Google hidden gems...

Google has made it’s place among the most popular brands of the world. One study mentions that the number of searches in a day on google has increases from approx. 150 million from early 2000 to more than a billion today. However the simple interface that google has, uncluttered , point hides the powerful search features that lie under it’s belly. While most people think of searching as a simple way to search for keywords , usually anywhere, either in the title or body of the page, the results in many cases can be too many to fish out the useful stuff. This is not surprising since for one , there are now more than 2 billion pages indexed by the google and secondly the words are often defined correctly by their context. A simple keyword search that matches the pattern of the words cannot capture the context and hence can throw up a lot of noise in the search results. Fortunately, google through the use of special keywords/operators can help you to find specific information you need. Here we will look at some of the more advanced operators that google provides to let you separate the music from the noise.

Quotation marks: use of quotation marks lets you locate the exact string. For example if you are looking for information on IBM PC’s then the search for “IBM PC” would return only the results that have the keywords IBM PC together. If instead you used IBM PC in the search, then it would return all pages which had either IBM or PC or both(but may not be together) in their results. Therefore you could have pages that talked about IBM mainframes, probably not what you want.
+/- operators : The + and – operators let you force inclusion and exclusion of keywords from a search. For example lets say you are looking for musical keyboards. Now if you search for keyboard you may end up with results that talk about computer keyboards also. You can instruct the search engine to look for only those pages that have keyword keyboard and the keyword music in the same page by using the search keyboard +music (although if you don’t specify the + operator, the default is +. Therefore this command is equivalent to +keyboard +music) . You could further refine your query by telling the search engine that return all pages that have keywords keyboard and music and do not have the keyword computer in it. This can be said using the search expression keyboard music –computer.

Site operator : Google earns a good amount of it’s revenues from licensing it’s search technology to different portals. You may have many news portals that carry a search box and mention that search provided by google. This basically means that you can use the same powerful search engine that you use to search the whole web for searching the contents of the site/portal only. A similar effect can be achieved from the google search page also by using the operator site. This is an extremely powerful operator. The search expression Infosys site:www.moneycontrol.com would search for all occurrences of the keyword Infosys only from the site www.moneycontrol.com . Lets say you heard that the Bombay stock exchange has issued some notice to a company xyz. You want to know about this specific piece of news on bse you could give the search expression xyz site:www.bseindia.com . Lets say you are researching for compression algorithms and you want to look for latest developments in this area and are interested in searching the sites of educational institutes only to see if there are any papers published on this area. You could use the search expression compression algorithms site:.edu . This expression would return the results from sites of all educational institutes, ie sites that have a .edu in their domain. If you are interested in looking only into the papers published by a specific institute, you could replace the .edu by the url of that university, for example for computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University, replay the url by www.cs.cmu.edu. Thus the site operator lets you search for a page either at a specific site or a top level domain( as in the case of .edu ). The site operator however cannot be used to search specifically for pages that exist beneath the main or default site, eg. A subdirectory under www.moneycontrol.com like www.moneycontrol.com/news

Link operators : Lets say you want to find out how popular a particular site, probably your homepage or your blog page is. The popularity of a web site can in an informal manner be determined by the number of hits that the site gets and also to some extent by the number of links that other sites have to your web site. After all others would link to your website only if it is popular and also the more the links the more is the potential for others to visit your site and hence make it popular. The search expression link: www.myhomepage.com would list out all the pages that google found to be linking to this url. Say if you are researching stocks and there are two portals to choose from you could determine which of those is the more popular one and thus better to use.

Filetype operator : The filetype is one of the most useful operators in my opinion. Using the filetype operators you can instruct google to return only the files of a certain type. Say you are researching on the J2ME technology, the technology that enables the Java applications to be ported to mobile phones but you are only interested in any presentations that people may have given on this topic and shared on the web. You don’t want to read loads and loads of web pages about it. You could use the search expression J2ME filetype:ppt . This would return the links with power point presentation files only. Similarly, say I would like to know about the Urban Ceiling Land Act, but would like to see a document that describes it. I could use the search expression “Urban Ceiling Land Act” filetype:doc . This would give me all the links that have information about UCLA in a word document. Say your boss asked you to prepare an expense sheet template in excel for recording travel expenses by the company employees. You could use the search expression travel expenses template filetype:xls to get a sampling excel sheet templates used for this purpose by others and build on that.

(tilde) ~ The synonym operator : Sometime you may not remember the exact word that you want to look for on the web. Instead you know something that sounds similar or has the same meaning. In this case, you can use google’s synonym operator, the tilde ~ in the search expression to tell google not to do an exact search on the word but also on what it thinks are the synonyms of the word. For example, you are trying to find information about some animal from the ape family, probably chimpanzee(something that you don’t know about, but know that it is related to the ape), you could enter the search expression ~ape and the search results would include monkey, gorilla and chimpanzee.

related operator : Lets say you are thinking of doing online trading in stocks. You know that there is one site, icicidirect.com that does offer this service. However, before you decide on which service provider to choose, you would like to know other online stock broking sites similar to this and evaluate them. In other words, you would like to know the sites related to the specific pages on icicidirect.com. The google operator related lets you do just that. The search expression related:www.icicidirect.com( note there is no space between the colon and the url) would list out the other online investing sites for you. Try seeing how many search engines are there by using the search expression related:www.google.com . Chances are that you may not find all the links listed as related directly to what you are looking for, however, I have found most of the results to be very relevant to make this operator very useful when looking for categories of sites related to a specific topic before exploring them further.


Inurl and allinurl operator : Typically the keywords you search for are matched against the body and the titles of the web pages. The inurl and allinurl operators restrict your search to URL’s of web pages. This syntax can be used to know if there any sites that may have specific type of information. For example, I would like to know if you are looking for a job in Australia and don’t know if there are any Job portals , you could start with a search expression like allinurl: au jobs or allinurl: au career to get to job portals in Australia or directly to career opportunities pages of organizations in Australia. The inurl operator is behaves similar to the allinurl operator, except that it looks for only the keyword specified after the operator in the url instead of looking for all the keywords.

Intitle and allintitle operator : The typical search without any operators searches for the keywords in the title as well as body of the pages. Suppose you are interested only in those pages that carry your keyword in the title. In that case you can use the operators intitle or allintitle. For example, suppose you want to search for information regarding exports from India. Now, all these are fairly common words and there would be many sites that would have these words in their body. The relevance of the sites would increase more if you found these keywords in the title. Therefore the search expression allintitle:export india would give you much more focused results.

The biggest gathering...

I recently read a story on the internet that stated that there are now more than 694 million online users above the age of 15. This it said was more than 14% of the population in this group. An incredible number. Barely 10 years back this would not even be about a 10th of this number and in another 10 having an online presence would probably be as obvious as having an electricity connection is now. The report did mention a few interesting facts about this data. It said, today, the online audience in the US represents less than a quarter of Internet users across the globe, versus 10 years ago when it accounted for two-thirds of the global audience. According to the report, the United States still had the single largest Internet audience, of 152 million users, followed by China with 72 million. Third on the list was Japan with 52 million users, followed by Germany (32 million) and Britain (30 million). In sixth place was South Korea (24.6 million) followed by France (23.9 million), Canada (19 million), Italy 16.8 million and India (16.7 million). Rounding out the top 15 countries were Brazil (13.2 million), Spain (12.5 million), Netherlands (11 million), Russia (10.8 million) and Australia (9.7 million). Further, you might find it interesting to know that in terms on most time spent online, Israel led the list, with the average user spending 57.5 hours online during the month -- twice as much time compared to the average person in the United States.
Of course one of the reasons fuelling the growth of the internet is the sheer amount of information being available. There is information on just about every conceivable topic out there. Most of it available for free, though some of the more specialized one available at a cost. With the maturing of the internet information model, more and more companies who use to offer purely free information are now offering premium access to specific information at a cost. Another reason that could be fuelling this growth of the internet is that access to internet is now not only possible through the PC or the traditional computer but through a number of other client devices, like the cell phone, pda, etc. This puts the convenience of information anywhere and everywhere. I don’t think the time is far away when you would be uniquely identified by your e-mail name instead of the name and your personal website url would be just as important as your physical address. When a new being is born, his/her e-mail and cyber-identity would be decided and registered at the local birth&death office before a name is decided for him/her. Ok, I am joking on this one, but don’t be surprised if something similar happens in your lifetime.

Inverting the idea ...

Recently I traveled with a friend of mind the new Ford Fiesta car of hers. She was telling me about how Ford had designed this car , especially for the Indian conditions and the kind of tests it had undergone before being launched. While I was looking around and discussing what the new features were in car I came across a extra meter reading on the dashboard dial that was neither the speedometer nor the trip meter ( the reading that you typically set to zero before the start of a journey, to know exactly the distance you travel for the particular trip) but a third one. This third dial was actually a meter the reading on which showed you how many more kilometers your car would run before you would need to refill. Depending on the fuel in the fuel tank and the average mileage the car has , this reading would automatically be set and decrement as you run the car. What a powerful , simple and useful idea. While we can use a trip meter in an inverted sense, to know when we would need to refill, by being aware of how much fuel was put in last time, then set the trip meter to zero, etc...Still , a simple inversion of this idea that instead of having the meter increment as you run the car, instead have it to decrement and know how far you are from zero makes it so much more convenient. A simple yet powerful idea. Why did not anyone else think of it before ?

Leveraging India As India Stands Up

Google TechTalks May 25, 2006 Ashok Jhunjhunwala Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and was department Chair till recently. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras. ABSTRACT Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala has significant expertise in incubating technology to make a difference for the masses in India. Dr. Jhunjhunwala leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. This group is closely working with industry in the development of a number of Telecommunications and Computer Network Systems. TeNeT group has incubated a number of technology companies which work in partnership with TeNeT group to develop world class Telecom Access products. The group has also incubated a company which aims to install and operate telephone and Internet in every village in India. Come here what he as to share from his vast experiences in this field. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- My comments... This is an excellent talk showcasing some of the recent developments in India. Particularly I like Dr. Jhunhunwala's comment that India is a huge market, BUT at the right price. He goes on to describe, how we have tailored some of the solutions to the west to meet the demands and the price points that would work in India. In the process, we have creates a market for these solutions at the most competitive rates in the world and still end up making a decent profit. This obviously opens up the world market for us. The other thing that I liked very much is the passion and pride with with Dr. Jhunjunwala speaks about some of the very interesting work being done out of India.Very inspiring.

The ever evolving mobile phone…

The mobile phone “revolution” is quite a recent phenomenon. While the growth of the mobile phone adoption is a record in itself in the sense that it is the fastest growing consumer electronic in the history of mankind. The phone essentially conjures up images of “Hello, Hello” and communication, it is interesting to see how the mobile phone has diversified into the domain of features reserved for other gadgets. This truly is an example of convergence.

Compare the features in the above diagram to that of a simple phone or even just the walkie/talkie from the last decades. Probably the common node would be the one to do voice calling and that also a subset of the functionality that is present in the mobiles of today. So, does it look saturated ? Has all the innovations that could be part of the mobile phone , already in there ?

There are a slew of new areas that can me made possible to do with the mobile phone and that are just waiting to hit the critical mass with mass adoption of 3G(read faster) networks. While the possibilities are endless, some of one that I can think of now( and some of these already have been tried as pilot projects in some countries in Europe and in Japan) are TV broadcasting to the phone, Location based services(there is a whole gamut of services like ‘provide me directions/map to the nearest Macdonald’s restaurant from here’ that you could provide under this umbrella), Navigational services, Remote computing( using your mobile phone as a client computer to the office network and work from anywhere) and many more. It would be interesting to see the whether in the next few years, each of the new features that has already converged into the mobile phone, like, the camera , would become more and more powerful( higher megapixel, optical zoom, sophisticated features) or a completely new set of features would make it’s way through, or both. Nevertheless, one important factor for the success of the mobile phone is it’s mobility and which has also led to it become a personal device. On the other hand, as you try to pack in more and more features into this tiny device, the size also becomes one of the limiting factors. Lets wait and watch.

The camera in the phone...

Did you every wonder how the cell phone companies came up with the idea of introducing a camera in the phone ? Alexander Graham bell would probably never would have imagined in his wildest dreams that the device he created for the purpose of communication, would one day be also be used for photography. The two seem to be very different applications. In hindsight, and with the success of the camera phones, it does seem an intelligent move by cell phone companies to include this application with your phone. However, what I am really interested is in understanding what would have the conversation looked like when in the board room of a cell company someone came up with the idea of packaging a camera(and that also a very low quality one to start with) with the device. There would have been arguments like, “why would someone who wants to make a call, be interested in a camera that takes postage size photographs ? (It’s seems that the idea of mouse as an input device to computers was something that was first proposed to the Xerox board, who rejected it as being frivolous)“ Some one else may have put another point across in favor. A deviant from the natural evolution of the product. I mean, you could add a bigger address book, voice activated calling, speaker phone, backlit LCD display, black&white to color display, password protection for calling specific numbers, barring specific calls, needing a password to receive calls from specific numbers, programming to automatically call specific set of numbers at specific times and speaking a pre-recorded message, call forwarding, programming to send a busy tone to specific set of numbers and so on…but, having a camera on the phone ? Give me a break !!

Obviously, someone was not thinking on the same lines and so we had the camera in. Looking back, if I try analyze the reason for success of camera phones, it looks to me that the mobile phone was transforming from a simple communication device to a much more personal device. The personalization was boosted due to the mobility aspect of the mobile phone. Why is the landline phone not a personal device ? Because, it cannot be carried in your pocket with you all the time. The same set is used by all members of the family. For the mobile phone, you may want to use your choice of ringtones, wall paper, skin covers, User interface themes , just to suit your tastes(also note that there is a whole entertainment industry that has evolved around providing content around these features on mobile phones). You don’t share this device with anyone else the way you used to share your landline phone of yesteryears. So, the phone was transitioning from a simple communication device to a personal entertainment device. In that sense , including a camera in that package made sense. Then with the introduction of mms (multi media services) by cell phone operators, people could relate to the camera as another communication feature by capturing and sending the images.

No matter what , I still find it very fascinating on how something like a camera could be imagined on an extension of a device that Alexander Graham Bell produced and be such a huge success. Can you think more examples of such “radical innovations” ?

Googling around the world !!!!

How often do you use Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/ ) ? More and more people are now becoming aware if this application and using it extensively. For those who are not aware , let me brief you on what this wonderful application is.

Google earth is an application that combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. You could

1) Fly from space to your neighborhood by typing the address and zoom right in.

2) Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions.

3) In the ariel view Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings.

4) Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations for later reference.

Now, that’s a mouthful. Just imagine, something that only till a few years ago was privy to set of people in institutions like NASA, ISRO and other organizations that utilize satellite imagery( eg. Businesses that provide GPS and other location based services) is now available to anyone with a desktop computer. The application is also free and so “everyone” can afford it.

While this may not look like a big deal, but is definitely a precursor of things to come, and which indeed would be a big deal. For right now , not every part of the world is covered to same level of detail, this is only a matter of time, provided there are no legal issues that crop up on the way. I have been playing around with the application for quite sometime now. Always wanted to go see the Grand Canyon but could never make it. Thanks to Google Earth. I have already flown over it a number of times now. For many of the cities in US, you could also zoom in from the top(from a satellite/air plane ) view down to a street level detail and choose to see the map in 3-D perspective or a flat area map optionally annotated with locations for hospitals, hotels, schools, etc. Imagine planning a trip to a city in the US and you could actually choose where you want to stay and even peep around the neighborhood.

So, where does all this seem to be headed ? To start with, probably in the next 5 years, not just the US, but all major cities around the world would be mapped to a street level detail and then on for the second level cities and so on. So, if you wish to plan a holiday in any part of the world, you could actually go for a virtual Holiday first then decide. Travel operators could actually use this technology to help their clients choose their perfect holiday spot. Does this look like the extrapolation of the “Visual walkthrough” concept that has now become so common among architectural community in which they actually make their clients virtually walk through the building using a reconstruction of their model building through 3D software ? Is it the return of virtual reality , with a vengeance ?

The next level of virtual tours could actually be walking down the streets of a remote city , in real time , sitting on the desktop. Actually , Microsoft is working on a concept called the virtual local live, street level where they are not only using the imagery from the satellite , but instead are photographing the city from the ground and stitching the photographs together along the map so that you could drive a virtual car through the “real” streets. It seems that to capture majority of the city like seattle they needed to stitch together 10 million photographs. Find more details at http://preview.local.live.com/

So, what is required for the to make your virtual tour of the world more real ? More processing power to process the images, higher bandwidth to provide the real time experience of the virtual tour, more storage to store the millions of photographs…and guess what !!! This is all happening, every day, every hour , every minute and second…

Test post

Hello World !!!