techian.com

The undisputed pre-eminence of Google took a beating with the emergence of facebook. With two forgettable forays into the social networking space, Google Buzz and Wave, being relegated to the back burner, Google has now come up with Google Plus, which takes Facebook head on. Facebook created internet history by building a robust networking platform that has been adopted by 750 million users. However, it has had its share of troubles with poorly positioned and sometimes absent privacy controls.

The uproar over privacy issues on Facebook prompted it to rework many of their features and publicize privacy options in order to keep scared users from deactivating their accounts. The introduction of Facebook Ads unveiled the revenue model of the social networking site. In a bid to attract users and advertising, Google launched Google Plus on June 18, 2011. Within a month, it had registered 25 million users. Although this is still miniscule compared to Facebook’s 750 million users, it is an indication of the rate of adoption of Google’s latest offering in the social networking arena. Google Plus has definitely created a buzz among users, with praise and criticism pouring in from all corners of the web. Here is a breakdown of what people are saying and thinking about the Google Plus versus Facebook face off.

1. Integration of services
The advantage of Google Plus lies in its being part of the suite of web services that Google offers. Seamless transition between services and universal log-in for Gmail, Google Reader, Picasa, etc., makes Google Plus especially attractive. Even for users who do not use the other services of Google, Google Plus offers them access to those services in the form of photo storage and basic editing, Sparks that allow you to build in a feed for topics that you like and text and multimedia chat. Google Plus alerts show up unobtrusively in your other Google services, so that you do not have to waste time checking your Google Plus page. In spite of offering messaging, photo storage, and lately, email, Facebook is still struggling to find a toehold in the space of allied services.

2. Feedback of User Preferences
Google uses the data it captures from user behavior on Google Plus to improve the results of Google Search, its core product, as well as to add value to its primary revenue earner, AdWords. Facebook has no such multi-use revenue model that it can route its user behavior into, beyond Facebook Ads.

3. Group Video Chat
This is one area that Google has come up on top of Facebook. Although Facebook did come up soon after with an enhanced chat module that offered video chat, Google Plus Hangout betters this by offering group chat, where up to 10 users can be logged in at the same time. The video and streaming quality is impressive.

4. Privacy Control
This has been a major issue with Facebook users, in spite of the List feature which allows you to share content with a specified list of people. However, like most of Facebook’s privacy controls, this is a feature that is lost to most users. Google Plus addresses this by letting you create Circles, groups of people that you would be considering part of a similar ‘circle’. Thus you can have one circle of friends, one of family, one of coworkers, and even customize them so that you can have a circle of different coworkers from different places of work.

5. User Base
The one place that Google Plus does lose out, at least as of now, is in the sheer number of users that Facebook has. If the purpose of your social networking is to connect back with lost friends, or to promote your cause, Facebook still remains way ahead.

The consensus among users is that Google Plus offers little that is new or different from Facebook other than the privacy control and the group video chat. The stream in Google Plus is almost a replica of the Facebook wall, and the Circles are really an upgrade of the Lists feature on Facebook. Google Plus still has bugs to iron out as it is relatively new out of beta. For those looking for a more secure social networking experience with greater privacy control and with easy integration of other web services from Google, Google Plus is an obvious choice. For those seeking a larger user base but not hampered by privacy concerns, Facebook remains the undisputed leader.

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About the author: Amanda Kidd is a blogger who is fond of writing on tech help and most expensive gadgets. She is all into computers and in recent times she learnt a lot about software downloads and android on windows mobile.

Get Google Adsense Account Approved for India even without having a website. Yes, this is true and i tested it myself yesterday with the help of my friend and it worked for him.

Getting google adsense account approved for Indians have been a difficult process as google is not so friendly in this regard with Indians. In some old posts we discussed the methods of getting adsense account approved using Bukisa and also using indyarocks. Those old methods are no more working. The latests working method is with the help of webanswers. Join webanswers.com with your gmail id. For those who do not know what webanswers is , It’s like yahoo answers where people create questions and people answers.  All you need to do is give answers to 10 questions and google will mail you with invitation to open adsense acc. This is an automatic process.

Once you get invitation, click the link provided and fill out the correct details. Based on these details the account will get approved. Please make sure that you provide the correct information including payee name as for Indian users the payee name can not be altered in future so make sure you check out the spellings carefully. Now submit the application and relax. Google will contact you in 1-3 working days normally with their approval email.

The important think you should note here is that your account will come under revenue sharing program and you will need to share 40% of your earnings with webanswers. If you want to keep 100% of the revenue then you need to remove them later from your adsense account by going to “My account” section under “Account access” tab. just click on “disable access” and you are done.

I hope this post of mine will help the people who are struggling to make their google adsense account. This method may not work always so do not waste your time and get one for yourself now.

On 30th June 2011 Google Banned http://co.cc domain and it resulted all the subdomains got delisted from google search results. This was a very big loss for many bloggers who was depending on free domains from co.cc. All the hardwork done by the hardworking bloggers is lost now. This is one of the reason why you should not rely on free domain names and hostings.

As we all know that co.cc names were badly used for spamming purpose and they were unable to work on this regard hence google was left with no choice than to penalize this domain. Now the people who were using co.cc service are left with no other option that to move to either paid domains or some other free subdomain service. But the worst part is that the entire work done for backlinking and other off site SEO works is lost with this move of google banning .co.cc domain.

Those who are on blogspot originally can very well use the blogspot subdomain and continue the the blogging but i suggest you to get a nice domain for you. You can get a domain name just for a dollar from godaddy.

2 days google updated the page ranks unexpectedly. It was suppose to do this in the beginning of the month only but as usual, google updated pageranks this time again.

Our blog was having pagerank 1 and after the update it is pagerank 3

Thanks to all you guys for supporting me. Hope we would be able to take this to next level. You may check the pageranks of your sites at prchecker.info

Google is well known for its innovative works and keepingits expectation up to the mark they have come up with their one more awesome feature in google search which you will definitively love. Yes, i am talking about google voice search feature. All you need to do is speak and google will understand your words and will search accordingly for your query.

They have very smartly programmed this feature which is able to read your voice commands very precisely depending upon your accent and location across the globe. On 14th June they officially announced that slowly they will roll out this feature in coming days. If you want to read more about it then you may check here for more information about google voice search.

The interface looks really cool. All you need to do is click on the “mic” icon appearing at the end of the search box and speak out your query and wait. Just sensing your gap it will fill the search box with the search query you spoke and will show you search engin results for that query.

Requirements for goole voice search:

Officially google has not stated any requirements for this but i personally tried to figure out what exactly is required for this to work

• A working pc with internet connection
• Preferred browser is google chrome
• google talk plugin
• and ofcource – a mic

If this feature is not appearing in your google homepage then just wait for some more time until its launched in your country. Feel free to sare your experience in comments section.

Last month Google Launched its street view vehicles in India

This was welcomed as well as criticized by many people across India. You opinion may vary from others and this post is not meant to influence your opinion. I would just provide the facts that i have.

People were concerned about their privacy and some people would not like to logged into the camera view. Not a problem. Google is having a very good privacy policy here. They are having their own algorithm to hide sensitive data such as faces and registration number plates of vehicles. Still if you want that some part should be totally blurred/removed then you may always use the report link present in the bottom of the screen. I personally checked how effective is their algorithm and found the result shown below.

As you can see the face is blurred and its effective enough. Still if you wish then you may use the link “Report Problem” and fill the form. They will act upon your request. Please note that only publicly accessible places will be made available through Google Street View.

Below is the video of the launch of the vehicle mounted with 360 degrees camera to take panoramic view of the streets

What are your views about this? feel free to leave you inputs in comments. Thanks for reading my post. Your friend Vivek Sinha Anurag will be back with more soon. Please bookmark this blog if you like it so that you may come back in future.

Today i am going to disclose some secrets of google panda. Please do not ask me the sources as i am bound not to disclose them.

What is Google Panda?

It is a new algorithm announced by Google. It’s aim is to fight against content farms (duplicate content website) and bring up the blogs/site with original content and fight against the website that contains low quality articles,blog and simply copy and paste the description from other website to their website to increase the search engine rankings.

What are it’s effects?

On 24th Feb Google launched Panda and it slapped many websites by penalizing them in terms of search engine rankings and de-indexing as well. Many site owners complained that even though they had genuine contents but still their site was affected. No doubt it was not 100% success because i read in blogs that people found loopholes to bypass and gain rankings again.

On 12th May 2011 Google launched the Panda update and it badly affected many websites with bad contents. But it is still doubtful as it affected mainly UK websites and major UK websites were slapped badly. You may want to read more here.

How Google Panda Works?

Most of you people know and believe Google search engine is better than all other in the market. But very few of you might be knowing the secret behind the success. The main reason behind the success of google search is not only their unique algorithm but also huge amount of manual work in background. Its true because i have worked for one of the companies which hire people as freelancers to work for google. [Recently they also started working for microsoft]. The people are selected for work after multiple rounds of exams. They are given proper training before starting the work and they are paid at rates @per hour.

The Secret

Recently before rolling over the Google panda, these companies trained their freelancers to identify sites with poor quality articles and duplicate contents. After passing the algorithm the work comes to these people for final touch. This make sure that no such sites gets bypassed. This makes Google Panda a deadly weapon against such sites.

If you want to read more about the panda you can read the interview of the people behind this idea

How to safeguard yourself ?

Make sure you have useful document on your websites.

A useful document does not have a 100% bounce rate followed by a click on a different search result for that same search query

Amit Disclosed few more secrets how we can make sure our site is not affected. He wrote on his blog the following points.

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Do not loose hope if your website is affected by Panda

If your website is affected by Google Panda then do not simply loose hope. You may regain rankings. Focus on quality articles. Do “white hat” backlinks. Remember * No scrapebox blasts and no SENUKE.  Follow white hat techniques and you will your website back into action.

Hope this article of mine will help you. Feel free to leave your valuable suggestions in form of comments. Thanks for reading. Bookmark this site for future use.

Google is back again with it’s new idea of google music. This time specially for the users of india.

Google has launched its online music service in India that enables users to search for legal music streams and downloads.

For its Indian music search service (google.co.in/music) Google has partnered with In.com, Saregama and Saavn. The three digital music providers, hold rights to hundreds of thousands of Indian tracks – ranging from old and new Bollywood hits to Indian classical music. The music search service currently indexes only Hindi songs.

URL -> www.google.co.in/music

Thanks to Pratik, who share this in OUG.  I thinks this is not a new idea but still new in the sense it will be offering “legal” downloads and streaming so if you download any music from it’s results you are not doing anything wrong. good going . Thanks for reading my post. If you like my blog please bookmark it.