Google Search in India on SMS!!

[Via TekRaja]
A great news for those, who don't have the enabled phone in India : Now
you can search Google via SMS and that without paying any premium charges!



Just sent your queries to 9-77-33-00000 and get
information about cricket scores, Indian Railways train schedules &
ticket status, horoscopes, movie showtimes, restaurant information and
more. To get started sms "help" to 9-77-33-00000.

The best side of this service : you will be n't charged @ Rs. 3/- like
other similar services. Just pay standard SMS charge and enjoy the SMS
search.



To see the query format visit this page. Here, you can try an interactive demo too, and view results just as they'd appear on your phone as SMS.



Cheers!



Related :

• Send Free Picture SMS
• How to get alerts of new e-mails for FREE 
• How to get more than 250 Tweets per week from Twitter 
• Google SMS Channel : Free Group SMS service
• Post Tweets via SMS at Cheaper rates 
• CAT scores via SMS and e-mails 

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Google in 2001

Google has brought back the index from January 2001
to show how many things have changed in almost 8 years. At that time,
Google's index included 1,326,920,000 web pages and it was the most
comprehensive index of a search engine.

Google explains that the
index from January 2001 is the earliest available. "Well, for various
technical reasons that are too boring to go into, earlier versions of
our index aren't readily accessible. But we did still want to offer
users a chance to search an older index as a way of looking back at web
history, and the January 2001 index is the best we can do."

It is extremely interesting exercise... do click on the "View old version in the internet Archive' link for a few results to see the web pages as of 2001 itself.

You will not believe how much world has changed in last 8 years.

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Panoramio: View Photos from Google Map

Viewing photos from google map is a great idea... did not know about it before.
I am visiting Fountain Valley next week and wanted to check out how it looks around... here it goes.

Great Idea perfect execution.

Uploading your photos is also pretty easy. You have to sign up to Paroramio, and simply upload your photos by giving locations...



There is also some contest going on to promote this tool.

Go.. keep shooting and uploading.

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Face Swapping to protect privacy

Found these cool images and good article about how Google is working on protecting privacy in the StreetView and also keeping their projects "live"

After finding itself in hot water with privacy advocates, Google has
begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which
lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the
images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces.

It
needn't be this way, says Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University, New
York. Kumar and his colleagues have developed software that gives
everyone a face - just not their own. The software randomly selects
33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then
picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes,
nose and mouth are used, resulting in a composite image of the two
people. "It matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image
resolution," says Kumar. "The selected faces are aligned to common 3D
coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the
target image."

The end result is a convincing face rather than a blur, although the team's images (pdf link here)
can be spooky, especially when people get features from the opposite
sex. What's more, the software works automatically. "Previous face
replacement software required manual assistance, much like editing an
image in Photoshop," says Kumar.

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Google: Success Story of 25 Million to 1 Trillion

As i just finished writing a post on Google crossing 1 trillion indexed pages mark... I thought of looking at the past, and this time http://web.archive.org/ came to my help!!

Here is the page that shows extensive archive of All the versions indexed for "Google.com"


I took a dig on the first captured version as on Nov 11, 1998 *. As i continued to explore i found this page (image shown on the left) what showed "Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)". The promise has certainly come true and in less than ten years it has crossed 1 trillion mark. That apart it has also moved from "search project" to a multi-billion dollar international giant...

(BTW, interestingly, the last archive of google is on Aug 29, 2007 !! what happened? Archive.com sleeping or it just blacklisted Google???)

Kudos to Google, its creators, investors, contributors and most importantly the USERS

WikipediaWictionaryChambers (UK)Google imagesGoogle defineThe Free DictionaryJoin exampleWordNetGoogleUrban DictionaryAnswers.comrhymezone.comMerriam-Webster

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Google Clocks 1 Trillion unique web-content pages

We know that Google is huge tracking every bit of "internet" with its huge "google-ware".
I happened to read this big news yesterday when Google announced in their blog that "systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a
milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web
at once!"

Now interpreting how big is 1 trillion is insane... but as they say... its big... and i am sure that there are plenty more pages that are waiting to be "indexed". You are welcome to read the original article to know how they track these pages and how things "actually" work at Google.

Accuracy?
While its great that google is tracking every-bit of information, i am wondering how they keep it up-to-date? There is perpetual internet-decay (internet rot or link rot) where the links disappear, the websites shut-down, sites are hacked or people simply change their addresses. I am wondering what google does with the cached data?


Downside?
Now its been proved that being indexed by google is a "previledge" and not a "right". While i am a big lover of Google, it also scares a bit as we are moving towards a clear-cut monopoly. Any system that becomes too big to compete with, will necessarily bring injustice to a small group of people... hope i am wrong here.

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1 reason i left the new igoogle!!

I read a lot about "why new igoogle sucks" and still i was ok to experiment... but one thing that i just could not stand was ... there is no minimize button... huff... it sucks...

I keep loads of things and open each when i have time.. otherwise they are minimized... its a must have and if its not there, i will not be the one to use the new UI just for the heck of it!!

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Constructive Criticism of the new Experiemental iGoogle

I thought of trying my hand on the new iGoogle and successfully did that by declaring myself as a developer iGoogle Sandbox Sign Up

Thought of also checking what people are saying about this new UI experiment and stumbled on this nice bit of article...

I have tried to pick my favorite ones:

---

* There is no way to hide the left-hand navigation tab. Since I onlyhave one page of information, which contains just the info I want to see at a glance when I start my browser, the left hand navigation is useless and takes up 1/4 of my screen width. I would love an option to "collapse" that column and free up that space for the actual content.

---

* There is no way to view just RSS headlines. With the new two-line preview for every item, I cannot fit all my feeds on one page without scrolling.

---

* After clicking on an item in an RSS feed from iGoogle, or clicking on one of my gadgets in the left-hand navigation, if I hit the "Back" button in my browser I am redirected to the page I was just viewing and cannot get back to my iGoogle page.

---

the new iGoogle page seems to be loading an INCREDIBLE amount of information in the background. Looking at my status bar, it seems like it's retrieving every image from every RSS feed on my page as it loads. This slows down my entire browser and my internet connection. Sphere: Related Content

Text Search in Video Speeches: Another feather in the cap for Google

This is another awesome innovation... Google constantly puts people in "shock and awe" situation... don't even imagined they could do this.

http://speech.clients.google.com/elections2008videosearch/gadget

This is simply unbelievable.. i tried searching for at least two dozen works and everything worked perfectly.

If you want a gadget for it, its also available

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=/ig&dpos=top&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/elections_video_search.xml

Currently the search in restricted to few political speeches but i am sure it will spread to all sorts of things like movies and video songs once they can take music out of the songs and recognize the words (easy said than done, but its google who needs to be blamed for spoiling people with great innovations).

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GMarks: Cool extension for Google Bookmarks

Categories

• Bookmarks

GMarks helps you sync & manage your bookmarks with Google Bookmarks...

GMarks can display the bookmarks almost the same as Firefox's native
bookmarks: in a separate menu and in the sidebar. There's also a
dropdown that can be added to Firefox's toolbars. The sidebar is useful
when you want to perform full-text searches in your bookmarks without
having to visit Google's site, while the GMark menu has an excellent
option for managing bookmarks. If you click on "Organize bookmarks",
you'll be able to import bookmarks, edit or delete bookmarks and create
Gmail-like filters. For example, you can automatically add the label
Google for any bookmark from this blog.

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Google Export Data

Very good article that lists all ways you can export your google data!!

Google mentioned in many occasions that it doesn't want to trap users' data
and some of its services have started to provide import/export options.
Here are some of the ways to export your data from Google's services:

* iGoogle lets you download the list of gadgets, feeds, themes and their corresponding options if you go to the settings page
and scroll down to the "Export / Import" section. The resulting XML
file can be imported to another Google account and those who are
familiar with XSLT could covert iGoogle's data file to OPML, so you can
subscribe to the feeds in Google Reader or any other feed reader.

* Google Calendar has options to export your calendars one by one as iCal files, but it's much easier to export all the calendar you created by going to: http://www.google.com/calendar/exporticalzip.

*
Google Docs lets you export your documents as an archive of HTML files
and images. To export your files, restrict the Docs list to documents, select all the files and choose "Save as HTML (zipped)" from "More actions". Zoho can already import your documents and there's a Greasemonkey script that helps you download all the files from Google Docs, not just the documents.

* Blogger added in the experimental version available at draft.blogger.com an option to export the posts and comments
from your blogs as an Atom feed. Hopefully, developers will write
scripts that convert Blogger's feeds to the formats accepted by other
blogging services.

* Google Bookmarks can be exported as a HTML file,
but for some reason browsers can no longer import the bookmarks. The
web history or search history can be exported as a RSS feed: http://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000 (replace 1000 with the number of items you want to export).
BTW: Firefox 3 imports Google Bookmarks just fine. It just uses folders instead of tags.


* Gmail lets you export your contacts as CSV or vCard, but Google automatically adds all the people you send a reply in the list of contacts.

*Gmail : To download your GMAIL, set up POP or IMAP (recommended) access in your
GMail account(s). Then use an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or
Mozilla Thunderbird (recommended) to download all your mail. Mac users
can use Apple's Mail which is built in. After downloading all your
mail, you can use your chosen client to export it to whatever format
you wish.

It
would be nice to export all your data from a single page, so you can
delete a Google account or switch to a competing service without losing
your data.

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Image Search >> Cool new technology by TinEye

This is some great innovation after a long time... incredible results.
http://www.ideeinc.com/products/tineye/



You can try your hand on this at the labs http://labs.ideeinc.com/

Read our blog

Back to Idée

Multicolour Search Lab
Like colours? Pick a bunch to search large images sets. Available with Alamy Set and Flickr Set.

Visual Search Lab
Combine tags with visual search to return never-before-seen combinations of images.

Image Upload Search Lab
Upload your own images or point to one on the web and we'll show you what it resembles.

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Google Map predicts Traffic Condition.

Google Maps can now predict traffic information
for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions.
By default, if you click on the Traffic button in a supported area from
the US, Google Maps shows real-time traffic information. "Comprehensive
traffic data is available in over 30 major US metropolitan areas
(including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and others), with partial
coverage available in many more," according to Google Maps help center. There's also a traffic layer in Google Earth and Google Maps Mobile, but these applications don't include yet traffic prediction.

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Salesforce for Google Apps: New way to do business

Salesforce for Google Apps

We had tried something similar at Oracle for a Open World demo.
We had integrated the "Credit Management" business flow.. this is the way business should be done!!
Collaborate -> integrate -> Make it User Friendly.

Good job by SFDC and Google.

Don't miss the demo.

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Map Jack... better way to view the street

MapJack is an effort similar to Google's Street View
to capture street-level imagery. The site only has imagery from San
Francisco, Sausalito (US) and Chiang Mai (Thailand), but San
Francisco's images are the most impressive. They look so good that you
almost think you're there.

When i say its clear, this is what i really mean :)

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My IGoogle

This is my iGoogle with some of the widgets i use... interesting... i am still a new-bee at igoogle... but will learn fast :D Sphere: Related Content