Load time of a website is becoming the dominant influencing factor in determining the ranking of the website. Now a days search engines consider the load time of website as a major factor in indexing the site. Moreover, faster loading sites provide good user experience and help in growing the traffic taking into consideration the users on slower internet connections.

Website administrators use several different tools to monitor the load time of their website, but a tool which lets you compare the average load times of two websites side by side is rare.

WhichLoadsFaster is an interesting web service that does the same as its name suggests. Yes! It is the page load analysis tool that compares the loading time of any two webpage side by side. To get started just head over to the website home page and enter the URL’s of the two website you wish to compare in the textbox available in each halves of the webpage as shown below.

Now, hit the “Go” button and you will see both the websites getting loaded side by side in the two halves. As soon as both the websites have finished loading, you will be served with the percentage comparison and the average load times of the two websites.

The “Repeat feature” allow you to repeat the match up specified number of times. The “Race feature” enables you to compare the series of URL’s. This feature is mainly applicable when you want a set of pages to load automatically just after one has finished loading. To try out the “Race” feature just click on the “Race” link and check which side is the fastest.

Overall, this is a nice web service to compare the loading time of two web sites and it serves you the comparative side by side analysis of the page load times. It also allows you to share the test by providing you with a link to share with others.

Bangalore based software development organization Legwork Labs have developed an interesting product known as TEXT me which claims to revolutionize the way communications happen between parents and educational institution. The best part about Text Me is that it does not require any hardware or software at clients place. It is a SAAS (Software as a service) product which just requires PC and an internet connection.

Text Me makes use of 2-way SMS notification system and thus ensures that right message is sent to right person. Using this system, parents can check the marks, attendance, performance, etc. and they will be updated using real time communication.

According to Legworks, Text Me will bridge the gaps between the parents and the educational institutions, which is increasing a lot. This service can be a lot beneficial even at the time of admission, telling the applications about rules and regulations.  Any last minute update or changes can be easily sent to the guardian effectively free of cost.

Legworks boast about Text Me stating,

If communicating real time to parent is a problem; if circulating day to day notifications to parent is a problem; if managing attendance is a problem; if updating exam results is a problem, we have a solution for you try TEXT me

Listiki is a new web startups that allows anyone to find, make and share lists of stuff and just like a wiki anyone can add, edit and reorder lists. These changes are then propagated in real time to a master list where you see the items flying around to their new positions. Listiki is a seed funded startup from an Athens-based seed level Venture Firm OpenFund.

Listiki is a real-time web app, having real-time widgets and with simple interface provides user to generate, edit and re-arrange any list and its items with drag-drop feature. Listiki will take full advantage of of the real-time web via Twitter & other social networks to add a layer of context and hierarchy as the data flows perpetually.

Listiki is indeed a promising useful and to some extent a productive app online as it allow users to start making a listwith  n number of items and allowing internet crowd to come and contribute to list be it adding or reordering them the power of commenting is harnessed as one of the feature of Listiki with comments being replaces with adding item to list. One can watch and contribute to various useful list such as – 2010: Products I can’t live without, Best European web start-up for 2010 or even this – top sites that pay you to test products.

To see more elaborately how it works watch the video below;

Have you ever heard of a name “DuckDuckGo”? If it’s the first time then you may find the name little childish, and may get scary with the name itself, but it is a pretty interesting search engine. If you have been facing problem in searching exactly what you are looking for, or unable to get to the desired resource on the web from the results of Google search then you might be looking for some alternatives or learning some tips and tricks to improve your Google search skills. DuckDuckGo is little known alternative to Google search which drops you to your destination in very few clicks instead, of making you land on some spam or shopping site. It avoids spam and returns the most relevant links about a given query.

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.

In recent years, there has been an enormous growth in the number of websites on the Internet and the number is forever increasing. In this scenario, sometimes it is quite irritating to dig out the relevant results from the billions of search results filtered by Google. Moreover, people are often served by the bunch of junk and irrelevant search results, specifically when someone is looking for something relevant but infamous academic or research content. Most of the search engines usually populate results with good SEO’s but not the relevant content which you are searching for. The search results are full of unworthy sites and sites that read well and convincing but lack academic rigor and hence, are not useful. If you are a student and think that your search engine doesn’t returns safe and accurate results in one go and requires you to search from the search results then, I have a sweet search engine for you.

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

Few students from IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IT BHU and Patnagar University have launched the first ever private e-counseling portal of Uttrakhand, named Uktech.info. The iniative is taken to provide proper guideline to the aspiring students with college reviews, rankings, branches details and various inspiring articles.

The newly introduced web portal was launched by vice chancellor of Patnagar University, Dr. B S Bisht. He stated,

uktech.info is a very useful portal and I am sure will be very helpful to the students who are looking for admission in engineering colleges. I compliment students for their effort.

Raghav Kansal, the leader of the project said that the website will help the student take better choices regarding their career, free of cost.

As the state AIEEE counseling is about to start, Uktech.info can be of great value to the students as it also gives the opportunity to students to interact with the active college students.

According to a report by TOI, Pakistan is set to block Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Bing and Some other sites as per the orders by the Pakistani Court. The reason behind this order is supposed to be the posting of irreligious and profane materials. Though by the end of the day there was no instruction to the ISP’s to block these sites.

Here are some Excerpts from the report of TOI :

“Media reports said the Bahawalpur bench of the Lahore High Court yesterday directed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to immediately block nine websites, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, Bing and Amazon, for publishing and promoting sacrilegious and blasphemous material. “

“Justice Mazher Iqbal Sidhu issued the order while hearing a petition filed by a man named Muhammad Sidiq who claimed these websites were publishing sacrilegious material. ”

“Aslam Dhakkar, head of a local bar association, was quoted as saying that the court had given a historic decision. He said the legal fraternity in Bahawalpur would observe a strike today to protest the publication of blasphemous material by the websites.”

It is never ever good to hamper the religious beliefs of People of any community in the World. But blocking the sites which are great sources of information and are the integral part of the web, is also not a permanent solution. There should be some alternative way needed to resolve this serious issue.

World Cup 2010 is now at its full flow, the most exciting matches are now underway. The FIFA fever is soaring high and the whole world is going crazy to support their favourite team and players. The fans are finding unique ways to express their love and affection for their teams. If you are one of the soccer fans then, you might be suffering from this Soccer fever. To satisfy your Soccer fever and to honor the World Cup you may like to get your face painted with the rich colors of your team and get Football sticker or tattoos on your body.

Picnicking is yet another way to satisfy your Football fever. With an Online photo editing tool called Picnik, you can easily put Soccer-themed effects to your photos and can share with your friends, just to show your craziness about the Football. It provides you with many new Soccer fever effects like digital face paint, Soccer-themed stickers and Team flag Overlays.

To get started to satisfy your fan fever, just head over to Picnik’s Soccer fever section and ‘Upload your photo’. You can also select the photo from your Picasa profile. Now you can select your favorite team from the drop down list found at the left side bar. To paint your face Click on “Face Paint” option and select the first color. You can choose the brush size, and also erase if something goes out of line.

You can also select and apply country flag, add text and Football stickers from the left side bar. This tool allows you to easily edit and retouch your photos. After you are done with all the photo effects you wanted to be in your photo then you can easily save your photo in your Picasa album and finally you can share your Football craziness with the entire world.

Check out World Cup Soccer Fever Effects: Click here

Searching on internet can be very tiresome at times and might confuse you if there are no proper ordering. For instance, if you type Nokia 2600 in Google Search, you will see the entries of the year 2005, 2006 and 2010. With NowRelevant, you will get more relevant and updated information as it gives search results only up to last 2 weeks.

Moreover, the site has a time slider which allows to search within a specific period within 14 days. So, if you want to search for a topic within past 3-4 days, you can effortlessly do it from NowRelevant.

NowRelevant monitors millions of other sources and feeds and provides the updated and relevant information. It maintains a complex algorithm and filtering techniques to search the results and scans over 55,000,000 sources of the information from the last two weeks on your search query.

The presentation of the homepage is fairly simple which does not even show the site URL and similar pages option like Google. This however can be slightly irritating as we very often search the results based on popular urls.

You can see the comparison of NowRelevant with Google in a video here.

If you are a great video enthusiasts and one among who regularly uploads video to video sharing sites like YouTube then this is going to be a good News for you. YouTube has already released a new online video editor which lets you do basic editing processes without any download or install of any heavy Software on your machine. The main aim of Google behind introducing this new tool in YouTube is to make video editing easy and fun.

The new YouTube Video editor offers you to combine multiple videos from your own “My Videos” to create a new longer video, to trim the beginning and ending of your videos/movies and also you can add sound tracks from the vast Audio Swap library. An advertisement can appear in your video if it contains soundtracks from the Audio Swap library. However, you can create new videos from your uploaded videos without worrying about file formats and can publish them to YouTube without any hassle. No separate upload is required.

This editor is really very simple and thus ideal for anyone to use. With this you can create a single  ‘video album’ by combining all your videos of your college life or your vacations etc. You can also trim unwanted moments from your video clips and then arrange them in a timeline to get the complete video clip of your like. You can trim your videos from the beginning or the end just from the simple slider available in the editor.

On the technical side, the user interface of YouTube video editor is mostly built in JavaScript. This editor utilizes the capabilities of cloud computing to enable its users with average configuration system to perform nominal video editing.

It is sure that YouTube will enhance this new video editing tool further while maintaining its simplicity for naive and non-technical users.

( SOURCE )