In order to obtain a significant increase in obtaining useful results from your searches, it is best to always keep in mind the 3 golden rules of searching the Internet:

1) Restrict. 2) Expand. 3) Obtain.

Let's see what each rule involves when applied to key word searches and what benefits you'll get if you apply them to the letter.

Restrict

• Avoid terms that are too general and "buzzwords" from the start, and cut the results you get back in half.
• Only use nouns as query keywords. Never use articles (a, the), pronouns (he, it), conjunctions (and, or), or prepositions (to, from).
• Limit your query to no more than 8 keywords.
• Check your word order, spelling, and use lower case letters (certain search engines are "case sensitive" which means they will only take into account words that are spelled correctly).
• Use speech marks where possible if your search contains several words you want it to take into account, e.g. "The Grand Canyon".
• Use the + sign and fine tune your search, e.g. to look for information that pertains only to homemade chicken soups: homemade+chicken+soup.

More to come

There's no doubt that everything that's "social" is hip on the Internet. At least that's what the Google Zeitgeist 2009 study has shown.  This study captures the fastest rising (or falling) queries for each quarter of the year, queries which show the most popular searches on Google in the U.S. in 2009.

According to this data, Twitter and Michael Jackson were the leading searches on Google, holding the top two positions in the Fastest Rising category, coming closely behind in third, was of course, Facebook. The second quarter of 2009 had a sharp peak with the breakout of swine flu cases, making swine flu the most searched query in the Google News ranking. The rest of the queries in this category are mostly comprised of references to reality television, something that has inevitably become an integral part of television and American culture. Searches of singing sensations like Britain's Got Talent's Susan Boyle or American Idol's Adam Lambert, in second and fourth place respectively, show that Americans still can't get enough of these so-called "rise to fame" stories that come from reality talent searches.

With data like this, obviously our interest isn't so much on knowing what words are the most searched ones, but to analyze why they are the most popular. It's striking to know that, at a point in time where browsers themselves self-complete the URLs typed in, taking user navigation history and the integration of practical functions such as bookmarks into account, people readily continue to use Google to target sites which they probably visit on a day-to-day basis, like Facebook.

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Windows 7 contains a handful of improvements, both functional and aesthetic. This last chapter in the Windows' story provides a new and improved Theme Manager that enhances the way Windows handles desktop themes. Among these enhancements is that it now gives you the opportunity to change your desktop wallpaper at regular intervals.

In order to add some new and cool images to your wallpaper collection, we've prepared three cute desktop wallpapers with a theme that we love: Finday! You can choose between two different screen resolutions, 1600 x 1200 and 1920 x 1200, so you can adapt them to your screen's proportions.

To save these images on your computer, choose the design you like best, open the link corresponding to the screen resolution you need, right click on the image and choose Save image as…

 Google Wave: you've probably heard about the new Google communications system; what you may not be too clear on is whether or not it implies something you should worry about in the short term. Don't worry, Google Wave is still under development and only a handful of invitations have been distributed among the thousands of interested people. However, at Finday we already had the chance to try it out and we're convinced that it will radically change the way we share information online.

As a collaborative online system, Wave allows us to interact with our contacts using rich format text, photos, videos or maps. A "wave" is simply a conversation in real time – like you would in a chat or, in an asynchronous way, like e-mail- with several people; a cross between e-mail, instant messaging and bulletin board which are managed, like Gmail, from a web interface. Participants in a wave can edit its contents and add more participants at any time. They can also "rewind" the wave to see who said what, and when. Now, thanks to the possibility of creating public waves, you can see and participate directly on the Finday wave.

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Let's be clear from the get-go: CAPTCHAs are annoying, a waste of time and in most cases, a strong blow to the mental health of anyone who has the audacity to try to decipher them. They come in all sizes and colors: distorted letters, displaced or crossed out numbers, even pictures of animals dressed up as words. Unfortunately, despite them being a real nuisance, they are also a necessary evil in the current state of the Internet.

As you may know, a CAPTCHA is a test where the user is asked to type in a set of characters shown as a distorted image. This challenge-response test is used to determine whether the user is human or not, since it is assumed that a computer program could not correctly interpret the sequence. In fact, CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Through this verification system, websites can prevent feared "spambots" from registering as users, participating in surveys or sending spam. Unfortunately, sometimes even Google needs a hand from the dreaded CAPTCHAs to verify whether or not we are "real". The good news is: with Finday, you'll never have to see a single CAPTCHA while searching for information.

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The Internet is the Internet, a place with so much going on in and around it like new start up companies, updates, applications, websites, sharing sites and ever so popular social networks, whether an online newbie or an avid surfer, it can tend to feel like you're logging onto the "Wild Wild West" than onto your PC. Inevitably, those three W's we type in can make our options seem so vast that it makes the not-so-internet or tech savvy, shy or inhibited at trying new things for fear that it might take us to places unknown or unsafe.

Our web surfing has become such a normal, day to day activity that we have inherently developed techniques like keyword searches, that have optimized the way we surf the net, although most of those techniques are self-taught along the way. Case in point, being monogamous to specific search engines and web pages we know and recognize is common but unrealistic; because unlike real life, in virtual life there really is always something bigger and better out there, it's just a matter of going outside the box and trying it out for yourself.

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We've done it: You liked Finday and Finday liked you. Last week we had the worldwide launch of Finday in Spanish and English, and the response we've been receiving from technologically specialized media has been largely positive. One of them has come as far as describing us as "the Softonic of searches," which fills us with pride and encourages us to continue building the world's best participative search engine.

Truth be it, at Finday we are not resting on one's laurels, and we continue working hard to incorporate substantial improvements as well as new and more interesting features in the very near future. And if you really think, like us, that Finday can dramatically improve your search experience of Internet content, you'll surely be interested in keeping abreast of all our updates. With that in mind, we introduce you to 3 different alternatives (aside from this blog of course) to receiving our news and suggestions on time.

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