Happy Blogiversary!!

A decade has passed since Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. Thus was discovered Blogosphere, an entire universe of humans turned aliens back to humans and other like minded creatures.So what do we do to celebrate a decade of blogging?

We Blog more!

Coming to celebrations, do we need to really celebrate days? Aren't such days just an excuse for our avenged souls to find more reasons to make us warm and eventually melt our beds and the aspirations of the one lazing on them?Well whatever be the reason here we have another reason to celebrate..the Beijing Olympics.

It all started with the 8.08 PM, 08/08/08 inauguration in which the Indian contingent led by R Rathode(That's another way of how we flaunt the only thing we have) staged a flag bearer's march appearing impressive from a distance but when it came near the media stands there you could see..Sania Mirza dressed in her training jacket,another lady with a similar dress besides her and another one in a green saree...what a delightful combo(!) for a 2.4 billion TV audience,80 world leaders and the biggest billionaire Olympic inauguration ever.And if that wasn't enough here are the results even before the first day draws to an end..

• "Mansher falls back after good start India's Manavjit Singh Sandhu is placed 12th while Mansher Singh was at 21 after the first round qualification in the men's Trap shooting event.." excuses..excuses!! and here more excuses: " Earlier, Indian shooters began on a false note, with Anjali Bhagwat, Avneet Kaur and Samresh Jung failing to qualify for the finals of their respective events."

• A few more results to celebrate:"Samresh Jung fails: Samresh Jung failed to qualify for the final in the 10m air pistol event, Tombi Devi crashes out: Indian judo champ Tombi Khumujam Devi's Beijing Olympics campaign lasted only two-and-a-half minutes as she was knocked out in the preliminary round of the women's 48kg event on Saturday."

Well I guess Olympics will be a far happier occasion for the Indian audience if they consider the fact that the Chinese and the Indians have evolved from essentially the same species of primates or apes or whatever..so we can celebrate almost every hour when a chinese wins a medal and we don't even reach close to qualifying for the finals....so obsessed are we with finding an Indian connection to anyone rich,famous or talented (aka Vikram Pandit,Arcelor Mittal,...) that we forget to build our own Identity.Or is it that we like being lazy enough to win one silver medal,clap about and then celebrate for the next four years?

Whatever the reason be,wherever the blame game may lead to...we'll still be the same(as far as I can perceive the Indian contingent at the Olympics)..That's why monginis was intelligent enough to come up with its Tagline.."go ahead...lets celebrate!"

Ciao till we win some medal :P

Internet Journalism I

The Internet is a powerful tool for the media.News portals like Rediff,Yahoo and Google News offer a vast repository of diverse happenings from America to Zhangjiakou.Apart from these portals there are search engines,RSS Feeds,Wiki and there's Google.Well googling has become an integral part of our daily lives but its neither the beginning nor the end to what you want to find.Here I cover some search engines that offer specialized sevices and in most cases these will help you end up with a better result than google...and in the end I'll just copy-paste a few tips on how to use Google in a better way!

The keywords I used to compare were "quark goa" without the quotes and the following are the results and what I think about the corresponding Search engines:

www.Google.com- Gave the www.bits-quark.org site on I'm feeling lucky! which basically means its the first site that appears on its search result page.199,000 results in all but the worst part:the rest of the immediate results were nowhere close to the official site which shows that google's *crawler isn't exactly the most intelligent bot out there.Neither is Google the most exhaustive search engine.

www.yahoo.com-First hit: www.bits-quark.org, next www.bits-goa.ac.in and the rest all relevant to either the BITS Goa Home page,wiki or blogs with the quark Tag.More results than Google in this case.

Windows live search- Excellent new engine.No need to hit next button 'coz all search results on one page.results close to yahoo's,Fast and offers excellent Image search options.Apart from that google still offers more tools than this.

Ask.com-Very good at searching across blogs and social networks.Use it when you are searchin for people or the birth place of your grandfather's aunt in Ullan Battor.

AltaVista.com-Good relevance of results but I see no point using this when there are other options already available.

Then there are slower engines like lycos.com and sites which integrate all engines in one.

Use www.555-1212.com to search area and country codes and email addresses,forumone.com to search across forums,www.infospaceinc.com to search across yellow pages and different directories and findforms.com for finding all kinds of legal material but all mostly related to US.

Then there are other specialized sites pertaining to medicine,news only,regional engines,computers,market watch and industrial products.

Now coming to the part of optimizing your Google search:

1)Use "Laloo Prasad yadav" in quotes when you want the results to contain the entire phrase as you have typed it else you'll end up with things like railway LALOO,rabri prasad yadav.

2)A capital OR to find either of the two parameters on each side of OR.

3)The + or - operator. Eg. search elizabeth -queen and you will get all instances of things in which elizabeth is not a queen.

There are plenty more tools and sites but these are fairly adequate at the moment.Of course Google is still the ONE but my favourite search engine is

http://www.cuil.com : Recently established by a bunch of former google researchers, this site provides 3-4 times more results then google and boasts of a very fast and efficient engine.The Intelligence component in the crawler is surely more than google which just ranks on basis of its pagerank feature.

So for a general search my ranks are:

1. Google OR Cuil
2. windows Live search
3. Yahoo
4. ask.com & www.555-1212.com
5. Any of the rest

That's all 4 the day folks!



*crawler-Well this is a program or something we may call a bot that roams all over the world wide web and indexes pages so that they are marked in an appropriate manner for the key words.This indexed data is then used when you press the search button.Read more on the crawlers at http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html