Since yesterday it seems that Google have been playing around with all my sites. ALL and ALL of my sites seem to have lost half of their backlinks as well as number of pages indexed in Google. A new site of mine which had got indexed two days ago is no more in Google now! Seems like some problems with some of the data center at Google. According to an estimate Google probably owns about 650,000 data centers spread across 25 locations in the world and a query made to Google is passed in about 700-800 servers. Of course these are just plain estimates and no one knows the official figure! So it seems like some of these data centers are facing the problem. Many of my friends as well are complaining about the same!

Please share whether your sites too are facing either a drop in traffic, indexing problems or anything as such!

Google’s new look is currently under beta but you can still see it. The new look was a bit bright to my eyes but the navigation panel in the left hand side was certainly a useful. You can now filter your results based on time relevancy. e.g. if you wanted to search “upcoming events in new york” and wanted to see the results that were posted only not more than a week ago, you can now do this from the filter panel. The new look however, is available only with the Google US search engine.

To use the new Google do the following:

1. Go to Google.com (In case you are redirected to localized Google site like Google.co.in then just click ‘Go to Google USA’ which at the bottom on the homepage.)

2. Then in your browser address bar copy-paste this:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

3. Refresh your tab and you will have the new Google now!

As simple as that.

Now try searching for “Islam is” in the same window. Google displays nothing in the search suggestion. The search suggestions are displayed from based on your past searches if you are logged in, popular search queries on the internet by other people and from Google’s own ad network Google adwords. This means that Google is censoring the search as opposed to it’s motto “Don’t be evil”. Google says it will filter results that include pornographic terms, dirty words, hate queries and violence. Seems like Islam too falls under these categories.

Next time try searching for “Christianity will” and “Islam will” and let me know in comments section what you get?

Got the Google Wave invite and are waving already? Great! But if you are wondering if Twitter can be integrated with Wave then don’t worry. You can tweet all your Google wave conversations directly your twitter account in few easy steps. All your conversations will be twitted instantly to your twitter account like in other services.To do this you all you have to do it add a twitter participant to your wave and your are good to go. Check out the following instructions to see how to do this.

STEP 1:

Add a participant to the wave that you want to be twitted automatically. To do this, select an existing wave first (or create new one) and then click on the ‘+’ symbol on the wave to add the participants. After you click it, a window will open and in that add this participant: tweety-wave@appspot.com

STEP 2:

Google Wave will authenticate the participant and you will see the the message as shown in the picture below. Just make sure you are not blocking any pop-ups in your browser. In case you didn’t get any pop-up window just refresh the page.

STEP 3:

You will be asked to log in to your twitter account that you wish to be linked to the current wave. Just enter your twitter login details in the window that opens.

STEP 4:

Upon logging in, you will be asked to confirm the application by twitter. Just click on ‘Allow’ access.

DONE!

You are now all set to send your wave conversations to your twitter account automatically. In case you want to use different twitter acounts  for different waves, just use different twitter login while adding the tweety wave participant, that’s it!

I had made this post to give away the FREE invites to Google Wave but due too many requests I am now going to give away the invites only to those people who do the following things:

• Follow me on Twitter
• Become a fan on Facebook

You can do the using the links on the right sidebar. After you are done with it, just mail me your email address to: amol(at)amol-patil.com and I will send you an invite instantly!

UPDATE:

Got more invites so now I can invite many more people!  Just mail me your requests at the above email address after completing the above terms.

There was no good specific search engine for searching just images (of course not considering the Bing Image search). To overcome this problem, Google has come up with Google Image Swirl, a product that is currently in the Google labs. The technology used is still a work in progress and hence no estimate can be given as when this product will roll out in the market. To use it, you need to have Flash and Javascript enabled in your browser.

Although it’s a similar feature as that of Bing’s image search, it still is a lot different that it. Try it here.

The current Google swirl page is just simple as the normal Google Search and upon looking up for a query you are shown with 12 images of the search string. upon clicking on anyone of these images, it opens in a circle with more similar images. Those upon click open in another circle and so on till no similar image can be found. The interface looks pretty good but it has it’s limitations.  At the moment only 200,000 queries can be searched and more are to be added. But this image search is mainly dependent on the meta data of the images. Only those images with meta data will be indexed and can be searched. Now the majority of the images on the net are without meta data as they are uploaded by millions of users and hence it will be difficult to search for every picture on the internet. Let’s see how Google handles this issue or it doesn’t?

But still, it’s still worth a try

Well this shouldn’t come as a surprise at all! Almost all major companies have their own languages and Google was the one without one – Not Anymore!  As per a post on Google blog, ‘Google Go‘, as it is being referred all over the internet, is a open-source programming language released under BSD license.  Google calls it as a  ‘Systems Programming Language’ that is fast, simple, concurrent and fun to work with.

Google goes on to explain the reason to come up with such a language that it needed a language that could use the modern computer landscape that changed over the past decade or so. Google says that “Go takes full advantage of modern, multi-core hardware and simplifies dependency analysis and avoids the overhead present in C-style languages, such as files and libraries.”

As per the ‘Conceptual Differences’ posted on Go,

• Go does not have classes with constructors or destructors. Instead of class methods, a class inheritance hierarchy, and virtual functions.
• Go has pointers but not pointer arithmetic. You cannot use a pointer variable to walk through the bytes of a string.
• Strings are provided by the language. They may not be changed once they have been created.
• Go does not use header files. Instead, each source file is part of a defined package. When a package defines an object (type, constant, variable, function) with a name starting with an upper case letter, that object is visible to any other file which imports that package.
• Go does not support function overloading and does not support user defined operators.

Some useful links about Google Go

1. Google Go main page
2. Go for C++ Programmers
3. Tutorials
4. Install Go

After so many days and suggestions finally Google is changing they way we work with adsense. A new intereface of Google adsense is being launched soon and the invitations for the same has been sent to a few beta testers already.  Google revelead this at the recently held conference in New York.

The new Google Adsense interface will be different mainly in three aspects:

1. More Details Reports

The daily reports that you can see now will be more detailed and will have even more stats. Also they will not be available in graphical version. This will be on the lines of analytics which we already use. A glimpse of what it might look like:

2. More Control Over ADs

New Adsense offers (at least they say) more control over the ADs that appear on your site. It gives you more flexibility to manage the  ADs to be displayed on your sites.

3. Manging Account (The part I liked most)

The new Intereface is said to be easy for users to manage common account related tasks like editing bulk AD units simultaneously. Better tips to help understand everything related to management.

The new Adsense is rolled out in English, Spanish, French, German and many other languges. More invitations are expected to be sent to publishers in the coming weeks and months. Of course it will take a lot of time until everyone of us gets the new look and feel but at least you now know what’s around the corner.

Google has integrated a desktop search application along with this toolbar. No it’s not like the previous desktop search provided by Google instead, the new toolbar places a ‘Google’ button just besides your XP or Vista start menu and clicking it will open a box as shown on the left hand side. You can type in your queries in that box and upon clicking enter it will show you the results in your default browser. This box can be opened using the shortcut key Ctrl + Space. This shortcut key can also be changed as per your requirements. What’s more is, you can also get suggestions in the dialog box just like the normal Google search engine. I really find it convenient and already a fan of it. The best thing, if you are firefox user is that, you can install Google toolbar 6 for IE and still use this new feature. You don’t have to worry about installaling it for Firefox too! It will still however, open Firefox, if that’s your default browser. Also, the layout of the Google Toolbar has changed and now looks like as shown in the picture below. I however didn’t find any big changes in this one apart from the GUI changes.

New Layout