I was browsing though a website when i saw this Google ad about exclusive discounts for technical students on Apple Notebooks in India.
Now this is an irresistible offer for technology enthusiasts like me. I clicked on the ad and was redirected to this website: http://macforstudents.netbiz.in/

To get the details of the offer, i had to fill in a simple contact form with details of my institution. Took me hardly 1 minute. After that i got a mail with the complete details of the offer, which can be seen in this screenshot:

But for those who want to avail this offer, hurry up as the offer is till 30th august only.

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.

While browsing i found a simple site, but which is worth lots of appreciation because of the research it has done on interactive interface.

I was browsing http://dontclick.it . And the last click i did with my mouse was on the homepage of the site. Believe me no clicks after that to browse a whole website. And the whole site structure and interface is quite interesting and appealing.

You must be wondering how is that possible? The navigation on the website works just by hovering your mouse over menus or links of the pages you want to view and it comes up with a nice animation or rollover.

And as the website says, the research on the interactive interface is not a joke. It records the mouse gestures and movements of every user that logs on the website.
If by chance you click anywhere on the website by mistake or knowingly, it displays and error screen and asks you “was that an accidental click or knowingly?”.
It contains whole statistics of how many people visiting the site still missed the conventional mouse clicking or not.
It even displays a spiky cover for your mouse if you are too much obsessed with clicking the mouse.

Hope to see more of such websites soon.

Mere starting of a weblog, commonly termed as “BLOG”, is not enough.

The success of your blog entirely depends on various factors, which in turn bring more traffic and make your blog popular and successful.

Some of the important factors are:

1. The readability of your blog
   This is as simple and straight as it sounds. You need not show your high-level English skills in your blog.
   The language should be as simple and appealing as it can be. Before writing your posts, just imagine whatever you are going to write, is for a “lower-kindergarten” kid. Simple and straight approach always wins.
   An interesting tool to check the readability of your blog:
   LINK: http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx
2. Marketing of your blog
   This is not as simple as it seems. I take for granted that most of the starting bloggers, like me don’t have money to spend on top-level SEO (search engine optimization), to gather traffic from search engines.
   The best tools of a blogger to popularize his blog are pinging, submitting to article directories, quality link exchange, submission to blog search engines like Technorati.
   A tool to to check the total worth of your blog:
   LINK: http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

WTF: :grin: The tool to check the worth of your blog is entirely based on tagging and the activity record of your blog on Technorati, so if you try to check the worth of even Google , the result would be 0$ !! :lol:

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. 

After much long wait Google finally updated its much respected Pagerank on 30th Arpril, among bloggers and webmasters.

This time, the time duration between two updates was the second longest, after around 120 days. The update according to many wasn’t too major, as:

1. The newer sites and blogs didn’t got updated, that is their PR still remains 0.
2. Only the older sites got updated with e.g PR 6- PR 7.
3. The update was slower, with most of the data centers of Google showing fluctuation in their PR. e.g for the same site some were showing PR6 while some PR7, some even showing PR8-PR10 (That’s really enough to give heart attack to an eager blogger like me )
4. The quality links in a blog or website, were not useful this time to for upgradation in PR (as reported by many).

Alas my blog didn’t got updated this time. But thats obvious, because it’s recently only that i have started to focus more on quality content.

Resource :

1. The favorite tool for checking Pagerank of a website still remains same, check: http://prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
2. The live and fluctuating Pagerank of a website can be checked out here:
   http://livepr.raketforskning.com/
3. In case you are still confused what exactly is Pagerank, get the info from the developers of Pagerank itself @Google:
   http://www.google.com/technology/

This is the list of the secret/suspicious domains purchased by Google i grabbed from various sources:

• georgle.com
• glogoo.com
• 30dayfitness.com
• essentialmommy.com
• thesecretofburritos.com
• goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com
• googlelovers.com
• googlereligion.com
• bankgoogle.com
• kuwaitgoogle.com
• google-yahoo-porn.com
• checkoutsucks.com
• googlepoo.com

I have drained whatever sense of domains, i have gathered, on thinking the use of most of these domains purchase. But still i am clueless about the intentions of Google in doing this.

One more domain, purchased reported way back was http://www.gbrowser.com . Speculations were hot that Google is roll its own web browser, but nothing came out.

Now let’s see what happens with these domains??

One strange search engine i came across:

http://googlepirate.com

The search engine clearly indicates it has no connection with Google.com, but still it uses Google to search the web, but with something it calls Google-hack, strange??

Impression:The search results are exceptionally accurate and refined, worth a try.