In 2011, anti-corruption leader and social activist Anna Hazare became the fastest rising people query of 2011.On the other hand IBPS (Institute of Banking Personnel Selection) and free SMS website way2SMS made new entries in this year’s list as one of the fastest rising searches.

Katrina Kaif, yet again became the most searched person in India and the most searched celebrity in India for the fourth year in a row.

With Indians getting more inclined towards doing every thing online be it – buying, purchasing, booking tickets, register for any event and searching for train timings and other railway-related information Indian Railways remained a popular search term this year as well along with BookMyShow.com in shopping category.

The Year-End Google Zeitgeist interactive website is available at – http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/#en/ to see the top searches of 2011 across the globe and 40+ countries.

Via – Google India Blog

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Metaweb Technologies was founded in 2005, to make the internet more connected. Let’s hear from the company in their own words about their work.

“We have been building the platform and populating the data for our content integration network, which enables site owners, publishers and developers to easily and intelligently add content from across the Web.

We do this by utilizing our large, open database of things in the world. Metaweb has information on over 11 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. In this way, we provide site owners with a seamless way to access third party content from leading sources like New York Times, Twitter, Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, and a wide range of others. ”

Metaweb Subsidiary Freebase is also now joining Google. Freebase is community-supported open database i.e. it’s the open repository of world’s knowledge. Freebase is quite like Wikipedia, where people can contribute and use data. However, the difference is that Freebase is more like repository of structured data which can also be read by software’s.

At the end, it is quite clear that this move of Google is to further enhance its search. Metaweb’s repository of tagged data will boost the search results of Google. Freebase will be maintained same as free and open database and Google will contribute in its further development to make the web richer. Metaweb will not entertain any new partners but continue to support existing ones.

(Source)

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DuckDuckGo (Hereafter referred as DDG) is a small yet powerful search engine maintained solely by Gabriel Weinberg. It populates the results from multiple sources like Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS and its own bots. DDG has many unique features that you may find interesting. Some of them are:

Zero-Click info:

It is the useful firsthand quick information about your query. It gives you little idea about your query without navigating away from DuckDuckGo.

Privacy:

DuckDuckGo takes your privacy very seriously and it claims to be the most private place to search the internet right now. I consider DDG’s privacy as one of the prime reason to use it as an alternative to Google. DDG respects your privacy and does not LEAK your private search terms to the site you clicked on.  Moreover, when you visit any site your private information like your “IP address” and “User agent” information is automatically sent by your computer to the visited websites. Hence, not only your private search terms are leaked but they can also know that you searched for it. DDG prevent any sort of search leakage by default. It also provides you with the encrypted (HTTPS) mode like other search engines.

!Bang:

This is one of the great features of DDG. You can directly search many popular sites from DDG. For example, if you want to search adobe.com for flash player, just type “!adobe flash”. DDG will directly take you to the suitable page on adobe.com. You can go through full list of supported queries available here.

Less Spam & ads:

DDG omits useless spam and ad sites and serve you with the Official websites as the top results of a search query. I have found DDG results quite accurate and sometimes I was even better served by DDG than Google.

Number of goodies:

If you want to generate a random password or check your IP address. No problem you can do it easily at DDG by just typing “pw” for a random password and “ip” for your IP address. DDG offers you many more smart tricks in short and sweet style at its goodies page. It has everything from time zone conversions and weather reports to advance calculations and conversion of units are supported.

Intelligent Search:

DDG Offers an intelligent search page for ambiguous queries which have different meanings. For example “Opera” can have different meanings.

Save your Clicks:

The rare infinite scrolling feature which automatically loads next result as you scroll down the page and the feature like easy keyboard navigation that most power users would appreciate are supported by DDG to drop to your destination in very few clicks.

At the end, is DDG the best search engine? No, it’s still in its beta stage but it certainly has some advance out of box functionalities which really deserves appreciation. As someone has better said “The biggest room in this world is the ‘Room for improvement’ “So, I think DDG can focus a little to improve on its speed. In spite of all, if you are really concerned about your privacy you must go for DDG as your Google search alternative. It’s really great to believe how a single guy has managed to bring up such an awesome Google search alternative for Internet users.

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Sweet Search is a powerful search engine owned by Dulcinea Media, created exclusively for students that return results which are accurate, reliable, safe and understandable. Accrding to Sweet search, it searches only the 35k websites that their staff of research experts, librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved. It gives you the result that you need. Often academic websites make very little effort to optimize their content according to the search engine bots, thus Sweet Search digs out the most credible academic websites for you and saves your educational time from being wasted. The search results are not only influenced by the search engine bots of Google (as sweet search is powered by Google) but also add up the common sense of human brain.

What makes the Sweet Search even sweeter is the Yolink toolbar present on the left side of the Sweet Search results page. In order to scan the results to determine their relevancy, enter a term to narrow your search. Then, Yolink scan the original search results in which your additional keyword appears thus, helps you to mine the appropriate result without navigating anywhere else. It integrates impeccably with Google Docs enabling you to save excerpts of search results as note for future reference. Yolink results can also be shared to Twitter, Facebook and blogger etc.

Sweet Search offers many other sections to trim your search further, like SweetSearch4me for emerging school kids, SweetSites is the collection of web resources for teachers and students organized by subject and academic level and SweetSearch Biographies provides profile information of 1000+ significant people sorted as per their origin and profession.

In the end, is Sweet Search an alternative to forsake Google Search? No, it is only a smarter way to find outstanding information and academic resources which remains buried deep in the search results of famous search engines.

Visit: Sweet Search ; A search engine for Students

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Google from today onwards will provide more secured search with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption that is now once can have more secure connection if they go to Google via URL – https://www.google.com.

What it means to you ?

With ‘https://‘ before www.google.com you have more secured and encrypted connection with Google servers and have more security of what you search, search terms and search activity being misused or intercepted by any one including your ISP or any third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL.

Search Experience

As the new SSL secured Google search is still in Beta stage, one might have different search experience when browsing with SSL secured Google search, that includes – slightly slower lower search than the regular one, modified Google logo, Google Image search and Google Maps not supported with SSL as yet so you wont see the same in “left panel/sidebar” (as per the new Google design).

This is one major appreciated step of Google towards it main product i.e. Google Search to provide its users more online privacy and security to billions of searchers around the world. However, this security only hides users data from third parties who seek it but Google will continue to store the search terms/ data in Google servers to improve search results and its quality.

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Lest say you need to know who is prime minister of india or say sachin tendulkar’s birthday Google regular search will now show accurate answers right at the top of your results, sourced from across the web using its own Squared technology.

Noticeably it takes a lot of computing power to dig that search out of unstructured, fragmented and redundant information as data spilled all across the web.

Google Squared which is still in labs has been an early attempt from Google to find and extract structured data from unstructured data or say information overloaded all across the web.

Along with these new things Google now also shows more enhancement called – “Something Different” which is also powered by same Squared technology that bring out new features to the search results page in terms of  related searches. For example – when you search on Google, you’ll see a new section at the bottom of the left-hand panel which contains related search terms. For example, search for ‘zebra’ (without quotes) and you’ll see other related searches such as ‘giraffes’, ‘elephants’ and ‘hippos’.

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Google Movies Search

Google movies search is accessible over web, mobiles, iPhones just go to google.com/movies, it will automatically trace your location and show latest/ upcoming movies listing in theaters new you and can even play trailers, show ratings and categories, movie posters, upcoming showtimes, and a concise list of the nearest theaters and their distances from you.

Google Files Search

Google search commands gives a very useful way to search specific files such as MS Word, PDFs, RTF or even ZIP files, all you have to do is add <space>filetype:<file extension> after the search, for ex. – ‘filetype:.doc’ for word documents and ‘filetype:pdf’ for acrobat PDF files (see pic above).

Google Music Search

Google music search is a good option for music lovers that allow you to search latest songs, albums or artist and play them at same time. However, due to legal constraints the Music search is restricted to users in US only.

Google Dictionary

Google Fast-Flip

As in google’s own words – “Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches”. One can also read the leading online dailies and websites over their mobiles through fast-flip mobile.

Google Stocks Quotes Search

Google Squared -

Google Squared returns search results in a spreadsheet format. It structures the unstructured data on web pages. So a search for ‘Indian Prime ministers’ will returns results with names, photo, description, date of birth, party etc., in columns and rows. Interestingly to create one of squared results it takes an incredible amount of compute power to throw results in structured form from all over the web, residing as unstructured form.

Google Accessible Search

Google Patent Search

More Special Search by Google -

• Search Stories on YouTube
• Google Linux Search -
• Google Apple Macintosh Search -
• Google University Search -
• Google News Archive Search -

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Google has now finally come up with all new and much more colorful design interface although till time its on google.com address only and not for all its country specific servers such as Google.co.in. After a big time of a decade Google has made drastic changes in its design interface, which everyone is talking about – more glossy and colorful Logo, eye-catching blue search buttons and new left sidebar with extra search filters.

Google has included the time-line search which was accessible in labs earlier and other search filters such as Blog, Forum, More or less Shopping sites in results and interesting ones are – Page Reviews and Related Search filters that show some extra metrics provided by Google.

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Ask.com had a new launched site just a month back called Ask.com/deals, which is nothing more than a shopping aggregator site to find and buy best bargained products online. Now for this Holiday season and with Halloween coming-up, Ask.com come up with new advertising model to propagate its product Ask deals.

Askdeals.com is a new microsite that show some videos of users which actually a new interactive way of viral marketing where users can record their own videos with ask jingle/tune in background and which would be shown on Askdeal microsite and can even get posted on facebook in ones’ news feed so that friends can see videos through link back to askdeals.com site.

A cool and smart way to propagate the askdeals.com through social networking medium and catch up the crowd. The site might not have great USP but the interactive advertising strategy is pretty much impressive.

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Microsoft today now revealed its buzzing search engine Bing’s next offshoot – Bing Travel, it has flight and hotel search, airfare price predictions, travel news and community, travel deals, and more.

Added to this, starting today itself, people searching on Bing search engine for hotels in a given city will get Bing Travel Instant Answers included directly in their search results, featuring the Rate Indicator, let them choose hotels etc.

Moreover, from now onwards Microsoft acquired Farecast, previously farecast.live.com and MSN Travel will be entertained through Bing travel only. Farecast has been named one of Time Magazine’s “50 Coolest Websites” in 2006. In recent Press note Microsof mentioned some of Bing Travel’s key features such as – Price predictor, Rate indicator, comparison flight & hotel search and more.

Bing Travel uses Farecast technology to analyze more than 175 billion airfare observations and predict whether the price of a flight is going up or down. It offers people a recommendation of “Buy Now” or “Wait,” including a confidence level and expected price increase or decrease over the next seven days.

Bing travel will also be twittering at twitter as ‘Fareologists‘ at Bing Travel to twit about airfare and hotel deals, industry trends, and travel news.

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