Browsing articles from "December, 2009"
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Carolina

Can’t find it? Don’t stress out! Here are some tips on how to search smarter (part 1 of 3):

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

Thursday, December 3, 2009
Carolina

Why do people search for the word “google” in Google?

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.

Zeitgeist U.S. overview.

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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Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Carolina

New wallpapers for your Windows 7 desktop

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.

Finday & Google
Pacman
Lego

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

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