Is Google Browser the Greatest Browser?

Why should you use Google Browser?

* You don't need a mouse to use it. Everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts, without dialogs and buttons.

* You don't need extensions for popup blocking, advertising blocking.

* You'll never need printer-friendly versions for a page.

* You won't waste time and bandwidth downloading useless pictures and Flash intros.

* Marissa Mayer uses Pine for business mail - "a simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts". Google Browser can also read your mail.

* You don't need help files. You just need to know:

Use the up and down arrow (cursor) keys to move between links.
To follow the link to the next webpage, press the right arrow (or hit Enter).
To go back a page, use the left arrow.
Use Page Up/Page Down to move between screens.
To visit a new site, type g, then the site address and press enter.
Pressing the foward slash key , ‘ / ‘, allows you to search the current page for a keyword.
Stop page loading pressing z, quit the browser with q.

More about Google Browser and the story of an April Fool's Day news.

New Wireless Technology: Extension Cords

ThinkGeek discovered a very useful tool that helps you get rid of long cords and troublesome cables.

"Now you can put anything in any room you want - even outside. Every once in a while, though, a long cord across the floor can be more dangerous than helpful. Sure you could just put a carpet or tape over the cord, but why bother? Let technology solve its own problems. Grab some Wireless Extension Cords, and leave the wires where they belong - somewhere else!

Just plug the Wireless Extension Cord (WEC) base unit into a standard wall outlet, and plug whatever you need into the satellite unit. The WEC uses microwaves in the 7.2GHz range, so it won't interfere with wireless networks, Bluetooth components, etc."

I wonder, is it dangerous to use this Wireless Extension Cord?

Update:
This is an April Fool's Day joke.

Read about wireless electricity and Tesla coil.

Best Of April Fool's Day

Slashdot turns pink

"Our marketing department has done extensive research over the last 3 quarters and discovered that our audience is strangely disproportionately skewed towards males. Like, 98.3% males to be precise. To correct this oversight, we have decided to subtly tweak Slashdot's design and content to widen our appeal to these less active demographics."


Opera Models

"Opera Models is a groundbreaking new online photo library that aims to offer realistic images of normal people and how they really use technology in their everyday lives. Opera Models was started as an alternative to the polished style of existing photo libraries that reinforce traditional stereotypes of beauty and trendy lifestyles rather than accurate representations of reality."

More April Fool's Day at Wikipedia.

The Real Google Prank: Google Romance

This year's Google prank isn't Google Browser or Google Rooms, nor the launch of Google Calendar, Google MBD, Google Health and not even the public release of Gmail. It's Google Romance.


"Ever been on a date and wondered "What on Earth am I doing with this person?" Or perhaps you wished there was a way that you could instantly find your perfect match, and then go on a date during which everything just went right?

Wish no more: Google Romance, a beta product currently incubating in Google Labs, uses cutting-edge personal search algorithms to help you find your soulmate, then sponsors your first Contextual Date with said soulmate-to-be in exchange for showing you highly relevant advertising that just might help Cupid's arrow find its mark. Does it really work? Ask our internal beta testers -- if you can find them, that is. Not a single one has shown up for work in days." (Google Blog)



"Our internal projections say Contextual Dating is going to be unbelievably huge, just a total cash cow," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in prepared remarks placed into the notes section of an executive PowerPoint presentation and intended solely for internal use but promptly leaked onto the web and then roundly mocked on Digg and Slashdot.

Use Google Romance and "you'll live happily, and contextually, ever after."

Yahoo Buys Web 2.0

Yahoo is tired of buying Web 2.0 companies one at a time. They just want tje whole package.

"We're in the midst of buying Dogg (a Web 2.0 cross between Digg and Dogster "Where Every Dog Has A Webpage"), and you know what? It's a lot of work. Buying up Web 2.0 companies here and there in piecemeal fashion gets old after a while.

It's a lot of work on our Corporate Development team, the Public Relations team, and really isn't that efficient.

So after some long discussions with Tim O'Reilly, Michael Arrington, and other Web 2.0 experts, we've decided to just buy Web 2.0.

All of it. All the people, the round cornered boxes, crazy business ideas, and pastel colors." (Yahoo Search Blog)

So if you want to be a Yahoo company, just create a Web 2.0 startup and you'll automatically be a part of Yahoo's big family.

Read some great tips to create a Web 2.0 site:

"If the name of your app isn't short and catchy, it won't take off. Try recording yourself reading paragraphs from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, then play the audio backwards, slowly, for inspiration.

Make access to the app invite-only, but don't actually invite anyone. Nothing creates more desire for a product than its exclusivity. If no-one has it, everyone will want it. Simple!

Ask an A-list blogger to review your app (linking to your own "review", so that you drive traffic to both your web app and the site that reviews it). While it's unlikely that they'll do so without actually logging in and trying out your app for real, they might change their tune if you offer them some kind of incentive. Send them some Photoshopped screenshots showing tag clouds and images of your app in use, and blame your data centre for the server being down -- the perfect excuse for why they can't login just now. Then promise them 20% of your profit when you sell the app to Yahoo! Negotiate as required -- everyone has their price."

Related:
Yahoo buys a company before its foundation
Google acquires Writely
The best Web 2.0 software of 2005
Just what is Web 2.0?

Google Rooms

Philipp Lenssen has information that Google Rooms is Google April Fool's prank for this year. In fact, Philipp Lenssen is so sure that Google Rooms is this year's hoax that he photoshopped posted some screenshots. Google Rooms shows a map of Larry Page's room with pictures of Playboy magazine, Marissa Mayer as Larry's ex-girlfriend and Star Wars stuff.




Related:
Google Browser launched
Yahoo buys all Web 2.0

Google Browser

Update (September 2008): After two years, Google has released an open source browser. It's called Google Chrome and you can download it from http://www.google.com/chrome. This post has been written for April Fools' Day 2006.

You want a browser that doesn't use all your RAM.
Firefox is a memory hog.

You want a secure browser.
Internet Explorer is not secure.

You want a fast browser.
Opera is fast, but not that fast.

You want a cross-platform browser.
Safari is definitely not cross-platform.

You want a browser that doesn't care about JavaScript.
Netscape cares about JavaScript - they invented JavaScript.

Presenting you Google Browser, a fast, versatile and secure text browser for the Internet. Google Browser is free, already out of beta, and the installer has only 1.68 MB.

Just open it, type g (that's from Google), enter a URL, press enter and visit the web through Google's eyes.

Download Windows version
Download Mac version
Download Linux version
Tutorial

Google mentions that Linux users should compile the downloaded package. Google Browser is the first major Google software released for Linux.

Note: This post was written for the April Fools' Day, so there's no Google Browser. At least not yet.

New Google Talk with Funny Avatars

A new build of Google Talk (1.0.0.91) includes the option to create a simple avatar from an image. The pre-installed pictures are really funny: aliens, Da Vinci, Hitchcock, penguins and rabbits.

You can also change your chat theme, to include contact's avatar.

Another new feature in this build is Gmail counter that tells how many new mails you have, so you don't have to right-click the tray icon.

You can download Google Talk 1.0.0.91 from here (this download is not linked at Google Talk's website).

[Via Google Blogoscoped].

Related:
Google Talk with Video

Gmail Users Need Fingerprint Readers

"We have seen a few cases where users report that their accounts have been deleted, and in each case our investigations have revealed that the accounts were deleted by someone with that account's password. In these cases, we're unfortunately unable to restore accounts," a Google spokeswoman told ZDNet UK.

Many users think that even if someone knows their Gmail password, that person shouldn't be able to delete the Gmail account. But that's absurd: if you log in to Gmail, you can select mails (in a batch of maximum 100) and delete them. That's almost the same thing as deleting the account.

Until the identification systems evolve from username/password to biometrics authentication there will always problems like these. Biometric solutions use unique biological or behavioral characteristics (like fingerprint matching) to verify identification. A growing number of notebook PCs and computer peripherals are coming to market with built-in fingerprint readers, including keyboards, mice, external hard drives, USB flash drives and readers built into PC card and USB plug-in devices. For example, Wireless Intellimouse Explorer from Microsoft has a fingerprint reader that allows you to log on to your PC and your favorite Web sites with your fingerprint.

Read more:
Gmail horror story: Gmail account deleted

What Happens When You Google Google?

If you go to Google, enter [Google] and press "I'm Feeling Lucky" nothing happens. In fact, Google sends you to the first result for [Google], which is, of course, Google.com. Conan O'Brien has a different opinion.

Google Local Shows Ads on Maps

Google launched a feature for businesses that want to target customers based on location. Marketers will be able to place photos and logos inside balloons that pop up on Google maps exactly where the merchants are located.

If you search for "New York books" and "Ralph Lauren New York" on Google Local, you will find some small icons on the map that represent a coffee cup, a shopping bag, a grocery cart, a flower or something related to the business. If you click on the link, you'll see more information about the place, the address, driving directions, the site.

Related:
Google Local ads
Google Local Mobile
Windows Live Local
Google AdWords Blog

Improve Time Management: Overcome Procrastination

Improve your time management routines, following some simple tips. Don't say "I'll read them later".

* start with a written plan of action to avoid getting distracted
* keep your plan simple and straightforward
* start with the one thing you must get done today to feel productive
* should be a manageable item you can complete in 10-15 minutes
* your tasks should match your values or purpose
* bring each task into congruence with your basic mission
* if you can't, take it off of your list
* don't put any "to-do" on your list that takes more than 30 minutes
* if it takes longer, it's actually a series of smaller "to-do's"

* don't try to do everything perfectly
* perfectionism often causes procrastination
* any small step toward completion is an accomplishment
* do the worst job (or part of the job) first and get it out of the way
* set a time limit -- "I'll file papers for 5 minutes"
* alternate unpleasant jobs with tasks you enjoy
* delegate out items you can't make yourself do

* interruptions tend to occur in identifiable patterns
* notice when interruptions occur, by whom, and why
* take steps to prevent those interruptions before they occur
* if they can't be prevented, learn how to delegate to someone else
* if they can't be delegated, learn how to delay until you are finished

* make the project and environment as pleasant as possible
* give yourself the best tools and work space for the project
* take a few minutes to organize your work space
* schedule a regular time to check in with a friend or colleague
* rewarding your accomplishments encourages productivity

From Online Organizing.

Google Sandbox and TrustRank Algorithm

Google's PageRank was the key to Google's success because it gave a plausible answer to a simple question: "How valuable a site is?". Let's see who links to it and how important these sites are. But as time went by, Google realized that many links from less important sites could outweigh few links from major sites. And that's especially true for blogs. So Google wanted to fight spam from search results.

Jon Galloway explains how Google changed their ranking system:

Jagger's [Google index update from October 2005] main change is the switch from the elegant but overly trusting PageRank system to the more realistically cynical TrustRank system, which is designed to only count votes from sites it trusts.

TrustRank imitates human behavior - if a stranger on a train recommends a movie, I'm going to value it a lot less than a recommendation from a close friend or movie critic, both of whom have earned my trust by either how long I've known them or by their reputation. Trust comes from two sources - site age and links from trusted sources. From my movie recommendation analogy above, site age is the close friend who has gained trust through the age of the relationship, whereas trusted sources are sites who has been granted a position of authority by links form a small seed group of trused sites.

Another way to look at this is from the point of view of a content publisher with a new site. At first, your links will be untrusted and will not contribute to the Page Rank of the page they link to. The site has to undergo an aging delay to before it is considered authoritative, which has led to discussion of the "Sandbox" (or the "Trustbox"). The idea is that new sites are sandboxed so they can't mess up the rankings until they've proven themselves, at which time they can participate in Page Rank voting.

There are two ways to gain trust and escape the Trustbox:
* Acquire links from highly trusted sources (the "movie critic recommendation")
* Acquire links from somewhat trusted sources and let them age (the "friend recommendation")

Google Sandbox is a filter whose criteria is the age of a site. After let's say 4-6 months or when the site acquires highly trusted links, a site is given credit for what it has achieved, for the backlinks it has established: its PageRank increases and it's more visible in the search results.

Related:
Expertrank: authoritative search
The future of search

Google Interactive TV

Radioactive Yak discovered that Google wants an Interactive TV Product Manager and some sofware engineers with experience in emerging TV standards and deploying robust, high-volume applications for consumer devices.

"You will identify key market trends that are shaping user behavior when watching Television. These include but are not limited to the intersection of internet and Television technologies, video-on-demand, personal video recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity. You will then identify areas where use of Google’s search and advertising technology can enhance this user experience and define appropriate products to deliver these user benefits." (Google Jobs)

Google aims to extend AdSense advertising program offline, in print and television. The problem is how will Google deliver contextual ads: they will just match the show content or the viewer profile?

Related: Google ads on TV

Burn a Windows Live CD

Bart's PE Builder helps you build a bootable Windows CD or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 setup CD.

You will have a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. It's useful for testing systems with no OS, data recovery or virus scan.

What's great about Bart's PE Builder is that it has many plugins that extend the operating system and allow you to do many tasks:

* Access USB drives.
* Load the CD with SSH, Remote Desktop Client and VNC so you can use the boot CD as a workstation.
* Recover deleted files.
* Defragment the hard drive (much faster that defragmenting from a boot HD).
* Use Internet Explorer and Firefox from the boot CD to surf the web.

You can get Bart's PE Builder here. You should copy the XP setup files on your hard-disk. Before building the Windows Live CD, visit PEBuilder Plugin Repository and Paraglider PE Plugins to get some plugins.

Related posts about data recovery:
System Rescue Live CD
TestDisk: Recover lost partitions
How to crack a Windows password

Will Google Buy Facebook?

Google may periodically sell up to 5.3 million shares of stock according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday. At its current share price of $394.98 a share, a sale of 5.3 million shares would raise nearly $2.1 billion.

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

Well, can you see a connection between the two news? BussinessWeek says it may be. After all, Facebook might integrate with Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Groups. But $2.1 billion is a lot of money. Just consider that Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace.com for $580 million.

Joga: Share Your Passion For Football

Remember I told you about Joga, a community site created by Google and Nike for football fans (I mean soccer fans)? Well, now you don't need an invitation to become a member of Joga. Just go to the site and create an account using your Google login.

The site will ask you a lot of questions about football: what teams you like, favorite players, most embarrassing football moment, favorite other sports. The good thing is that most of them are optional.

But what can you do on Joga? You can create a blog, upload videos, create albums, add bookmarks, add friends based on simple criteria like location, age and join communities. You can also create your own teams, find local fields, and play other Joga teams in your community.

"Whether we've succeeded, of course, will be up to all of you to determine. We look forward to seeing football-crazy people from around the world playing as beautifully as possible at Joga.com." (Google Blog)

The New Yahoo Mail Will Have Obtrusive Ads

The new Yahoo Mail, currently in beta, will be available to all users very soon. An evidence for that is the fact that Yahoo Mail started to display obtrusive ads: along with an animated flash in the right sidebar, you can now see huge ads (like the one for Vonage) that fill an entire page. Ironically, this ad is included in the Spam section.

Another usability problems regarding ads in Yahoo Mail Beta. There are two group of ads in most of the pages, one in the right sidebar (animated flash), next to the scrollbars that lets you select a mail or read it. The other group of ads sits at the bottom, right under the navigation, and includes the usual "credit card", "free loan consult" small ads. The problem is that it's very easy to click on the ads by mistake. And if you click on an ad, it doesn't open a new page or tab, the page just replaces the ad in the iframe, so you'll get this funny picture.



Because Yahoo chose to stick with the flash ads, if you move from a page to another (from inbox to the RSS reader, for example), you'll notice a big delay in page loading, especially if you have a slow connection.

And another thing: Yahoo didn't drop the welcome page that announces you how many emails you have, and whose only purpose is to make people click on the ad if they don't have any new messages.

BitTorrent Search Engine Defends Itself Against MPAA

Torrentspy, a BitTorrent search engine which was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), said that the music business might just as well have dragged Google into court. They say Google does the same thing as Torrentspy, sometimes much better, that is search for torrents and not host them.

The judges won't probably too impressed to hear that searching for [photoshop bittorrent] on Google yealds as a top result a site that links to Adobe Photoshop torrent links. If you search for something unlawful, Google is not responsible for the sites you find.

The MPAA filed seven lawsuits against Torrentspy and other search companies that help visitors find torrents or instruct them how to download it.

"The MPAA is in essence trying to outlaw the .torrent file format." says Ira Rothken, Torrentspy lawyer.

BitTorrent has become a widely used online system to download very large files as the technology is very efficient at splitting up and sharing data.

Google Page Creator Review

Google Page is a service from Google that allows you to create simple static pages with a WYSIWYG online editor. There is a page on GooglePages.com that reviewed the product.

"You can easily add for example many HTML, CSS, Java, and JavaScript features by simply creating your web page for example with an HTML editor (e.g. Mozilla Composer), a WYSIWYG editor (e.g. OpenOffice.org) or with a text editor (e.g. SuperEdi, Notepad, or emacs) and then you just upload the file to GPC. You can also use Google videos, Google maps and stat counters by uploading your pages, which isn't possible with the Google Page Creator's Page/HTML editor, because it removes objects that use features such as JavaScript, which usually are in elements like script or embed in the HTML source."

So if you want Flash, Google AdSense, Google Maps, Google Video, Java, JavaScript, music, stat counters, or videos, create your pages offline and upload them to Google servers. And if you think the whole point of Google Page Creator was to create pages online, you're wrong. What webhosting provides you with 100 MB quote, 10 MB maximum size for files, unlimited bandwidth (well, almost) and no restriction for file types (mp3, avi, exe, zip) - all for free, and without including their ads in your pages?

Google April Fool's Day 2006 - Take A Guess

What hoax will get out of the Googleplex this year for April Fool's Day? They made a tradition from making fun of their products, their corporate culture and their geekiness.

Let's take a guess:

1) Google will take over the world. Google will produce a device that will scan your important information (documents, bills, pictures, favorite colors, what you say, SIM content, hard-drive content), organize it, upload it to your Google account and make it searchable. EGoogle device.

2) Google will drop its simple and clean homepage in favour of the Personalized Home, that will also contain ads. Furthermore, you won't be able to search Google unless you have a Google account and you are logged in.

3) All mails from Gmail will be deleted. The Gmail team released it's so inefficient to type so many emails every day, so they will introduce AudioGmail, where you can record, search and organize voicemails. The new AudioGmail has another advantage: spam will be easier to recognize.

On a more serious note, everybody waits for the Google Calendar and there are some people out there that still hope that Gmail will go public.

Related:
The real Google prank from this year
Google April Fool's Day 2000: Google MentalPlex
Google April Fool's Day 2002: PigeonRank
Google April Fool's Day 2004: Lunar Jobs
Google April Fool's Day 2005: Google Gulp

Googlebot Can Destroy Sites

Googlebot follows every links in the pages it indexes. But what if that links have disastrous effects? Here's a lesson about Googlebot's power to destroy a badly conceived site.

"Josh Breckman worked for a company that landed a contract to develop a content management system for a fairly large government website. Much of the project involved developing a content management system so that employees would be able to build and maintain the ever-changing content for their site.

Things went pretty well for a few days after going live. But, on day six, things went not-so-well: all of the content on the website had completely vanished and all pages led to the default "please enter content" page. Whoops.

Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn't belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google's very own web crawling spider. Whoops.

As it turns out, Google's spider doesn't use cookies, which means that it can easily bypass a check for the "isLoggedOn" cookie to be "false". It also doesn't pay attention to Javascript, which would normally prompt and redirect users who are not logged on. It does, however, follow every hyperlink on every page it finds, including those with "Delete Page" in the title. Whoops."

So next time don't assume every visitor has JavaScript activated and validate the actions both on client side and on server side. If you want to validate your data for accuracy and security then you must use server side code to check your form inputs.

And something else: according to the HTTP 1.1 specification, the GET method is defined as a Safe Method which "SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval." If you to change a state (delete content, replace data), you should use POST.

Related posts about security:
Google Deleted... Google Blog
GMail vulnerability: GMail runs javascript in body
Get sensitive information using Google

How To Crack Your Windows Password

If you forgot your Windows password and you don't want to reset it, you have a new option: Ophcrack LiveCD, a Windows password cracker that claims to be able to crack 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds. Ophcrack is based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables, some precalculated data stored in memory. A rainbow table is a lookup table that is constructed by placing a plaintext password entry in a chain of keys and ciphertexts, generated by a one-way hash (a function that is easy to calculate but hard to invert). The end result is a table that contains statistically high chance of revealing a password within a short period of time, generally less than a minute.

Minimum amount of RAM required: 256MB.
Recommended amount of RAM: 512MB.

Download Ophcrack Live CD

Related:
Reset Windows Password
Rainbow Tables (Wikipedia)

Google's Internal Competition

George P. Alexander Jr. writes in his blog about a different perspective on life at Googleplex:

"Do you know that there is so much internal competition in Google? For instance, there are some situations when a project is set to start its life cycle, that there is, on a parallel other teams that work on the same project (and if I'm right, sometimes the identity of the opposing team members or even this aspect of parallel teams existing for a project is not revealed until a later time in the SDLC). The final product that gets released belongs to the team that comes with the best proof of concept AND / OR the best design AND / OR the best pilot AND / OR the best final product AND / OR the best something else based on various parameters."

It seems that Google uses both competition and collaboration to deliver great products, but it's weird to work at Google as an undercover programmer.

Related:
Inside Google Campus
Xooglers (ex-Googlers )
Google Office

How To Reset Windows Password

Let's say you change the password very often on your Windows XP admin account from your home computer and you suddenly realize you don't remember the password. What do you do? No, you don't reinstall Windows XP and you don't format your hard-disk. You download Offline NT password & Registry editor, create a bootable floppy or CD, boot from the floppy / CD and start the utility. You can reset the password of any user that has a local account on your system.

This tip works for NT operating system: Windows NT4, 2000, XP and 2003.

Related posts about data recovery:
TestDisk: Recover Lost Partitions
System Rescue Live CD

Google Gains Share Market In The US

Google‘s share of the US search market increased to 42.3 from 36.3 percent a year earlier, according to a study by ComScore. Yahoo's share dropped to 27.6%, MSN share dropped to 13.5%, while AOL's share increased slightly to 8.0% from 7.9% in Jan 06. Ask market share rose to 6.0% from 5.6% in Jan 06.

Related:
Where Do You Want To Go Today?
Google Market Share in the U.K.

FlashGet - Best Download Manager For Windows

FlashGet is a feature-rich download manager with a nice interface and powerful features. Why would you need a download manager when you can download files with your browser? If you use Internet Explorer and your connection drops, you lost your file. If you want to download big files, FlashGet is a lot faster and can shut down your PC when finished downloading. Another advantage of a download manager is that it forces you to organize your downloads.

FlashGet features:

* clipboard monitoring, browser monitoring (Explorer, Firefox, Opera) - you just click or copy the download link you want and FlashGet will get it for you

* split files into sections or splits, and download each split simultaneously

* supports RTSP and MMS protocols

* it displays only an ad on top of the window (similar to the ad-supported Opera)

* a very nice Site Explorer utility that lets you explore HTTP and FTP sites. You can crawl Google site, starting from the index and flolowing all the links recursively.

* you can create rules for download management: for example, all mp3 files should go into a specific folder

Download from Softpedia (FlashGet's homepage has slow mirrors for download)

Update: FlashGet is now free and it doesn't have ads.

Google Deleted... Google Blog

Last night, Google deleted its blog by mistake. That allowed a so-called hacker, Trey Philips, to go to Blogspot and create a blog at googleblog.blogspot.com, Google Blog address. You can see how did Google Blog look for a couple of hours.

"We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad." says Jason Goldman, Blogger Product Manager.

TestDisk: Recover Lost Partitions

TestDisk is an open-source data recovery software that can run under:

• DOS
• Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003)
• Linux
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• SunOS
  
• MacOS

TestDisk can help you recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again. It works with the following partitions: FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, Linux (EXT2/EXT3/JFS/RFS/XFS), Linux swap (version 1 and 2), NTFS (Windows), BeFS (BeOS), UFS (BSD), and Netware.

Related:
System Rescue Live CD
Google Desktop As Data Recovery Software

Where Do You Want To Go Today?

The famous Microsoft tagline from 1996 is a very big question for many big websites. What do you visit on Google, Yahoo and MSN? The most visited page for Google is, of course, Google homepage. But things aren't the same for Yahoo. Most users visit Yahoo just to check their mail. That's why Yahoo disabled POP3 access on Yahoo Mail. MSN's situations looks even more dramatic: 3 from 4 visitors go to Hotmail.

google

google.com - 75%
images.google.com - 9%
mail.google.com - 7%
groups.google.com - 2%
video.google.com - 2%
news.google.com - 1%
froogle.google.com - 1%

yahoo

mail.yahoo.com - 53%
search.yahoo.com - 9%
news.yahoo.com - 3%
login.yahoo.com - 3%
bid.yahoo.com - 2%
yahoo.com - 2%
finance.yahoo.com - 2%

msn

hotmail.msn.com - 73%
search.msn.com - 8%
spaces.msn.com - 5%
msn.com - 3%
msnbc.msn.com - 2%
moneycentral.msn.com - 1%
arabia.msn.com - 1%

*The data is provided by alexa.com and it's not statistically accurate.

Check Multiple GMail Accounts

If you have more than one Gmail account and want to check them simultaneously, install Gmail Manager, a Firefox extension that allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts.

Gmail Manager displays account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets. You'll also get a compose menu for your Gmail accounts.

Also read:
5 Fast Ways To Check Your Gmail
Gmail Skins: Change Gmail Interface
Gmail Horror Story: Gmail Account Deleted

Google Market Share in the U.K.

WebSideStory informs that Google holds 75 percent marketing share in the U.K. in February 2006. Google’s search referral percentage in the U.K. exceeds both the U.S. average for the month (55.39 percent), as well as the global average (62.4 percent).

Here are the top 5 search engines in the U.K.:

Google	74.67%
Yahoo	9.30%
MSN	5.46%
AOL	4.21%
Ask Jeeves	2.28%

Read:
Google Traffic Breakdown (November 2005)

Gmail Skins: Change Gmail Appearance

Gmail Skins is a Firefox extension that lets you customize Gmail interface.

Features:

* Change the colour scheme of your inbox
* Insert smileys/emoticons and images in to your emails
* Make the navigation (Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail) horizontal
* Zebra stripes on the inbox (alternating colors for rows)
* Change the attachment paperclip to an icon indicating the file type of attachment
* Hide invite panel, page footer
* Hide your email address at the top - for privacy issues

The skins don't look very pretty, but they disrupt a little the monotonous Gmail look.

Alternatives:
Skinning Gmail with user-defined CSS page

Highest Paying AdSense Keywords

From CyberWyre:

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Detecting Near-duplicate Documents

Approximately 30% of the pages on the web are (near) duplicates. Google has a patent for some improved duplicate and near duplicate detection techniques.

"From the perspective of users, duplicate and near-duplicate documents raise problems. More specifically, when users submit a query to a search engine, most do not want links to (and descriptions of) Web pages which have largely redundant information. For example, search engines typically respond to search queries by providing groups of ten results. If pages with duplicate content were returned, many of the results in one group may include the same content. Thus, there is a need for a technique to avoid providing search results associated with (e.g., having links to) Web pages having duplicate content."

One idea might be indexing the keywords in the documents and comparing the percentage of terms shared by the two documents, but that highly inefficient.

Or you can try to compute the edit distance (Damerau-Levenshtein distance) between the two documents. The edit distance between two input strings is the minimum cost of a sequence of edit operations (substitution of a symbol in another incorrect symbol, insertion of an extraneous symbol, deletion of a symbol, and transpositions ) needed to change one input string into the other string.

A much better method for detecting duplicate and near-duplicate documents involve generating "fingerprints" (hashes) for elements (paragraphs, sentences, words, shingles) of documents. Two documents would be considered to be near-duplicates if they share more than a predetermined number of fingerprints.

A k-shingle is a sequence of k consecutive words from a documents. If S(A) is the set of shingles contained by A, we can compute the resemblance of A and B like this: |S(A)VS(B)| divided by |S(A)US(B)|. The problem is that the intersection is hard to compute, so it has to be estimated.

Learn more from Andrei Broder's course at Princeton University [PDF, html version].

"Search without a box" - A chat with Andrei Broder

Internet Censorship In China

CNN has a brilliant article about Internet censorship in China.


WHO (helps China censor the Internet)

Western corporations provide much of the equipment and services for China's Internet system. Major players include Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, 3COM, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, IBM and others.

Cisco Systems has been integral to China's Internet development. Its router equipment, which reportedly provides no anonymity or encryption and was specifically designed for China, is in the core of the nation's surveillance of the Internet.

WHERE (is censorship exercised)

Called wangba, or Net bars, cybercafés are required to keep detailed logs of customers' online activity on file for 60 days. If a user tries to access forbidden Web sites, a café must disconnect the user and file a report with state agencies. Penalties for violations include fines and even imprisonment.


WHAT (is censored)

Chinese search engines monitor content by keyword and remove offending Web sites. When people request banned content (for example: Revolution, Democracy, STD, Human rights) through Chinese search engines like Baidu and Yisou, the filtering system disconnects them.


HOW (to bypass the censorship)

People use proxy relays to get around Internet filtering and monitoring.

Tunneling allows a user in a censored location to access information through a tunnel to a computer in an unfiltered location. All requests run through an encrypted tunnel to a non-filtered computer, which forwards requests and responses transparently. Both private and commercial tunneling services are available.

Related posts:

Google censors search results in China
Free proxy list (anonymous proxy servers)

Google April Fool's Day 2000: Google MentalPlex

Google announced a new "MentalPlex" search technology that supposedly read the user's mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the step of actually typing in the search query. Of its origins, Google comments that "As with the Internet itself, MentalPlex began as a highly classified Dept. of Defense initiative under the direction of Al Gore." In the FAQ, Google co-founder Larry Page said that "typing in queries is so 1999."

Google MentalPlex gives some funny error messages:

* Error 01: Brainwaves received in analog. Please re-think in digital.
* Error 005: Searching on this topic is prohibited under international law.
* Error 008: Interference detected. Remove aluminum foil and remote control devices.
* Error 8P: Unclear on whether your search is about money or monkeys. Please try again.
* Error 666: Multiple transmitters detected. Silence voices in your head and try again.
* Error: MentalPlex(tm) has determined that this is not your final answer. Please try again.

More Google April Fool's Day:
Google April Fool's Day 2002: PigeonRank
Google April Fool's Day 2004: Lunar Jobs
Google April Fool's Day 2005: Google Gulp
Google April Fool's Day 2006 - Take A Guess

Google April Fool's Day 2002: PigeonRank

In 2003, Google decided to ignore April Fool's Day. But in 2002, Google explained that "the heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University."

"PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.

By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings."

It's PigeonRank, not PageRank.

More Google April Fool's Day:
Google April Fool's Day 2000: Google MentalPlex
Google April Fool's Day 2004: Lunar Jobs
Google April Fool's Day 2005: Google Gulp
Google April Fool's Day 2006 - Take A Guess

Horoscopes, Financial Advice, Chat

" Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." (Google Ten Things in 2004)

Well, two years later look what you can see on Google pages: Google Finance, Google Talk and horoscope on Google IG.



Also see:
Google is not a portal
Google Finance launched
Mike Grehan: Google to become a portal