At the end of the day Google is an artificial engine based on a search algorithm. This algorithm gets tweaked and perfected by Google engineers every so often. But that can never eliminate the human element. Several SEO’s, both blackhat and whitehat have techniques which give you better search results for specific terms. Google takes various measures to counter these nefarious methods to return genuine results that the user is most likely interested in. You can use this fact to your advantage and in fact this is how I …

Have you ever arrived at the airport on time to pick up that annoying aunt only to find the flight is delayed for 3 hours? You might have rushed out of a business meeting or didn’t get to finish your lunch or spilled hot Starbucks during your drive and rushed to the airport to find out Flight 555: Status – Delayed. Well those days are over. Google now provides latest flight status data directly in your search results. Simply search for Airline + Flight Number and you will have …

No more boring sitemaps for your website. Now you can have video sitemaps thanks to Google Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools team released this new feature on Monday evening and announced it on their blog. But the credit does not only go to the Webmaster Tools team as the Google Video team put in significant effort as you can imagine. Once the video sitemap is published for your site it will become searchable via Google Videos increasing your chance to be found on the internet. Using the video sitemap you …

Gmail has a comparatively large list of keyboard shortcuts. These come in handy when dealing with a large volume of email coming in through Gmail. Undoubtedly helpful these shortcuts become a feat of memory to remember. That is a thing of the past now. Gmail now features a useful help feature which will show a list of all the shortcuts inside the same Gmail window as an overlay. All you have to do is press Shift + ? to bring up this help menu. This is a very handy utility …

Starting your own website you will spend a lot of time getting the best CMS software, best possible hosting solution which won’t make you broke and installing as many plugins as you can think of. But a week or two into the project you will realize you can’t visit your own website 24hours every day. So how do you make sure your site is up? You use FreeSiteStatus.
FreeSiteStatus is a free service which monitors your site and emails you reports every week about downtime experienced by your site in the …

Google has been pushing Google Checkout since the day of its launch. With coupons and rebates it has been fairly popular. And why should it not? They offer some discounts on stuff that you would buy anyways. If I get the same item for $50 with Google Checkout instead of $80 with Paypal why not use Google. After all it means more savings for the consumer. This holiday season Google Checkout is keeping true to its self by giving rebates. Having a bunch of rebates spread across several retailers is …

If Darwin’s concept of “Survival of the fittest” is applied to blogging, less than 1% of the 50 million blogs would survive. If you want to see this theory applied on the internet then look at digg. Digg has consistently produced and maintained the hottest news stories on the web. Powered by Digg’s users is not just a catch phrase but the foundation beneath Digg’s success. But whenever a blogger submits a story there is a one in a hundred thousand chance (same as winning the lottery) that it will …

You look different from the person next to you and the person next to him or her. Following along the same lines, don’t you want your logo to be different and unique from the rest of the crowd? Countless times I arrive on a website and I see the standard WordPress or Blogger theme with no unique favicon or logo. On the other end of the spectrum I have seen websites and companies spending hundreds of dollars just to create a logo.

At the start of the Web2.0 craze creating a …

Facebook started off as an immensely popular social networking website targeting a very specific and drunk group of individuals aka college students. Since then the website has grown exponentially and now looks to overtake MySpace in popularity. The Alexa graph below should give you some idea how Facebook stacks against MySpace in traffic.

But, as far as I know, Facebook has not paid any of its users. Although, paying users would skyrocket its user base Now Lara Saad from I Make Money on Facebook is about to show us …

Windows Vista has introduced several new and innovative features. But it has also changed the familiar look and feel of certain desktop components. For example have you tried to shut down a Vista PC? In the classic Start Menu of Windows XP there were 2 dedicated buttons – Log Off & Shutdown. Then if you press Shutdown then you would have to confirm if you want to Shutdown, Hibernate or Standby. Vista has changed this to allow users to Standby PCs with one click from the start menu. But if …