AltaVista offers superb audio and video searches, If you want to find people or find out what people are talking about, Lycos makes sense, If you want to customize and save your search results, A9’s your engine (but cozy relationship with Alexa raises privacy concerns). For everything else, use Google.
CNet has a nice comparison of search engines - They took a fresh look at Google, Yahoo, and seven of their closest competitors, focusing on their interfaces, features, and functionality. While Google and Yahoo still trump their rivals in terms of overall search, we found that almost every player in our competition brought something unique to the table. For example, AOL Search offers real-time search suggestions while you type in your query; Ask Jeeves offers a cool thumbnail preview of Web pages on its search results; and LookSmart has a unique periodical search feature, plus a one-of-a-kind page archiving tool.
Search engine alternatives such as A9, AltaVista, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, LookSmart, Lycos, and MSN Search are launching innovative tools and services to catch up with the two Web searching giants. The search engine comparison report can be viewed in a matrix style - As expected, Yahoo! and Google top the charts but A9 from Amazon is fast catching up.
Google wins because of the intuitive interface; excellent image searches; best-of-class local searches, producing maps with satellite imagery; cached pages and related links; sponsored links clearly separated out into the right-hand column; desktop search tool; downloadable toolbar. Businesses can use search engines to better understand their competition in the marketplace.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
There is life beyond Google
Monday, May 30, 2005
Track your spouse 24 hours a day
Those readers who suspect that their other half may be playing away from home, or that their teenage daughter is currently getting down and dirty with some spotty ne’er-do-well are pointed in the direction of the ultimate errant female tracking device: the truly sensational forget-me-not panties with sensatech technology.
These “panties” can trace the exact location of your woman and send the information, via satellite, to your cell phone, PDA, and PC simultaneously! Use our patented mapping system, pantyMap®, to find the exact location of your loved one 24 hours a day. The technology is embedded into a piece of fabric so seamlessly she will never know it’s there!
Rather than become an over-protective parent , I decided to try forget-me-not panties™.
They work wonderfully. My wife and I bought our Sarah several pairs so we can watch her around the clock, and if we see her temperature rising too high, we intervene by calling her cellphone or just picking her up wherever she is. My only comment is it would be great to have a video camera, maybe you can work that into V.2. [Via]
Sony has a new idea to stop piracy
ABC reports: Sony tests anti-CD burning technology.
As part of its mounting United States rollout of content-enhanced and copy-protected CDs, Sony BMG is testing technology that bars consumers from making additional copies of burned CD-R discs.
Since March the company has released at least 10 commercial titles - more than 1 million discs in total, featuring technology from UK anti-piracy specialist First4Internet that allows consumers to make limited copies of protected discs, but blocks users from making copies of the copies. The concept is known as “sterile burning” and, in the eyes of Sony BMG executives, the initiative is central to the industry’s efforts to curb casual CD burning. “Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs, which is why making the CD a secure format is of the utmost importance.”
Early copy-protected discs as well as all Digital Rights Management (DRM)-protected files sold through online retailers like iTunes, Napster and others offer burning of tracks into unprotected WAV files. Those burned CDs can then be ripped back onto a personal computer minus a DRM wrapper and converted into MP3 files.
Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.
How Google News works
Joi writes about a presentation by Krishna Bharat titled: Inside Google News where Bharat explained how Google News works. [Dan Gillmor pressed Krishna for more transparency on the algorithm and the list of sources.]
Google News basically crawls news sites, finds “story clusters”, ranks the sources, figures out how prominently each source is running the story, figures out whether its a big story or a little story, figures out geographic references, and builds the pages for the various geographic and language editions. He was talking to an audience of editors so there were many questions about how the “editing” process worked and many people couldn’t seem to believe it was algorithmic. Some people seemed afraid that Google News would replace them. The point that he made and was clear from the process that he explained is that it uses the decisions that the editors of the various media make about what story to run and where in deciding how important a story was. It was basically aggregating the decisions of the editors, not replacing them. Without the editors and the “front page process" Google News couldn’t decide what story to lead with. At least in its current form.
The derivative conclusion you can come to is that Google News is just amplifying or reinforcing systemic biases in MSM editorial and NOT helping to address these issues. I think this make Google News very news media friendly and also provides an opportunity for bloggers and projects like Global Voices to still have a very important role. I guess that if Google New started incorporating more of the alternative press, they could shift the bias.
Exploring the Hidden Web
Google, one of the most popular search engines, at best can index and search about 4 billion to 5 billion Web pages, representing only 1 percent of the World Wide Web.
But officials from Connotate Technologies, said they have developed technology that can mine and extract data from the Deep Web, which contains an estimated 500 billion Web pages, and deliver it in any format and through any delivery mechanism. The Deep Web refers to content in databases that rarely shows up in Web searches.
Through the use of intelligence-based software modules called information agents, corporate and government organizations can quickly and easily target specific unstructured data from intranets and password-protected Web sites on a continual basis.
Molloy said information agents can go to complex Web sites and databases, extract information — such as dates, names or contract identification numbers — and automatically deliver that data in any format. Pricing starts at a little more than $100,000. [Going where no search engine has gone before]
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Inside Bill Gates House - Pictures of Bill Gates Home
The Bill Gates family lives in the exclusive suburb of Medina, Washington, in a huge earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington.
Billionaire Bill Gates home is a very modern 21st century house in the “Pacific lodge” style, with advanced electronic systems everywhere. In one respect though it is more like an 18th or 19th century mansion: it has a large private library with a domed reading room. While it does have a classic flavour, the home has many unique qualities.
Lights would automatically come on when you came home. Speakers would be hidden beneath the wallpaper to allow music to follow you from room to room. Portable touch pads would control everything from the TV sets to the temperature and the lights, which would brighten or dim to fit the occasion or to match the outdoor light.
Photographs - Bill Gates House
Visitors to Bill Gates House are surveyed and given a microchip upon entrance. This small chip sends signals throughout the house, and a given room’s temperature and other conditions will change according to preset user preferences. According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million.
According to the National Association of Home Builders, the median American house size is slightly more than 2,000 square feet. Microsoft founder William Gates III house is more than 30 times that size.
Bill Gates Mansion satellite view from Google Maps
Bill Gates House Aerial view from MSN Virtual Earth
There has been lot of speculation that the home of Bill Gates on Lake Washington was designed on a Macintosh. Pictures of the Gates’ complex are both private and copyrighted, so in order to see what this place really looks like you need to go to BCJ’s website. Following the “residential menu” click on the forward arrow key at the bottom of the pictures to advance to the house entitled, “Guest House and Garage, Medina, Washington”.
USNews.com provides an interactive tour of Bill Gates home that covers the Pool building, Exercise facilites, Library, Theater, Formal dining room. Microsoft’s own Seattle Sidewalk site has a birds-eye view of the project under construction. (Medina Washington project)
It took seven years to build the 40,000-square-foot Bill Gates mansion on a wooded five-acre compound in the moneyed Seattle suburb of Medina. [Bill Gates House Address: 1835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA 98039 map - arial photo] Much of the Bill Gates house is built underground into the hill, so the house looks smaller than it actually is. Unfortunately the hidden section underground did not escape the taxman’s view; Bill paid over a million dollars last year on property taxes.
Earlier, Bill Gates organized a private party at his waterfront mansion. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a “temporary security zone” around Gates’ Lake Washington home which locked down all of Lake Washington south of the Highway 520 bridge and stayed in effect for two days. Gates’ homestead is approximately 48,000 square feet with a garage that reportedly accommodates 30 cars.
The architects who designed Bill Gates’ famous residential compound in Washington were James Cutler Architects and the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ).
Inside Bill Gates’ Garage, you’ll find a 1999 Porsche 911 Convertible and 1988 Porsche 959 Coupe. Steven Ballmer drives a 1998 Lincoln Continental. In fact, due to the 959’s questionable emissions and unknown crash ratings, it took a federal law signed by President Clinton for Bill Gates to legally drive his 959 on American roads.
Read this interview with James Cutler, FAIA, the best-known architect of Northwest Style and the designer of the Bill and Melinda Gates residence on Lake Washington near Seattle. Firm: Anderson Cutler Architects (formerly James Cutler Architects), on Bainbridge Island, off the Seattle coast.
Microsoft Office Tips and Tricks
We probably use office programs - word processors, spreadsheets, email and presentation applications - more than any other kind of software on our computers. Of this kind of software, Microsoft’s Office suite is the most popular.
It can, however, be hard to get to grips with all the time-saving features; all those menus, toolbars and buttons can seem overwhelming at times, particularly if you are just starting out.
Once you delve a little deeper and discover Office’s hidden shortcuts and tricks, however, you can make your software work a lot harder for you and make your life easier in the process.
My favourite MS Word trick is Scraps - You can create ‘scraps’ in Word, which are small blocks of text from a document. Highlight some text in an open document and drag it to the Desktop, and you will see it appear as a document scrap. You can arrange and rename your scraps on the Desktop, and simply drop them back into Word documents as you need them. The scraps can be pasted into most other applications too.
MS Word and MS Excel Tricks
Did Google visit your website today?
Since this blog is hosted on Blogger, I do not have any access to their webserver logs and the only way to find out if Google visited my site is check the date on Google Cache.
But looks like there exists a better way of doing things - I just came across an undocumented but very powerful syntax called “daterange” - Google did mention it in the API documentation but very few know about it.
Remember: A date-range search has nothing to do with the creation date of the content and everything to do with the indexing date of the content. And this is exactly what I was looking for.
If you want to limit your results to documents that were published within a specific date range, then you can use the “daterange:” query term to accomplish this. The “daterange:” query term must be in the following format: daterange:
where
The catch is that the date must be expressed as a Julian date that is calculated by the number of days since January 1, 4713 BC.
For example, the Julian date for August 1, 2001 is 2452122. You can use this online tool to Convert calendar date to Julian DateThis simple form allows you to do a date range search using google. Rather than constructing fancy queries such as ” life daterange:2453461-2453491”, simply put in the # of days back. e.g. if you want to do a search for life in the past 20 days, type in life in the query box and 20 in the days back box.
I used the query below to find the pages on my site that were indexed by Google a day before.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://labnol.blogspot.com%20daterange:2453517-2453518
The number of results retrieved are actually the number of files that were indexed by Google yesterday.
And don’t forget that there are a few simple things you can do to help the Googlebot understand your web site as fully as possible. Read this great article at Scribbling.net.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Read this page before Microsoft sues you
Microsoft has listed all its Trademarks here.
According to MS, the absence of a name or logo in this list does not constitute a waiver of any and all intellectual property rights that Microsoft Corporation has established in any of its product, feature, or service names or logos.
The name Microsoft is synonymous with high-quality computer software and hardware products and services. Microsoft trademarks are extremely valuable because they represent the standards of excellence and consistent quality associated with Microsoft. This page contains detailed information about how to reference Microsoft trademarks in different scenarios. Read General Microsoft Trademark Guidelines.
After reading the guidelines, I found one mistake which almost all of do all the time. See the example below.
Set Microsoft Trademarks Apart From Other Words or Nouns They Modify
The common way to do this is to capitalize the product name and use the appropriate trademark symbol and appropriate descriptor. You may also underline, italicize, or bold the name.
Correct: After you install the Windows® operating system…
Incorrect: After installing Windows programs you can…
Then there is a Microsoft logo guidlines page .
Download your favourite Programming Fonts
Every font you will find here was created by a programmer and is free.
Proggy Programming Fonts is the home of the Proggy programmer’s fonts (Proggy Clean, Proggy Square, Proggy Small, and Proggy Tiny) as well as a number of contributed programming fonts (Crisp, Speedy, CodingFontTobi1, and Opti). It is also the home of two other proportional bitmap fonts for use on web pages (Webby Caps and Webby Small).
Each font only comes in one size that it looks good at. The ttf fonts should also be used at their intended point size as they are basically conversions of the pixel based bitmap versions. The fonts were optimized while coding in C or C++… for this reason, characters like the ‘*’ were placed vertically centered, as ‘*’ usually means dereference or multiply, but never ‘to the power of’ like in Fortran.
The {}s are centered horizontally (as my coding style aligns braces vertically), the zero looks different from the capital oh, and there is never any confusion between ells, ones, and eyes.
Additionally, the arithmetic operators (+ - * ) are all axis aligned… unlike the last ones you just saw.
Try software for 7 days - either buy it or delete it
Jeff writes about his passion for trying out new software. He says: I love to try out new software all the time, in fact its sort of an obsession. I’m always on the prowl for cool new applications. After seven days of use though if I’m not totally blowon away or if its not improving my PC life, its straight to add/remove programs I go.
What will make a piece of software get registered vs. uninstalled?
1. Does it play well with my other applications or does it clobber my other applications?
2. Does it have a weird user interface or is the experience sleek?
3. Is the data easily available to all of my machines or do I have to perform registry judo to get the data to another desktop?
4. Does it improve my PC experience, make me more productivity or do I have fun with it?
5. Have I completely forgotten about the application after seven days?
Edd adds: Actually, I have a similar rule. I will not install a new program when I first hear about it, no matter how tempting it sounds. Instead, I wait at least two weeks, and during that time I check the software out. Any known problems? Any unfortunate interactions with other programs? Only after I satisfy myself that the program is safe and reliable do I allow myself to install it. You’d be amazed how many programs that sound irresistible at first turn out to be completely, um, resistible.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Secure Windows login with typing a password
Palcott Software have just released Natural Login Pro that offers secure Windows login without the need to type your password every time. It works by storing your password on a USB key, which automatically identifies you and can log you in automatically. To log-off, you can simply remove the USB key and the computer will be locked. The program supports multiple users, and can also store multiple account logins on a single USB key. In addition, Natural Login Pro offers an emergency login that can be used if you forgot or lost your USB key.
With Auto-Login, a user can be automatically logged in to their computer as they insert the device into the USB port. Natural Login Pro recognizes the user, determines their access privileges, and connects them to the appropriate account on the computer. The result is powerful hardware-based security melded with convenient access. In addition, unlike other security schemes that require users to carry around hardware tokens made specifically for access-control, with Natural Login Pro the user gets all of the advantages of a hardware token without the need for a dedicated device.
The Battle for Bloggers
As big-footed competitors like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft enter the blogosphere, Juan Carlos ponders whether the changes they are bringing will be benefitial or detrimental to the [blogging] market.
MSN Spaces was topped only by blogging stalwarts. Google’s Blogger and its accompanying Blogspot hosting site together drew 12.63 million unique visitors in April, followed by Six Apart’s Typepad and LiveJournal services, which together rang up 11.47 million, and by Xanga.com with 8.26 million.
Introduced in beta form just last December, MSN Spaces now hosts over 10 million blogs, an eye-popping adoption rate that has blown past internal Microsoft expectations. In April, when MSN Spaces exited its beta period, it was already among the most popular blogging sites in the U.S. based on stats indicating 2.87 million unique visitors that month, according to market researcher comScore Networks. Microsoft is tapping mostly people who haven’t blogged before, and specifically among the ranks of MSN Messenger users
In March, Yahoo introduced in limited beta a service called Yahoo 360 whose concept and design are similar to MSN Spaces. This service comes as no surprise, because Yahoo, like Microsoft’s MSN, has a wide variety of online services with which to surround its blogging service. As two leading Web portals, MSN and Yahoo have an amount and variety of online services under one roof that few others can rival, and blogging is something they’re weaving into their overall fabric.
This clashes with the philosophy of most original blogging services, including Blogger, which Google acquired in 2003 after Blogger had become popular. Services such as Blogger offer basic blogging functionality but also tend to be open, flexible platforms that tech-savvy users can extend, build upon, and integrate with third-party services. Howerver, Blogger to date has no native way for users to control access to their blogs, nor does it feature native image uploading, two capabilities core to MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360.
What's missing in MSN Search Toolbar
Paul Thurrott does an extensive review of MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search and says that is the best desktop search tool available to Windows users, and a must-have addition to any XP user’s desktop. It’s fast, free, and functional, and offers virtually every feature you’ll ever need. And thanks to its open architecture, companies can create custom iFilter extensions that let WDS index any file type. This will prove hugely important for corporations that have created proprietary file types, but it also means that WDS can be instantly updated should some popular new document type hit the Web tomorrow.
No software is perfect and the missing features that Paul mentions are also an extension to my previous post MSN - You could not win my heart :
WDS finds documents (and email), and not “files.” The distinction is important. If you want to find every document you’ve written that includes the text “MSN,” WDS is a great tool. If you want to find files like msn.dll, WDS can’t help you. That’s by design, of course. But sometimes you need to find files.
WDS is incapable of winnowing down results beyond its stock document type filtering (documents, email, music, etc.). Let’s say you perform a search that retrieves hundreds of results and would like to narrow the search from there. WDS doesn’t offer a way to query only the existing results.
WDS also lacks some high-end features, like the ability to save dynamic search results in a special folder, as Apple does with Spotlight’s Smart Folder feature.
WDS doesn’t offer a way to open up a discrete location in the file system and launch a search of just that location (and, optionally, all of the folders logically found under that location).
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Why are Bull and Bear symbols of the stock market?
For those who don’t spend a lot of time on Wall Street, bulls and bears refer to opposite trends in the stock market. According to Investor Words, a bull market is “a prolonged period in which investment prices rise faster than their historical average.” Conversely, a bear market means “a prolonged period in which investment prices fall, accompanied by widespread pessimism.” So, bulls good, bears bad…
No one’s quite sure how the two animals came to symbolize the market, but there are a few theories floating around. According to Motley Fool, a bear market earned its name because bears tend to swat at things with their paws in a downward motion (as in “the market’s going down”). A bull market, on the other hand, got its name because bulls swing their horns upward when they strike (as in “the market’s going up”).
Another theory proposes that the animals’ personalities are behind the symbolism. Bears move with caution, while bulls are bold and like to charge ahead. So a “bearish” investor thinks the market will go down, while a “bullish” investor thinks it’s headed up.
Certainly no one can argue that both animals are intimidating and best avoided. Maybe they’re meant to serve as a warning to investors: Unless you know what you’re doing, you could be headed for pain. [Via]
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Simplifying the complex amazon.com image URLs
Nat Gertler has done a complete investigation of the Amazon.COM URLs which are really difficult to understand. According to Nat, the details of size and format are built into the image’s URL. What that means that, if you want, you can create URLs that generate odd and unlikely Amazon images. The proper combination of product choice and added elements and effects could create an interesting visual.
The foreign Amazon sites all seem to use the same method; the only difference is that instead of starting with the http://images.amazon.com/ domain, the amazon.jp images start with http://images-jp.amazon.com/ while the amazon.co.uk and amazon.de images start with http://images-eu.amazon.com/ - Amazon.ca uses the same domain as Amazon.com.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0762423374.01._PE20_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ - doesn’t vary. That points to the right place on the Amazon servers.
0762423374 is the ASIN, the identifier that Amazon uses for every item it stocks.
01 is an odd duck of a field. It selects the image and the format of the percentage off bullet.
_PE20_SCMZZZZZZZ_ gives information on the size of the image and adornments added to the image. I’ve found three formats that this field can have.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Images in Google Adsense Text Only Ads
Jensense reports that icons, better known as 16 by 16 pixel favicons, have been spotted in AdSense wide skyscraper ad units (160x600). Register.com, eBay.com and Amazon.com are among those advertisers whose favicons are being shown.
This could have a negative impact on the earnings of Google Adsense publishers. A text link with an image on the left would attract more attention of the visitor and is more likely to be clicked than the one without an image. And premium advertisors might be paying less per click. So your Google.com Adsense CTR may go up but the EPC may fall. 
DigitalPoint members have seen favicon icons even in LeaderBoard style. See some screenshots of Google Adsense ads embedded with icons here or here
Try the free Favicon Generator - Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size, resolution) for the “Source Image” and click “Generate FavIcon.ico”
Bloglines developing a blog search engine
In an interview, Mark Fletcher, the CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub. “The challenge,” he says, “is to create world-class blog search, which we don’t think exists now.”
Bloglines is one of the most popular online news aggregator but faces strong competition from emerging players like Pluck, Newsgator, Microsoft’s Start.com and even Findory which learns from the articles you read and surfaces other interesting weblog posts and news articles.
Bloglines has one big advantage - It has a huge subscriber base, they know what blogs are popular and what posts are most frequently viewed or emailed. This could be potentially a very big parameter in ranking blogs. We can also see a site search box from bloglines similar to Technorati Searchlet.
But how does Bloglines expect to make money ? Jack Krupansky has an interesting point - Google is now beta-testing AdSense ads that eventually I can put into my blogs and that users of Bloglines (and other aggregators) will then see. That will let me make a little money, but where’s Bloglines going to monetize their infrastructure and services?
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
FlashPaper to become a feature in Acrobat
Macromedia FlashPaper allows easy creation of both PDFs and Flash documents - SWF files that are interchangeable with PDFs for most Web purposes. Look for Adobe to rapidly make FlashPaper go away as a standalone product, replaced by new functionality in Acrobat: the ability to save documents as SWF files.
This is predicted in a report by the Forrester research group on the future of Flash after the Adobe-Macromedia merger Adobe’s PDF standard is already facing the heat from Microsoft’s Metro which is being called by some as a potential “Adobe Killer”.
Flash Player will keep its sacred status. Adobe knows that this is the crown jewel that makes all of the Flash-related products so compelling. Flash MX tools slowly transform into part of the “Photoshop family”. Adobe will add support for Flash Video to its video tools namely Premiere Pro and After Effects. Adobe will put the format squarely in focus for Web designers who want to create streaming video.
Download the full report “With Adobe in Charge, What Will Happen to Flash? (PDF, 96K)” here.