Google

Just a few days back I bought licensed copy of Mint; the cute powerful Web analytics application. When I wrote about Mint some days back I also mentioned about the poor navigation interface in Google Analytics

Looks like I was not the only one complaining; Jeff Veen and Brett Corsby unveiled the new version of Google Analytics at the EMetrics Summit.

What’s different?We've redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you

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FeedDemon, the popular RSS feed reader for windows is/was one of my favorite application. It has a clean user friendly interface and reading/managing the feeds is a treat with this application. Its also one of the few desktop based readers which can synchronize with an online service -Newsgator. However FeedDemon comes at a price (30$) and I have been searching for a good alternative to FeedDemon from some time now.

I did try to shift to Google Reader many times but somehow I found the UI sluggish and for certain operations (marking feeds read) you have to go through a lot of clicks.

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When I initially started this blog I signed up with Statcounter service which showed me detailed data of visitors reading my posts. It was exciting and nice to see the increasing number of visitors every day.

However the free service of Statcounter has limited functionality and you infer less data with more visitors visiting your blog.

Later I started using Google's free analytics service: Google Analytics.

I have been using it from the past 8 months and I still find it difficult to get in terms with the user interface. Of all Google products, I believe Analytics has one of the worst navigation interface.

There are 2 analytics service I have heard

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GMail, Google's free webmail service is a top class service in comparison to Microsoft's Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

GMail which was "invite only", recently opened up its service worldwide to everyone. Now all you to need to get a GMail account is to signup :)

Now Google is even running Ads to promote GMail !!

No second thoughts, GMail's spam filter is THE best and they are marketing the same via their ads.

If anyone is not using GMail as their primary E-Mail ID, its time to switch :)

Checkout this video (from Google) to get a quick overview of GMail's features

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Koders is a code search engine which enables developers to easily search and browse source code hosted on thousands of open source repositories.

Krugle (which sounds like Google) is yet another search engine focused on developers and intends to make code search easier and faster.

One of the nice features about this search engine is the additional information displayed along with the search results.

There is a section which displays Code snippets from Safari Books Online. It also displays the related Open Source Projects and related Tech Pages.

Also the links within the search page as tabs and this way you don't end up cluttering your browser.

However the search engine itself was not up to my expectation. After seeing Scoble talk high of the search engine, I took it for a test drive.

Test 1

Search Keyword : Convert String to intLanguage : JavaResults: The search results listed all files having name as Convert.java and having String in the code text

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide including India ! No more waiting for someone to invite you just create an account directly at www.gmail.com. Meanwhile Mark Malseed has an interesting story on Sergey Brin (Google's Cofounder)

SearchMash as the name suggests is a mashup of a Search Engine and is created and maintained by Google itself !

Surprisingly you don't see any Google logo in the index page or the search result page. Only the TOS page seems to confirm that the site is maintained by Google !

When it was launched few months back SearchMash was a mashup of Google Search and Google Image Search.

There seems to be a lot of additions done since then and now SearchMash displays results from Google Search, Image Search, Blog Search, Video Search (Displays YouTube videos too) and Wikipedia.

However the number of search results returned

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Technorati , the Internet search engine focused on the world of weblogs has probably one of the worst spam filters.

BSNL, one of the popular Internet Service Provider in India, recently introduced 2Mbps bandwidth across all plans.

I wanted to check the experience of the customers/bloggers using BSNL.

A Technorati search for the same (http://technorati.com/search/bsnl) produced these results.

All the posts had the same title and the same summarized content. And it was not just these 5 results, there were at least 3 search result pages (apprx. 30 Links) with the same title, and each one of them was pointing to a different web site.

Now why is anybody going to

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Orkut, the Internet social network service run by Google allows you to post personal or professional information and link to friends and acquaintances.

The service which was available only by invitation was recently opened up for all users. Also unlike other services you don't need a Google Account to access Orkut.

These are some of the things I have noticed about Orkut

Google doesn't market Orkut as a social network service. The services page has no mention of Orkut. Google Labs page also doesn't mention Orkut There is no official blog for Orkut Orkut is one service which clearly shows the usage of a Microsoft Technology (ASP) - I am not ...

If you are searching for a meaning of a word or a term, the Definitions feature of Google Search should come in handy.

Till now if I wanted to quickly lookup a meaning for a word say preposterous, I used to search in Google with this keyword

preposterous+meaning

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word "define," then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If Google has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results.

You can also get a list of definitions by including the special operator "define:" with no space between it and the

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