digital thoughts

Google is developing googligan phones. It needs your help to develop best applications for its new phones.

Google is sitting on billions of dollars of cash. It can afford to throw away $10 million. That’s what it intends to do now. Although it won’t literally throw away $ 10 million, it’s going to offer the prizes for people who build the best software for the company’s coming cellphone operating system.

Google is developing a free cellphone software package, called Android, that it says will make it easier to surf the Web over mobile devices. It also will give Google more opportunities to sell ads and services.

A panel of judges will pick 50 winners from entries received from Jan. 2 through March 3 as part of the Android Developer Challenge Those winners will each get $25,000 and be eligible for 10 awards of $100,000 and another 10 $275,000 awards.

Google also released a tool kit for working on the new platform, which is to be released in the second half of next year. Click here for more details about the competition.

Every webmaster wants Google to index their website. However, there are instances when you don’t want Google to index some of your pages.

If Google indexed some of your sensitive/confidential pages and if you want to remove those pages from Google’s index, there is couple of ways to do it.

» Make sure that the pages you want to remove return a status of either 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) in the header. These status codes tell Googlebot that the requested URL isn’t valid. 

» You can block the page using a robots.txt file.    

» You can block the page using a meta noindex tag.

These methods will remove your content from the index only when Google crawls your site next time. If you want to remove your content from Google’s index immediately, Google has a new tool for that.

To access this “URL Removal” tool, you need to have valid Google account and you mush have verified your web site in Google.  

1. Go to Google webmaster tools
2. Click on Webmaster tools (including sitemaps)
3. Logon to your Google account
4. Now, you will see that Dashboard with your all websites listed.
5. If your website is not listed, you can add it using “Add site” form in the top of the page. If you have already added the site, click the name of your site from the list given in that page.
6. At this point, you will be presented with the menu options for “Diagnostic” section. Click “URL Removals” link. Here you can enter the URLs you want to be removed from Google’s index.

Once Google verify your identity, your pages will be removed from its index. This removal is effective only for six months.

Meanwhile you can exclude your pages from crawling using robots.txt file. After six months, Google returns to normal crawling and indexing.  If you want the pages permanently removed you must still have your existing protocols excluding bots from those pages in place.

Apart from your robots protocol, permanently removing the pages (an HTTP 404 response from your server) will of course ensure that the files are not included again.

Have you heard about SearchMash.com? It’s a search engine that pulls up video, images and text all at the same time. Some people think that SearchMash is better than Google.

Here is the secret: SearchMash is Google. In recent months, Google and its main rivals have stealthily set up a new generation of search engines where they try out new tools and features on consumers — without putting their tried-and-true formulas at risk. If something proves to be a hit — the combined search results that some people like so much, for instance — it could eventually be folded into the parent site. For now, though, these sites provide an entertaining and even useful glimpse into the evolution of Web, and in particular, search engines, which in their basic operation haven’t changed much in years.

Google launched SearchMash.com in September without the Google name, although it is mentioned in the site’s privacy policy. SearchMash displays a subset of the normal Google search results in an entirely different interface with collapsible menus for video, blog and image results on the same screen. In December, Ask.com launched Ask X, which chops up the results page into an unconventional three-panel format. Standard search results are flanked on the left by suggested terms to help you narrow or expand your search and, on the right, by results broken down by categories such as news and dictionary results.

Microsoft recently launched MsDewey.com, a search engine where users pose their query to prerecorded video clips of an actress playing the role of Ms. Dewey, a brassy and attractive woman in a low-cut black dress. The site is helping Microsoft test users’ tolerance for a fancy interface with high-resolution images and audio. I like the way Ms. Dewey thinks, give it a try!

Yahoo launched next.yahoo.com to test the new projects. It’s also experimenting with Alltheweb.com it acquired. All these sites aim to test new features that may make search more successful, often hoping to fold those features back into core sites if they prove popular.

When all these experiments are over, let us hope that we would get exactly what we want when we search. Not the 1,00,000 results.