Razvan Antonescu

Google Desktop is by now the fastest product on getting out of Google Labs . The beta stage was only 5 or 6 months. I will not talk about the product because more competent reviews can be found here and here.

What is interesting in this version are the plugins. Haven’t installed any yet but at least 2 will get a test drive in a few minutes:

Larry’s Help File Indexer

Larry’s Help File Indexer allows you to index CHM files, one of the most popular formats for Windows help files, manuals and ebooks. An alternative to the Help menu – just use Google Desktop Search to find the help information you need.

well …this one looks awsome….just imagine to have all your reference helps just one click away

Kongulo

This plugin is a web spider (“Kongulo” is Icelandic for spider) that crawls websites you specify and makes them searchable via GDS.

This version does not have a graphical user interface and can be run from the command-line only.

Another one good for quick references. For example if you have a pair of sites that you check regullary for knowledge this plugin makes it easier to get ALL the proper results. Just like your own Google. Still I hope it doesn’t count the external links because your results will be messy than

Tags: Google, desktop search, Plugins

Screw the sandbox filter. And for this remark I have 2 reasons behind:

1. As an end user I am depraved of new quality content and instead I see pages from the 90s. Try doing a research on new software/information and see pages dating back from the stone age.
2. As a SEO consultant…ahem should i continue with clients opinions on this?

Search Engines spam is a problem and even a big one. Yesterday I come across an idiot that was messing the results on a research I was doing BIG time but this is not the solution. They keep out new spam but the old spam is doing well

I think I”ll start a category on this blog called “Idiots Hall of Shame” with notorious cases of search engine spamming.

If Google continues to do this end users will turn to other engines that shows fresh and tasty results

Tags: SEO, Google, google sandbox

A post on Google Blog by Ben Sigelman announces that a weather shortcut is now available on Google.

The syntax is:
weather city (ex. weather Chicago)

This shortcut is available for quite a time on Yahoo and it even does more than Google by showing weather for cities outside US

Ahem….earth to Google, outside US there are other countries…you know?

Tags: Yahoo , Google , weather ,

Since the search engines strated taking steps into the field of personalizations of their services I had become a fan of this.

From all the efforts since now, from my point of view only 2 are worth using: A9 and My Yahoo! Search.

Now Ask Jeeves brings up something similar through My Jeeves.

At first look it is very similar to My Yahoo Search but lacks some important features:
- you cannot output to RSS the stored results
- you cannot save to My Jeeves from browser (My Yahoo! Search has both Firefox and IE support in this case)

Still you can email the results and if you are an Ask Jeeves user you will find this very usefull for colaborative work.

Tags: Yahoo, Ask Jeeves,

Gmail now works with Picasa, Google’s free photo organizer. Use Picasa to easily find, edit and preview your photos. Log in to Gmail directly from Picasa and send the photos from your Gmail account. Picasa even automatically resizes your photos so they’re easier to receive and open. Your friends without such large email accounts will thank you.

And another thing on Gmail, after the guys at Opera finished to make their browser compatible, Google thought of “helping” and now redirects Opera users to a basic HTML page that lacks many of the important functions

Tags: Gmail,email,photos,opera,picasa