Vodafone adds Google Maps

Vodafone has joined hands with Google to develop and provide 'Maps' to their clients.These maps have the potential to gain huge revenue if local ads are placed along with the results.These maps are not only going to be popular but also addictive because people would use them to locate famous shopping malls, holiday spots, medical shop, book stalls etc through these maps.In some places like Japan, people use their mobiles to organise important business trnasactions and meetings through these mobile search locators.Google maps on mobiles have a large revenue erning potential if Google Ads are Indexed beside the maps.

Yahoo has already introduced advertising on its mobile-specific Web sites display advertising on its mobile-specific Web sites in 19 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The move, which follows a year of aggressive expansion in the wireless space, marks Yahoo's first formal rollout of graphical ads on its sites around the world.

Recent Microsoft mobile 6.0, then Google's and Yahoo! 's interest in mobile industry shows that Internet is no more pertained to computers and to those who are computer professionals.

Windows on your Mobile.

We all are aware of the Windows Mobile 5.0 .
Now Microsoft Corp. has unveiled its new Windows operating system for mobile phones, Mobile 6, incorporating several features of Windows Vista, including HTML email support and additional security features.

The software will be available in the second quarter of 2007, the company said. It will support Windows Exchange Server 2007 and will also have Windows Live, which allows instant messaging with more than one person at a time, while it can send a file or image or record and send voice messages. Users will also be able to view, navigate and edit documents in Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint formats.

The OS also makes use of the direct email push technology, which is available in Exchange 2007, and help to receive and send email faster and more efficiently. It also offers better security like protection to data.Phones using the OS will be able to protect not only data stored on the device,but also encrypt information stored on a removable memory card.Businesses will be able to set policies requiring passwords to be changed regularly.

The company had codenamed the OS as Crossbow during the developmental stages and experts said it is expected to provide a virtual visual treat for users.

The software is available for both touch screen and non-touch screen versions.

According to the company, its hardware partners, which are supporting the new OS are Toshiba, Lenovo Group, LG Electronics and Samsung.

Is it internet in mobile or mobile in internet.

Google Webmaster Central

Google webmaster central is a great place to hang out.After Google developed its Webmaster Tools , the webmaster central has turned out to be a heaven for webmasters.This was in response to the dismissal of 'site:' command.Webmaster central provides information about your visitors,where they are coming from,which sites link to your pages,what are the outgoing links from your site,traffic statistics etc and much more.These surely help you a lot in improving your site's performance.A brief outline of some services available at Google webmaster central.

• The Site status tool shows whether your site is indexed by Google or not.
• The Site map helps you to present more information about your site pages to Google.
• Google base is a newly launched tool which has a lot of interesting stuff in it for Googlers.You can submit your content on the topic of your choice from this place.
• The Webmaster central blog informs you about the latest updates and developments in Google webmaster tools.
• The Google's discussion group for webmasters to talk about and share your feed backs with Google.

All these services are available at this page.Use them in your own way.

YouTube Story

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen,the YouTube founders became millionaires overnight after Google bought the video sharing site last November.

Chen and met Hurley in 1999, while working at PayPal, three years before the online financial transaction service was bought by Internet auction site eBay for 1.5 billion dollars.Hurley left PayPal to work for himself as a consultant. Chen remained at PayPal and worked on the company's expansion into China.

The friends first discussed wanting an easy way to share home videos online while at a dinner with other former PayPal employees in February 2005.
Hurley, Chen and former PayPal colleague Jawed Karim launched YouTube in April 2005.

Google bought YouTube in November in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal that marked the search engine's most expensive acquisition and crowned the young start-up an enviable success story.
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares, valued at nearly 328 million dollars on Thursday. Hurley got another 41,242 shares of Google stock, valued at 19.5 million dollars, which were placed in a trust fund.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen received 625,366 shares valued at 295.5 million dollars and another 68,721 shares worth 32.47 million dollars that were placed in a trust fund, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Google's third founder, Jawed Karim, received 137,443 shares of Google stock with a market value of 64.9 million dollars.

Sequoia Capital, which financed YouTube to the tune of 11.5 million dollars, got a payoff of 941,027 shares worth 444.64 million dollars, the SEC filing indicated.

Google, the supreme search engine,indexes videos from the top video sharing site,YouTube.Thus they enhanced each others efficiency.

Google - Expanding Gmail

Google has made its Gmail e-mail service more widely available. The company has now removed the 'invitation only' restrictions on its Gmail service in several regions including European countries, Middle East, Africa and Brazil.

The service has been already open to all in several other parts of the world, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Egypt since quite some time.
Google also said that the restrictions (invitations) would be removed in other markets pretty soon.

Though Gmail is far behind Yahoo! and MSN in e-mail services,Gmail has its own fans (most of them are Google search fans or Blogger fans) Gmail has to improve a lot to be able to compete with Yahoo! and MSN in e-mail service market.One of the main accusation is that Gmail is that user privacy is at stake because of Gmail.This is mainly attributed to the fact that Gmail scans all the mails to be able to put up relevant Ads beside the mail.But Google's says that 'The Ad program is to enhance the services' they provide to the users.And that they 'take user privacy very seriously'

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo has released their new Web 2.0 style RSS mashup tool, called Pipes on Wednesday.It's pretty enjoyable to look at: drag around various boxes and hook them together with 'pipes'. The boxes rip data from around the web ( from anywhere you choose) and process it, spitting out an RSS feed at the other end.This mashup tool gets you RSS feeds of 'anything' that you are interested in right on your desktop.Some authors also call it as 'RSS Remixer'.

'Pipes' recieved an unexpectedly warm and huge welcome as we can see in the words of Yahoo! team.This was their (Yahoo team's) response to WebPro news :
“Wow! We were hoping to have a low key release of Pipes, and we’ve gotten more attention than we could have ever dreamed. Thanks to Tim O’Reilly who called it a “milestone in the history of the internet” but our goal was really just to get developers to test it, play with it, and give us feedback. Now, we need to take the site down to increase capacity. Our pipes, are, so to speak, clogged.”
Find more information on this topic at WebPro News.

The pipes site is down due to excited webmasters rushed to get their own Yahoo! pipe.It says "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
At 7:20 Pacific time on Thursday, Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny updated his blog on Pipes."Pipes is currently down. There's a lot of interest, so things are getting tweaked on the backend. I'll post more when we have an update."

Google Search Engine - Not a bot anymore

Google is successful from time and again to give its search engines all the requirements which can turn it live.Google search engine is not a bot anymore.It has gone too far from naming it as an 'engine' or 'robot'.It behaves just like a human being.If you are thinking why? and how? , Take a look at these self explanatory points -

• Ignoring Meta tags - Google search now ignores meta tags completely because of their over-usage by webmasters.
• Checking Keyword density in the page - Google search engine ignores pages in which keywords have been packed densely (just to attract the search engine).This is to stop the growing number of 'keyword spammers' who want to attract Google search engine with the large quantity of keywords in their pages.
• Checking English and grammar - Google prefers to index pages which have well formed sentences with good grammar to ill organised pages.
• Ignoring Duplicates - Duplicate site content is not only ignored but infact given a negative ranking (just like link spam) by the search engine.Duplicate content may be a content which is repeatedly posted in the same site or content posted in a site from another site.
• Checking Link spam - Google has made its search engine immune to link spammers.Link farms which contain a bulk of link lists are just ignored by Google.Google looks at the exact location where the link is placed and the content preceding and following the link.
Search History - Google has recently made 'personalised search' as default.This enables Google to maintain your search history and record your web activities.On one hand Google wants to provide its users better and user friendly search results and on the other hand,it can trace your search history and start ignoring your tricks and tactics to optimise your site to Google search.

An article by John Fowler from searchenginecollege.com -

If I write half a page
and you write thirty four
I can use three keywords
whilst you get forty more
I can be brief and concise
and speedily spit pages out
but your one and only masterpiece
Carries far more clout,
I am but a comic strip
to your Tolstoyan drama
I am all wild excitement
whilst you are perfect karma,
I have few words to play with
to juggle in a subtle key
whilst you have an epic
to aid keyword density
the old bull takes his time
never rushing, always serene
he has created multiple options
whilst young bull was over keen,
so when you code your pages
don't undersell your wording
or you'll be virtually alone
when you should be herding,
ten keywords in a thousand
dilutes the trend to oversell
and makes the reader relax
from the instinct he can tell
that a little page is but a ploy
to put him onto a sales hook,
whereas an interesting article
is worth a second look.

Click - Google's recommendations about SEO.It is clear that Google wants to Index 'clean' and 'fair' sites and that it would not tolerate spammers manupilating the search engine for better ranks.So SEO is becoming a hard task day by day.While Social media optimization is as free and simple as it has always been.

HinKhoj - Hindi Search Engine

A Hindi (Indian national language) search engine has been launched by a software engineer from the prestigious IIT (Indian Institute of Technology).This site is entirely hindi based.Unlike other Indian search engines,hinkhoj is completely based on hindi literature.Its a good news for people who blog or wish to blog in hindi and of course for hindi lovers.HinKhoj is now in its beta phase.
This button carries the link to hinkhoj.com.


Now Hinkhoj also provides a Hindi-English dictionary. You can toggle between hindi and english languages by pressing F12 key. This dictionary is very interesting as it also provides the user wtih goole search results of the inquired word.
Though Indian people on the net mostly deal with english on the net (unlike Chinese people) , lets hope that Hinkhoj makes its mark just like Baidu.

When did Google last visit my site?

To know when Google last visited your site and what all information Google has stored up about your site pages, just follow these steps

• Go to Google.com main page
• Enter info:your site name.com (don't type www or http://)
• Click search and Google will show you what all information it has got regarding your site.
• Click on 'Google's Cache' , it will show you the Google's snap shot of your site and when did Google visited your site the last time.
• Other information you can find - Pages that link to your site,Pages that are similar to your site,web pages from your site,sites which contain your site's URL.

By this,you can know how often Google search engine has indexed your site.If Google visited your page recently and frequently,it means that Google search engine finds your site friendly enough.If Google has not crawled up your site for quite a long time, then try to improve your link popularity,introduce your site to like minded people and increase the visibility of your site in social networking places.

Google personalised search

When we create an account at Google accounts,we see the following statement below the re-enter password box saying
"Creating a Google Account will enable Search History. Search History is a feature that will provide you with a more personalized experience on Google that includes more relevant search results and recommendations. Learn More "

This is a great service but at the cost of your privacy.Google stores your search history and data along with your Name,account details.If you don't mind your search history being stored,you will find this a wonderful service.But if you think the other way,you would feel that Google is being unfair.Google has a solution for this problem too.Go to This page and click on "Pause Settings".This option will stop Google from recording your search history unless and until you change the option to 'Resume settings'.
Also while signing up at Google accounts, don't forget to 'uncheck' the Enable 'Search History' box if you don't want your search history to be recorded.