Internet

SearchWiki Goes, Stars Debut In Google Personalized Search

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Google Kills SearchWiki, Adds Stars For Customized Search:

Google has rolled out new “Starred results” in Google search results, killing its previous “SearchWiki”.

This feature will be available to all the users in the coming few days, according to a blog post on Official Google blog.

Google has been offering personalized search via SearchWiki, which the search engine giant thought should be replaced by much simpler “Starring the results”

How This Works?

Google Bookmarks actually allow you to bookmark the sites right from the search results.Just go to search for anything you want in Google,

Find the small white star logo on the extreme right after the every search result listing, click on any result that you liked or what to bookmark to save it.

adding star bookmark in Google results

Now that you have saved the result page in your Google bookmarks using star, next time when you search for the same query, you would see the results like this:

Google starred results overview

Add YouTube Official Buttons For Your Website

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youtube-logo

YouTube has released brand new set of banners that you may keep in your website to promote your channel in YouTube.

You can either use them to link to your main YouTube channel (ex:http://www.youtube.com/user/google)

or

link to your YouTube subscription page (ex: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=google)

The following are the some of the YouTube buttons available on this YouTube page for download.

The image buttons are available in all possible sizes (small, medium & big) for your site.

YouTube Banners:

iheart_youtube watchmyvids2_yt subscribemyvids_yt

ytsuperstar_green

Youtube_watch_blue

Add these buttons to your website to make yourself popular on YouTube.

You may also grab Twitter, Facebook, MySpace Ribbons For Your Website

Google’s SEO Report Card Available For Download

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Google SEO report card

Google has released SEO report for its product pages for search engines.Actually, it is intended for Google engineers to analyze how the Google’s product pages doing in search engines so as to optimize them for better SEO.

subjects in SEO report for Google

The report (PDF file, 49 pages in total) contains 3 Subjects:

Subject I: Search result presentation

Subject II: URLs and redirects

Subject III: On-page optimizations

These subject cover the all the basic tests and reports reports for better SEO.These are not just for Google employees, you can use this report perhaps to start preparing for your own SEO report for your site.This would be the perfect reference guide if you want to come out with such a report for your site.

Download Google’s SEO Report Card

[Link updated]

If you want to start from scratch in Google’s SEO, you may want to download Google’s SEO beginners’ guide which is available in more than 40 languages.

Buzrr Offers Google Buzz Counter

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Buzrr logo

Buzrr re-buzz

With Google Buzz setting itself as another social content sharing tool, there are more and more easier sharing options are being introduced by developers.

We have previously talked about Google Buzz desktop applications for easier buzzing.Now a website called buzrr.com has come forward to offer the Google Buzz count button service similar to that of tweetmeme.com’s ‘retweet’ service.

Buzrr Google Buzz count button

Implementation:

If you are using Blogger.com blogs, visit buzrr.com to get the code to be inserted in your blog’s HTML source

If you have a WordPress blog, you can download the newly released plugin from here:

Download:

Buzrr_wordpress_plugin

Well, the share count buttons list is growing endlessly (Retweet, F share chount, now Buzrr) 🙁

Show Post Tags In Your WordPress Blog Posts Easily

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post tags in WordPress

WordPress users might be knowing about Post tags/ template tags or simply the tags that this blogging platform supports.

Many a times themes come up with default feature to show either individual post tags or “tag cloud” in the single post pages.

But some themes do not come with showing post tags on single post pages by default.In such cases, follow add these codes to your “single.php” file with in The Loop.

single posts php file

Case-1 : Default Use (Separated by Commas)

<p><?php the_tags(); ?></p>

Case-2 : Tags Separated by  Arrows

<?php the_tags('Social tagging: ',' > '); ?>

You can replace ‘>’ in the above code with a bullet ‘ • ’ to show tags separated by bullet

Case-3 : Tags as lists

<?php the_tags('<ul><li>','</li><li>','</li></ul>'); ?>

post tags example

If you are not using Noindex for tag archives, you must disable showing full post on tag archives to just showing excerpts only.`

Install Google Dictionary in Google Chrome

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Now a days we like a lot of things to be inbuilt. What about a inbuilt dictionary on your browser? Just double click on the word you want to know the meaning, zoom..the meaning comes up! This miracle is possible in Google Chrome installed with the Google Dictionary Extension.

The installation of Google Dictionary is very easy. It is just and extension in Google Chrome and takes very less time to install.

Google Chrome

See the steps below:

Step 1: Go to the Google Dictionary Extension link below from your Chrome Browser:

To Download Click Here

Step 2: Click on the Install Button. Click Install again to confirm. That is it, is installed. You can see the installation confirmation.

Google-dictionary-extension

Google-dictionary-install

Google-chrome-dictionary-extension-install

Now, while visit any website and if you find any word which you want to know the definition. Just double click on it. The meaning will be displayed. If you want to know more, click on More>>

Google-chrome-dictionary-extension

By default the settings will be to display the definition on double clicking the word. if you want to change the settings to the language see the steps below:

Go to Settings Tab and select Extensions.

chrome-extensions-tab

Click on options button.

chrome-extensions

Set the settings as you want.

Google-chrome-dictionary-extension-settings

This extension is a very useful one. You don’t even have to open the online or offline dictionary and search for the words. What you have to do is just double click.

Google Adds Local Search Filtering

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Google has finally launched the Local search results, which the search engine giant had already launched the similar local search feature as “Near me now” for high-end Smartphones sometime back.

The options is available in the “Search Options panel” that you can find by clicking (see the pic below)

Search Options panel link

The results will be shown based on your “default location”, that Google decides most of the time based on your internet IP address.

Google local search screen shot-1

But you can also choose custom location to enter particular City, state name etc.

Also, to get familiar with this feature, try these examples quoted in Google official blog:

>>[things to do on st. patrick’s day] – In the Minneapolis region
>>[food blogs] – Near you
>>[farmers market] – Near the city of Ithaca
>>[dmv] – In the same state as Tucson

Note: As of now, it’s working with Google.com domain only, I tested with Google.co.in where I didn’t notice this feature.

How To Create Profiles in Mozilla Firefox For Customized Browsing

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In Mozilla Firefox we can create and use more than one profile.This is also another useful feature Firefox. Here we will see how to create new user profiles and use it to browse more efficiently pertaining to each user.

This feature will enable Firefox as an Operating software for the web where each user profile can be thought as a different user in the computer.

Firefox Logo

Benefit of Profiling in Firefox:

Each user can develop his/her own profile according to their preference and desire. But there is another concept of profiling. A single user can maintain different profiles for different purposes. For example, for using the browser for Social Networking, the profile setting can be made a bit relaxed and all the scripts allowed to run. If you are using the browser for secure internet banking, then you can create a new profile with strict settings like disallowing scripts and cookies.

Enabling User Profiling in Firefox is very Easy. Just follow the steps below:

Step 1: Enable User Profiles in Mozilla Firefox Startup. To do this Just Create a different shortcut for Firefox and Right click on it. Select Properties and add the following in he Target.

-profilemanager -no-remote

Firefox profile manager

Step 2:  Create a user Profile: In order to create a user profile, open Firefox using the shortcut. Click on create profile button. Enter your profile name. Click on Finish.

Firefox profile create

Firefox profile naming

Step 3: Now open Mozilla Fire fox using the Created profile.

Firefox profiling

Now you can use your profile and customize the settings and preferences in the way you want your Firefox should behave.

How To Gain Ownership Of An Ownerless Orkut Community?

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orkut logo

Orkut, Google’s popular Social networking website in Brazil, India & Pakistan is one of the largest daily visited site in these countries (mainly among the youngsters).Popularity always bring exploitations, isn’t it?  you can always find so many hacks, tweaks, tips, hacks exchanged between the users about Orkut.

The one such vulnerable feature being exploited was taking the ownership of an ownerless community.If the profile of the existing owner of a community gets deleted or the something of that sort happens and the community suddenly becomes ownerless.

ownerless orkut community screen shot techrena.net

Orkut had an easy option till last year that enables any user who is active in the community for at least a period of 7 days.That means that if I want to become a owner of a big community which is currently ownerless (of course for notorious reasons), then what I’d do is I just simply scan the orkut for such commnities and I’ll find the best of such communities and join.Then after 7 days, I’d get a link “Become the owner of this community” I click it and would become the owner.

Well, if you have been using these kind of tricks, may be not anymore from now, Google has recently updated the criterion for becoming owner of an ownerless community,

To become the owner of an ownerless community, you must need to be member of that community for at least 3/4th of the age of that community

So, as per the new rules to become a owner, you must be a member of that community for at least 3/4 th age of the community and also the age of the community should be more than 7 days by the time of registration.

However, as expected this is sure to rise the voices of the other group of people.Orkut users expressed their concerns over here and here.

This policy is subject to change if the Orkut team thinks it is important for the safety of orkut communities in general

Where To Report About Google & Yahoo Search Result Spam ?

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Recently I was searching for a movie review in Google and was astonished to see the Google search results page complete filled with spam results:

Case Study:

Check the below picture for this query in Google.

The top 8 results shown here are spam results.Look at the pattern of the title page carefully, you can easily make out  that these are spam results.

Dare to click any of those results? I did, and I was immediately redirected to another webpage that has no connection with what I was searching, this is definitely cloaking right?

Apart from not giving the desired WebPages that I was looking for, Google giving me pages that are compromising Google index to spam the most popular searches happening at a particular time.Why is the big brother Google pretty calm on this and feeding them, it shouldn’t be doing this right?

Well, if you just think like that and leave it without reporting, may be we are encouraging such spammers  indirectly to grow bigger and bigger so much so that they eat entire Google search results space on your browser.

Spam results in Google search

How  I Can Report Spam in Google Search Results?

Search engines do look into the spam reports submitted by the users, as they take this kind of spamming very seriously.You can report to Google about spam in search results from the below links:

>> If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can report from HERE.

>> If you haven’t got a Google Webmaster tools account, you can still report to Google from here.

Yahoo:

Report Spam in Yahoo Search results here

But in this particular case, virtually 80% of the top 10 results contain spam (above screen shot).No one in this world will have the patience to report if there are that many spam results in one page.Well, Google has to think about this particular issue.