Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

I want to talk this lot of times when we talk with non IT organizations, churches who just have this simple question how do we get found on Google. Someone goes down to Google and says "I am looking for hotels in London" or “some church in London” how do we get on page 1 Getting found on Google is called SEO = Search Engine Optimization And if you are in the online business world or in online marketing or advertising you may heard this phrase or know little about it, but lot of times churches don’t know how you get found on Google. They just think it is up to Google. You have good site and it looks really nice and you probably up right on Google and if it’s ugly website you will like on page 10, that’s not true at all because: Google doesn’t have eyes   Google is looking at you code   Google is weighing other factors   Based on algorithm Paid Ads vs. "Organic search" Paid/Sponsored: Google Adwords   Main results/free: Organic results Organic results: Tha...

Saving that parting email from your first love in your inbox? Well, chances are, after you pass away, your spouse and the entire family will know about the long-held secret. This is because web email services like Hotmail and Gmail do not let users specify what should happen to their messages when they die. In fact, email services owned by internet giants like Google and Microsoft have a policy of keeping your data after you die and letting your next of kin or the executor of your estate access it. These services can hold tens of thousands of messages. Accounts with Gmail can hold up to 7GB — or roughly 70,000 emails with a small to medium picture attached to each and they archive the messages you’ve written as well as received. When it comes to deleting the data, Microsoft’s Hotmail will remove an account if it is inactive for 270 days, while Gmail leaves the responsibility to the next of kin. Of the top three providers, only Yahoo refuses to supply emails to anyone after the user ...

Unicef, per Child One Laptop and Google have joined together to set up a portal of stories. This portal, www.ourstories.org , is meant to be a repository of traditional stories from various places. The portal is part of the attempt by the three agencies to preserve folktales and through them, different cultures. Under this project, children will write, narrate and upload folk stories which they have heard from grandmothers, friends and local people. People all over the world will be able to read these stories online and can also locate the places from which these stories come using Google Map. This will facilitate interaction between different cultures and make people aware of their common humanity.

A GENETICS website encouraging people to send in swabs of their saliva began operating on Monday in a closely watched Silicon Valley venture with links to the search firm Google. The site, 23andMe.com , is named after the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human body It claims to offer the first "personal genome service" for $999 (about Rs 39,000) a customer Using hi-tech analysis software, the company says it can read up to half a million points in an individual's genome. The service is intended to help people understand their inherited traits and to allow them to compare themselves with friends and family Anne Wojcicki , one of the co-founders, said, "We believe this information provides intriguing insights into an individual's genetics, with the goal of expanding the collective knowledge base by enabling active participa- tion in research." Wojcicki is married to Sergey Brin , Google's co founder The venture is based in Mountain View, the same Silic...

Although we credit Google, Yahoo , and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex. But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine: Ted Nelson Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted's project Xanadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off, much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Ted...

The Net is abuzz with reports that web major Google is holding talks with Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited to launch its muchhyped Gphone in India. If the speculations of bloggers are to be believed, Google is planning a worldwide release of its Gphone within two weeks. It is expected to be a sleek machine which will provide users easy access to all of Google's services including mail and search. Google has neither denied nor confirmed that the Gphone is in the pipeline. The success of Apple's iPhone has taught it that speculation and expectation are free publicity. If all goes well, Indians will be able to lay their hands on a GPhone even before the coveted iPhone hits the market.

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are vying to buy Rediff.com India Ltd., the Hindustan Times reported citing an unnamed source. The paper said the potential takeover could value the Mumbai, India-based news, entertainment, shopping and search site at close to $1 billion. In addition to Mountain View based Google and Sunnyvale based Yahoo , the paper said Time Warner Inc.'s America On Line unit may be a suitor. Besides the Web site, Rediff.Com India limited publishes two weekly newspapers aimed at Indian-Americans, India Abroad and India in New York. Rediff share price has risen recently on speculation that the company may be a takeover target. It’s possible that Rediff could be in talks, but speculation that it’s Google or Yahoo that is looking to acquire Rediff is exactly that: speculation, and with no basis in fact. On recent history, Google and Yahoo are actually unlikely suitors; although Rediff’s market cap and therefore rough takeover price of $738.9million would put it into the...

The ‘dark' version of Google, aptly termed ‘Blackle,' is making waves in the Net. Darker does not have any disturbing moral connotations here. In fact it is quite ‘lighter' in terms of the monthly power bill. Blackle is the same as Google except that the background is totally black and the text is in light grey ( www.blackle.com ). It was set up by Heap Media, an Australian firm, after environmentalists proved that black screens consumed only 59 watts of power while white screens consumed about 79 watts. You can save lots of power by using black background. Heap Media founder Tony Heap said that Blackle would not solve the world's energy problem but was a small effort in that direction. The response to Blackle has been so great that the site even crashed several times. But Google said it has no plans to have a black background.

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of Vista is anticompetitive, lawyers involved in the case said on Tuesday. The settlement, reached in recent days by state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft, averted the prospect of litigation over a complaint by Google that Vista had been designed to frustrate computer users who want to use software other than Microsoft's to search through files on their hard drives. Google had made its complaint confidentially as part of the consent decree proceedings set up to monitor Microsoft for any anticompetitive conduct after it settled a landmark antitrust lawsuit five years ago that had been brought by the states and the Clinton administration. The US government and the states were planning to file a joint status report by midnight on Tuesday in the consent decree proceedings that outlined the changes Microsoft would be making to Vista. St...

Each day, around the world, millions of people log into onlysearch engines to, well, search for study. The other day I logged into a search engine and typed, just for the heck of it, the words “pudgy dogs”. And, voila, I got scores of hits. Now, what next for search engines, in the age of social networking? I spoke to Rod Brachman, vice president, worldwide research operations at Yahoo! Research. Dr Brachman has been, as they say, around the block. He was earlier director of the information processing technology office at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and is considered an authority on artificial intelligence. I asked him where online search was headed. “Search engine companies are now beginning to look at social networks. At Yahoo!, we have started doing some research on how social networks work. Frankly, social networks, though popular, are quite crude in their technology,” he said. What’s Yahoo! area of focus in this? “We don’t yet understand how online social groups...

When the video-sharing site YouTube.com was sold to Google, many of its users worried that corporate ownership would restrict the con tent of its videos. But now one of YouTube’s partners is changing the ways that users comment on those videos. YouTube, which is host to many official CBS video clips under an October licensing agreement with the network, has changed its layout for some of the Web pages with CBS videos. Most YouTube videos are embedded on Web pages that allow viewers to read user comments, with some of them listed directly below the video. These comments can range from the coherent (“That was hilarious.”) to the, er, less-so (“omg lol!”) to the profane. The comments on many of the videos posted by CBS have now been moved to a separate page; instead of sample comments underneath the videos, a link to “view all comments” takes users to a separate Web page where they can read comments. CBS began moving and filtering comments on some videos shortly after announcing its lice...

Glenn Chapman, San Francisco: Google is in behind-the-scenes talks with film and music studios trying to make newly acquired video-sharing website YouTube a gold mine, and not a lawsuit-generating black hole. While some analysts questioned the sanity of Google buying YouTube in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal, Internet insiders contend that Google is shrewdly manoeuvring on solid ground. “The Internet offers real opportunities for media companies to reach a wider, global audience and to interact more directly with users,” Google said. On the day the online search powerhouse bought superstar start-up YouTube it also announced deals with CBS, Sony, BMG, Vivendi Universal Music and Warner Group to feature their videos on the Internet. A number of studios have contacted Google to explore ways to cash-in on their shows, films or songs becoming Internet sensations. Google can shield itself from lawsuits by taking down copyrighted videos after the owners complain, according to attorney Jason...