Google

I was talking to my brother the other day on phone and I had to quickly convert 4lbs to Kg's. I was about to search in Google for a unit converter and he reminded me that I could do this easily in Google Search itself !

I just had to enter "4lbs in Kg" in the Google search box and it returned this result :)

 

 

Some other examples !

2^20 in hex cube root of 125 5 Feet in inches

In fact Google's calculator goes beyond basic arithmetic to do complex math and crunch physical constants, too. It will process queries such as "G * mass of earth." or "speed

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Now you can search/find full text of U.S patents via Google Patent Search.

Phil points out that Unites States Patent and Trademark Office does have its own search service and its not that really useful.

The first keyword I searched was "Google" and I ended up with this result !!

Sanitary Device for Repelling Mosquitoes... - How does Google have a hand in this 1927 Patent ? I opened up the patent and found that this result came up because the patent was filed by a guy named CHAULES P. GOOGLE.

So when you end up with funny results like this, time to switch to the Advanced Search option :)

[Via

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I am still using Java 1.4 and was contemplating on move to Java 5/1.5 and lo Java 6 is out.

Ok now if you are confused with these version numbers check this page.

I am still to get in terms with the new features of Java 1.5 itself and now Java 6 seems to come with a bunch of more goodies !

Also Sun seems to be marketing their Netbeans IDE with this release

Java SE 6 is the current major release of the Java SE platform, with full support from NetBeans IDE 5.5.

I have tried to use NetBeans couple of times and I

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The integration of Google Talk within Orkut has been in news from quite some time. However unlike other Google products, there isn't an official blog for Orkut which raises questions on Google's commitment to this product ! One reason might be the lawsuit on Google by a small company which alleges that the Orkut developer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code that he had written for the company ! Also Orkut is the only Google product I guess, clearly showing a Microsoft Technology (ASP) being used ! Anybody noticed that ? From the past few months there have been some constant updates on the User Interface front like Message Handling, Reply to Scraps etc ! Also Google ...

Google Reader, the online RSS reader from Google had a major upgrade some time back. Check this post to know more about Google Reader.

Mihai Parparita, one of the lead developer of Google Reader has written a Greasemonkey Script to add Reader into GMail. The script added a "Feeds" link within GMail as shown below:

Winston has written another Greasemonkey script to integrate Reader into GMail. Some of the new features are:

GMail a.k.a Google Mail is still in Beta even after 2.5 years in service. However the application is evolving continuously based on user feedback.

This is a snapshot of some of the suggestions that have already been implemented based on user feedback

You can suggest more features to the GMail team via this link. I voted on 2 features:

Automatically apply new filters to old conversations Control whether people I send mail to are added to Contacts

If you have any other new feature to recommend which is not in the default list, you can always use the suggestion box !

I would like to see these 2 new features in GMail:

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StumbleUpon is a nice way to find new sites and today I stumbled upon PCNames.com. Its a domain search engine which uses Ajax to display the domain status (i.e taken, available etc). So in a sense its one of the "web 2.0" domain search engine.

I started typing in random words like Googled,Googler etc. Then I started adding o's to the Google ! And I found that every other domain was taken !

The largest string that I could enter in PCNames search was this:

This had 26 o's and the domain was taken !

I didn't want to stop at 26, so I opened the browser and to my wonder I was able to add 33 more o's.

So

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Google Reader, the online RSS reader from Google had a major upgrade in terms of features and UI. The most useful features included folder-based navigation and the expanded view of posts. Overall the UI looked a lot similar to GMail. Even while writing about Google Reader, I was wondering why Reader was not integrated into GMail. Like the Google Chat widget, it would have been very nice to have a Google Reader widget within GMail. Then we would have had an "Inbox for web" and "Inbox for E-Mail" in a single place ! Mihai Parparita, one of the lead developer of Google Reader has written a Greasemonkey Script to add Reader into GMail. Here is a run down ...

Writely , the online word program from Google is now integrated with Google spreadsheets and is now known as Google Docs & Spreadsheets .

I guess this is the first product from Google making use of "&" for combining 2 products and in a way combining word and spreadsheet does make sense. (However as of now there is no easy of dropping spreadsheets into the word document)

As in every other product from Google, the highlight of Google D&S is the clean user interface. The document can be saved into multiple formats(HTML,RTF,PDF) and the collaboration feature makes it easier for multiple users to work

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When it comes to searching content in Blogs, the default search engine many people prefer is Technorati.

The Technorati engine is totally dedicated for searching within blogs. Bloggers/Publishers can ping the Technorati service to notify Technorati of new content in your blog.

In many of the publishing software including Wordpress, this can be be done automatically/programmatically.

Google has become a synonym for Search, however when it comes to blog search Google is way behind.

It doesn't mean that Google Blog search is bad, its only that the indexing of new content in blogs take lot of time and the content you get is generally not "fresh" i.e. until now !

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