Hotlinking

Hotlinking - What is it and why avoid hotlinking?

Hotlinking (stealing dandwidth), inline linking, remote linkingand many other terms are used to describe a way taking images, or other files and embedding it directly into a website. In other words, unauthorized use of someone else's bandwidth. Hotlinked files are files Not stored on your own server i.e. you are showing files on your website but those files are hosted on some one else server. For example, a hotlinked image code would look something like this:

OK, so why is Hotlinking wrong and why should be avoided?

If the person who owns the media file you are embedding into your own website gives permission to hotlink, then nothing is wrong. Sadly, this is not usually the case. Frankly speaking its better to host the image files on the same server, as they are not much big in size, compared to Video Files. Now a day many of the webmaster use sites like youtube and google video etc. to host there videos. This is also one kind of hotlinking

If you don't have permission, remote linking to any media and / or program file is theft :).

Yes, theft.. even if it's a clipart archive offering free images, a music server giving away free tunes or a website with freeware... Unless the original website specifically states otherwise, hotlinking is stealing though chances of any legal action are silm.

"Wait a minute" I hear you say, "I didn't steal anything, the file is right where the owner left it!" OK, let me explain this a bit. Each time a file is called from our servers we have what is called a data transfer request, or another way of saying it.. we have bandwidth used of his server.

Bandwidth is a bit like gas for a car. Every time you drive (or a file is loaded), a bit of fuel (or bandwidth) is used up. Now imagine if each night one of your neighbors siphoned out a tiny bit for their own car... then other neighbors thought "I'll just take a couple drops as well"... by morning your fuel tank is empty. Your neighbors each thought taking just a tiny bit would be unnoticeable.. but added all up it left nothing for you.

Serving up images is not only usually our biggest consumer of bandwidth, when others remotely link to them (ie. embed them in their websites from our servers without our permission), we have to pay... bandwidth is not free! though it will not cost much. Most websites have a limited amount of data transfer and the website owners either have to cough up extra money each month to pay the fees, or face shutting down.

The difference between hotlinking & linking to a web site:

When people link directly to a media file (gif, jpg, png, mov etc.), the webmaster of the original site has to pay the fees. When someone links to a page on that same website, the webmaster still pays fees but the content is shown in the form the designer (and copyright holder) wished, and they may be able to cover costs by displaying advertising on the page.

Super simply put... Hot Linking to media files = bad... Linking to pages = good, linking to my site is cool :)

Other reasons you shouldn't hotlink files

Eventually every website owner that faces this dilemma has to make a decision. Close up shop... or fight back? Since their files would now be embedded into your website, they are free to do with those files as they wish... and most will.

Some things webmasters can do to hotlinkers:

1. Rename the file and give the hotlinker a broken file.
2. Replace it with a very nasty file
3. Replace it with a notice that hotlinking is not allowed and an advertisement for their own website.
4. Contact the hotlinker's website host and submit a copyright / terms of service abuse report. In most cases this will result in the hotlinker losing their website.

OK, but...

So by now you (should) realize why hotlinking is wrong, but what if your web site host doesn't allow images stored? That's an easy one!

Either find a better host, that will allow image uploading.

Option number 2, keep your current host and use a free image host that allows hotlinking.

Can't save files?
If for some reason you can't save a file, or perhaps not on your own computer and find an image that you want, there's the Transload Service that will upload it for you, or you could always email yourself the file for later use.

Oh, and please, before you take any file whether it's an image, sound file or anything else.. check that it is allowed to be used elsewhere. Just because something is on a website does not mean that anyone is free to take it! There are copyright laws online as well.

If you like this article you are welcomed to add this article to you site or hotlink it in you site

Google's micro-blogging search engine

Coming soon: Google's micro-blogging search engine

It’s been talked about before, but now there is solid evidence that Google is building their own meta search engine for Twitter and other micro blogging sites. Micro-blogging is emerging as an extremely popular way for people to share real-time information with the world.

For example, as you can see on my Twitter, I just got the HTC Magic — but do random people really care? I’m not convinced yet that searching through tweets like “going to watch drag me to hell!” (which are the vast majority of tweets) is really useful — though I don’t argue there are certain times when it’s possible to bring back interesting real-time results.

Hints of this new search service are popping up in Google’s translation console, which is where Google harvests voluntary human translation services they use to make their products multilingual. The phrase they want translators to do their magic on was the following:

Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format.

If you look at the screenshot posted by Ionut, this appears to be a part of the main Google search engine rather than a service by itself. Let’s hear what you think in the TalkBack!

Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content frommicroblogging services like Twitter. Since it's very easy to post updates and the posts are usually very short, micro-blogging services are great for live blogging, posting real-time information about an event.

Twitter's search engine has two important drawbacks: it's limited to Twitter and it sorts the results by date. While there are other search engines like Tweefind that try to sort Twitter posts by relevancy and search engines like Twingly that index multiple microblogging sites, none of them does a great job.

Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.

Here's the description used in Google's localization service:

"Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format."

Who dominates the Internet?

Who dominates the Internet? "Do You Have The Answer"

The entire internet is run by only a few giants.

We will understand this fact when we just analyze what we are doing online. The entire web is considered the storage of information.

Who are the driving forces behind these?

Who gives us access to them all?

The major force behind the web is Google.

Google has dominated the internet than anybody else.

The Google search box is what a user believes in more than anything.

To visit a website, to get the meaning of a word, to buy a book, to download a software, music, games, and access anything on the internet Google is the most trusted source.Google is the starting point of search for millions of users. Everybody comes only second to it.

Google is the search power that dominates the web world.

There are many other companies who want to snatch this from Google. They have tried a lot and lot and are still trying to match the services offered by Google. The companies that got effected by Google are mostly Yahoo! and Microsoft. Yahoo has become a unstable company because of Google! Yahoo started well as a directory search engine, drives millions of users to its website, became the most popular company on the internet, and somehow has lost its focus now, because of Google. The magical power of pagerank has sinked the giant into a black hole. The other company that is trying to keep up with Google is Microsoft. Microsoft is now miles away from Google. They are not in a situation to do any miracles online. They have created some great softwares for PCs, but online applications from Microsoft has not tasted success since the emergence of Google. They have provided lot of services, but with less creativity and the result is that either they are short lived or are not purposeful.

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Microsoft has not studied the online world like PCs. They still did not understand the fact that more than brain power they need more creativity to attract users to their services. That is the reason why even many other small online applications become a success Microsoft fails. Twitter is a online tweeting. The site is simple and the idea is creative and purposeful. Twitter is now one of the most powerful messaging services now. Millions of users now access Twitter to share their tweets with friends and the world. Twitter is an example of how a simple and useful idea can take the world by storm. Microsoft fails to understand this fact.

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Rapidshare is a gaint file hosting service.

The service that rules the web next to Google is, Rapidshare. Rapidshare is the house of millions of files. Rapidshare is mainly user powered, even if users have to pay for hosting and sharing their files. Rapishare has enough power to retain its position as the #1 destination for downloading softwares, games, books, movies, music, DVDs, and CDs. You can find almost evey digital good you want in Rapidshare. Rapidshare is one of the high traffic sites in the world. Millions of people share and download files from Rapidshare everyday. Even if it is a payed service they allow limited downloading for free and also offers free accounts from time to time so that users will get a chance to join their service for free. There are many other file hosting services like Megaupload, but they still are not able to reach where Rapidshare is now. Undoubtfully, the service that offers users everything they need and the major force that make people beleive the web is still a free country is Rapidshare.

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Youtube is a free video sharing website.

Youtube has a very powerful video streaming technology that allow millions of online users with a medium broadband connection to enjoy music, movies, and tutorial videos online. Youtube has become the major player in online video sharing only within a few years. Now when we say video sharing online it is Youtube. Youtube allows users to upload videos to Youtube and share them with the world for free. Youtube has been owned by Google now and is undoubtedly the best video sharing site online. The availability of hundreds of Youtube video downloaders instead of streaming video downloads underlines this fact. You can find videos about anything and everything in Youtube. There are no barriers, you can share videos in any language, based on anything, and as a result Youtube has millions of videos from around the world. The success of Youtube is based on the fact that it is also user-driven with millions of users uploading their videos and millions of users visiting it, Youtube is clearly second to none in case of popularity and is also a prime force ruling the web.

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Wikipedia is the ultimate destination for your queries.

If you have a doubt in your mind about anything instead of looking in Britanicca encyclopedia, you can look in Wikipedia, the largest user contributed, and the worlds largest encyclopedia in the world. Wikipedia is where you can quench you thirst for knowledge. It has answers for everything you want to know about the world, people, science, technology, sports, arts , culture, and so on. The articles in Wikipedia are written by its users. They are all free and you can also contribute the Wikipedia and become a writer for an encyclopedia. You can also edit what others write if you find some mistake. Wikipedia also offers thousands of books for free from its another venture Wiki Books. As time passes Wiki Books will be your ultimate destination for textbooks and study materials. Moreover, Wikipedia is a great reference material with millions of articles and answers for your questions. Clearly, Wikipedia is where your voyage for knowledge may start or end. Wikipedia has pioneered the information revolution in the web and is also a front-runner that shrinks the web to few sites.

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E-bay is the most prominent auction site in the world.

It has everything you want to bid on from pearls to airplanes. E-bay is something that monetized the web like no other. It made the web a bidding platform. It offers powerful tools for users to take part and manage bids. It has dominated the web like no other e-commerce company has done before. It started the wave of e-commerce on the internet. It unleashed the greatest potential of the web and make it a money-spinner. E-bay now is the largest auction platform on the earth. E-bay is powered by its great technology and infrastructure that is unmatched. It provides users a unique place to sell, bid, and buy anything they like. E-bay is also a website with purpose and great vision that enchanted web users and attracted users to it like a honeypot and is clearly a driving force on the internet.

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Amazon is the biggest bookseller in the world.

It is where you can find any book you want to buy on the earth. Amazon has a great respiratory of not only books but also electronic goods, toys, games, home appliances, and lot more. It is one of the biggest online store in the world. Millions of users visit Amazon to buy books and other goods. It is one of the most trusted stores online. The success of Amazon attributes to the fact that it was started with great vision and supported by great technology and affiliate network. It is where millions of users search and buy goods online everyday. It has become the trusted source for buying and selling goods online and has won the hearts of millions of users. Amazon clearly is a traffic snatcher on the internet.

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Blogging is a great opportunity for millions of people to share what they know.

Blogs are different from many other services. It offers users with their own web logs to write content. Any body can start a web log. WordPress and Blogger are two giants in the world of blogging. These two blogging platforms host millions of blogs. Blogs are hot bed of activities. It is where millions of users with vast range of taste blogs about anything and everything like. Blogs are high traffic generating, rich information based service on the internet. WordPress is a huge user pulling blogging platform highly SEO optimized and attracts millions of users everyday. Blogger also offers free blogging service and there are millions of blogs at blogger. Blog search engines alone underlines the vast information that spread around millions of blogs. Technorati and Google Blog search are some of the popular blog search engines. WordPress and Blogger blogs definitely share among themselves millions of users everyday and they are definitely are rulers of the web.Photobucket is a photosharing website. Photobucket is where millions of users upload and share their photos online everyday. Photobucket now has millions and millions of photos and is the one of the biggest photo hosting and photo sharing site in the world. The users can create a free account with Photobucket and start uploading images. They also offer premium photo sharing services. You can create image sideshows, rate photos, edit images and so on with photobucket. With millions of photos added to it and thousands of users joining it everyday, Photobucket is unarguably one of the user attracting and traffic generating site on the web.

Flickr is another photo sharing site with the same reputation as Photobucket. It is governing the photo sharing online like Photobucket and offers great photo sharing for free. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and is clearly a traffic-puller.

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The above are few websites I think is dominating the web like no other.

I just tried to analyze the factors behind some of the traffic snatching sites in the world. I just want to know how they become giants in the world of computing. I just want to understand the factors that played a major role in their success. The thing is that it definitely is not just money alone. More than money there are few thing that make them the emperors and rulers of the web, that make them crowd-pullers. My assumptions about their success are the following things

1. Great vision

2. Novel technologies.

3. Great Ideas.

4. User generated content.

5. Vast collection of information.

6. Amazing Creativity.

7. Offer free services.

8. Understands the diverse needs of users.

9. Allows users freedom to share.

10. Quality service.

I have just mentioned my own thoughts about the web and the internet, the forces behind it. The entire information we need spreads around thousand of websites. These websites in one way or the other are the door ways for these information. That is the why they are huge success. For example Youtube allows users to embed videos and we see Youtube videos in many websites. It attributes to the success of Youtube in a great way. Flickr and Photobucket sideshows can be embedded in web pages. Blogger blogs and WordPress blogs contains vast information and they are free services. They offer services matched by any premium hosting service. So high quality service and freedom to share made above websites a great success. There are many other services like bookmarking websites that attracts millions of users. The contents in these websites are also user generated. They also have the ability to get more visitors and act as pointers to many websites and quality content. This post is just my opinion on who rules the web and this is not the ultimate list of websites ruling the web. Hope more and more web services will emerge and rule the web.

Will You Be a Slave to Google's Wave?

Will You Be a Slave to Google's Wave?

By now you've read the accounts from a couple weeks ago about Google Wave, the experimental, open source collaboration and communications tool that bundles e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing and other tools in one application. Google Wave hijacked the Microsoft Bing announcement when Google announced it at Google I/O May 28.
Lars Rasmussen, the Software Engineering Manager at Google who introduced Wave at Google I/O, wrote:

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.

You can then refer back to a Wave to see the whole conversation and document thread. When a Wave is open on two users' screens, messages bounce right off Google's servers into another user's browsers to enable instant messaging-like communication.

Users don't even need to hit send to communicate their message as each typed character shows up in the other Wave user's browser less than a second after it's been typed. True real time.
You can also check a box to keep communication private until you're ready for the recipient to see what you've written. Want to add more participants to the conversation? Just drag and drop the contact into the browser window.

There are plenty of other features, all of which make the product more fascinating.
Cool? Yes. Ambitious? Hell, yes, but this is where the future of communications is heading online, or at least Google hopes so. I hope so, too. Who isn't tired of accessing siloed apps such as e-mail and instant messaging? We love how these apps synchronize with calendar apps and increasingly, how these apps port to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

But why should there be separate apps for all of our communications tools? Why can't we merge them all and have them play off one another, creating a smarter, unified communications platform? Combine Google Wave with Facebook, Twitter and other networks du jour.
Importantly, Google demoed Wave running on its newfangled Android browser and Apple's iPhone. Wave must work on mobile or it defeats the purpose.

Search Engine Land proprietor Danny Sullivan and GigaOm's Jordan Golson were hardly impressed, but I suspect they'll change their tunes when/if a finished product comes to the fore doing things that Yahoo wished it could do with its revamped Yahoo Mail.
To that end, don't think Google is alone in this unified solution scheme. IBM is regularly enabling the apps in its Lotus Notes collaboration platform to work together. Microsoft follows a similar integration plan with its SharePoint tools.

The main difference is that Google is iterating on its existing products from the Web up, it's not starting from a legacy package. It's also open sourcing Wave and asking developers to help build the product.

We already recognize that Google whipped IBM and Microsoft to the Web for online collaboration. I wonder how long before these venerable software providers get up to speed online, which is where Google, Facebook and others are driving innovation.
Of course, there are nervous Nellies. Fast Company's Chris Dannen offers up this warning while those who are already leery of Google's gluttonous information-gorging will be loath to get themselves and their friends on Google's Wave. After all, many of you are already upset about the data Google culls through Gmail.

Imagine routing all of your communications apps, wiki documents and communications apps through the Google Borg. Why, Google's fingerprints would be on virtually on all of your data save for banking and other bill payment apps. No doubt some of you are queasy about this possibility. I guess it boils down to whether you buy into Google having a handle on your data. It could entail becoming a slave to Google Wave.

I feel comfortable the same way I feel comfortable that a bank handles my money. There's no guarantee nothing will happen to it, but you kinda have to place your trust in it. You can put all your money under your mattress, but the same is NOT true for your data in this highly electronic age.

I can't wait to test Google Wave. Have you signed up for the test coming later this year? It's good to get in at the ground floor. The more we test it and give Google our feedback, the better the product should be in the end.

Higgest blog hits and with higgest blogs

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WElcome and thanks all of you for showing ur kind attention
This is the only blog with more than "95" hits per day with full of knowledge and Encyclopedia and every topic covered with more than "115" blogs in just "THREE months",
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Building43.com

Robert Scoble launches Building43.com


Robert Scoble, a very renowned technology blogger recently started a brand new project called - building43, which is an online community for all Internet enthusiasts.

What is Building43?


The main objective of Building43 is to help businesses use modern technology and social sites to increase their online exposure and revenue. Now I am hearing a lot of people ask on Friendfeed, how building43 is any different from a traditional tech blog?

Well, based on my initial analysis I found that Building43’s whole focus is more on practical business & tech advice rather than covering tech news like what Techcrunch and Slashdot does. So I believe Building43 has touched a completely different niche and it would be an understatement if we just call it a blog! Its more like an community of similar minded people wanting to become successful on the web and Building43 is sort of trying to be the platform for that.

Now I’m not saying that this concept is new or ground breaking, probably there are handful of other sites that does the same thing - I just don’t know. But why does it matter anyway?! There has always been a handful of ‘everything’ on the web and thats why today we have more options & diversity of the content.

So Kudos to Scoble for starting this wonderful project! The site currently has quite a number of video interviews of some impressive interviewees including Google’s VP of Search - Marissa Mayer, Facebook’s CEO - Mark Zuckerberg, Principal with Union Square Venture - Fred Wilson and many more! Other than the videos, the site also has some blog posts from famous web entrepreneur like Guy Kawasaki and Scoble himself.

They are clearly going to add more and more content as the community grows. Currently they have a dedicated community page where they are showing the building43 twitter & friendfeed feeds.

They are asking the community to share their valuable content via video, blog posts, podcasts, friendfeed comments and tweets. If you are interested to be a part of Building43 in any way, just drop them an email.

To learn more about Building43 just check out their website - www.building43.com

wolframalpha The latest search engine

www.wolframalpha.com/

Some might say that Mathematica and A New Kind of Science are ambitious projects.
But in recent years I’ve been hard at work on a still more ambitious project—called WolframAlpha.

And I’m excited to say that in just two months it’s going to be going live:



Mathematica has been a great success in very broadly handling all kinds of formal technical systems and knowledge.

But what about everything else? What about all other systematic knowledge? All the methods and models, and data, that exists?

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things.

And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.

I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules.

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.

But, OK. Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it?

The way humans normally communicate is through natural language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too.

Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.

But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.

All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.

Of course, even that has never been done in any generality. And it’s made more difficult by the fact that one doesn’t just want to handle a language like English: one also wants to be able to handle all the shorthand notations that people in every possible field use.

I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.

Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task.

It’s certainly the most complex project I’ve ever undertaken. Involving far more kinds of expertise—and more moving parts—than I’ve ever had to assemble before.

And—like Mathematica, or NKS—the project will never be finished.

But I’m happy to say that we’ve almost reached the point where we feel we can expose the first part of it.

It’s going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

We’re all working very hard right now to get WolframAlpha ready to go live.

I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web.

That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!


www.wolframalpha.com/


Regards,
Harish Thyagarajan
Systems Administrator
www.eresourceerp.com
stay ahead of your competitors

Google Rolls Out Google Squared

Google releases Google Squared,

An application for structuring results data into easy-to-read tables. A number of search engines, including the much-publicized Wolfram Alpha, have already been experimenting in this space. Google finds itself adding more features to its lineup in the face of increased search competition from companies such as Microsoft, which recently released its own new search engine, Bing.

Google released Google Squared, its application for ordering search results into a spreadsheet-like "square," on June 4.

The application seems designed to join a broader move in search toward presenting structured data in response to a query, instead of the traditional page of blue hyperlinks. Indeed, other search engines have crowded into the space: Wolfram Alpha, the specialized search engine that made its debut on May 18, earned a great deal of media attention for its structuring of results into easy-to-read tables.

Google has been integrating an increasing number of tools into its core search offerings in order to better maintain its market-share lead over Yahoo and Microsoft, which launched Bing, a new search engine, on June 1.

Google had previously announced Google Squared at its annual Searchology event on May 12, along with a selection of other upcoming search products, including Google Search Options and a Google Android application called Sky Map.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search and User Experience for Google, introduced Google Squared at Searchology by saying that it would take "unstructured information and present it in a structured way." The subsequent demo showed that a search for "small dogs" would create a table listing information such as size and breeds. At the event, Mayer suggested that the application would roll out at the beginning of June.

The widely released version of Google Squared varies little from the original demo.

"Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet," Alex Komoroske, associate product manager for Google Squared, said in a June 3 corporate blog posting accompanying the release. "If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed."

However, the user might need to engage in a little back-and-forth to nail the result they’re looking for.

"This technology is by no means perfect," Komoroske cautioned. "That’s why we designed Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer."

To that end, Google Squared also allows rows and columns to be added or removed, and then responds dynamically to those changes by suggesting additional rows and columns to add that will potentially refine a search.

Released under the umbrella of Google Labs, Google Squared can be found here.

Google maintains its lead in the search-engine arena with 64.2 percent of the U.S. core search-engine market in April 2009, according to a ComScore report, while Yahoo held second place at 20.4 percent, and Microsoft came in third with 8.2 percent.

http://www.google.com/squared

BING IS HERE --->

So, Bing, earlier known as the Kumo is finally here. Announced at the recently concluded D: All Things Digital conference, the Bing is Microsoft's
first dedicated attempt to challenge Google's domination in the search arena. And prima facie, it seems to be a very good attempt indeed if we are to go by the worldwide reviews received soon after launch. Bing is all set to replace Windows Live Search and will be fully operational, starting Wednesday - although it's available in most countries now.

Soo what is bing ???

It's now time for us to take a first look at Bing. Does it really have what it takes? Will it ever replace that Google homepage of yours? Before we delve further into this, let's just try to shake off our prejudice (is that the right term?) most people have for anything that originates from Redmond. That, coupled with the unshakable faith in Google, makes for a nice combination, which usually ends up in most of us writing off any competition (to Google) even before actually trying them out. Remember Cuil? Anyone? So, has Bing managed to catch Google with its pants down? Or is it a product you can pass? Read on.

--- THE LOOK ---^

First off, what strikes you is the look of the Bing homepage. It's loaded with nice wallpapers that seem to change on a daily basis. On a closer look, you notice that you can find the story behind the wallpaper by hovering your mouse over various "locations" on the image. The interface is quite basic and intuitive - as good as Google.

The only complaint here is the image that some people might deem is an unnecessary addition. For others, this might be a welcome change from the white, too minimalist, simple Google page.

--- Searching ----

The most important function of any search engine is the way it displays search results and Bing does it pretty well. The good thing about Bing is the way it throws the information at you in a much uncluttered, unconfused manner. The keywords you feed in are further used to "suggest" you more results. There is a related searches bar on the sides, similar to Google. As for the results, it does come up with what you are actually looking for most of the times. However, this one actually needs some time for you to "settle" in. Maybe a month down the line, we can comment if Bing can really replace Google, or even Yahoo for that matter, which if you're not aware, is in second position in the search engine segment. What we liked about the web results are the "snippets" of information that you see beside every search result link. To get an idea of

what I am talking about, take a look at the image below. Once you search for a term and get a page with the search results, all you need to do is to hover your mouse over the thin line on the side of the list, and it will display what else is there on that page. Although I am not very fond of these mouse hover initiated things, this one does it in a very unobtrusive way. Nice!

---- Bing Tips & Tricks ----

1. Use the full version of Bing

If you are using Bing outside North America, chances are that you seeing a localized version of Bing that may be missing some features. For instance, the Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history and the image on the Bing home page here is not interactive as in the US version.

To explore the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English - US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.

2. Track Companies from the IE Favorites Bar

If you search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), Bing will automatically create a web slice for that company which you may then add to IE 8 and track the performance directly from the favorites bar. You need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.

3. Watch Preview of Hulu Videos outside US

Hulu hosts some popular popular TV shows but the problem is that you can only watch these videos if your computer has US based IP address.

However, Bing lets you watch shot previews of Hulu video even outside US. Just search for any TV show episode on Bing Videos (see example) and hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnail to watch a short clip.

4. Save and Email search results

With Bing, you can save your search history on to a local folder inside Bing or to your Windows Skydrive account. Alternatively, you may send your search queries to a friend via email or publish them on your Facebook wall via Bing. You’ll need Silverlight to share queries in Bing.

5. RSS Feeds of Search Results

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

This RSS feature is not available for Image or Video search in Bing.

6. Find Pages That Link to MP3 Files or Documents

Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.

For instance, a search like susan boyle contains:mp3 will show pages that are about the British singer and that also link to MP3 files. Replace mp3 with doc to search pages that contain links to Word Documents.

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