Jalaj P. Jha

Riding on Google Wave

jalaj — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:45:55 +0000

I had this mail in my inbox since last 6 days and I was very eager to follow the link but not getting time. Yes! it is an invitation for Google Wave preview!!! Am I one of 100000 early adopters or Google have extended it to more people and I am one of them?

Clicking on the link created a Google wave account for me. The screen that opened looks more like an email interface (you get a @googlewave.com email id too) but a mail sent from gmail to my googlewave id did not reach this new inbox… So this account does not send or receive emails… it sends and receives “Waves”… Looks like it would be fun riding the waves.

There is only one person in my contact list who already have a Google wave account to interact with! But wait there is an email, I mean Wave, waiting for me that says I can invite 20 people to Google Wave. Want to get invited? I am offering 10 of the available invitations to those who request by commenting on this post. Don’t mention email address in the comment body, for there is an email address field for it and which is not publicly displayed

Will write more on Google Wave later. Bye for now.

Riding on Google Wave

jalaj — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:30:01 +0000

Will write more on Google Wave later. Bye for now.

Crossed 2 million views

jalaj — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:42:57 +0000

Today the blog crossed 2 million views. I am still busy with personal affairs and hence no new posts in making but hope to start again soon.

Wake Up India!

jalaj — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:24:13 +0000

The lead characters in a recently released movie called the city by that name which was made obsolete by reinstating the city’s original name, and this created controversies that lead to stopping of screening of movie in certain theatres/screens and eventually made its producer apologize.

Now that all’s fine why don’t we realize that even after more than 60 years of Independence our Country is still called India and not Bharat, its original name.

Expect the unexpected – Recover Exhausted Space in Gmail!

jalaj — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:25:20 +0000

When Gmail first came up with 1 GB (and counting…) of storage space, who thought if anyone ever is going to exhaust this limit. Afterall each one of us was mostly sing email services that provided 2-10MB of space. Well then Gmail storage limit went up to more than 7GB (currently 7376MB).

Ever wondered what would happen when you exhaust the limit? No need to guess have a look at the screenshot below.

Yeah that’s true! I exhausted the limit in my very first gmail account (opened in early 2005) and am 3 MB less than 7376MB limit.

Now as I sit down to delete unwanted mails here’s a tip that you can too use in your turn. Say for example the secret behind my exhausting the 7GB space is subscribing to a lots of Yahoo Groups, many of which delivered mails with attachments, one of which is Chumma that delivered more than 20 thousand emails with attachments in last few years. If I delete all the mails from there I can recover a lot of space. This can be done using “Filter” facility. Click on “Create a filter”

Enter “Chumma” in the Subject field, needless to say all mails from each group have a string in the subject. Click on “Next Step”

Now check “Delete it” and “Also apply filter to…” and click on “Create Filter”. This will delete all the existing mails from the group and delete all future mails too.

Let me get back to work of deleting the files as the group that I mentioned above would be the last one to go for deletion.

Update: After deleting a lot of emails and emptying the trash, I ended up with 30% free space. Ironically the trash page asks “Who needs to delete when you have over 7000 MB of storage?!”

Google Hot Trends Indexing to Cool Down

jalaj — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:50:03 +0000

Google Hot Trends that started somewhere in 2007, 15th May to be precise, has been inspiration to a large number of blogs and sites who created content taking hot keywords from the ones listed in it. While some sites produced remarkable content from it, many took to create brainless content mashing up the keywords and nothing else. Some even took to replicate the Hot Trends site when they could not think of ideas.

Google index is full of pages that are nothing but the copy of the contents of Google Hot Trends site (some are owned by Google itself). Here is a glimpse

m.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
pro.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
www.freesc.com/trends/hottrends
m.googlearth.de/trends/hottrends
www.rechargeit.org/trends/hottrends
www.ggoogle.com/trends/hottrends
www.blogger.ae/trends/hottrends
pro1.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
www.gppglr.com/trends/hottrends
www.gmail.fr/trends/hottrends
www.heima021.com/trends/hottrends
www.janinaordmann.com/trends/hottrends
m.googlearth.de/trends/hottrends
www.nihilisme.ca/trends/hottrends
www.ngauthier.com/trends/hottrends
www.googleanalytics.ru/trends/hottrends
www.sharesigns.com/trends/hottrends
www.ciecet.net/trends/hottrends
wireless.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
pro2.blogger.com/trends/hottrends

While intentions of other site owners behind replication of pages can be understood, that is getting traffic, it’s beyond imagination that why would Google want to replicate its own data that too with different subdomains of same domain as m.blogger.com, pro.blogger.com, pro1.blogger.com, pro2.blogger.com and wireless.blogger.com

Anyways, Google now seem to have decided to remove these pages from index and, to effect it, have included exclusion rules in its robots.txt. This change seem to have been done on 2nd of July. You must be wondering that this step may stop Google owned sites to get indexed but what about other sites which are not under Google’s control? Well they will succeed in that too, as the sites replicating the Google Hot Trends page are replicating the robots.txt too

Let’s see how much time it takes to get all these pages removed from the index.

Here is the rest the list.

www.gmail.fr/trends/hottrends
64.233.189.100/trends/hottrends
www.dancrone.com/trends/hottrends
www.ciecet.net/trends/hottrends
www.worx.biz/trends/hottrends
www.非主流服装.com/trends/hottrends
www.familiekoret.com/trends/hottrends
www.387groep.nl/trends/hottrends
www.ggoogle.com/trends/hottrends
tonder.hveruge.dk/trends/hottrends
www.antesoft.com/trends/hottrends
www.googlemaps.it/trends/hottrends
www.algianviaggi.com/trends/hottrends
googleimageads.com/trends/hottrends
bassboutique.com/trends/hottrends
64.233.179.104/trends/hottrends
72.14.221.104/trends/hottrends
www.blogger.se/trends/hottrends
images.wwwgoogle.de/trends/hottrends
www.nihilisme.ca/trends/hottrends
tonder.hveruge.dk/trends/hottrends
www.rechargeit.org/trends/hottrends
www.bsp-zt.at/trends/hottrends

and on… and on…

What Exactly is a Good Search Engine?

jalaj — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:57:39 +0000

Some times back I had carried a post where I showed how, for a particular term, Google and Yahoo both failed to give relevant result and surprisingly Live Search pointed to the correct site as the first result.

This incidence showed me that definition for a Good search engine is relative and depends on the keyword you are searching for. While I always use Google for search, it was the first time I realized that live.com was not bad after all.

Since then, Live.com has given way to Bing.com, a new search engine from Microsoft which promises improvement not only in result quality but also in user experience. And now that today I got to read Webmaster Tools Give “Live” a Second Life, I achieved another realization, that definition for a Good search engine is also relative to and depends on the people. Let me expand this statement with more explanation as under

The are two type of people using a search engine. First is the Researcher, as we all know, who searches for information that he needs using the search engine. Second one is the Webmaster, who makes all his efforts to make sure that his site is the one which is visited by researcher, even if there is a lot of competition out there. We all now this process as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). At one point of time Google became synonym to SEO by providing webmasters with all the tools that webmasters could use to rate and improve their sites. After this no webmaster cared for other search engines as they could improve themselves to suit Google and get the extra traffic that others could not have generated easily.

Yahoo was next to understand this secret and thus it came up with Site Explorer. While Webmasters started giving importance to Yahoo, Live.com was looked at with hatred as it never cared to provide webmasters with similar tools.

Better late than never, Bing the new search engine by Microsoft includes a Webmaster Center and already we have Webmasters who have started praising Bing. After all, at the end of the day it’s only traffic that matters!