The Five Things That Yahoo! Search Can Do But Not Google

Google is the world’s favorite search engine but there are a some cool things that you can do only in Yahoo!. Here they are:

1. Compose emails from the Yahoo! search box.

Type !mail abc@xyz.com in the Yahoo! search box and it will automatically compose a new email message for you in Yahoo! mail.

2. Get Lyrics of any song or your favorite artist.

Type James Blunt lyrics (for lyrics of James Blunt songs) or Jmaes Blunt 1973 lyrics (for lyrics of a particular song)

3. Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries

Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.

4. Search your favorite websites from Yahoo! itself.

For instance, type !wiki google in Yahoo! search box to search Google in Wikipedia.com. Other popular shortcuts are !ebay, !amazon, and !flickr. You can also execute these from the Firefox search box without changing the default search engine.

5. linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.

A quick question - Can you find the number of articles on Wikipedia website that link to CNN.com ? It’s almost impossible to get this data from Google but you can do so quite easily in Yahoo! with the incredibly useful linkdomain operator. The answer is:linkdomain:cnn.com site:wikipedia.org

Or take another example - How many stories on TechCrunch actually link to the PayPerPost, Arrington’s favorite topic. The answer here is:site:techcrunch.com linkdomain:payperpost.com

Technorati Tags: MDI, Research at MDI, Yahoo vs. Google, Google vs. Yahoo, Yahoo Operators.

How About Karaoke-Lyrics plugin unleashed

How about some karaoke! If I'd say that most of the people (at least the ones I know) use Windows Media Player or Winamp. Wouldn't it be fun if you would be able to sing your favorite song as it is playing. Many would say that it's easy, just open a freaking browser window and search for the lyrics. What if I'd say that it's even more easier. All you have to do is to install what is popularly called as lyricsplugin. This is a small but awesome piece of software. As you play your favorite song the lyrics is pulled right into your players window. Here's a snapshot of how it can be integrated with WMP.

Technorati Tags: Lyricsplugin, Lyrics Plugin, MDI, Research at MDI, Information Management Research

I am not going to Boast

I am not going to be boastful, at least not to the extent of being obnoxious. I just realized that I have a PR of 2. For the less tech savvy guys, PR is Google's patent technology to give ranks to the web-pages. One site can have multiple web pages and each of these pages have their own page rank. Let me scrape a few lines from how Google defines it's page rank.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Getting a pagerank of 2 is not a big deal, but getting it without any optimization effort is pretty neat. I am not going to struggle to take it to a higher level nor am I interested in selling posts on my blog and make some cheap money. But I'll keep a close eye on how the PR is making a progress.

Technorati Tags: PageRank, Information Management Research, Research at MDI, MDI, Research

What I have been upto...

I sometime wonder myself about what I am up to. Seems to the world that I am busy but I am not sure about it. The fact is I should be busy but I am not. I have been up with some assignments. Let me try to put down the assignments that I have been up with. One of the courses that I opted for in the first term was called as BPM (Business Process Management and I took up evaluation of Intalio, an open source BPMS as part of my readings in Business Process Management System. The assignment was pretty unique as I was evaluating the Intalio against the industry norms like BPMN and BPEL.

The second course that I credited was called as "Advances in Marketing Management". I had more than one assignment and all of them were pretty academically rigorous.

Another compulsory course that I has to take is called "Philosophies and Methodologies for Creating Knowledge" and this had two assignment. One of them (fortunately for me) has been submitted. The other assignment that I am working on and is keeping me busy is titled by me as "A Paradigmatic and Methodological Examination of CRM in IS: 1995 to 2007"

Now this is pretty hectic and hence time consuming. Second term is on it's way and I already have 2 very rigor assignments to start.

~May God bless me !

Technorati Tags: BPM, Marketing, AMM, Intaio, MDI, Research at MDI

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What an Irony....

Disclaimer: This post and for that matter any other post is solely my opinion (which might not have to be true/correct). Also, these opinions have nothing to do with my institute and my professional life at the institute. The opinions are very personal and cannot/should not be generalized to a group of people/users/students/others. These are strictly my personal thoughts which are not driven by motivation/influence from anyone. Readers of this post are free to use their comments on the post. However, I'll not by any means be responsible for comments from users on my post.

What an irony ! I just wished that we saw the world and the world of internet with a very open frame of mind. MDI (Management Development Institute) of which I am a doctoral student has blocked orkut.com. This is quite sad because of the wrong notion about orkut which most people believe is that it's just an online dating/relationship site, which is quite ironical because orkut.com is a platform where you also get to meet people of similar interest when it comes to your professional life as well. Say for example there are communities which are dedicated for "Doctoral Program in Management". Let me start assuming the reason behind the ban:

1. Just because it's a dating/relationship site.
2. Because people are wasting too much time on orkut (however the definition of wastage has to be critically scrutinized)
3. Because it's taking up too much of bandwidth.

Now let me start refuting the above assumptions based on further assumption (which are much closer to reality)

Assumption 2 that people are wasting too much of time holds no argument because there are countless other sites on internet which can cause the same problem.

Assumption 3 it's taking up too much of bandwidth holds no argument because there are other sites like youtube which has streaming videos and can cause a much larger collateral damage to the philosophy of saving bandwidth.

It's quite a sorry situation because I never thought that a matured institute will do something like this. The problem also is that Orkut is a big brand name. There are other sites like facebook.com which is also a platform to meet people and is not blocked. I am also pretty sure that the kind of filtering that is taking place based on either very well known restricted sites database or based on the heuristics/keywords matching in URL. There are countless other dating sites when you perform a google query:

online dating -inurl:dating

and will even have sites like http://www.socialfriendsonline.com/.

I am just hoping that this is a temporary testing that's been taken on. Otherwise we might have to even block google.com and other search engines which are gateway to stuff like the one above. Also, this leads to a more bigger and complex scenario. We all know that kids are smart enough to use web proxy (I am not going to suggest how it can be used because of the sensitivity of the issue) and this would lead to a 2 fold problem:

1. Bandwidth consumption: Proxy sites use too much of ads on their sites which clogs the network.
2. These sites are usually the ones which run on business model of downloading adwares/spywares/Trojans/viruses etc which compromises privacy of the user. You never know how long your online bank account password will be safe...

Let me just wish that this won't last for long because there is both good and bad side of technology and you have to chose whether you want to weigh bad one over the good one.

Peace!

Technorati Tags: orkut, orkutblocked, mdi, management development institute, research

Information to knowledge...

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

You must be wondering what makes me start the post with the mission statement of one of the fastest growing company in the history of business. Before I answer this. Let me get critical of myself. With a research lense (apart from the contacts I wear), I always put my way of looking at things in a very narrow perspective. This is 2 way beneficial. One it gives me a scope to avoid the problem of viewing world from just one perspective and 2 it allows me to listen better and understand the lens of others.

As promised now I come back to answering the scope of Google's Mission statement in this post. I was reading an interesting distinguishing feature (thanks to Prof Saxena) of information in relation to information. No! we are not discussing the classic aspect of how information becomes knowledge and so forth. I context here is that "information is descriptive in nature whereas knowledge is associative". This doesn't bring down the importance of information over knowledge. But as Google has been maturing as a company and is continually providing breakthrough services, it looks like Google is moving towards getting into organizing knowledge from the perspective of customers. The core still remains organizing information, but as you put on a lens that looks at Google from a customer's perspective, I know that Google is keeping track of each of my actions, saving searches and every kind of data mining technique it can think of.

Cautiously I am still keeping my perspective narrow so that I am open for a discussion and would love to be proved long. Meanwhile, keep open yourself to get overloaded with information. But see how much of it you can convert to knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge, Knowledge Management, KM, IM, information, information management, research, research at MDI

Really Caught up..

I don't know when this happened, but I am not the same person anymore. I just got to know from Nik that Ubuntu has come up with a new alpha release code named gutsy gibbon. Call it for the flavor of open source or strong community support, none of the Linux distros have excited me more than Ubuntu. More about gutsy gibbon.

The first thing that I am going to go today is hit www.torrentz.com and search for partition magic for Vista. Install it. Simultaneously download gutsy gibbon and get back to my good old days of playing with Linux. I am sure I haven't lost a technique to prove myself worthy of being "Crusader of open source". Long live community development. Peace!

Getting Heavy on sports..

Almost a week now and the series of events are more or less focused on sports. From daily Gym to Table Tennis, Volleyball and Basketball. And the sessions are grueling and exhausting. But getting back to Games (I should say Sports rather) is fun. You have that piece of mind that your day is not wasted lying on the bed and not doing anything.

I hope I am not pushing myself too hard. And I am sure to take up cycling soon. How soon is a question. Just waiting for my home theater to get delivered so I can rock my room. For a change I am not talking studies, research or papers. Interestingly I am feeling happy about it. BTW yesterday I bought a Nike's Release model basketball with a sexy black attire.

I had a visitor..

Wow! I cannot believe I had a Flock ambassador visiting my blog and commenting on the post where I talked about Flock. Here is comment section of the post that talks about Flock. Evan Hamilton is the person who commented on the post. He also has a blog that's actually pretty related to my interest areas as well. And I thought I could be lazy and get away from regular blogging. But these kind of visitors are the one's who encourage me to blog. And yeah trust me blogging about things other than the theme of your blog pays of sometimes.

Zotero - Unleasching the power of community development

I've had the privilege of playing around with quite a good number of open source softwares and various their flavors. And I keep falling in love with Firefox each time there is a new extension that redefines my browsing experience. With my endeavor into Academic research and a basic requirement to read research papers and use them as citations made me look for a software that could manage bibliography. I was introduced to Zotero by Sumit; a colleague and senior at MDI. Zotero is a great piece of firefox extension that can make your research journey a very exciting and smooth one.

Zotero sits right into your browser and manages the research papers/journal articles for you. It's so smooth that even a novice can get addicted to it in no time. The power of community development is wonderful. May god bless open source. Amen!

The day as it goes by..

Trying to find something constructive that was part of the day. I had the opportunity to attend the mock pre-thesis defense of one of the guys from our FPM programme and I am starting to realize that more than the content/outcome of your pre-thesis work is your ability to justify the methodology of your research. May be I am too new to understand and conclude that it's quite ironical.

What I am starting to realize already is that you must be very strong in your research fundamentals and this gives a real upper edge in justifying your work and marketing you work. If you are looking to do a Ph.D from MDI come prepared with the state of mind that you'll be doing hardcore studies in Research methodologies and importantly the philosophy of the way the knowledge is to be created. After all an FPM program is knowledge creation exercise.

Rendezvous with truth !

Today was the day I learnt that it's not an easy life to be into academics and specially more importantly into an FPM programme. I was part of a presentation of what we call here as Pre-thesis defense. This is the time when a scholar presents post proposal work and has to defend his/her upcoming Ph.D.

From what I saw and felt the scenario is really tense and there's a grill down session on the proposed thesis. If you are the one defending the prethesis you better go with some psychiatrist advice on how to face pressure; immense pressure.

The professors show no mercy on questioning every aspect of your work. I'd not want to discuss here the person nor the prethesis that he was defending for the reasons of confidentiality. I am starting to believe that there's more than what meets the eyes when it comes to going about Ph.D.

I hope all of you'll pray for my survival :)