New technologies, products, laptops, phones, computer

Fixing laptop after liquid spill

2011-08-26T19:57:00.000+07:00

In this post I provide a few tips on fixing a laptop after liquid spill.

IMPORTANT: If you spilled something on your laptop you should stop using it right away, even if the laptop appears to be running good. Right after the spill you should turn it off, unplug the power adapter and remove the battery. The laptop should be disassembled as soon as possible and all internal parts should be inspected for liquid damage.

Liquid spills are very unpredictable and even a small amount of liquid spilled on the laptop can cause a serious damage.

IF YOU SPILLED A SMALL AMOUNT OF LIQUID ON THE KEYBOARD

Let’s say you spilled less than a teaspoon of liquid on the keyboard and the keyboard stopped working properly, but anything else works fine.

It that’s the case, it could be enough to remove just the keyboard for the liquid damage inspection. Turn off the laptop, unplug the AC adapter and remove the battery. Now remove the keyboard and take a closer look underneath.

- If you see liquid on the motherboard, you’ll have to disassemble the laptop completely for the further inspection.
- If the motherboard appears to be completely dry, do not disassemble it any further. Replace the keyboard with a new one and test the laptop. Hopefully replacing the keyboard will fix it.

IF YOU SPILLED SUFFICIENT AMOUNT OF LIQUID ON THE TOP COVER

If you spilled a lot of liquid on the laptop, turn off the laptop, unplug the power adapter and remove the battery AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Most likely it will be necessary to remove the top cover and inspect the motherboard.

Search for any liquid presence on the back side of the top cover and motherboard.
If you found liquid on the motherboard, probably you’ll have to remove it from the laptop in order to inspect the other side of the motherboard.

HOW TO CLEAN UP LIQUID DAMAGE

If you found liquid inside the laptop, you can wipe it out with a soft cloth.

Be very careful wiping the motherboard. There are many very small components on the board and you don’t want to damage them.

If you find any corrosion on the motherboard, you can clean it with a toothbrush and 91%-99% isopropyl alcohol.

Make sure the motherboard (or any other internal component) is completely dry before testing it.

IF YOU SPILLED SOME LIQUID ON THE SCREEN

If you spilled liquid on the screen, wipe it out clean as soon as possible. The liquid might get inside the LCD screen and you don’t want that. If it happens, you’ll get very irritating liquid stains on the white background. In one of the previous post I showed how to clean laptop screen with liquid damage. Believe me, it’s not easy. But if it happens, just replace the whole screen.

HOW TO ASSEMBLE A LAPTOP AFTER LIQUID SPILL CLEANING

Do not assemble the laptop completely after cleaning internal parts. Do it step by step.

First, assemble just main components of the laptop: motherboard, CPU with the cooling fan and memory modules. Now turn it on and see if you can get any image on the screen.

If the laptop turns on and you can see the image, start adding other parts one by one and test after each step.

If the laptop doesn’t start, take another look at the motherboard and other components. Maybe you missed an area with liquid damage. Try cleaning it again.

If nothing helps and the laptop doesn’t turn on, most likely the motherboard (or other component) is damaged.

HOW TO RECOVER DATA FROM LAPTOP HARD DRIVE

Let’s say the laptop is dead and you cannot do anything to make it work. In this case you still should be able to recover personal data from the hard drive. I assume the hard drive wasn’t damaged by liquid spill. You canaccess data using an external USB enclosure.

How to install Laptop RAM

2011-08-26T19:53:00.000+07:00

This guide has been created to instruct readers (both technicians and consumers alike) the proper procedures of installing laptop memory. It includes a step-by-step illustrated guide on the physical steps required for installing laptop RAM.

First of all, not all laptops have this type of access to the RAM slots and if yours does not you will probably need an authorized laptop repair technician to do it for you.
Before you start removing the panels to get access to the RAM slots, read the manual. If your laptop didn’t come with a manual or you cannot find it, your laptop manufacturer’s website should have one available for download in PDF format.

The manual should specify the maximum memory capacity of the laptop and you can also see how much RAM is currently installed by going to the Windows System Information (as mentioned in the last picture in this guide).

Once you determine that your laptop will be able to handle a memory upgrade and you have purchased the parts, you are ready to start.

Turn off the computer and remove all cords from the system AND the battery. The battery can still hold charge which can surge your hardware.

Turn the computer upside down and locate the panel which allows you to access the RAM modules, for the laptop below the panel had a picture of a little ‘computer chip’ to indicate the memory panel.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 1.0.2

2011-04-20T22:20:00.000+07:00

Features

Platforms	iPad, iPhone
License	No Trial Available. Purchase Only
Manufacturer	Electronic Arts
Version	1.0.2
Size	367.00 MB

Need for Speed Undercover demonstrated just what it was possible to achieve with games under iOS and the next installment, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit pushes things even further. Featuring a similar grade of high quality graphics and action packed gameplay, anyone who has played the predecessor or a desktop or console version of the game should have a pretty good idea of what to expect.
Reality is hardly the order of the day in the Need for Speed franchise - speed is what is called for, and that is precisely what is delivered. Crashes and take down are pleasingly over-the-top, exaggerated affairs and throughout the game the graphics really are something to behold - the retina display is really put to amazing use.
There are so many options when it comes to choosing the type of race you would like to take part in. You have the option of driving as a racer or a cop for different game styles, and there are 24 events to work your way through and four different game modes to try out. There are an impressive 15 cars to choose from, with an extra ten becoming available when racing in head-to-head mode.
Whether you are looking for a pick up and play racer, or a game that you can work through in career mode, picking up achievements and racking up a highscore along the way, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit is the game for you. With real-world cars to race with, this is a game that you will come back to again and again.

Verdict

EA once again proves just what the iOS platform is capable of, producing a high speed racer that provides all the thrills of a console game.

Accord CD Ripper Free v6.6.8

2011-04-20T22:17:00.000+07:00

D Ripper Free v6.6.8

Features

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	Accmeware Corporation
Version	6.6.8
Size	2.20 MB

DOWNLOAD for Windows (2.20 MB)

The increased popularity of MP3 players such as the iPod has meant that the humble CD has been all but consigned to the history books. That said, many people still own very large collections of physical CDS, and whether these are to be kept for posterity or sold on to make a little money, it is always helpful to have copies of the music you own in MP3 format so that it can be enjoyed on the move.
Software such as Windows Media Player and iTunes can be used to rip audio tracks from CDs and save them in a variety of formats, but these are large, bloated pieces of software that can be cumbersome to use. If speed is of the utmost importance and you don’t want to me tied into using software from Apple or Microsoft, using a dedicated CD ripper may be the best option for you.
This is exactly what Accord CD Ripper Free is. This free software can be used to convert audio CDs into .wav or MP3 files and you are granted full control over the ripping process so you can configure quality settings to your exact requirements. The software has been optimised to take advantage of multi-core processors, hlping to ensure the best possible performance.
Ripping CDs is all well and good, but MP3s are of little use if they are not correctly labelled. To this end, Accord CD Ripper Free can make use of the online CDDB to generate ID3 tags and attach other metadata to tracks. The software is quick and easy to use, and while it boasts few extra features, it performs its designated role well.

Verdict

A no frills CD ripper that operates faster than the likes of iTunes and Media Player, but is lacking some features.

Microsoft Safety Scanner (32-bit version) 1.0.3001.0

2011-04-20T22:13:00.000+07:00

Features

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows Server, Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows XP
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	Microsoft
Version	1.0.3001.0
Size	68.60 MB

DOWNLOAD for Windows (68.60 MB)

Sometimes you can’t trust your security software to have blocked a specific threat. If your computer is playing up, but your security tool swears blind there’s nothing wrong, you might want to get a second opinion. The problem is, you can’t just go and install another anti-virus tool, because chances are it’ll conflict with the program already on your system.
What you need to do is run an anti-malware tool that has scan-and-remove capabilities, but doesn’t offer any realtime protection. If you don’t want to install another program on your PC, try a portable option: download the program, run the scan, job done.
Microsoft Safety Scanner is one such tool – it presumably uses the same virus definitions and technologies as Microsoft’s popular Security Essentials package, albeit without any real-time protection. Just download the correct version (this is the 32-bit version, there’s also a 64-bit version available), then double-click the tool and follow the instructions. Start with a quick scan, migrating to the full scan if nothing is found and you still don’t trust the results. If any infections are found, the tool will attempt to remove them.
And that’s pretty much it. The download includes all the latest definitions at the point the program was downloaded, hence the large download size. There’s no update facility within it; instead the program will expire 10 days after downloading, forcing you to download it afresh before running it. The reasoning is sound – download a single package, perhaps on to a clean computer before transferring it across – but it’s still annoying as it means the tool can’t be downloaded and stored somewhere safe before updating and using.

Verdict

Its major selling point is the fact it doesn’t require installation, but the need to re-download a fresh version every 10 days works against Microsoft Safety Scanner.

Norton AntiVirus 2012 beta

2011-04-20T22:08:00.000+07:00

Features

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	Trial Software
Manufacturer	Symantec
Version	19.0.0.43
Size	775.00 KB

Norton AntiVirus 2012 beta offers an early look at the next generation of Symantec's antivirus engine.
Despite the beta tag, the program installed smoothly and easily on our test system, and was immediately ready to go (no reboot required). A simpler interface means you can be running your first scan in just a couple of clicks. And performance wasn't too bad, either: nothing exceptional yet, but that's no surprise for a beta, and Norton say they're looking at optimising speeds in more than 50 areas, so we'd expect considerable improvements over time.
AntiVirus 2012 also offers comprehensive real time protection, even in this early release. Its Auto-Protect system runs constantly in the background, watching the files you access, detecting and removing threats before they can do any damage. Download Insight 2.0 uses data from other Norton users to warn you about dangerous files, and Symantec's SONAR behaviour monitoring has been enhanced to pick up even more malware.
The program has plenty of other features to offer, and the best way to explore these is via the settings dialog. You'll discover how you can schedule scans to run when your PC idle; check your emails and instant messages for viruses; and find controls to monitor your browser, network, application performance, and many more.
It's all surprisingly complete, then, and doesn't feel like a beta at all. But even if you're less lucky, and run into problems, then the new Autofix feature may be able to address them automatically. Just click Support > Get Support and it'll try to solve any issues it finds with your installation.
Please note, you need a product key to use the Norton AntiVirus 2012 beta. You must register first at http://us.norton.com/beta/register.jsp?pvid=nav2012beta and you'll receive a 14 day license code.. Symantec will provide a means to extend this before it runs out, but it may not be wise to do that; the program will have bugs, and you shouldn't rely on it for long-term protection. By all means take a look - it's impressive - but when you're done, we'd recommend you uninstall Norton AntiVirus 2012 and replace it with a finished, feature-complete product.

Verdict

Norton AntiVirus 2012 already looks and feels like an impressive product (if it wasn't for the word "beta" on the console we wouldn't have guessed that it was unfinished). It will contain bugs, though, so give the program just a brief look and then use something else

History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google Today

2011-04-10T22:57:00.000+07:00

As We May Think (1945):

The concept of hypertext and a memory extension really came to life in July of 1945, when after enjoying the scientific camaraderie that was a side effect of WWII, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think was published in The Atlantic Monthly.

He urged scientists to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all mankind. Here are a few selected sentences and paragraphs that drive his point home.

Specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

He not only was a firm believer in storing data, but he also believed that if the data source was to be useful to the human mind we should have it represent how the mind works to the best of our abilities.

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of the systems of indexing. ... Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work this way. It operates by association. ... Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency.
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his own shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.

He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.

Gerard Salton (1960s - 1990s):

Gerard Salton, who died on August 28th of 1995, was the father of modern search technology. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the SMART informational retrieval system. Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms.
He authored a 56 page book called A Theory of Indexing which does a great job explaining many of his tests upon which search is still largely based. Tom Evslin posted a blog entry about what it was like to work with Mr. Salton.

Ted Nelson:

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution.
While Ted was against complex markup code, broken links, and many other problems associated with traditional HTML on the WWW, much of the inspiration to create the WWW was drawn from Ted's work.
There is still conflict surrounding the exact reasons why Project Xanadu failed to take off.
The Wikipedia offers background and many resource links about Mr. Nelson.

Advanced Research Projects Agency Network:

ARPANet is the network which eventually led to the internet. The Wikipedia has a great background article on ARPANet and Google Video has a free interesting video about ARPANet from 1972.

Archie (1990):

The first few hundred web sites began in 1993 and most of them were at colleges, but long before most of them existed came Archie. The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original intent of the name was "archives," but it was shortened to Archie.
Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query. Essentially Archie became a database of web filenames which it would match with the users queries.
Bill Slawski has more background on Archie here.

Veronica & Jughead:

As word of mouth about Archie spread, it started to become word of computer and Archie had such popularity that the University of Nevada System Computing Services group developed Veronica. Veronica served the same purpose as Archie, but it worked on plain text files. Soon another user interface name Jughead appeared with the same purpose as Veronica, both of these were used for files sent via Gopher, which was created as an Archie alternative by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota in 1991.

File Transfer Protocol:

Tim Burners-Lee existed at this point, however there was no World Wide Web. The main way people shared data back then was via File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
If you had a file you wanted to share you would set up an FTP server. If someone was interested in retrieving the data they could using an FTP client. This process worked effectively in small groups, but the data became as much fragmented as it was collected.

Tim Berners-Lee & the WWW (1991):

From the Wikipedia:

While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named Enquire.
After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet. In his words, "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web". He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first Web server called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).
The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tim also created the Virtual Library, which is the oldest catalogue of the web. Tim also wrote a book about creating the web, titled Weaving the Web.

What is a Bot?

Computer robots are simply programs that automate repetitive tasks at speeds impossible for humans to reproduce. The term bot on the internet is usually used to describe anything that interfaces with the user or that collects data.
Search engines use "spiders" which search (or spider) the web for information. They are software programs which request pages much like regular browsers do. In addition to reading the contents of pages for indexing spiders also record links.

Link citations can be used as a proxy for editorial trust.
Link anchor text may help describe what a page is about.
Link co citation data may be used to help determine what topical communities a page or website exist in.
Additionally links are stored to help search engines discover new documents to later crawl.

Another bot example could be Chatterbots, which are resource heavy on a specific topic. These bots attempt to act like a human and communicate with humans on said topic.

Parts of a Search Engine:

Search engines consist of 3 main parts. Search engine spiders follow links on the web to request pages that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last indexed. These pages are crawled and are added to the search engine index (also known as the catalog). When you search using a major search engine you are not actually searching the web, but are searching a slightly outdated index of content which roughly represents the content of the web. The third part of a search engine is the search interface and relevancy software. For each search query search engines typically do most or all of the following

Accept the user inputted query, checking to match any advanced syntax and checking to see if the query is misspelled to recommend more popular or correct spelling variations.
Check to see if the query is relevant to other vertical search databases (such as news search or product search) and place relevant links to a few items from that type of search query near the regular search results.
Gather a list of relevant pages for the organic search results. These results are ranked based on page content, usage data, and link citation data.
Request a list of relevant ads to place near the search results.

Searchers generally tend to click mostly on the top few search results, as noted in this article by Jakob Nielsen, and backed up by this search result eye tracking study.

Want to learn more about how search engines work?

In How does Google collect and rank results? Google engineer Matt Cutts briefly discusses how Google works.
Google engineer Jeff Dean lectures a University of Washington class on how a search query at Google works in this video.
The Chicago Tribune ran a special piece titled Gunning for Google, including around a dozen audio interviews, 3 columns, and this graphic about how Google works.
How Stuff Works covers search engines in How Internet Search Engines Work.

Types of Search Queries:

Andrei Broder authored A Taxonomy of Web Search [PDF], which notes that most searches fall into the following 3 categories:

Informational - seeking static information about a topic
Transactional - shopping at, downloading from, or otherwise interacting with the result
Navigational - send me to a specific URL

Improve Your Searching Skills:

Want to become a better searcher? Most large scale search engines offer:

Advanced search pages which help searchers refine their queries to request files which are newer or older, local or in nature, from specific domains, published in specific formats, or other ways of refining search, for example the ~ character means related to Google.
Vertical search databases which may help structure the information index or limit the search index to a more trusted or better structured collection of sources, documents, and information.

Nancy Blachman's Google Guide offers searchers free Google search tips, and Greg R.Notess's Search Engine Showdown offers a search engine features chart.
There are also many popular smaller vertical search services. For example, Del.icio.us allows you to search URLs that users have bookmarked, and Technorati allows you to search blogs.

World Wide Web Wanderer:

Soon the web's first robot came. In June 1993 Matthew Gray introduced the World Wide Web Wanderer. He initially wanted to measure the growth of the web and created this bot to count active web servers. He soon upgraded the bot to capture actual URL's. His database became knows as the Wandex.
The Wanderer was as much of a problem as it was a solution because it caused system lag by accessing the same page hundreds of times a day. It did not take long for him to fix this software, but people started to question the value of bots.

ALIWEB:

In October of 1993 Martijn Koster created Archie-Like Indexing of the Web, or ALIWEB in response to the Wanderer. ALIWEB crawled meta information and allowed users to submit their pages they wanted indexed with their own page description. This meant it needed no bot to collect data and was not using excessive bandwidth. The downside of ALIWEB is that many people did not know how to submit their site.

Robots Exclusion Standard:

Martijn Kojer also hosts the web robots page, which created standards for how search engines should index or not index content. This allows webmasters to block bots from their site on a whole site level or page by page basis.
By default, if information is on a public web server, and people link to it search engines generally will index it.
In 2005 Google led a crusade against blog comment spam, creating a nofollow attribute that can be applied at the individual link level. After this was pushed through Google quickly changed the scope of the purpose of the link nofollow to claim it was for any link that was sold or not under editorial control.

Primitive Web Search:

By December of 1993, three full fledged bot fed search engines had surfaced on the web: JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider. JumpStation gathered info about the title and header from Web pages and retrieved these using a simple linear search. As the web grew, JumpStation slowed to a stop. The WWW Worm indexed titles and URL's. The problem with JumpStation and the World Wide Web Worm is that they listed results in the order that they found them, and provided no discrimination. The RSBE spider did implement a ranking system.
Since early search algorithms did not do adequate link analysis or cache full page content if you did not know the exact name of what you were looking for it was extremely hard to find it.

Excite:

Excite came from the project Architext, which was started by in February, 1993 by six Stanford undergrad students. They had the idea of using statistical analysis of word relationships to make searching more efficient. They were soon funded, and in mid 1993 they released copies of their search software for use on web sites.
Excite was bought by a broadband provider named @Home in January, 1999 for $6.5 billion, and was named Excite@Home. In October, 2001 Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy. InfoSpace bought Excite from bankruptcy court for $10 million.

Web Directories:

VLib:

When Tim Berners-Lee set up the web he created the Virtual Library, which became a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link lists.

EINet Galaxy

The EINet Galaxy web directory was born in January of 1994. It was organized similar to how web directories are today. The biggest reason the EINet Galaxy became a success was that it also contained Gopher and Telnet search features in addition to its web search feature. The web size in early 1994 did not really require a web directory; however, other directories soon did follow.

Yahoo! Directory

In April 1994 David Filo and Jerry Yang created the Yahoo! Directory as a collection of their favorite web pages. As their number of links grew they had to reorganize and become a searchable directory. What set the directories above The Wanderer is that they provided a human compiled description with each URL. As time passed and the Yahoo! Directory grew Yahoo! began charging commercial sites for inclusion. As time passed the inclusion rates for listing a commercial site increased. The current cost is $299 per year. Many informational sites are still added to the Yahoo! Directory for free.

Open Directory Project

In 1998 Rich Skrenta and a small group of friends created the Open Directory Project, which is a directory which anybody can download and use in whole or part. The ODP (also known as DMOZ) is the largest internet directory, almost entirely ran by a group of volunteer editors. The Open Directory Project was grown out of frustration webmasters faced waiting to be included in the Yahoo! Directory. Netscape bought the Open Directory Project in November, 1998. Later that same month AOL announced the intention of buying Netscape in a $4.5 billion all stock deal.

LII

Google offers a librarian newsletter to help librarians and other web editors help make information more accessible and categorize the web. The second Google librarian newsletter came from Karen G. Schneider, who is the director of Librarians' Internet Index. LII is a high quality directory aimed at librarians. Her article explains what she and her staff look for when looking for quality credible resources to add to the LII. Most other directories, especially those which have a paid inclusion option, hold lower standards than selected limited catalogs created by librarians.
The Internet Public Library is another well kept directory of websites.

Business.com

Due to the time intensive nature of running a directory, and the general lack of scalability of a business model the quality and size of directories sharply drops off after you get past the first half dozen or so general directories. There are also numerous smaller industry, vertically, or locally oriented directories. Business.com, for example, is a directory of business websites.

Looksmart

Looksmart was founded in 1995. They competed with the Yahoo! Directory by frequently increasing their inclusion rates back and forth. In 2002 Looksmart transitioned into a pay per click provider, which charged listed sites a flat fee per click. That caused the demise of any good faith or loyalty they had built up, although it allowed them to profit by syndicating those paid listings to some major portals like MSN. The problem was that Looksmart became too dependant on MSN, and in 2003, when Microsoft announced they were dumping Looksmart that basically killed their business model.
In March of 2002, Looksmart bought a search engine by the name of WiseNut, but it never gained traction. Looksmart also owns a catalog of content articles organized in vertical sites, but due to limited relevancy Looksmart has lost most (if not all) of their momentum. In 1998 Looksmart tried to expand their directory by buying the non commercial Zeal directory for $20 million, but on March 28, 2006 Looksmart shut down the Zeal directory, and hope to drive traffic using Furl, a social bookmarking program.

Search Engines vs Directories:

All major search engines have some limited editorial review process, but the bulk of relevancy at major search engines is driven by automated search algorithms which harness the power of the link graph on the web. In fact, some algorithms, such as TrustRank, bias the web graph toward trusted seed sites without requiring a search engine to take on much of an editorial review staff. Thus, some of the more elegant search engines allow those who link to other sites to in essence vote with their links as the editorial reviewers.
Unlike highly automated search engines, directories are manually compiled taxonomies of websites. Directories are far more cost and time intensive to maintain due to their lack of scalability and the necessary human input to create each listing and periodically check the quality of the listed websites.
General directories are largely giving way to expert vertical directories, temporal news sites (like blogs), and social bookmarking sites (like del.ici.ous). In addition, each of those three publishing formats I just mentioned also aid in improving the relevancy of major search engines, which further cuts at the need for (and profitability of) general directories.

WebCrawler:

Brian Pinkerton of the University of Washington released WebCrawler on April 20, 1994. It was the first crawler which indexed entire pages. Soon it became so popular that during daytime hours it could not be used. AOL eventually purchased WebCrawler and ran it on their network. Then in 1997, Excite bought out WebCrawler, and AOL began using Excite to power its NetFind. WebCrawler opened the door for many other services to follow suit. Within 1 year of its debuted came Lycos, Infoseek, and OpenText.

Lycos:

Lycos was the next major search development, having been design at Carnegie Mellon University around July of 1994. Michale Mauldin was responsible for this search engine and remains to be the chief scientist at Lycos Inc.
On July 20, 1994, Lycos went public with a catalog of 54,000 documents. In addition to providing ranked relevance retrieval, Lycos provided prefix matching and word proximity bonuses. But Lycos' main difference was the sheer size of its catalog: by August 1994, Lycos had identified 394,000 documents; by January 1995, the catalog had reached 1.5 million documents; and by November 1996, Lycos had indexed over 60 million documents -- more than any other Web search engine. In October 1994, Lycos ranked first on Netscape's list of search engines by finding the most hits on the word ‘surf.’.

Infoseek:

Infoseek also started out in 1994, claiming to have been founded in January. They really did not bring a whole lot of innovation to the table, but they offered a few add on's, and in December 1995 they convinced Netscape to use them as their default search, which gave them major exposure. One popular feature of Infoseek was allowing webmasters to submit a page to the search index in real time, which was a search spammer's paradise.

AltaVista:

AltaVista debut online came during this same month. AltaVista brought many important features to the web scene. They had nearly unlimited bandwidth (for that time), they were the first to allow natural language queries, advanced searching techniques and they allowed users to add or delete their own URL within 24 hours. They even allowed inbound link checking. AltaVista also provided numerous search tips and advanced search features.
Due to poor mismanagement, a fear of result manipulation, and portal related clutter AltaVista was largely driven into irrelevancy around the time Inktomi and Google started becoming popular. On February 18, 2003, Overture signed a letter of intent to buy AltaVista for $80 million in stock and $60 million cash. After Yahoo! bought out Overture they rolled some of the AltaVista technology into Yahoo! Search, and occasionally use AltaVista as a testing platform.

Inktomi:

The Inktomi Corporation came about on May 20, 1996 with its search engine Hotbot. Two Cal Berkeley cohorts created Inktomi from the improved technology gained from their research. Hotwire listed this site and it became hugely popular quickly.
In October of 2001 Danny Sullivan wrote an article titled Inktomi Spam Database Left Open To Public, which highlights how Inktomi accidentally allowed the public to access their database of spam sites, which listed over 1 million URLs at that time.
Although Inktomi pioneered the paid inclusion model it was nowhere near as efficient as the pay per click auction model developed by Overture. Licensing their search results also was not profitable enough to pay for their scaling costs. They failed to develop a profitable business model, and sold out to Yahoo! for approximately $235 million, or $1.65 a share, in December of 2003.

Ask.com (Formerly Ask Jeeves):

In April of 1997 Ask Jeeves was launched as a natural language search engine. Ask Jeeves used human editors to try to match search queries. Ask was powered by DirectHit for a while, which aimed to rank results based on their popularity, but that technology proved to easy to spam as the core algorithm component. In 2000 the Teoma search engine was released, which uses clustering to organize sites by Subject Specific Popularity, which is another way of saying they tried to find local web communities. In 2001 Ask Jeeves bought Teoma to replace the DirectHit search technology.
Jon Kleinberg's Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF] was a source of inspiration what lead to the eventual creation of Teoma. Mike Grehan's Topic Distillation [PDF] also explains how subject specific popularity works.
On Mar 4, 2004, Ask Jeeves agreed to acquire Interactive Search Holdings for 9.3 million shares of common stock and options and pay $150 million in cash. On March 21, 2005 Barry Diller's IAC agreed to acquire Ask Jeeves for 1.85 billion dollars. IAC owns many popular websites like Match.com, Ticketmaster.com, and Citysearch.com, and is promoting Ask across their other properties. In 2006 Ask Jeeves was renamed to Ask, and they killed the separate Teoma brand.

AllTheWeb

AllTheWeb was a search technology platform launched in May of 1999 to showcase Fast's search technologies. They had a sleek user interface with rich advanced search features, but on February 23, 2003, AllTheWeb was bought by Overture for $70 million. After Yahoo! bought out Overture they rolled some of the AllTheWeb technology into Yahoo! Search, and occasionally use AllTheWeb as a testing platform.

Meta Search Engines

Most meta search engines draw their search results from multiple other search engines, then combine and rerank those results. This was a useful feature back when search engines were less savvy at crawling the web and each engine had a significantly unique index. As search has improved the need for meta search engines has been reduced.
Hotbot was owned by Wired, had funky colors, fast results, and a cool name that sounded geeky, but died off not long after Lycos bought it and ignored it. Upon rebirth it was born as a meta search engine. Unlike most meta search engines, Hotbot only pulls results from one search engine at a time, but it allows searchers to select amongst a few of the more popular search engines on the web. Currently Dogpile, owned by Infospace, is probably the most popular meta search engine on the market, but like all other meta search engines, it has limited market share.
One of the larger problems with meta search in general is that most meta search engines tend to mix pay per click ads in their organic search results, and for some commercial queries 70% or more of the search results may be paid results. I also created Myriad Search, which is a free open source meta search engine without ads.

Vertical Search

The major search engines are fighting for content and marketshare in verticals outside of the core algorithmic search product. For example, both Yahoo and MSN have question answering services where humans answer each other's questions for free. Google has a similar offering, but question answerers are paid for their work.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN are also fighting to become the default video platform on the web, which is a vertical where an upstart named YouTube also has a strong position.
Yahoo and Microsoft are aligned on book search in a group called the Open Content Alliance. Google, going it alone in that vertical, offers a proprietary Google Book search.
All three major search engines provide a news search service. Yahoo! has partnered with some premium providers to allow subscribers to include that content in their news search results. Google has partnered with the AP and a number of other news sources to extend their news database back over 200 years. And Topix.net is a popular news service which sold 75% of its ownership to 3 of the largest newspaper companies. Thousands of weblogs are updated daily reporting the news, some of which are competing with (and beating out) the mainstream media. If that were not enough options for news, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us frequently update recently popular lists, there are meme trackers like Techmeme that track the spread of stories through blogs, and sites like Digg allow their users to directly vote on how much exposure each item gets.
Google also has a Scholar search program which aims to make scholarly research easier to do.
In some verticals, like shopping search, other third party players may have significant marketshare, gained through offline distribution and branding (for example, yellow pages companies), or gained largely through arbitraging traffic streams from the major search engines.
On November 15, 2005 Google launched a product called Google Base, which is a database of just about anything imaginable. Users can upload items and title, describe, and tag them as they see fit. Based on usage statistics this tool can help Google understand which vertical search products they should create or place more emphasis on. They believe that owning other verticals will allow them to drive more traffic back to their core search service. They also believe that targeted measured advertising associated with search can be carried over to other mediums. For example, Google bought dMarc, a radio ad placement firm. Yahoo! has also tried to extend their reach by buying other high traffic properties, like the photo sharing site Flickr, and the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.
After a couple years of testing, on May 5th, 2010 Google unveiled a 3 column search result layout which highlights many vertical search options in the left rail.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is marketing via search engines, done through organic search engine optimization, paid search engine advertising, and paid inclusion programs.

Paid Inclusion

As mentioned earlier, many general web directories charge a one time flat fee or annually recurring rate for listing commercial sites. Many shopping search engines charge a flat cost per click rate to be included in their databases.
As far as major search engines go, Inktomi popularized the paid inclusion model. They were bought out by Yahoo in December of 2003. After Yahoo dropped Google and rolled out their own search technology they continued to offer a paid inclusion program to list sites in their regular search results, but Yahoo Search Submit was ended at the end of 2009.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click ads allow search engines to sell targeted traffic to advertisers on a cost per click basis. Typically pay per click ads are keyword targeted, but in some cases, some engines may also add in local targeting, behavioral targeting, or allow merchants to bid on traffic streams based on demographics as well.
Pay per click ads are typically sold in an auction where the highest bidder ranks #1 for that keyword. Some engines, like Google and Microsoft, also factor ad clickthrough rate into the click cost. Doing so ensures their ads get clicked on more frequently, and that their advertisements are more relevant. A merchant who writes compelling ad copy and gets a high CTR will be allowed to pay less per click to receive traffic.
In 1996 an 18-year-old college dropout named Scott Banister came up with the idea of charging search advertisers by the click with ads tied to the search keyword. He promoted it to the likes of Yahoo!, but their (lack of) vision was corrupted by easy money, so they couldn't see the potential of search. The person who finally ran with Mr. Banister's idea was IdeaLab's Bill Gross.

Overture (Formerly GoTo)

Overture, the pioneer in paid search, was originally launched by Bill Gross under the name GoTo in 1998. His idea was to arbitrage traffic streams and sell them with a level of accountability. John Battelle's The Search has an entertaining section about Bill Gross and the formation of overture. John also published that section on his blog.

“The more I [thought about it], the more I realized that the true value of the Internet was in its accountability,” Gross tells me. “Performance guarantees had to be the model for paying for media.”
Gross knew offering virtually risk-free clicks in an overheated and ravenous market ensured GoTo would takeoff. And while it would be easy to claim that GoTo worked because of the Internet bubble’s ouroboros-like hunger for traffic, the company managed to outlast the bust for one simple reason: it worked.

While Overture was wildly successful, it had two major downfalls which prevented them from taking Google's market position:

Destination Branding: Google allowed itself to grow into a search destination. Bill Gross decided not to grow Overture into one because he feared that would cost him distribution partnerships. When AOL selected Google as an ad partner, in spite of Google also growing out their own brand, that pretty much was the nails in the coffin for Overture being the premiere search ad platform.
Ad Network Efficiency: Google AdWords factors ad clickthrough rate into their ad costs, which ensures higher relevancy and more ad network efficiency. As of September 2006 the Overture platform (then known as Yahoo! Search Marketing) still did not fix that problem.

Those two faults meant that Overture was heavily reliant on it's two largest distribution partners - Yahoo! and Microsoft. Overture bought out AltaVista and AllTheWeb to try to win some leverage, but ultimately they sold out to Yahoo! on July 14, 2003 for $1.63 billion.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords launched in 2000. The initial version was a failure because it priced ads on a flat CPM model. Some keywords were overpriced and unaffordable, while others were sold inefficiently at too cheap of a price. In February of 2002, Google relaunched AdWords selling the ads in an auction similar to Overture's, but also adding ad clickthrough rate in as a factor in the ad rankings.
Affiliates and other web entrepreneurs quickly took to AdWords because the precise targeting and great reach made it easy to make great profits from the comfort of your own home, while sitting in your underwear :)
Over time, as AdWords became more popular and more mainstream marketers adopted it, Google began closing some holes in their AdWords product. For example, to fight off noise and keep their ads as relevant as possible, they disallowed double serving of ads to one website. Later they started looking at landing page quality and establishing quality based minimum pricing, which squeezed the margins of many small arbitrage and affiliate players.
Google intends to take the trackable ad targeting allowed by AdWords and extend it into other mediums. Google has already tested print and newspaper ads. Google allows advertisers to buy graphic or video ads on content websites. On January 17, 2006, Google announced they bought dMarc Broadcasting, which is a company they will use to help Google sell targeted radio ads.
On September 15, 2006, Google partnered with Intuit to allow small businesses using QuickBooks to buy AdWords from within QuickBooks. The goal is to help make local ads more relevant by getting more small businesses to use AdWords.
On March 20, 2007, Google announced they were beta testing creating a distributed pay per action affiliate ad network. On April 13, 2007 Google announced the purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Google AdSense

On March 4, 2003 Google announced their content targeted ad network. In April 2003, Google bought Applied Semantics, which had CIRCA technology that allowed them to drastically improve the targeting of those ads. Google adopted the name AdSense for the new ad program.
AdSense allows web publishers large and small to automate the placement of relevant ads on their content. Google initially started off by allowing textual ads in numerous formats, but eventually added image ads and video ads. Advertisers could chose which keywords they wanted to target and which ad formats they wanted to market.
To help grow the network and make the market more efficient Google added a link which allows advertisers to sign up for AdWords account from content websites, and Google allowed advertisers to buy ads targeted to specific websites, pages, or demographic categories. Ads targeted on websites are sold on a cost per thousand impression (CPM) basis in an ad auction against other keyword targeted and site targeted ads.
Google also allows some publishers to place AdSense ads in their feeds, and some select publishers can place ads in emails.
To prevent the erosion of value of search ads Google allows advertisers to opt out of placing their ads on content sites, and Google also introduced what they called smart pricing. Smart pricing automatically adjusts the click cost of an ad based on what Google perceives a click from that page to be worth. An ad on a digital camera review page would typically be worth more than a click from a page with pictures on it.
Google was secretive about its revenue share since the inception of AdSense, but due to a lawsuit in Italy Google feared they would be stuck disclosing their revenue share, so they decided to do so publicly for good public relations on May 24, 2010. Google keeps 32% while giving publishers 68% of contextual ad revenues. On search ads Google keeps 49% and gives publishers 51%. Some premium publishers are able to negotiate higher rates & custom integration options as well.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is the rebranded name for Overture after Yahoo! bought them out. As of September 2006 their platform is generally the exact same as the old Overture platform, with the same flaws - ad CTR not factored into click cost, it's hard to run local ads, and it is just generally clunky.

Microsoft AdCenter

In 2000 Microsoft launched a keyword driven ad program called keywords, but shut it down after 2 months because they feared it would cannibalize their banner ad revenues.
Microsoft AdCenter was launched on May 3. 2006. While Microsoft has limited marketshare, they intend to increase their marketshare by baking search into Internet Explorer 7. On the features front, Microsoft added demographic targeting and dayparting features to the pay per click mix. Microsoft's ad algorithm includes both cost per click and ad clickthrough rate.
Microsoft also created the XBox game console, and on May 4, 2006 announced they bought a video game ad targeting firm named Massive Inc. Eventually video game ads will be sold from within Microsoft AdCenter.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information in a format which will make search engines believe that your content satisfies the needs of their users for relevant search queries. SEO, like search, is a field much older than I am. In fact, it was not originally even named search engine optimization, and to this day most people are still uncertain where that phrase came from.

Early SEO

Early search engine optimization consisted mostly of using descriptive file names, page titles, and meta descriptions. As search advanced on the page factors grew more important and then people started trying to aim for specific keyword densities.

Link Analysis

One of the big things that gave Google an advantage over their competitors was the introduction of PageRank, which graded the value of a page based on the number and quality of links pointing at it. Up until the end of 2003 search was exceptionally easy to manipulate. If you wanted to rank for something all you had to do was buy a few powerful links and place the words you wanted to rank for in the link anchor text.

Search Gets More Sophisticated

On November 15, 2003 Google began to heavily introduce many more semantic elements into its search product. Researchers and SEO's alike have noticed wild changes in search relevancy during that update and many times since then, but many searchers remain clueless to the changes.
Search engines would prefer to bias search results toward informational resources to make the commercial ads on the search results appear more appealing. You can see an example of how search can be biased toward commercial or informational resources by playing with Yahoo! Mindset.

Curbing Link Spam

On January 18, 2005, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! announced the release of a NoFollow tag which allows blog owners to block comment spam from passing link popularity. People continued to spam blogs and other resources, largely because search engines may still count some nofollow links, and largely because many of the pages they spammed still rank.
Since 2003 Google has came out with many advanced filters and crawling patterns to help make quality editorial links count more and depreciate the value of many overtly obvious paid links or other forms of link manipulation.

Historical, Editorial, & Usage Data

Older websites may be given more trust in relevancy algorithms than newer websites (just existing for a period of time is a signal of quality). All major search engines use human editors to help review content quality and help improve their relevancy algorithms. Search engines may factor in user acceptance and other usage data to help determine if a site needs reviewed for editorial quality and to help determine if linkage data is legitimate.
Google has also heavily pushed giving away useful software, tools, and services which allow them to personalize search results based on the searcher's historical preferences.

Self Reinforcing Market Positions

In many verticals search is self reinforcing, as in a winner take most battle. Jakob Nielsen's The Power of Defaults notes that the top search result is clicked on as often as 42% of the time. Not only is the distribution and traffic stream highly disproportionate, but many people tend to link to the results that were easy to find, which makes the system even more self reinforcing, as noted in Mike Grehan's Filthy Linking Rich.
A key thing to remember if you are trying to catch up with another website is that you have to do better than what was already done, and significantly enough better that it is comment worthy or citation worthy. You have to make people want to switch their world view to seeing you as an authority on your topic. Search engines will follow what people think.

Hypocrisy in Search

Google engineer Matt Cutts frequently comments that any paid link should have the nofollow attribute applied to it, although Google hypocritically does not place the nofollow attribute on links they buy. They also have placed their ads on the leading Warez site and continued to serve ads on sites that they banned for spamming. Yahoo! Shopping has also been known to be a big link buyer.
Much of the current search research is based upon the view that any form of marketing / promotion / SEO is spam. If that was true, it wouldn't make sense that Google is teaching SEO courses, which they do.

Google

Early Years

Google's corporate history page has a pretty strong background on Google, starting from when Larry met Sergey at Stanford right up to present day. In 1995 Larry Page met Sergey Brin at Stanford.

By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™ bricks, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network.
A year later, their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen it. Buzz about the new search technology began to build as word spread around campus.

BackRub ranked pages using citation notation, a concept which is popular in academic circles. If someone cites a source they usually think it is important. On the web, links act as citations. In the PageRank algorithm links count as votes, but some votes count more than others. Your ability to rank and the strength of your ability to vote for others depends upon your authority: how many people link to you and how trustworthy those links are.
In 1998, Google was launched. Sergey tried to shop their PageRank technology, but nobody was interested in buying or licensing their search technology at that time.

Winning the Search War

Later that year Andy Bechtolsheim gave them $100,000 seed funding, and Google received $25 million Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers the following year. In 1999 AOL selected Google as a search partner, and Yahoo! followed suit a year later. In 2000 Google also launched their popular Google Toolbar. Google gained search market share year over year ever since.
In 2000 Google relaunched their AdWords program to sell ads on a CPM basis. In 2002 they retooled the service, selling ads in an auction which would factor in bid price and ad clickthrough rate. On May 1, 2002, AOL announced they would use Google to deliver their search related ads, which was a strong turning point in Google's battle against Overture.
In 2003 Google also launched their AdSense program, which allowed them to expand their ad network by selling targeted ads on other websites.

Going Public

Google used a two class stock structure, decided not to give earnings guidance, and offered shares of their stock in a Dutch auction. They received virtually limitless negative press for the perceived hubris they expressed in their "AN OWNER'S MANUAL" FOR GOOGLE'S SHAREHOLDERS. After some controversy surrounding an interview in Playboy, Google dropped their IPO offer range from $85 to $95 per share from $108 to $135. Google went public at $85 a share on August 19, 2004 and its first trade was at 11:56 am ET at $100.01.

Verticals Galore!

In addition to running the world's most popular search service, Google also runs a large number of vertical search services, including:

Google News: Google News launched in beta in September 2002. On September 6, 2006, Google announced an expanded Google News Archive Search that goes back over 200 years.
Google Book Search: On October 6, 2004, Google launchedGoogle Book Search.
Google Scholar: On November 18, 2004, Google launched Google Scholar, an academic search program.
Google Blog Search: On September 14, 2005, Google announced Google Blog Search.
Google Base: On November 15, 2005, Google announced the launch of Google Base, a database of uploaded information describing online or offline content, products, or services.
Google Video: On January 6, 2006, Google announced Google Video.
Google Universal Search: On May 16, 2007 Google began mixing many of their vertical results into their organic search results.

Just Search, We Promise!

Google's corporate mission statement is:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

However that statement includes many things outside of the traditional mindset of search, and Google maintains that ads are a type of information. This other information includes:

Email: Google launched Gmail on March 31, 2004, offering search email search and gigabytes of storage space.
Maps: On October 27, 2004, Google bought Keyhole. On February 8, 2005, Google launched Google Maps.
Analytics: On March 29, 2005, Google bought Urchin, a website traffic analytics company. Google renamed the service Google Analytics.
Radio ads: Google bought dMarc Broadcasting on January 17, 2006 .
Ads in other formats: Google tested magazine ads and newspaper ads.
Office productivity software: on March 9, 2006, Google bought Writely, an online collaborative document creating and editing software product.
Calendar: on April 14, 2006, Google launched Google Calendar, which allows you to share calendars with multiple editors and include calendars in web pages.
Checkout: On June 29, 2006, Google launched Google Checkout, a way to store your personal transaction related information online.

Paying for Distribution

In addition to having strong technology and a strong brand Google also pays for a significant portion of their search market share.
On December 20, 2005 Google invested $1 billion in AOL to continue their partnership and buy a 5% stake in AOL. In February 2006 Google agreed to pay Dell up to $1 billion for 3 years of toolbar distribution. On August 7, 2006, Google signed a 3 year deal to provide search on MySpace for $900 million. On October 9, 2006 Google bought YouTube, a leading video site, for $1.65 billion in stock.
Google also pays Mozilla and Opera hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search provider in their browsers, bundles their Google Toolbar with software from Adobe and Sun Microsystems, and pays AdSense ad publishers $1 for Firefox + Google Toolbar installs, or up to $2 for Google Pack installs.
Google also builds brand exposure by placing Ads by Google on their AdSense ads and providing Google Checkout to commercial websites.
Google Pack is a package of useful software including a Google Toolbar and software from many other companies. At the same time Google helps ensure its toolbar is considered good and its competitors don't use sleazy distribution techniques by sponsoring StopBadware.org.
Google's distribution, vertical search products, and other portal elements give it a key advantage in best understanding our needs and wants by giving them the largest Database of Intentions.

Editorial Partnerships

They have moved away from a pure algorithmic approach to a hybrid editorial approach. In April of 2007, Google started mixing recent news results in their organic search results. After Google bought YouTube they started mixing videos directly in Google search results.

Webmaster Communication

Since the Florida update in 2003 Google has looked much deeper into linguistics and link filtering. Google's search results are generally the hardest search results for the average webmaster to manipulate.
Matt Cutts, Google's lead engineer in charge of search quality, regularly blogs about SEO and search. Google also has an official blog and has blogs specific to many of their vertical search products.
On November 10, 2004, Google opened up their Google Advertising Professional program.
Google also helps webmasters understand how Google is indexing their site via Google Webmaster Central. Google continues to add features and data to their webmaster console for registered webmasters while obfuscating publicly available data.
For an informal look at what working at Google looked like from the inside from 1999 to 2005 you might want to try Xooglers, a blog by former Google brand manager Doug Edwards.

Information Retrieval as a Game of Mind Control

In October of 2007 Google attempted to manipulate the public perception of people buying and selling links by announcing that they were going to penalize known link sellers, and then manually editing the toolbar PageRank scores of some well known blogs and other large sites. These PageRank edits did not change search engine rankings or traffic flows, as the PageRank update was entirely aesthetic.

Yahoo!

Getting Into Search

Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang as a directory of websites. For many years they outsourced their search service to other providers, considering it secondary to their directory and other content features, but by the end of 2002 they realized the importance and value of search and started aggressively acquiring search companies.
Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista in 2003. Yahoo! purchased Inktomi in December, 2002, and then consumed Overture in July, 2003, and combined the technologies from the various search companies they bought to make a new search engine. Yahoo! dumped Google in favor of their own in house technology on February 17, 2004.

Getting Social

In addition to building out their core algorithmic search product, Yahoo! has largely favored the concept of social search.
On March 20, 2005 Yahoo! purchased Flickr, a popular photo sharing site. On December 9, 2005, Yahoo! purchased Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. Yahoo! has also made a strong push to promote Yahoo! Answers, a popular free community driven question answering service.
Yahoo! has a cool Netrospective of their first 10 years, a brief overview of their corporate history here, and Bill Slawski posted a list of many of the companies Yahoo! consumed since Overture.
On July 2, 2007, Yahoo! launched their behaviorally targeted SmartAds product.
On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! decided to give up on search and signed a 10 year deal to syndicate Bing ads and algorithmic results on their website.

Microsoft

In 1998 MSN Search was launched, but Microsoft did not get serious about search until after Google proved the business model. Until Microsoft saw the light they primarily relied on partners like Overture, Looksmart, and Inktomi to power their search service.
They launched their technology preview of their search engine around July 1st of 2004. They formally switched from Yahoo! organic search results to their own in house technology on January 31st, 2005. MSN announced they dumped Yahoo!'s search ad program on May 4th, 2006.

On September 11, 2006, Microsoft announced they were launching their Live Search product.

On June 1, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, a new search service which changed the search landscape by placing inline search suggestions for related searches directly in the result set. For instance, when you search for credit cards they will suggest related phrases like

credit card types
apply for credit cards
credit cards for bad credit
advice on credit cards

Microsoft released a Bing SEO guide for Webmasters [PDF] which claimed that the additional keyword suggestions helped pull down search demand to lower listed results when compared against the old results 6 through 10 when using a single linear search result set. Conversely, the Google format tends to concentrate attention on the top few search listings. After extensive eye tracking Gord Hotchkiss named this pattern Google's Golden Triangle.

Other Engines

One would be foolish to think that there is not a better way to index the web, and a new creative idea is probably just under our noses. The fact that Microsoft is making a large investment into developing a new search technology should be some cause for concern for other major search engines.
Through this course of history many smaller search engines have came and went, as the search industry has struggled to find a balance between profitability and relevancy. Some of the newer search engine concepts are web site clustering, semantics, and having industry specific smaller search engines / portals, but search may get attacked from entirely different angles.
On October 5, 2004 Bill Gross ( the founder of Overture and pioneer of paid search) relaunched Snap as a search engine with a completely transparent business model (showing search volumes, revenues, and advertisers). Snap has many advanced sorting features but it may be a bit more than what most searchers were looking for. People tend to like search for the perceived simplicity, even if the behind the scenes process is quite complex.
Outside of technology there are four other frontiers search is being attacked / commoditized from

Browser & Software Distribution: Search companies are paying computer manufacturers or software companies an aggregated value of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars each year to bundle their search toolbar with their products.
Social Search: Large social networks have significant reach and a ton of page views. Yahoo! is rumored to be entertaining buying social network Facebook nearly a billion dollars. Yahoo! has already bought social picture site Flickr and social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. In August of 2006 Google signed a 3 year $900 million contract to provide search and advertising on MySpace.

In addition some companies, like Eurekster, are trying to create products which allow groups of webmasters to make topic or community specific search services.
Content Providers: Some content providers are trying to publish content on their own domains and build off their brand. Some are refusing to be included in search indexes. Some are requiring a kickback to be indexed. Some are unsure of what they want and are choosing to sue search engines, either for further brand exposure, or to gain further negotiation leverage.
Content Aggregators: Search is just one way of finding information. Via RSS feeds and various other technologies many sites are offering what some people consider persistent search, or a way to access any information about a specific topic as it becomes available. Google also bought YouTube for $1.65 in stock. YouTube consists largely of pirated content which Google can organize and publish ads against based on usage data and other forms of ad targeting.

Search & Legal Issues

Privacy

In 2005 the DoJ obtained search data from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!. Google denied the request, and was sued for search data in January of 2006. Google beat the lawsuit and was only required to hand over a small sample of data.
In August of 2006 AOL Research released over 3 months worth of personal search data by 650,000 AOL users. A NYT article identified one of the searchers by name. In 2007 the European Union aggressively probed search companies aiming to limit data retention and maintain searcher privacy rights.

Publishing & Copyright Lawsuits

As more people create content attention is becoming more scarce. Due to The Tragedy of the Commons many publishing businesses and business models will die. Many traditional publishing companies enjoyed the profits enabled by running what was essentially regionally based monopolies. Search, and other forms of online media, allow for better targeting and less wasteful / more efficient business models. Due to growing irrelevancy, a fear of change, and a fear of disintermediation, many traditional publishing companies have fought search.
In an interview by Danny Sullivan, Eric Schmidt stated he thought many of the lawsuits Google face are business deals done in a court room.

Newspapers

In September of 2006 some Belgian newspaper companies won a copyright lawsuit against Google News which makes Belgium judges look like they do not understand how search or the internet work. Some publisher groups are trying to create an arbitrary information access protocol, Agence France Presse (AFP) sued Google to get them to drop their news coverage, and Google paid the AP a licensing fee.

Books

In September of 2005 the Authors Guild sued Google. In October of 2005 major book publishing houses also sued Google over Google Print.

Photos

Perfect 10, a pornography company, sued Google for including cached copies of stolen content in their image index, and for allowing publishers to collect income on stolen copyright content via Google AdSense.

Access to Hate Information

In May of 2000 a French judge required Yahoo! to stop providing access to auctions selling Nazi memorabilia.
Many requests for information removal are covered on Chilling Effects and by the EFF. Eric Goldman tracks these cases as well.

Pay Per Click & Ad Targeting Lawsuits

In 1999 Playboy sued Excite and Netscape for selling banner impressions sold for searches for Playboy.
Overture sued Google for patent infringement. Just prior to Google's IPO they settled with Yahoo! (who by then bought out Overture) by giving them 2.7 million shares of class A Google stock.
Geico took Google to court in the US for trademark violation because Google allowed Geico to be a keyword trigger to target competing ads. Geico lost this case on December 15, 2004. Around the same time Google lost a similar French trademark case filed by Louis Vuitton.
Lane's Gifts sued Google for click fraud, but did not have a strong well put together case. Google's lawyers pushed them into a class wide out of court settlement of up to $90 million in AdWords credits. The March 2006 settlement aimed to absolve Google of any clickfraud related liabilities back through 2002, when Google launched their pay per click model.

Search User Information

The US government requested that major search companies turned over a significant amount of search related data. Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL gave up search data. The Google blog announced that Google fought the subpoena

In August, Google was served with a subpoena from the U. S. Department of Justice demanding disclosure of two full months’ worth of search queries that Google received from its users, as well as all the URLs in Google’s index.

A judge stated that Google did not have to turn over search usage data.
AOL not only shared information with the government, but AOL research also accidentally made search records public record.

Search as a Commoditizer

Each search company has its own business objectives and technologies to define relevancy. The three biggest issues search engines are fighting are

Publishing Rights: All search engines are fighting trying to gain the rights to index quality content. Some of the highest quality content is so expensive to create and market that there is not a business model for openly sharing it on the web. Worse yet, as more and more people get into web publishing the businesses that delay to get their content indexed will have lost authority and distribution the whole time they delayed. This, and the fear of disintermediation, are part of the reason there are so many lawsuits.
Distribution: The more distribution you have the more profit you can use to leverage the ability to buy more content or make better content partnerships. Also more distribution means that you can potentially send more visitors (and thus profit) to a person who lets you index their content. More usage data may also help engines improve their relevancy algorithms.
Ad Network Size & Efficiency: Efficient ad networks can afford to pay for more distribution, and thus help the search company gain more content and distribution.

In order to try to lock users in search engines offer things like free email, news search, blogging platform, content hosting, office software, calendars, and feature rich toolbars. In some cases the software or service is not only free, but it is expensive to provide. For example, Google does not profit from Google news, but they had to pay the AP content licensing fees, and hosting Google Video can't be cheap.
In an attempt to collect more data, better target ads, and improve conversion rates Google offers

a free analytics product
free cross platform tracking
free Wifi internet access in San Francisco and Mountainview
a free wallet product which makes it quick and easy to buy products

The end goal of search is to commoditize the value of as many brands and markets as possible to keep adding value to the search box. They want to commoditize the value of creating content and increase the value of spreading ideas, the value of attention, and the importance of conversion.
As they make the network more and more efficient they can eat more and more of the profits, which was a large part of the reasoning behind Jakob Nielson's Search Engines as Leeches on the Web.

Selling Search as an Ecosystem

Because search aims to gain distribution by virtually any means possible the search engines that can do the best job of branding and get people to believe most in their goals / ideals / ecosystem win. Search engines are fighting many ways on this front, but not all of them are even on the web. For example, search engines are trying to attract the smartest minds by sharing research. Google goes so far as offering free pizza!
Google hires people to track webmaster feedback across the web. Matt Cutts frequently blogs about search and SEO because to him it is important for others to see search, SEO, and Google from his perspective. He offers free tips on Google Video in no small part because it was important for Google Video to beat out YouTube for Google to become the default video platform on the web. Once it was clear that Google lost the video battle to YouTube Google decided to buy them.
Beyond just selling their company beliefs and ideology to get people excited about their field, acquire new workers, and get others to act in a way that benefits their business model search engines also provide APIs to make portions of their system open enough that they can leverage the free work of other smart, creative, and passionate people.
Selling search as an ecosystem goes so far that Google puts out endless betas, allowing users to become unpaid testers and advocates of their products. Even if the other search engines matched Google on relevancy they still are losing the search war due to Google's willingness to take big risks, Google's brand strength, and how much better Google sells search as an ecosystem.

Extending Search

Google wants to make content ad supported and freely accessible. On October 9, 2006, Google announced they were acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. In March, 2007,Viacom sued Google / YouTube for $1 billion for copyright infringement. In 2007 Microsoft pushed against Google's market position calling Google a copyright infringer (for scanning books) and doing research stating that many of Google's blogspot hosted blogs are spam.

Social Search

In 2006 and 2007 numerous social bookmarking and decentralized news sites became popular. Del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking site, was bought out by Yahoo. Digg.com features fresh news and other items of interest on their home page based on user votes.

Text REtrieval Conference (TREC):

In 1992 TREC was launched to support research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies. In addition to helping support the evolution of search they also create special tracks for vertical search and popular publishing models. For example, in 2006 they created a blog track. Past TREC publications are posted here.

Other Search Conferences:

There are a number of other popular conferences covering information retrieval.

Search Science lists a number of conferences on the right side of the Search Science blog.
There are also a number of conferences which talk about search primarily from a marketer's perspective. The three most well known conferences for are

PubCon - hosted by Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld.
Search Engine Strategies
Search Marketing Expo - hosted by Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land

Sources and Further Reading:

Many of the following have not been updated in years, or only cover a partial timeline of the search space, but as a collection they helped me out a lot. SearchEngineWatch is amazingly comprehensive if you piece together all of the articles Danny Sullivan has published.

Archive.org - The Internet Archive Wayback Machine (especially useful to view old content if any resource links break).
SearchEngineWatch - Danny Sullivan's site about search. Here are some important events from his first decade of writing about search.
Where Are They Now? Search Engines We've Known & Loved - Danny Sullivan reflects on some of the search engines that have passed away.
Google Corporate History - The history of Google, from 1995 to today.
Shmula - timeline of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! acquisitions.
SEO Consultants - Offers a timeline of important events associated with the history of search and the internet. Up to date through 2006.
Story about the foundation and history of Ask - by Kelli Anderson, through 2006.
John Wiley & Sons - by Wes Sonnenreich, a history of search through 1997.
Google Blogoscope - by Philipp Lessen, a history of search through 2003.
CBS MarketWatch [PDF] - colored timeline of search through 2004.
Wikipedia: Search Engines & Timeline of Hypertext
Search Engines: Evolution & Revolution - by Glen Farrelly, covers 1990 through 1999.
Enquiro Eye Tracking Study - report of how humans interact with search results.
History of the Internet, Internet for Historians (and just about everyone else) - Richard T. Griffith's article about the history of the web, from 1991 to 2001.
Searching on the Web - Link to a page that is no longer active, but which content still exists on the wonderful Archive.org. Contents are from 1960's to 2000.
W3C: A Little History of the World Wide Web - by Robert Cailliau, from 1945 to 1995 .
Search History Page from Sympatico - Link to a page that is no longer active, but which content still exists on the wonderful Archive.org. Contents are from 1990 to 2003.
Hobbes' Internet Timeline - by Robert H'obbes' Zakon, from 1957 through 2004.
How Yahoo Blew It - Wired article about how Google beat out Yahoo to win the search market race
A Brief History of the Internet - by Walt Howe, from 1960 through 2006.
The Sergey Brin Story
Search Industry Explained - Search and Go discusses search history and SEO history
ISOC Internet Histories - list of various histories of the Internet.
SEO and Social Media: Can You Be Number One?
BusinessWeek: Can Google Stay on Top of the Web? - feature article along with a series of interviews of 5 top Google engineers
WIRED: How Google's Algorithms Rule the Web

Books About Search

The Search - John Battelle's book about the history of search and how search intersects with media and culture.
The Google Story - David Vise's book about Google.
The Google Legacy - Stephen E. Arnold's book about why he believes Google is in a better market position than its competitors.

Infographics

AVG Family Safety 10.1.7

2011-04-10T22:46:00.000+07:00

Platforms	iPad, iPhone
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	AVG
Version	10.1.7
Size	614.40 KB

DOWNLOAD for iPhone (614.40 KB)

DOWNLOAD for iPad (614.40 KB)

Parents have always been concerned about how the internet may be used by their children, and with the advent of mobile devices such the iPhone and iPad, it has become harder than ever to keep track of what activities are being carried out online.
AVG Family Safety is a free iOS web browser that makes use of an ever-growing database on the AVG servers which categorizes sites to allow for filtering. Categories of web site that you deem to be unsuitable for your children can be blocked, and this means that they can only be accessed by entering the administrative password.
Performance is surprisingly fast, and although every time a new web site is visited the browser must check with AVG to see which category it falls into, there is no noticeably delay in page loading. To maximise the amount of screen space that is available for viewing web pages, the address bar will automatically hide.
It does not matter whether your iPhone or iPad is connecting to the internet via wifi, 3G or an EDGE connection, AVG Family Safety will work in exactly the same way. The free version of the browser is an effective parental control tool, but by purchasing the full AVG Family Safety product, additional options are unlocked such as the ability to block more categories and the option of receiving email alerts to monitor activity.
Note that If you have the full AVG Family Safety product (through subscription, which is $19.99/year), you can access more advanced features such as customer block/allow lists, access times, reporting, additional category blocking, email/SMS notifications, password override, etc.

Verdict

This is an interesting product that will offer some peace of mind, but it is no replacement for supervised web browsing with children.

Google Chrome Portable 11.0.696.34 beta

2011-04-10T22:38:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	Google
Version	11.0.696.34
Size	24.00 MB

DOWNLOAD for Windows (24.00 MB)

At first glance Google's new Chrome 11 looks and behaves much the same as it always has: a clean, straightforward browser that's significantly faster than most of the competition.
There are some interesting features just beneath the surface, though, and top of the list has to be support for the HTML5 speech input API. The demo at HTML5 Rocks shows you how this might work right now - talk into your microphone, and your words appear in a web page text box - but more dynamic applications may not be too far away.
Chrome 11 also adds support for GPU-accelerated 3D CSS transforms, allowing it to render more complex sites with the minimum of impact on your CPU usage.
Oddly, at the same time Chrome's old 3D icon has disappeared, to be replaced by a flatter and more stylised version.
And of course there's the usual pile of bug fixes, performance and other technical tweaks, which are all listed in the SVN Revision Log if you're interested.

Verdict

There's nothing too revolutionary here just yet, but the speech input support points to interesting future possibilities, and despite its beta status Chrome 11 proved fast and stable in our first tests

Microsoft Outlook 2010

2011-04-10T22:33:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	No Trial Available. Purchase Only
Manufacturer	Microsoft
Version	14.0.4763.1000
Size	298.00 MB
Date Added	July 03, 2010

DOWNLOAD for Windows (298.00 MB)

When it comes to email, Microsoft Outlook has long been considered the choice for professionals and business users. It’s one of the jewels in Office’s crown, and that’s before you consider its other capabilities as a general tool for organising your life.
Outlook 2010 finally adds the full ribbon interface to Outlook, and does so in such a way as to help make it easier to stay top of the ever-increasing volume of email that appears in your mailbox. It’s now possible to condense, categorise or even ignore entire conversations with a few clicks. The new Conversation view helps you manage an overloaded inbox by organising it into just a few relevant conversations. Two other new tools – Mail tips and Quick steps – also help speed up the way you navigate your mail folder.
If you have multiple email accounts set up, you’ll be glad to know you can now combine them all into one single, easily accessible view – the same is true for calendars and address books. A new Schedule View also allows you view multiple calendars from Outlook, Windows Live and other shared calendars using a single horizontal display.
New easy-to-access contact cards, which segue in with IMessenger-compatible apps like Windows Live Messenger, give you an at-a-glance view of a person’s availability, or you can get a more detail viewed of someone using the new Outlook Social Connector, which doesn’t just provide a recent history of your dealings with that person, but links in with other social networking platforms including Windows Live and SharePoint 2010 to provide updates about that person and links to their colleagues and friends.
Finally, as with all Office 2010 apps, the File tab on the ribbon provides access to the new Backstage view – in Outlook it’s your one-stop shop for managing your accounts, inboxes and more.
Note that there is no trial version of Outlook 2010. You can try the Office 2010 suite.

Verdict

If your inbox is becoming unmanageable than Outlook 2010 has much to offer, along with a much better, more streamlined ribbon compared to the halfway house adopted in Outlook 2007.

Apple Bonjour for Windows 1.0.6 [64-bit]

2011-04-10T22:26:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit)
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	Apple
Version	1.0.6
Size	2.40 MB

Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers.

Bonjour for Windows includes a plugin to discover advertised HTTP servers using Internet Explorer. Click the Bonjour icon in the Internet Explorer toolbar to enable Bonjour browsing. If you have Bonjour devices on your local network with embedded HTTP (Web) servers, they will appear in the list.
The Bonjour Printer Wizard is also included and allows Windows computers to print to Bonjour networked printers, including USB shared printers connected to the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express Base Stations. Since Apple first launched Bonjour in 2002, every major maker of network printers has adopted Bonjour. With the Bonjour Printer Wizard, computers using Windows can also experience the benefits of effortlessly discovering and printing to these Bonjour printers.

Bonjour is commonly installed by third-party software to provide zero-configuration networking capabilities to various applications. If your version of Bonjour does not include the IE plugin or Printer Wizard mentioned above, and you would like these features, you can download the complete Bonjour for Windows package from here.

Verdict

Although this software is installed with Apple Bonjour hardware, you may find you need to re-install to use your device

DOWNLOAD for Windows (2.40 MB)

Webroot Removal Tool

2011-04-10T22:23:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	Webroot
Version	7.0.3.366
Size	7.17 MB

The Webroot Removal Tool is a simple program that will uninstall and remove all traces of Webroot security software from your PC.
Of course in theory the "uninstall" program should do that, but removing antivirus software isn't always so straightforward. It has to dig deep into your system to protect it, making Registry changes, setting up services and more, and occasionally you'll find the uninstall option doesn't do a sufficiently thorough job.
If you're trying to run some other security tool, then, and it's complaining that you've a Webroot package installed - even though you thought you'd removed it some time ago - then you need to download the Webroot Removal Tool. There's no installation required, no options to set, just run the program and it'll search for and remove any leftover traces of Webroot packages. The program even deletes itself - that's what we call thorough.
Please note, the Removal Tool may not work with beta versions of Webroot products. If you're having problems uninstalling a Webroot beta then consult their support pages for more advice.

Verdict

A simple and effective way to uninstall and clean up any remaining fragments of Webroot software

Internet Explorer 9 (Windows 7, 64-bit)

2011-04-10T22:21:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Windows 7 (64 bit)
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	Microsoft
Version	1.9.7745.6019
Size	470.00 KB

Faster, simpler and with many interesting new features, the Internet Explorer 9 official release is the next incarnation of Microsoft's flagship browser.
The interface has become even more cut down, following competitors like Chrome. By default there's no menu, no status bar, no Favourites bar (though as with IE8 these are all available if you need them), just an address bar and the most minimal of toolbars.
There is a useful internet addition when you open a new tab, though: the program now displays links to your "most popular sites", so you can relaunch a particular favourite with a click.
Elsewhere, tabs are now colour-coded to show you how they relate to each other (open one link in a new tab, for instance, and they'll both share the same colour). And you can now drag tabs out of IE to open them in a new browser window.
Performance is massively improved, too, thanks not least to hardware-accelerated graphics, and a new JavaScript engine optimised for multiple CPU cores. If you've ever tried a browser benchmark like SunSpider before then you'll probably have noticed that IE always lagged far, far behind - but not any more. IE9 is now a little faster than Firefox, and very similar to Chrome, so in many cases you won't notice any speed difference between the browsers at all.
Microsoft have finally paid proper attention to downloads, giving IE its own download manager window. Now you can see everything you're downloading in one place, pause and restart a download if necessary, or locate and launch downloads at a click.
New support for Windows 7 allows you to pin a favourite website to your taskbar, where it looks just like any other pinned program. Click the icon later and it'll open in an IE window.

Security tweaks include Tracking Protection, which allows you to prevent sites from using cookies, web beacons and other technologies to track you around the web. While ActiveX filtering can block all ActiveX content unless you specifically allow it.

And you also get enhanced searching from the address bar, a simplified notification bar, extra information on add-ons that may be slowing you down, and more.
This is the IE9 final release to market version, for Windows 64-bit.

Verdict

IE9's great performance and excellent new features ensure that it definitely deserves a closer look

System Cleaner 5.94

2011-04-10T22:17:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	Trial Software
Manufacturer	Pointstone Software
Version	5
Size	4.00 MB

System Cleaner is the trial version of a PC cleanup, optimisation and maintenance suite.
The program comes with 12 modules, separated into categories like "Clean up & Repair", "Optimise & Improve" and "Privacy & Security" to help you locate the function you need. And these will help you to clean up your hard drive, fix Registry problems, locate duplicate files, shred confidential files so they can't be recovered, and control your Windows startup programs, amongst other things.
This looks much like any other suite of this type, then, and the individual tools don't really stand out, either. So the Disk Cleaner found very few junk files on our test PC, for instance, and the Startup Manager displayed less startup programs than you might find with some free tools.
Still, there are some plus points here.
A System Snapshot tool allows you to record your system state before or after some action, like installing a program, and will then report on any changes.
System Cleaner backs up any settings before it changes them to the "Rescue Manager", making it easy to reverse your last tweaking session, if it should be necessary.
The interface is clear and attractive - it's really very easy to use.
And the suite is amazingly compact, with the entire Program Files\Pointstone folder taking a mere 3.26 MB of hard drive space on our test PC.
Whether that justifies the $34.95 purchase price is another matter - but if you're curious, download the trial and find out for yourself.

Verdict

System Cleaner is well presented and includes one or two useful features, but most people will probably get better cleanup and optimisation results by using the top freeware tools, instead

RockMelt beta 2

2011-04-10T22:15:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Mac OS X, Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
License	Freeware
Manufacturer	RockMelt
Version	0.9.45.51
Size	545.00 KB
Date Added	March 12, 2011

RockMelt is an interesting social media browser, based on Chromium, which allows you to monitor and use your social networking accounts as you browse the web.
The program unsurprisingly looks a lot like Chrome, and can even use apps from the Chrome Store, but it also displays "edge" panels that can, say, display your Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and more. Another panel displays your Facebook friends (yes, you currently need a Facebook account to use the browser), and so you can easily chat with them, check your stream, read new tweets and more, without having to visit the Facebook or Twitter sites.
The RockMelt team are also just beginning to create new apps of their own for the browser. Install the YouTube app, for instance, and one click will open a YouTube panel where you can watch videos, search for new clips without interrupting what's playing, create playlists, see your search history, and share videos with your friends, amongst other things.
And, of course, because it's essentially Google Chrome with some custom extensions, you can be sure that the browser will perform well on all the other sites you visit - it's fast, secure and easy-to-use.

Verdict

The interface is cluttered and it's not as easy to use as it should be, but if you're a Facebook fan in particular RockMelt could save you some time by providing instant, always-on access to your friends and Facebook stream

Roxio Toast 11 Titanium

2011-04-10T22:11:00.000+07:00

Platforms	Mac OS X
License	No Trial Available. Purchase Only
Manufacturer	Roxio
Version	11
Size	399.00 MB
Date Added	March 16, 2011

OS X already includes the disc burning options which most people would need on a day-to-day basis – files can be easily copied to disc, and there is also the option of creating and working with disc images. As such, you may wonder why anybody would need a third party disc burning tool. But glance through the features and options available in Roxio Toast 11 Titanium, and you quickly start to understand just what is missing from the Mac OS.
A slightly re-designed interface makes it easier than ever to navigate through Toast’s various options. In addition to standard disc burning tools, there is also an impressively easy to use backup app that can be used to secure your files – but the main focus of the suite is on getting creative with your media files
As such, it is easy to create audio, video and photo-based discs and even create covers and labels for them. Audio and video can be captured from a variety of sources including web sites and camcorders, and there are a number of conversion options available – including the ability to optimise video for display on iOS devices. Support for multiple burners means that creating several copies of the same disc is now faster than ever.
The Pro version of Toast 11 Titanium includes a number of extra tools and options, such as the ability to burn high definition video to a standard DVD, but there is also support for Blu-ray burning. A copy of Adobe Photo Photoshop Elements is included to allow for image optimisation and manipulation, while FotoMagico 3 RE can be used to create eye-catching photo projects with your snaps. You’ll also get a copy of BIAS SoundSoap 2 SE which can be used to clean up audio that has been captured from a variety of sources.
Whichever version of Toast you decide to buy, you are investing in a feature packed disc burning suite. Whether you are looking to create the occasional DVD from camcorder footage, create photo slideshows to commemorate a family event, or backup all of the data on your Mac, everything you need, and much more, can be found here.

Verdict

This is a superb package of disc burning tools, but if you do not intend to make use of all, or at least most of them, it could be regarded as a little expensive.

10 free software downloads for your laptop

2011-04-10T22:05:00.000+07:00

Have a laptop or netbook and want to get more out of it? You're not alone. We've experienced the frustration of trying to keep data or bookmarks on a portable synchronised with those of a desktop PC or other laptops. We've struggled with diminishing battery life. We've needed assistance getting connected at hotspots or staying safe once online. And we've wondered how to take full advantage of USB flash drives.
But we've found help, and it's all free. Here are ten no cost pieces of downloadable software that will solve your synchronisation, battery, Wi-Fi and USB woes. They'll make it easier and more fun to get your work done, too.

Synchronisation Tools

If you own a desktop in addition to a laptop, you constantly have to deal with synchronising files and folders between them. If you're not careful, you'll end up working on older files on one computer while the newer versions sit on the other. Worse yet, when copying files between the machines, you might accidentally overwrite a newer version with an older one. The following three freebies solve those problems for you. They can synchronise your files automatically, and they can even synchronise between PCs and Macs.
SugarSync Free
This excellent software does double duty as a synchronisation tool and as an automated backup program. Exceedingly simple to use, it offers 2GB of free online backup space, takes up little RAM and few system resources, and works with Macs as well as PCs. All that, and it's free.
Simply install the software on your computers and indicate which folders to synchronise. SugarSync Free then works in the background. If the computer to which you wish to sync is not online, the files will sync to it when it returns. In addition to syncing the files, SugarSync Free backs them up online.
You can do a lot more, too, such as sharing files and folders with other people. The software also keeps older versions of your file online so that you can revert to any of them.
The free edition of the software will synchronise only two computers, and it has a limit of 2GB of online storage space. For-pay versions let you synchronise among multiple PCs and offer faster upload speeds; prices range from $5 per month to $25 per month.
Download SugarSync Free | Price: Free
Windows Live Sync
What if you want to synchronise your laptop with more than one other desktop or laptop, but you don't want to spend the money that SugarSync charges for it? Give the free Windows Live Sync a try. With this tool, you can sync folders on as many computers as you want, and you don't have to pay a penny. Keep in mind, however, that this software doesn't include online backup; it only synchronises folders from computer to computer.
Using Windows Live Sync is even easier than working with SugarSync Free. The method of adding and removing folders is more straightforward. Since you manage everything from a website, you can set up your synchronisation options in a single step rather than multiple ones.
Like SugarSync, Windows Live Sync works with Macs as well as PCs. However, I have been unable to get the software to work with Snow Leopard, the newest version of Mac OS X. If you want to synchronise with a Snow Leopard Mac, you may run into problems.
Download Windows Live Sync | Price: Free
Xmarks
Here's a common problem for laptop owners who also have another machine: How do you keep your Favorites and bookmarks synchronised among all your computers? Let's say that you browse the web on your laptop, adding a few bookmarks and deleting a few. The next day you use your desktop, but of course it doesn't have the latest bookmark changes you made. Trying to make the corresponding additions and deletions on the desktop's web browser can be time consuming, and that's assuming you even remember them all.
Xmarks solves the problem neatly. It synchronises the bookmarks on multiple PCs, and better yet, it does so between browsers as well: With its help, you can keep Internet Explorer bookmarks on one PC synchronised with Firefox bookmarks on another. The tool even works on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The software used to be known as Foxmarks. Since then, its creators have updated it with additional features, including the ability to offer information about sites when you conduct searches. The extras are useful, but you'll really want this software for its synchronisation of the bookmarks on all your PCs.
Download Xmarks | Price: Free

Laptop Battery Managers

Ah, batteries, the bane of every laptop owner's existence. They never seem to have enough power, and they run out far too quickly. These downloads will help you manage your laptop's battery life, and they can even help you get more juice out of a single charge.
BattCursor
You have work to do, but you know that your battery is starting to run out. So you keep checking the laptop's battery icon to see how much power is left and every time you check, you waste precious time. Sound familiar?
This clever, free program shows your laptop's remaining battery life on your mouse cursor. The app can display the information on your desktop, as well.
You can have the cursor text's color and transparency level change, depending on the power level. For example, you can set the program to keep the text transparent in cases when your laptop is connected to a power source, but visible if the portable is unplugged and below a certain power level. BattCursor has a lot of extras, too, such as ways to improve your notebook's battery life.
Download BattCursor | Price: Free
BatteryBar
Want to check battery life, but don't like the idea of having your mouse pointer display the text? Here's another alternative. BatteryBar shows, on your taskbar, exactly how much juice you've already used and how much you have left. You can set the app to display remaining battery life either as a percentage or as an amount of time.
Hover your mouse over BatteryBar, and you'll see even more information, including the total battery capacity, the discharge rate, the battery wear, and how much total capacity your battery has in terms of time per full charge.
When you first run the program, it won't appear to work. You'll need to configure your taskbar to display it. Right click the taskbar, and select Toolbars, Taskbar. Once you do that, the program will appear.
Download BatteryBar | Price: Free

Wireless Networking Utilities

One of the main reasons to use a laptop is that you can connect wirelessly when you're away from your home or office. But finding a connection, and keeping safe when you are connected, can be problematic. Here are two downloads that can help.
Hotspot Shield
When you use your laptop to connect to a hotspot at a public location such as a coffee shop or airport, you put yourself at risk. Hackers may be able to sniff your data packets, invade your PC and steal your username and password when you log in to websites.
Here's a freebie that promises to keep you safe by encrypting your connection when you're at a hotspot so that no one else can read the information you send. The program is extremely easy to use. Install it and it logs you in to a virtual private network (VPN) that performs the encryption.
A few installation notes: If you don't want various toolbars to install too, make sure to uncheck the boxes next to the toolbar items during installation. And if you don't want your home page and search engine to be changed, uncheck those options as well.
Download Hotspot Shield | Price: Free
WeFi
If you're a laptop owner and a fan of social networking, you can combine the two with WeFi. Not only does this program find hotspots so that you can connect to them, but it also finds people to whom you can connect as well. After you install WeFi, the app lists nearby hotspots along with information about each, such as the signal strength and whether the hotspot is encrypted. To connect to one, double click it. You can also go to a web page that displays a map of where you are and shows nearby hotspots.
To see people who are connected to hotspots near you, click the People tab. You can then see more information about any of them, and get in touch with them via the software.
WeFi also includes a feature that will warn you away from suspicious web pages. If you prefer, however, you can turn it off during the installation process: Uncheck the box next to Include Wi-Fi Secure Browsing.
Note that this program will make WeFi Search your home page, establish WeFi Search as your default search, and install a toolbar. If you prefer that it not do that, during the installation process select Custom and uncheck the boxes for Toolbar, Make WeFi Search my default search engine, and Make WeFi Search my homepage. Also, during installation, WeFi will ask you to install a variety of additional software. To be safe, uncheck the boxes next to those items.
Download WeFi | Price: Free

USB Flash Drive Programs

USB flash drives are designed to be portable, just like your laptop. But they can be problematic. For one thing, how can you make sure that your files aren't compromised in the event that you lose your drive? We have a few downloads to help with that, and more.
PortableApps
If your laptop or netbook has only a modest hard drive, you may not be able to fit all of your applications on it. Microsoft Office, for example, can occupy plenty of hard disk space and leave you little room for anything else.
With PortableApps, you won't have that problem. In this download you get a full suite of free applications, including OpenOffice.org, which has a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a database, and a drawing program. You'll also find an antivirus utility, a slimmed down version of Firefox, and more. In addition to the applications, you get backup software, plus a menu that makes accessing all of the programs easy.
The Light version takes up just 150MB installed, and the more full featured Standard version consumes 355MB. You can install the software on your laptop or netbook of course, but to save space you can install the programs on a USB drive and even run them from there. You can store your data on the USB drive as well. No matter how little storage space your laptop or netbook has, you'll be set.
Download PortableApps Standard | Price: Free
Download PortableApps Light | Price: Free
TrueCrypt
USB drives are a great way to carry work with you when you travel. They're light, they're cheap, and they have enough capacity to handle large image files, hefty documents, and entire presentations. But you can easily lose or misplace them, a serious problem if your files are personal or sensitive.
The free TrueCrypt does an excellent job of keeping your files safe from prying eyes, even if your USB drive falls into the wrong hands. You get a choice of many different encryption algorithms, including the powerful 256-bit AES and 448-bit Blowfish methods. The program will not just encrypt the files and folders, but also hide them so that no one but you knows that they are there.
This isn't the most intuitive of programs to work with, so take some time to read the manual and be sure to use the program's built-in wizards.
Download TrueCrypt | Price: Free

USBDriveFresher

The more you use a USB drive, the more it becomes cluttered with excess files. For example, your drive may have old Thumbs.db files, which Windows uses to display thumbnails of pictures, but if you don't keep the pictures themselves on the drives any longer, there's no point to retaining the .db files. You may also notice odd file names that start with underscores, and other weird bits and pieces that serve no apparent purpose.
USBDriveFresher is a simple little program that automatically cleans the clutter for you. Run it, and it sweeps out unnecessary files so that the drive contains only the items you want. You can have the program do its work automatically whenever you plug in a USB drive, or else manually run the app. You can also customise which files it should clean.
Download USBDriveFresher | Price: Free

Add2Run

2011-04-06T21:45:00.001+07:00

Add2Run is a small utility that launches programs, or open files, from the Start menu Run command using an alias (ie type "word" and Microsoft Word will open).
It requires no installation, does not need to be running for the alias to work, simple to use, and more.
This little program is cool. Tell it that you want the word, say, "firefox" to open your Firefox web browser and you simply open the Run command box in the Start menu (or use the Win-R shortcut), type in firefox, and your Firefox Web browser will open.
You could use the word "mail" to open your e-mail client (Outlook Express, Pegasus, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc), "photo" for your image editor (PhotoPlus, Picture Publisher, CorelDraw, etc) – the potential is enormous!
You can also use an alias to open documents, Excel files, or any other specific file you like (as long as it is associated with a program). We said it was a cool little program!
Start to use Add2Run and you will wonder how you ever lived without it.
A "must have" for all computer users.
Note: we have been advised that this program is not suitable for Windows 95, 98 or ME.

Screenshots (fullsize):

Below: the program window
Below: using the alias to launch a program

StrokeIt

2011-04-06T21:43:00.000+07:00

StrokeIt is an advanced mouse gesture recognition engine & command processor that lets you control programs by drawing symbols with the mouse, and will perform the "action" associated with that gesture. It can recognize more than 80 mouse gestures, and be trained to recognize more.
This is an unusual tool which recognizes specific mouse actions or gestures (like drawing the letter E) on the screen while holding down the right mouse button (the E gesture opens Explorer). Draw a C on any program's window and it will close, an N and it will open a new document or window.
A few minutes experimenting with this amazing little tool should convince you of its value. It can be used as a macro facility to write text to a word processor, to launch programs, to perform specific tasks in specific programs (the same gesture can be used in different programs with different results), and more.
Gestures can be drawn "forward" or reverse (a letter E starting at either the top – forward – or the bottom – backwards) and have different functions associated with each direction.
The biggest problem in using StrokeIt is to remember all of the gestures, and what each gesture does in each program. Of course, most users will probably only have 5 or 10 favorite gestures, but even using this limited number will enhance your computer experience and make working on your computer much easier.
We found StrokeIt to be an exceptional program and recommend it to all PC users without reservation.
Get it!
Note: this program is free for individual and not-for-profit charitable entity use (excluding governmental entities & educational institutions).

Screenshots:

Below: the desktray icon (turns red when temporarily disabled)
Below: the Command Editor window

Below: the Preferences menu

Below: an E "gestured" on the desktop with the mouse (opens Explorer)

StrokeIt link

Partition Wizard Home Edition

2011-04-06T21:41:00.000+07:00

Partition Wizard Home Edition
Partition Wizard is a hard disk partition manager (resizing, copying, creating, deleting, formatting, exploring & hiding partitions).
It supports FAT & NTFS partitions, supports RAID & USB drives, changes drive letter, sets active partition, offers partition recovery, has a good Helpfile, and more.
This is an excellent partition manager that offers most requested features. It is very easy to use, and visually shows which partitions are NTFS, which are FAT, etc.
Unfortunately it does not display non-Windows partitions (for example, Linux) so you cannot manage those partitions through Partition Wizard.
Apart from the ability to re-size existing partitions (great if you want to add a new partition or drive), we were most impressed with the Wipe Disk function which offers five different types of disk wiping or erasing – everything from a quick "fill sectors with zeros" to an ultra slow (but very secure) 7-pass wipe to US Department of Defense specification DoD 5220.28-STD.
Partition Wizard is a superb way to manage your drive partitions.
We loved!
Note: we have been advised that this program is not suitable for Windows 95, 98 or ME.

Screenshots:

Below: the main window
Below: up close and personal

Below: the Moving/Resizing dialog box

Below: the Disk Wipe dialog box

Easeus Partition Manager

2011-04-06T21:37:00.000+07:00

Easeus Partition Manager is a hard disk partition manager, with an easy-to-use user interface.
It can resize/move partitions without losing data, can create & delete partitions, supports FAT (FAT12, FAT16 & FAT32) plus NTFS partitions, supports hardware RAID, supports USB drives, and more.
This is one of the best partition managers we have seen. It allows you to do a huge number of tasks on your hard drive partitions, including changing their size and also moving them. The best part is, you can do that without destroying your data!
Other functions are also carried out through an excellent interface that makes it so much easier for users than trying to use FDISK or other DOS tools (which probably won't read NTFS partitions anyway).
Easeus Partition Manager cannot display partition information from secondary operating systems, like Linux, so this is one small problem for people with dual OS computers.
We found Easeus Partition Manager to be an excellent tool for working with partitions through a Windows GUI.
A "must have" for all serious PC users.
Note: we have been advised that this program is not suitable for Windows 95, 98 or ME, and the author does not state if it is suitable for Vista.

Screenshots:

Below: the main window
Below: up close and personal

Below: creating a bootable disk

Below: resizing or moving a partition

Restoration

2011-04-06T21:34:00.001+07:00

Restoration is a tool which can restore files removed from the Recycle bin by mistake, or which have been deleted directly without going through the Recycle bin (by holding down the Shift key when deleting a file).
It features an optional scan of all clusters on a drive.
This utility is tremendous. It scans a hard drive and lists all deleted files, allowing you to copy a deleted file to a nominated folder (never put it back where the original was until it has been checked). If a file has just been deleted, and no other files have been subsequently loaded, changed or deleted, Restoration should be able to restore it fully.
We couldn't get a JPG file to restore (it was restored as a BMP file) but were successful on all other recently deleted files.
If a file was not recently deleted, there is a good chance that it will contain bits and pieces of other files and you may need to do some judicious copying and pasting (called "stitching") to restore a text file to something like the original.
When a file is deleted that location is marked as being empty and other files will be written over the top of it (a file is rarely all at one physical place but in bits and pieces across your hard drive). A program like Restoration cannot be expected to find all of an over-written file. Likewise, checking the contents of clusters on a hard drive may offer missing pits and pieces of files which can be, in part, stitched back together again.
There are many commercially available file "undeletion" tools but this is one of the best we have seen, at any price. It is not "magic" and cannot do the impossible, but if a file can be undeleted and restored to its original condition then Restoration should be able to do it.
We consider this to be an absolutely "must have" for all PC users. Get it!

Screenshots:

Below: the main window
Below: cluster scanning

Multi Clipboard

2011-04-06T21:32:00.001+07:00

Multi Clipboard is a Clipboard management utility which gives fast and easy access to often used pieces of text.
It features 9 x 3 Clipboard texts (sometimes called 'clips') which can selected either via the mouse when the program window is active, or via hotkey (Ctrl + NumPad 1 to 9) when it is not. The 9 slots are increased by selecting one of three text storage files (CLIP1.TXT, CLIP2.TXT, etc).
The utility lives as an icon in the desktray (next to the clock) but does not need to be active to be called by using the hotkeys. The clips can be huge – certainly more than most people would want – but not of unlimited size. They are certainly large enough to handle the text for most business letters (standard sections or clauses which could be pasted into a word processor) and the usual Web addresses, etc which most people find easier if they can be pasted into documents.
If you wish to use a clip you simply select the appropriate paste button from the program, or use the hotkey to place a copy of the selected clip into the Windows' Clipboard ready for pasting where and when required.
The utility requires about 2% of system resources which is probably not too much for most users to keep it permanently active in the desktray. If you use the hotkey approach you will need to have the NumLock key active.
This is a most impressive utility. It looks great, has a superbly easy interface, is not greedy with system resources, holds quite large clips, can be expanded to hold a total of 27 clips in three files, and is so convenient we wonder why everyone doesn't use it.
If you aren't convinced so far you obviously don't have to write any e-mails or use a word processor. We are even using it for storing pieces of HTML code!
Amazing...

Screenshots:

RocketDock

2011-04-06T21:31:00.000+07:00

RocketDock is an animated program launcher.
It minimizes windows to the dock, offers real-time window previews in Vista, has running application indicators, a drag 'n drop interface, multi-monitor support, supports alpha-blended PNG & ICO icons, icons zoom & transition smoothly, auto-hide & popup on mouseover, positioning & layering options, fully customizable, completely portable, and more.
This is a fabulous program launcher that has the added advantage of minimizing all open windows to the dock. You can drag 'n drop programs onto the dock, rearrange their order, reposition the dock or change its appearance (there are 30 skins provided with the program, plus more you can download).
Using the default settings, when you place the cursor over the icon of the program you want to load it becomes highlighting by becoming larger, dragging the icons around it so that they, too, are larger than normal. The effect is superb with a rolling transitional appearance that enhances the eye candy aspect of RocketDock.
It can also be hidden so that the dock only appears when the cursor is placed over it.
One of the neat aspects of RocketDock is its ability to minimize all open programs to the dock. There are also optional indicators to show if a program in the dock is currently open on the desktop.
RocketDock is more than simply eye candy, it is a practical button-bar program launcher to make your oft-used programs quickly accessible.
With lots of customization options, and the ability to add or subtract icons quickly (to remove an icon simply drag it off the dock), RocketDock is an awesome tool and a valuable asset for all PC users.
We loved!
Note: we have been advised that this program is not suitable for Windows 95, 98 or ME.

Screenshots (fullsize):

Below: the default dock window (positioned at the top center of the screen)
Below: showing the mouseover effect on a modified dock

Below: the 5 faces of the Dock Settings dialog box (default settings)

Windows PowerPro

2011-04-06T21:28:00.000+07:00

Windows PowerPro is a compact and powerful button-bar program launcher, menuing system, and desktray icon facility, all of which are fully configurable in almost all aspects.
It features alarm timer, multiple button bars, hot keys, window hot spots, scroll windows using middle mouse key, control of Caps Lock/Shift & Scroll Lock, etc, and is skinnable.
This is a superb desktop tool which goes much further than simply being a button-bar program launcher. If there could be any criticism of this program it would be that there was simply so much to see, do and control! The first reaction is one of bewilderment at its scope. However, as you start to use it you find that even though it has nearly 100 dialog windows (most incorporating dozens of control features), there is flyover help on every single control feature of every single dialog box. There is also a printable manual and an excellent Helpfile.
The program's bar can be positioned within the Windows system tray beside the Start button, in a number of predetermined locations (floating button bar, choice of many resolution-independent standard positions, or placed in an active window caption) it can also be made to disappear after a predetermined number of seconds and appear when the mouse cursor is placed in the hot spot.
This highly configurable tool has one outstanding feature – it uses less than 1% of system resources so you can have it load at startup without worrying about the resources it uses. If the bar is hidden you won't even know that it is there – until you need it.
The desktray icon (see screenshot below) can be configured any way you like – the default is to exit Windows on a left mouse-click, and to hide the desktop with a right mouse-click.
Windows PowerPro is probably the most essential tool which any user can obtain, at any price! Get it now before the author changes his mind.

Screenshots:

Above: the bar can be positioned anywhere on the desktop...

Above: ...or locked into the system tray

Above: the desktray icon is highly configurable, this screenshot shows the default actions

Above & Below: there are nearly 100 dialog boxes offering every configuration possible