Random Google Image Search

I stumble upon this service that lets throws you the images from Google image search with random phrases. The service adds a random name with a random verb each time you refresh the page which means it will search form "people doing stuffs". Good for time pass.

Merry Christmas

If you are a Digg user then there is greeting for you from Google maps. The greeting is created by taking out letter shaped buildings from Google maps.

Indian Roads Now on Google Maps

Google maps added in itself a detailed maps of national highways, roads and streets of all the major cities and towns of India. This is a measure breakthrough in the online mapping system in which the country is lacking a good deal of features as compared to its western counterparts. MapMyIndia was the only service which existed uptill now in this area and it is still more detailed than Google maps. But the Google map service is all set to take off because of its combination of both satellite imagery and maps.

Related: MapsMania , Google Earthopedia , Maps and Maps , Virtual World

Google Soap API

Google deprecated their soap search api reports O'Reilly Radar. Instead Google is promoting its Ajax Search API. The site reports:

The AJAX Search API is great for web applications and users that want to
bling their blog, but does not provide the flexibility of the SOAP API. I am
surprised that it has not been replaced with a GData API instead. The developer
community has been discussing this and do not seem happy with the change. Discussion on the forums have pointed out that Yahoo! has a REST Search API. Live Search also has a SOAP API available.

The service is stopped by not issueing the keys any longer. However, hours later, a hack appeared at Hackszine which will get you the keys. You can obtain the keys from here, the page will show error but you will receive key in email.

Google Apps for Your Domain

If you have registered a domain or planned to register this is probably is good news for you. Google is giving away its goodies like Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar etc to serve the multidimensional purpose of your domain. The good thing is that its fully customizable to give the apps a touch of your site. Besides you will also be able to put content on the site by leveriging the power of WYSIWYG editor.

If you have planned or just decided out of shear excitement of this news to register for a domain, again this is a great time. Google has partnered with GoDaddy and eNom to provide for registration services for $10 a year. The added flavor is that you get private domains which means your privacy will be preserved and your contact information will not be revealed. Other services charge 3-10$ extra to get you private domain.

Get started here ..... happy blogging!!

Google Launches Patent Search

A patent search feature has been integrated with Google's ever increasing range of services. The patent search at the time of writing seems to search US patents only as it pulls data from USPTO database. It covers all the 7 million (approx) patents issued by USPTO since 1790. The contribution of Google being conversion of all the image database of patents of USPTO into searchable format.

Search Queries--
» To search patents by patent number(lets patent no be 1247412) -- patent:1247412

» To search by inventor (ex. patents awarded to Edision) -- ininventor:edison

» To search by assignee ( ex. assigned by Fairchild) -- inassignee:fairchild

» By classification
US Classification -- uspclass:"99/385"
International Classification -- intlpclass:"A63B 6308"

You can use advanced search to search by filing date or issue date to narrow down your results.

The Google Toolbar Story

So far...

» Google released toolbar for Internet Explorer 7 which resembled just like Yahoo Toolbar (get it here) which made a good fuss in the blogosphere.

» Google later on corrected the problem and released the more Google looking toolbar for IE7 (get it here)

» How can Google forget Firefox? And so it is here.

Google Toolbar 3 Beta lets you add bookmarks and access it from anywhere on the internet. You can add custom buttons to the toolbar and share webpages via Blogger, Gmail or SMS. All these features are with IE7 toolbar too.

A feature that is exclusively for Firefox users is that you can now view the documents you come across while on web right inside your browser window without downloading anything on your computer. [via Official Google Blog]

Google launches Click to Call ads in India

Google adwords, a advertising portal for advertisers launched its new Click to Call(?) service in India. This service allows advertisers to connect directly to users/consumers. It works as follows:

» Advertisers registar at Google Adwords for the Click to Call service.
» Users see a small phone icons next to Google ads.
» Users click on the icon, and it expands and prompts you to enter your phone number.
» Users phone almost immediately rings and they are connected to advertiser free of charge.

Google ensures that your phone numbers are not leaked to the consumers. Google is also trying to ensure that you do not become to prey of pranks when someone enters your phone number.

This service is already launched in US, and you can use it in conjunction with Google Maps, just click the Find businesses tab while searching (via Official Google Blog).

Maps Mania

Google by virtue of its two killer apps Maps & Earth brought the revolution and reduced the world to fit into your monitor ( see Google Earthopedia) and it has got a lot of takers worldwide. They take Google earth, leverage their APIs and come up with their own apps. Here is a brief compilation of user created Google Maps apps:

» Webcams of the World : A collection of webcams geographically laid out.

» 7 Wonders : Seven wonders of the world classified by ancient, medieval, modern and nature.

» Ascii Art : Google maps made with ascii characters. Creative one.

» BBC news : See the news as it happens at places in Britain.

» Cheap Hotels : Affordable hotels worldwide.

» Travel n Blog : See what people are writing about places they visit. Good guide.

» Classifieds : Classified ads laid out geographically.

» Photos & Videos : Google maps + Flickr + Youtube. Lets you see pics n vids shared by others.

» Frappr : Social map. Add maps, add yourself to others maps, track your site traffice & more.

» Link with Friends : Add buddies. Good for blogs, groups, forums.

» BuddyPing : Google maps+Flickr+Del.icio.us . Shoot & Share pics geographically.

» Life History of George Bush : Bush biography geographically.

Theres a lots more useful maps spread all over the cyber space. Do a Google for them using relevant keywords like hospital maps , hotels google map etc.


See Also : Maps & Maps,
Virtual World.

Google Earthopedia

A so called Geographic Web Layer has been added to Google Earth by integrating Wikipedia, Panoramio and Google Earth Community to itself making it a good storehouse of geographical information. This means that you gotta see a layer consisting of icons from the above services and when you click on them you will get information put up on those services about that landmark. This integration really opens up a completely different Earth where you can fly to places while learning secrets about them, besides you will be able to see a good number interesting places or sights bookmarked by other peoples.

[via Official Google Blog]

Yahoo Search vs Google Search

Langreiter lets you compare Google vs Yahoo searches side by side with a slick graphical report. The search results of the two sites are connected by lines to show their relative position of appearance. The dots are clickable in order to get to the results.

Test Drive:

Get Mails from other Accounts into Gmail

Very recently a new feature called Mail Fetcher has been added to Gmail. Now you can have emails from your different accounts bundled into single platform Gmail. Gmail allows you to add upto 5 accounts from which you want to fetch mails into your Gmail account, thus enabling a centralized administration over all your mails. You can also create a customized From: address which lets you send mails from Gmail but appear as if send from your other mail account that you have configured. All you have to do is to go to your settings section on the top right corner of your Gmail interface, click account tab and click "Add another email address". Heres a step by step guide. Be informed though that it can be confiugred for only those webmails which enable access to there POP servers. So, at this point of time its not possible to add free Yahoo or Hotmail accounts to your Gmail.

» One last note, this feature is already there in Yahoo Mail, Go to Options->Mail->Mail Addresses. Yahoo also allows you create an extra mail account.

» In case you want disposable email addresses see "Fighting Spam with Disposable Mails".

» In case you want to do some comparative analysis of Email providers see -- Webmail Comparisions, Email client comparisions.

Dr Google

The way the IT has been revolutionizing all the aspects of life,empowering organisations and at the same time vesting more and more power within individuals, how can the field of Medical Science be left behind. Today it has become more than necessary to be aware of ones own health,and carry ones 'VitalBase'(health database) with oneself. Thats why Dr Google is now aroundthe corner.

">

Google started its foray into the area of health and medicine with an enhancement to its search results. Search for a medical issue or a treatment like diabetes,aids,malaria etc and you will know. Just above the search results as shown in the snap you will find links to refine the results according to treatment,tests,symptoms etc. You can also refine search based on roles such as patients,medical authorities or health professionals.No doubt this has been made possible by the recent introduction of Google optimized search (previous coverge here).

Alternatively, you can also do optimized search as laid below:

»Treatment:- diseaseName more:condition_treatment (ex. "diabetes more:condition_treatment")

»Tests/diagnosis:- diseaseName more:tests_diagnosis

»For Patients:- diseaseName more:for_patients

»From medical authorities:- diseaseName more:medical_authorities

»Symptoms:- diseaseName more:condition_symptoms

»Causes/risk factors:- diseaseName more:causes_risk_factors

»For health professionals:- diseaseName more:for_health_professionals

»Alternative medicine:- diseaseName more:alternative_medicine

[link: Google Official Blog]

Just Married -- Orkut and GTalk

Today Orkut and GTalk were integrated, which means that you can see the online status of you friends and invite them for chat or give 'em a call. Now you can import your Orkut friend's list to GTalk. All that is needed is to go to the settings page on Orkut and check a simple radio button. Its even easier to send scraps from GTalk. Here is the help by Google and download GTalk here.

Google Earth Workaround

I found a lot of tiny dots on the most beloved Google Earth (download it here). There are a lot of places marked by other and I am sure you will find one which is near your place of interest. My work started by searching Google. First I searched by keywords like "Google Earth Placename", later started searching with keywords like "site: filetype:kmz" or "site: filetype:kml". But then came up this great site containing a good amount of information on geographical locations. Tageo contains a lot of information about even the smallest of towns of the world alongwith latitude and longitude information, but on top of that it provides a link to KML/KMZ (to be opened with Google Earth) file for each place.

Now that I have located my place on Google Earth, in order to share it I must upload somewhere. In order to accomplish this "this wonderful site" came handy which allows the upload of KMZ and KML files. So finally I am able to share my location with you right here.

Google's New Customized Search Engine

Google released its customized search engine facility called Google Co-op that allows to perform customized search limited to few chosen websites. This search engine can be owned by anyone with Google Account. Moreover you can customize it so that other users of your search engine can add relevant links/sites. More details on Techcrunch.

Check out my search engine Latest Tech Search Engine which I have customized to search only a few good tech sites such as cnet, slashdot, techcrunch, digg etc.

Orkut open to all

The orkut, google's online community portal (very popular in India,Brazil,Pakistan and Iran) finally opened its door to all. It means that now you do not need an invitation from others to open account with orkut. Orkut has added some extra features like instant reply of scraps , deleting multiple scraps etc. More details can be found at Dreamchaser's blog.

Meanwhile, final results are out for the "Most uggliest vegetable in Britain" contest and the winner is a parsnip grown by Mrs Hillary Nellist.

MP3 Search using Google Search Techniques

There are a lot of techniques of searching google for specified filetypes (such as .mp3) and contents ( in url or title). This is another good place to search for different filetypes, here filetypes are arranged in alphabetical order and you can perform a good search.

The MP3 searching hack of google has been levereged by this site to get a good result on search by artist or album name.

A word of caution though, even though its so easy to locate them its not always legal to download and use them.

Google Suggest powers Firefox 2

The recent release of Firefox 2 web browser has included the Google Suggest ( which is built upon Ajax technology) feature into its toolbar. Not only this but now your Firefox can work as a calculator without you being pressing enter or equal to key. All we have to do is to key in the expression into the search toolbar. It looks like there is some implicit implementation feature of the calculator feature of Google Search.

Web Services - Solutions over web

The routines and daily lives of todays techno-homo-sapiens are shaped in a way like never before by employing the power of web services. A web service seeks to solve the computing problem of an individual over the web. Gone are the days when you need to code your own program to solve problems. As the solution delivered over web is XML based, it can be transefed by the standard HTTP protocol and all you need is a web browser to acces them. The W3C defines web service as "A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards."

Here's a list of some useful free webservices:

http://www.lionwap.org/validationtest.html
Validates the email address first by checking if its syntactically correct ( better to use client side script to do this) and later checks whether an email server is found at this address. Check out the error message at the bottom which gives a good clue.

http://centralops.net/co/
http://www.ippages.com/
http://network-tools.com/ or http://nwtools.com/
http://visualroute.visualware.com/ (includes visual search)
www.tracert.com/cgi-bin/trace.pl
Solutions for ipaddress to domain name or location( lots more),email validation, root tracing, path tracing (great to see what path the data traverses from source to destination), getting your browser details etc. These are implemented through basic ping,traceroute,nslookup etc commands besides looking up the HTTP Header. On top of that you can get source code of all their services.

http://www.xe.com/ucc/
http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html
Online Currency conversions, can also compare/plot graph for the history of currencies.

Services By Google

There are a hell lot of services being offered, most of them can be found here.
Some of the less known and used services I have listed here.


Translate

Translate text between some of the common languages or translate a whole webpage.



Currency Conversion
To use our built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion you'd like done into the Google search box and hit "Enter" or click the Google Search button
Example:

    3.5 USD in GBP
    currency of Brazil in Malaysian money
    5 British pounds in South Korean money
    2.2 USD per gallon in INR per litre

Definitions

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word "define," then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If Google has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results.
Example:

    define World Wide Web

define Computer

File Types

Google has expanded the number of non-HTML file types searched to 12 file formats. In addition to PDF documents, Google now searches Microsoft Office, PostScript, Corel WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and others. The new file types will simply appear in Google search results whenever they are relevant to the user query. If you prefer to see a particular set of results with a specific file type (for example, PDF links), simply type filetype:[extension] (for example, filetype:pdf) within the search box along with your search term(s).


Q&A

Want to know the population of Japan? What currency is used in Algeria? The birthplace of Bono? Hit us with a fact-based question or query (like "population of Japan") by typing it into the Google search box. We'll search the web and display the answer at the top of your search results page. We also link to our source for this information so that you can learn even more.



Site Search

Searches a specified site. To search a site key in "site:sitetosearch.com query" into the search box.



Google code APIs

Google recently released APIs for its products and services which can be found at http://code.google.com.

Watching what is happening when a web service is called. Also provides some useful web-services.

http://www.mindreef.net


Here is an elegant list of web-services.