Recently, in the bucket full of features, the loyal users of gmail got a new feature, which they had in every other mail account, but were missing in Gmail. Now gmail can be personally customized with around 30 themes, many of them similar to their orkut counterparts.

Today morning, i logged into my gmail account, and found a new notification about themes. My first reaction was “Now that’s what was missing”. I instantly clicked on the link and browsed all the themes. Many of them were ported from orkut itself, where Google introduced themes earlier.
You can theme your gmail accont through settings-> themes tab.

While most of the themes are appealing, i found “DESK” the right one for me and applied it immediately. Now my gmail inbox appears more tempting for communication. Many people won’t believe now i am checking my inbox every two minutes !, and it’s hard to take my eyes away from my INBOX.

So, who all have not yet experienced it, login immediately and indulge into it.

Last week Google again smoothly made a pagerank update of all the websites.

http://techunknown.com got lucky this time. In just 5 months, that without much effort we got PR1.

I found one more useful website to check the pagerank of your websites in bulk at once @ http://checkbulkpagerank.com/

Regarding how exactly the pagerank algorithm of Google works, i found some pretty interesting images. Do have a look:

Knol is another Google project which aims to include user written articles on various topics ranging from science medical information, geographical and historical information, entertainment, how-to’s and all.

It was officially announced on December 13th 2007, but opened in beta to public on July 23 2008.
Google defines “knol” as a unit of knowledge.
All contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.

Knol is being described as a competition to sites such as Wikipedia, but in its layout and model, it most closely resembles About.com.

It still has a long way to go to be fairly useful to general public.

Information source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

Another search rival to Google cropped up, this time maybe a bigger one, CUIL.
\

It claims itself as the biggest search engine on the planet.

Cuil’s hype is understandable given its claim of indexing 120 billion web pages compared to approx 40  billion by Google.

Some quick facts about it:

1. Most popularly being pronounced as COOL.

2. Cuil is an old irish word for knowledge.

3. Its robot web-crawler is named Twiceler.

4. Cuil’s two main goals as pointed out clearly in the about section of the search engine is: One-how to index the whole internet, not just a part of it and Second-how to analyze and sort out its pages to get relevant pages.

5. Main features of its search are Drilldowns, Roll-over definitions, tabs and navigation suggestions.

6. The main people in its foundation are TOM COSTELLO, who has earlier worked mostly in IBM
And Anna Patterson, who was a key person in the technical line of google adsense and google search index.
Both of them happen to be spouse.

But on the performance front the search engine failed miserably.
The news of its failure is floating all over internet. It can’t even produce relevant results for common words and queries. In that way it can’t even challenge rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is still a distant dream.
If you want to test it, just type its name in Google.com and Cuil.com simultaneously and see the difference. Holes like this in the search engine can put it into grave forever.
Right now, Google still rocks.

The only thing that went into its favor was large investment, which enabled it to build reliable cluster of servers. Most of the new start-ups are launched with lots of pomp, but crash (die) as soon as the initial users and traffic increase. Atleast cuil was able to survive that phase and did reasonably well.

The Adsense team at Google have decided to retire their Referrals program. I got a mail from the adsense team yesterday.

According to them, they retired  it to move onto their other projects which are on the way.

Gmail is undobutably one of the most powerful and feature rich email facility on the internet today.

Keeping and managing, multiple accounts with a main account, is very simple and easy.

1. login to your gmail account and click on the settings tab:
   
2. click on forwarding
   
3. checking the radio button for forward a copy, enter the gmail id and select the option for keeping a copy in the same account or not:
   that’s it. Next you will have to confirm by clicking on a link from other account, and DONE!

After that, whenever you need to compose a new mail from the main account, you will get option to use any one of the multiple id’s:

One of the biggest natural calamities of our times, the  cyclone in Myanmar has already tolled 20k human lives.

Google is taking initiative, to help those people, by collecting donation of minimum 50$, from the millions of its users.

It has put in a link to donation page on its home page: http://google.com

The full link is: http://www.google.com/myanmarcyclone/

Even i request to all the people who can read this initiative on my blog or on Google, please support. 

Already existing Google translation service, has added now Hindi in its translation application, which works quite well, infact very close, if not too accurate to Hindi grammer.

Google translates any text or web page from English to Hindi. or vice-versa.Now, it translates 14 dialects language from English including Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic language from Asian continent.

First log on http://www.google.com/translate_t and then type the word to be translated, choose the language as per requirement and press enter

I felt quite excited and tried to translate this Blog, from English to Hindi. The tool did the job very fast and here is the screenshot of what i got :

Click on the image to zoom

Experience : The final output was quite amazing to read an English tech-blog into Hindi, but the mistakes, or maybe the clash of English grammar with Hindi dialect, was quite a mess up, proved hard with my grey cells.

Famous and very interesting, Google cheat sheet. It contains all information about, all the services of Google, about Google-bot, Google search keywords and many more….

Get to know the technical details of Google.

Download it here:

Google cheat sheet

“iGoogle”, is the company’s fastest growing service along with e-mail. Google won’t specific how many people use iGoogle, but says the number is in the millions.

iGoogle, is the customized homepage given to users.

Google began to add more fan-fare to its famously plain home page, nearly three years ago when it offered its users the option to include stock quotes, weather forecasts and other features.

Google last year introduced its first set of skins for iGoogle, which were internally developed and consisted of mostly simple landscapes.

The emphasis on graphics illustrates Google’s evolution from, a once-pure Internet search engine, into an all-purpose Web site that offers e-mail, video, news, photo sharing, instant messaging, shopping and mapping services…..and the list goes on…

Know more : http://www.google.com/artistthemes