on a conference call with reporters and analysts.
One such barrier will be removed with a new technology called "Wubi," which is a Windows based installer for Ubuntu. Creating a dual-boot machine is fairly common, with Windows on one partition and Linux on the other, but it can be a daunting task to anyone not comfortable with disk partitioning or unwilling to lose existing files. With Wubi, there is no partitioning of the disk drive, so Ubuntu can be installed on to an existing Windows machine without losing any data. If the user or admin decides against Ubuntu, it can easily be uninstalled using the Add/Remove Programs option in Control Panels.
Ubuntu 8.04 comes with several new applications, such as the Transmission BitTorrent client, a new CD burning program (Brasero), the Cheese webcam application, a new version of Xorg (which offers improved auto-configuration options for monitor set up) and the PolicyKit (an interface which enables users to more easily allow or deny access to applications).
Ubuntu 8.04 also comes with a photo managing application, F-Spot, as well as music sharing features, a movie player with YouTube browsing capabilities, a clock and a calendar. GNOME applications provide desktop visual effects.
Corporate and individual users get security updates and maintenance for three years due to the longer upgrade planning cycle for Ubuntu 8.04. Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, due in October this year, will be an appealing option for users needing the latest applications. Those who need longer deployment cycles can continue with Ubuntu 8.04 for 3 years and then move on to the next LTS release. Adobe, Google, Real Networks, Nero, Skype, Corel, Parallels, Fluendo are among the more than 30 commercial independent software vendors who plan to distribute their applications on the 8.04 LTS desktop platform.
A new version, Ubuntu 8.10 (codenamed Intrepid Ibex), is just around the corner; it is scheduled to be released sometime in October.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Security risks in Firefox, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word and Eee PC
Firefox: Version 2.0.0.11 of the browser has numerous security loopholes. These include a data leak that allows attackers to read user's surfing history and a buffer overflow that could allow dangerous code to be executed.
Solution: Version 2.0.0.12 was released to patch these holes. Update your browser immediately.
Adobe reader: Since January, pdf files that infect victims with a trojan using a security loophole have been circulating around the internet.
Solution: Click on 'Help-Search for updates..' to patch the program.
Microsoft Word: Hackers could target Word 2000-2007 because of a security hole in a common database component. This doesn't apply to Vista users.
Solution: For now, it remains unpatched. Be wary of random executable email attachments.
Eee PC: The cheap and compact Eee PC from Asus has a few security loopholes, including vulnerabilities in the Samba network service for Windows. The errors in the customised Xandros Linux OS were discovered more than a year ago.
Solution: So far, Asus has not issued any updates.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sharp Willcom D4 - World's first Intel Atom mobile internet device
Japanese tech company Sharp has collaborated with Willcom to develop their Sharp Willcom D4 device.
The company said that this would be the first product to be powered with the recently launched Intel Atom processor.
Measuring 190×84x25.9mm, the Mobile Internet Device Willcom D4 weighs just 470 grams.
The world’s first mobile Internet device comes packed with fantastic features that include 1.33GHz Intel Atom Processor, a 5- inch TFT screen with 262k color LED-blacklit, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, QWERTY keyboard and a 2 mega pixels camera.
Besides, the new Willcom D4 also features a micro-SD card slot and WANSEGU Digital TV Tuner. Users can tilt or slide the screen as and when required.
The new mobile internet device works on Windows Vista Home Premium. Moreover, it boasts connectivity options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Priced at ¥128,600, ‘Sharp Willcom D4’ will hit Japanese market by June 2008.
Youtube grabs 73% of video market.
Hitwise reports that YouTube and Google video combined grab over 77 percent of US video visits. In March, YouTube snagged 73.18 percent of US visits, a 32 percent increase over March 2007. Despite decreasing by 52 percent, Google Video maintained third place at 4.06 percent, compared to 8.42 percent last year.
MySpaceTV, Yahoo Video, Break.com, MetaCafe and DailyMotion all bled a few visitors over the past year in a market that declined by seven percent in general. MySpaceTV fell 48 percent from March of last year to grab just 9.21 percent of the online video audience.
Yahoo Video and Break.com are virtually neck and neck in the race, jockeying for 2.16 percent and 1.82 percent respectively. The rest of the top ten are lucky to grab one percent, with Blinkx rounding out the bottom with 0.58 percent.
Though YouTube and Google prove their dominance, the numbers show both how fragile the online video market is and how wide open it is to newcomers. NBC and Fox's joint venture, Hulu, appeared on the list at number 22, just exiting beta on March 15. In two weeks, Hulu grabbed 0.22 percent of the market.
"As online video becomes more mainstream with internet users, the share of referred traffic from the younger audiences of social networks is declining, shifting instead toward search," said Heather Dougherty, Hitwise's director of research.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Chinese hackers target Indian Government website
The MEA (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India) computer systems have become the target of hackers from China on Friday. Official sources said that the hackers, who penetrated the computer systems of the MEA, are suspected to be from China because their IP addresses have been traced to China. The sources expressed confidence that no sensitive material was acquired by the hackers who penetrated the system last month.
What were the hackers looking for? Were the hackers trying to sniff into the Tibet policy related data in the MEA servers? On the same day unknown hackers blocked access to the official website of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, www.tibet.net Read here
The government of India did not rule out recurrence of such incidents in the future and stressed the need for more caution.
In fact last year the Chinese government itself was accused of hacking into the highly sensitive system of the Pentagon in the US. The Chinese government denied that it was behind the attack and said that Beijing was against cybercrime. The hackers had penetrated the computer system in the office of defence secretary Robert Gates in June last year. Official sources added that this was not the first time hackers have targeted the MEA’s computer systems and that there have been numerous attacks from hackers in Europe. They added that hackers have been trying to penetrate the system for the last 5 years.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Tibetan website hacked
Unknown hackers on Friday blocked access to the official website of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, Tibetan officials said.
The website, www.tibet.net, offered "blank" as a message or drew Internet surfers to other Tibet-related sites through the Google search engine.
The hacked website, constructed four years ago, had been carrying a flurry of anti-Chinese statements since March 10, when Beijing ordered a crackdown on riots which erupted in the Tibetan capital Lhasa. Tibet.net had also carried several statements of the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and had turned into a vehicle of support for the exiles to crank up their opposition to the Beijing Olympics Games in August. A spokesman for the Dalai Lama said he was aware of the hacking, which came a day after Indian newspapers reported an attack on computer servers of India's diplomatic mission in Beijing.
A spokesman for the Dalai Lama said he was aware of the hacking, which came a day after Indian newspapers reported an attack on computer servers of India’s diplomatic mission in Beijing.“We are not surprised as this had happened a couple of years ago,” said Tenzin Takla, the Dalai Lama’s spokesman by telephone from the Indian town of Dharamshala.Tibetan exiles said they did not know who had hacked into the website but said they suspected it could be the Chinese.“Who else could it be but China that destroyed our website?” said Tibetan student Dolma.
Source: AFP
Threat to Israel's National Security - Facebook
Israeli defence chiefs have put curbs on social networking sites such as facebook after the officials discovered some soldiers had uploaded pictures of themselves with classified equipment, inadvertently revealing sensitive information. A review of Facebook pages belonging to Israeli troops found that some had posted detailed pictures of air bases, operations rooms and inside submarines.
A new list of rules announced Thursday aims to prevent soldiers and Defense Ministry employees from revealing classified information on social networking sites.
The new set of rules - which have not been made public and some of which existed previously - include a ban on images of pilots and members of special units, and anything that shows specific military manoeuvres.
Media reports - BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7343238.stm
Fox News - http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,350329,00.html
Thursday, April 10, 2008
21 Spectacular websites on the internet
Here is a list of 21 best-designed websites on the net.
1) Lightbox 
3) By Hook
4) Lois Jeans
5) Proxonic Visuals
6) Supersteil
7) Erik
8) Un.titled
9) Persepolis
10) Pink Floyd
11) Nalden
12) Commonwealth of cultures - Poland
13) Virtual Murder
14) Parent design
15) Vermeersch
16) Design and the Elastic Mind
17) Color Chart
18) Converse
20) Minuit
21) Maniack
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Internet 10,000 times faster than broadband
"The Grid", the superfast internet is on its way. The lightning-fast grid will be capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, the grid will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spinoff from CERN, the particle physics centre that created the Web, could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players, and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
CERN has built Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed. It took almost 15 years and $8 billion to construct for CERN. The LHC is located in a 27-km circular tunnel 100 metres below ground level outside Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border.
The project will recreate what happens in nature all the time by sending protons crashing into each other. The main difference is that this time there are powerful detectors set up to monitor what exactly happens.
Cern, which is based near Geneva, in Switzerland started working on the Grid seven years ago, when researchers realised the LHC would generate data equivalent to 56 million CDs each year – if they were stacked one on top of another, the pile would be 40 miles high.
Cern was where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989. But it is not powerful enough to handle this much data – if it was used, the entire Internet could crash worldwide. That’s because the Internet is linked by cables and routing equipment that was originally designed for telephone calls. It lacks the capacity for massive high-speed data transmission. But the Grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres. There are no outdated components to slow the data. Over 55,000 servers have already been installed to store the data, and this network will expand to 200,000 within two years.
Technical Director of the Grid project Prof Tony Doyle says: “We need so much processing power, there wouldn’t be enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern.” So the new network has to be powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries. This parallel Internet is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world. From each centre, further connections radiate out to research institutions, using existing high-speed academic networks. Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the Grid system – in theory, any student in these chosen institutions should be able to hook up to the Grid rather than the Internet by the end of this year. Grid project leader Ian Bird says grid technology could make the Internet so fast that people could stop using desktop computers to store information and keep it all on the Grid. “It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
But the real goal of the Grid is to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, it is supposed to be what gives matter mass. But even at optimum performance, The LHC will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data is such a huge task that it will keep the Grid’s gargantuan capacity busy for years to come. The bad news is that the Grid itself is unlikely to be available to domestic Internet users, but the good news is that many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of them, dynamic switching, creates a dedicated channel for Internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory, a standard desktop computer could download a movie in five seconds using this technology, rather than the three hours or so it takes today.
But the Grid will be made available to academic researchers, including astronomers and molecular biologists. Cern scientists claim it has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria. Researchers used the Grid to analyse 140 million compounds, a task that would have taken a standard Internet-linked computer 420 years. Projects like the Grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science, experts say. The history of the Internet shows one cannot predict its real impacts, but they are bound to be huge.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
18 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS
1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.
2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.
3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.
4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.
5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.
6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.
7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.
8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.
9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.
10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.
11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!
12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.
13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.
14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing - Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.
15. Ensure you Language is Supported - Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.
16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page - With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral.
17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. - Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.
18. Do not confuse with adjacent images - It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!
I got this from http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=746977 and http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/05/15-common-mistakes-by-google-adsense-publishers/
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Google's April Fool 2008
** Google announces technology that searches tomorrow's web, today. Google Australia today announced the launch of gDay™, a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.
View
http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/press.html
** Google announces a joint project with the Virgin Group that aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. This operation has been named Project Virgle. It also includes videos of Richard Branson as well as Larry Page & Sergey Brin (The Founders of Google) on YouTube , talking about Virgle.
View
http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
** Google launches Dajare in Japan (google.co.jp), with the mission of "organizing the world’s laughter." Dajare, as Wikipedia explains, is a kind of comical Japanese wordplay, “similar in spirit to an English pun relying on similarities in the pronunciation of words to create a simple joke.”
** Google also introduced a new feature called "Gmail Custom Time". Google claimed a new Gmail feature had been added that would allow people to date stamp their emails in the past, allowing for all sorts of mischief. Users would be limited to 10 Custom Times a year to minimize the number of fraudulent emails. Clicking any of the three links at the bottom of the page brought the user to a page indicating that Gmail Custom time was, in fact, their April Fools prank for 2008.
** Google Book Search has a new feature: capturing a book's smell. Inside Google Book Search Blog - "I'm pleased to let you know that we've made some headway with one type of volume we've struggled with in the past: books employing scratch-and-sniff technology. Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we're now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search."
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Why Google has to innovate?
I'm quite a fan of google and we all know how google innovates by releasing one brilliant product after the other. Why is it that google has to innovate?
In fact innovation is the only way to survive for google. Tell me, how long does it take you to stop using google and switch to another search engine? Less than ten seconds?
But it is quiet hard to switch from a microsoft product to an alternate product as it runs on your hardware and there are so many things involved in switching. So google has to keep you there. Build its brand value because most part of google's revenue comes from that 50 cents or so they make when you click on those ads which gets displayed along with the search results. So google gives you one product after the other. gmail, picasa, orkut, blogger, google docs and what not. Unlike microsoft's products, google's products run on the web and does not run on hardware. And almost all services are free and some of them can substitute microsoft products. So as more people use the products, google spreads its tentacles even more.
Friday, March 28, 2008
URL Canonicalization
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When a search engine “canonicalizes” a url, it tries to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
Read more from Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Frank McCown on url canonicalization http://frankmccown.blogspot.com/2006/04/url-canonicalization.html
Friday, March 14, 2008
Simon's Cat in 'Let me in'
A hungry cat resorts to increasingly desperate measures to get indoors. Watch!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
MacBook Air is World's Thinnest Laptop.
The Apple MacBook Air is the world's thinnest notebook computer. It has about the width of a pencil at its narrowest point. The $2366 MacBook Air is just 2 cm deep, thin enough to fit inside an envelope. MacBook has a memory of 2GB with hard drive of 80GB and a battery life of about 5 hours.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Food Fight. Watch!
An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch on Youtube.
For a breakdown of foodstuffs go to http://homepage.mac.com/stefannadelman/foodfight/cheat.htm
For a breakdown of the battles portrayed in the film, go to http://homepage.mac.com/stefannadelman/foodfight/index.htm
Friday, March 7, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
What is the meaning of life?
As Albert Camus states in 'Myth of Sisyphus' there is just one philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the most fundamental question of philosophy. All other concerns are merely games to pass the time.
Lemme try to bravely confront the question. No, don't talk god and religion and salvation to me. A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world, Camus says. In a universe suddenly divested of lights and illusions, man feels an alien, a stranger.
So, do I have a path to proceed, rationally and logically, following the path of reason and not that of belief?
So, what is happening now?
Billions of neurons are firing in my brain and I am able to feel what I am feeling and think what I am thinking. My self-knowledge is shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamic-limbic system of the brain. These centers flood my consciousness with all the emotions. What made the hypothalamic and limbic systems? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement is the key to all answers.
I pity Camus. Truth is more worse than he comprehended. The hypothalamic-limbic system automatically denies logical reductions to suicide in most of us by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. We are machines made to survive.
In evolutionary time, the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms, it reproduces genes and it serves as their temporary carrier. Each organism generated by sexual reproduction is a unique accidental subset of all the genes constituting the species.
E.O. Wilson in 'Sociobiology - a new synthesis' elaborates - Natural Selection is the process whereby certain genes gain representation in the following generations superior to that of other genes at the same chromosome positions. In the process of natural selection, then any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species. One class of such devices promotes prolonged individual survival. Another promotes superior mating performance and care of resulting offspring. As more complex social behaviour by the organism is added to the genes' techniques of replicating themselves, altruism becomes increasingly prevalent and appears in exaggerated forms.
