Hello all,

I seem to be talking "Google" a lot during these times, but what else can I do with all the stuff I keep finding about this behemoth website?

Today for instance, I found something pretty amazing. I was going through my search stats, when I found a keyword "INDIAN BYBY NAMES" through which a person came to Blogging India. Now that was pretty weird, since I had no idea what the keyword was all about. So I decided to search for it and guess what I found?

I have reason to believe that Google is using the aid of pronounciation(pronunciation) to better refine its searches. Google used the pronounciation of "BYBY" and matched it with "Bye Bye". And then, it searched for and highlighted pages having the term "Bye Bye" rather than "BYBY". Never before have I seen it happening, and it didn’t work for a few other combinations I tried, but nevertheless, the fact remains, it equated one search term, with the other, without a command from the user.

Again fascinating in this same query is that search terms are never sliced to find a match. i.e. If you search for "multiplayer", you don’t get results for "multi" and "player", or for "mul" and "tiplayer". Here, you can see that "Indian" has been substituted with "India" and "Names" with "Name". Of course, Google had mentioned earlier that it would consider plural results when we searched for singular queries, and vis versa. So that explains the "Name" result. But what about "Indian" being substituted with "India" in a search result?

Don’t believe me? Try searching for "baba black sheep" on Google. You get results on "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and the search engine doesn’t show a correction("Did you mean…").

Now does this mean that Google is experimenting with pronounciation search? Its a field I’ve never heard of before, nor have I heard of search engine experts talk about it. Would it be an innovative break for all those words which have different pronounciations throughout the world? We shall wait and see.

But one thing is for sure, if Google is indeed playing with pronounciation search, they are heading the semantic way. And a slight amount of semantic search mixed into the present Google formula could make it a lot better.

Technorati Tags: google, pronounciation, pronunciation, search, best search, better search

Hello all,

I found this rather curious little thing while I was browsing about a week back. I was searching for something in Google, and it was something rather hard to find, so I thought of searching for it in Google Groups and News. So I scrolled to the top of the Google search page, where the little links to Google Images Search, Google News Search, Google Scholar Search and other Google utility searches were displayed.

To my surprise, there was a link to Orkut(Orkut is the social networking website owned by Google)! This particular link took me to an Orkut search page for what I searched. I was logged in to Orkut at that time, and thats why it showed me the search page. When I logged out, and searched, and clicked Orkut again, the usual log in page appeared.

But the interesting point is that, Google either thinks that Orkut has useful material, or it wants to drive traffic to its Social Networking site. It is most probably the latter, since most of the content on Orkut are either highly personal (and useless for a 3rd person, unless he’s studying customer psychology) or extremely spammy. Most of the communities I’ve been to so far, barring a single one on Indian stock exchange updates, are notoriously spam filled, thus presenting nothing search-worthy.

Then we have to question - why is Google going so orkutty?  A few of my observations -

• Information contained in Orkut is highly useless to any person searching for something conrete
• Orkut communities are extremely spam filled - thus leading to incorrect information
• Orkut communities harbour many illegal activities, like hacking/phising attempts
• Thus, presenting Orkut search as an option in Google search destroys the search engine’s credibility by providing highly incorrect search results.
• Google, by putting in the Orkut link, is trying to get more visitors to sign up at Orkut, thereby providing more income to Google

So finally, we have to ask a few questions… Is Google compromising on search quality to drive forward its products? Isn’t Google thus creating an unfair advantage for Orkut over other social networking websites? Isn’t Google misleading people to click on the Orkut search link, and thus making them sign up?

Unfortunately, we do not have answers. Hopefully, a Googler will see this post, and send me a rather flighty email But until then folks, ciao, take care

Technorati Tags: orkut, orkut search, google, google search, decreasing google, google standards, orkut information, google news

Hi all,

I was a bit late to catch up on this news, but Google is planning to release a Wikipedia-Squidoo style social content website. Christened "Knol", Google calls this a "tool" which will "encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it".

In short, Google is trying to chase an area, in which Wikipedia currently rules the roost. With a big difference - Google will be commercializing Knol. Which means that a user can opt for an advertisement, Google Adsense of course, on his/her article pages, and he/she gets a "substantial share" of the revenue.

(click to enlarge)

Now the debate raging throughout the web is whether Google will give unfair advantage to pages from Knol on their search results.

Extract from the Official Google Blog

"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

I hope that Udi Manber, the writer of this post in the Google blog means what he said in a positive sense.

Anyway, experts argue that the Google brand will give value to these Knols, which will encourage users to link to Knols, and thus organically increase the ranking of Knols. This is again a far cry, since this same image and reputation exists even for Wikipedia. Ok, so Google is set to earn profit for Knol, unlike Wikipedia, but does that really matter?

Meanwhile, I’ve contacted a couple of my friends, well placed at Wikipedia, to try and get invites to Google Knol. Hopefully, they might succeed, and give me an insider review.

Now, bloggers are opining that Google is going a step too far with Knol. To be exact, Duncan Riley of TechCrunch. He’s given quite a comprehensive insight into how Google could do foul play with Knol, but then, Riley is known for his hopelessly ridiculous What-If posts (not that his intuitions are not accurate, but sometimes, when he plays with the "hot" of the moment, he gets carried away; otherwise, his reviews are excellent).

"He’s right. Google is moving away from simply indexing the worlds content to being a content provider itself. Of course Google in response would argue that it is simply facilitating user generated content (like with Blogger), that ultimately they are the host as opposed to the creator, but it still competes with existing content providers, many of whom rely on Google search results for their living. Which takes us to question of search results.

(TechCrunch)

Well, pretty true that Google is moving towards being a content provider, so what? So whats the big deal? If Google doesn’t cash in unethically, then why the big hue and cry?

Well, I guess we’ll wait and see…. And then we’ll decide to knol, or not to knol…

Technorati Tags: google knol, knol, knowledge, social content, wikipedia, squidoo, advertisements, make money, write articles

Hi all,

I just noticed that I had got my Google PageRank back. Well, not exactly back, but I’m now better off than 0. I had a PR of 4 before, until Google started penalizing blogs for displaying paid links which did not have the "nofollow" tags. I was advised by a Google contact of mine on what to do, and now I’ve got a PR of 2 - which I attribute to my inactivity.

Steps to recover your PageRank if you’ve been penalized by Google -

1. Remove the paid links
2. OPTIONAL : Append rel="nofollow" to all hyperlinks in your site to "shifty" webpages
   eg : <a href="http://the page here . html" title="Page here" rel="nofollow"> Link </a>
3. Go to Google Webmaster Central and sign up, if you haven’t already
4. Log in and click on "Request Reconsideration"
5. Select your site, check the checkbox, and explain in the text box truthfully about what happened, why it happened, how you got to know the Google guidelines only now, what actions you’ve taken, what all you’ve removed, and that your site now complies with all Google guidelines. After all this, hit the button which says "Request Reconsideration". You’re done!

Now wait for a couple of weeks (2-4 weeks). If your case is genuine, and you’ve been honest, you’ll get your Google PageRank back. Thats what happened to me, and many others. I wish you luck!

Technorati Tags: five steps, get back pagerank, google pagerank, google pr, google, pagerank, blog pr

Disclaimer : I found this on Digg. Thanks to Nirmal. We envision that you use the information given below for legal(or educational) purposes only. Thank you.

Hi all,
Here’s a cool tool named Google Hack which allows to you easily search for the file of your choice - be it music, video, lyrics, hacks, caches items, fonts, proxies, torrents, applications or books.

Google has in built search queries which can be used to effectively track down these files, but these long codes need to be appended to the search term. Who will bother to do that?

So here, a few smart guys have released a cool program which will surely reduce your search time, and increase your search accuracy, when you’re searching for such, uh, ‘unconventional’ things.

Google Hacks hosted at Google CODE is a program available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Download the appropriate file, and enjoy Googling