Adsense and Adbrite Sunday, November 23, 2008

These days I've found almost all of the commercial sites run with Adsense or Adbrite ads blended with their templates, well optimized and probably having good click through rates. Forums also have engaged their users with ads. What really happens is that the site owners are happy that they are making a good amount of money, the other side of it is that having ads that are very relevant means you are giving a link to a competitor who might be better than you eventually losing a valuable or loyal customer. Might be that customer chose to buy a product from your competitor instead of you just because there was a link from you to your competitor. The click on the ad might have earned you at most $2 but because the customer chose not to buy your product you might have incurred a loss of $xxx. The fact also is that you cannot live in an island on the web. One of the possible ways to solve the problem is not to advertise, which is not an option but to place ads in places where it is likely to pickup key words that show ads that do not point to your direct competitors but to point to words relating to your site.

There is also one more thing. Adwords people are not just writing some text on their ad. Carefully chosen and powerful words in their text ads. When your ad blends with your site's template, it looks like a part of your site and so is the reason why a visitor chose to read the text, some ads are really powerful that grabs their attention and keeps them occupied with advertisers site.

Some folks say they are happy with adsense because when their customers look for something and don't find that in their site, ads give them what they wanted. This is just one possibility of what might run in the mind of the visitor.

Around 65 percent of the Internet users never click on their ads, still the Internet advertising industry is making huge profits and growing into an unstoppable force. Take a look at the success stories featured in adsense, these are sites that have something unique for themselves and they have repeat visitors who helped them earn more from the ads.

All of this comes down to make it a point that if your site does not have something unique and prove worthy to a visitor, he has a lot of options to choose from, its right in front in the ads.

Google SearchWiki

The buttons near the search results gives you a new feature called Search Wiki. This name is confusing You can split it into two and see what it means and read on to know what this really is.
Pertaining to the post in Google's official blog about this new feature called SearchWiki. Sometime I wanted a site in 4th or 5th position to show up at first, this feature lets you do exactly the same thing. I tried using this feature, I removed a search result and it moved down to the bottom of the results under a category called removed results and there are buttons near each search result that lets you move that up and down as you like.

I assumed this feature would be present in all the result pages from that time. But did not see it again after the first time. These changes take effect only in my results.

Munthinam Paarthene - Lyrics Thursday, November 20, 2008

I like this song most.

முந்தினம் பர்தெனே
பார்த்ததும் தோற்றேனே
சல்லடை கன்னாக
நெஞ்சமும் புன் ஆனதே...

இத்தனை நாளாக
உன்னை நான் பாராமல்
எங்கு நான் போணேனோ
நாட்களும் வீன் ஆணதே.

வானதில் நீ வெண்ணிலா
ஏக்கத்தில் நான் தேய்வதால்
இப்பொது என்னோடு வந்தால் என
ஊர் பார்க ஒன்றாக சென்றால் என

இப்பொது என்னோடு வந்தால் என
ஊர் பார்க ஒன்றாக சென்றால் என

முந்தினம் பர்தெனே
பர்ததும் தோற்றெனெ
சல்லடை கன்னக
நெஞ்சமும் புன் ஆனதே.

இதனை நாலக..
உன்னை நான் பரமல்
எங்கு நான் பொனெனோ
நாட்கலும் வீன் அனதே.

காதலே...ஸ்வசமே

துலா தட்டில் உன்னை வைய்து
நிகர் செய்ய பொன்னை வைய்து

முகம் பர்து பேசும் உன்னை
முதல் காதல் சிந்தும் கன்னை
அனைக்காமல் பொவேனோ ஒர் உய்ரே

நிழல் போல உன்னை விடாமல் உன்னை தொடர்வேன் அடி
புகை போல படாமல் பட்டு நகர்வேன் அடி
வினா நூரு கனவும் நூரு விடை சொல் அடி

முந்தினம் பர்தெனே
பர்ததும் தொற்றெனே
சல்லடை கன்னக
உள்ளமும் புன் ஆனதே.

இதனை நாலக..
உன்னை நான் பரமல்
இங்கு தான் பொனெனோ
நட்கலும் வீன் அனதே.

க்டல் நீலம் மங்கும் நேரம்
அலை வந்து தீண்டும் நேரம்
மனம் சென்று முழ்குமோ ஈரதிளே

தலை சாய்க தொனும் தந்தாய்
விரல் கொர்து பக்கம் வந்தாய்
இதழ் மட்டும் இன்னும் ஏன் தூரதிலே

பகல் நேரம் கனாக்கல் கண்டென் உரங்கமலே
உயிர் ரெண்டும் உராய கண்டென் நெருங்கம்லே

உனை அன்றி எனகு ஏது எதிர் காலமே

முந்தினம் பார்த்தேனே

Ubuntu Ultimate - Almost Ultimate Sunday, November 16, 2008

Ubuntu Ultimate, its a distro which was my dream, I even thought of creating such a distro myself, this is more than what I wanted to do. The desktop is themed exactly like Windows Vista, but the icons are pretty good. The cursors are also new. Most of all, This edition ships with a large number of pre installed applications including VLC media player, Amarok, OpenOffice, GIMP, Blender, Anjuta for development and also gcc compiler. I like the new dark theme, the new wallpapers within are also cool. I was also able to install google desktop search and screenlets(linux equivalent of google gadgets). You can see it in the picture above

I think it is because of the large number of apps shipped with it. It takes 30seconds to boot as usual. But the login time is more than what is expected in ubuntu probably because its 'bloated' by many apps, not as bad as in Windows still there is a delay in time taken to login. Almost Ultimate. I expect the fixes will make this edition Ultimate.

Do it yourself Lobotomy - Tom Monahan - Creativity! Monday, October 27, 2008

Creativity. What does this mean? I never read a book on being creative till now, still trying to be creative unknowingly. This is a wonderful book, i took it in random from a collection of mind books. I want to share thoughts about this book and creativity

"The human mind is capable of infinite imaginary thought, as proven
daily by our children. But kids have an advantage over most adults:
Their minds aren’t filled with knowledge. "

could be this is the reason Dr.Abdul Kalam advocates so much for kids and he loves them too (like me :-)).yes kids are interesting. now i remember something piccaso told

Its taken me all of my life to have mind of a child – picasso

This is a fundamental thinking of what creativity is and it also answers why kids are creative where adults are commonly not. When your mind is free you can think, this is it! The initial chapters of the book was very interesting, author talks about the paradigm shift from manual work to knowledge workers of today.

Here's the amazon link to the book

http://www.amazon.com/Do-Yourself-Lobotomy-Creative-Thinking/dp/0471417424

Ads are closing in! Sunday, October 19, 2008

Watch out... It might be standing right next to you.

I almost never pay for anything I take from the Internet. Of course all of these are free stuff, for which these web sites get their visitors. I live in India and this is the way it works for most of Indians. Advertising campaigns are effective on Google, the most important reason is that they keep throwing the same ad across all the sites you use. The same ad shows up on all sites that I visit, that has partnered with Google on adsense. This is one of the hundreds of tricks that Google uses for advertising on web sites. The ad that is right on top of my gmail's inbox an one line text ad grabs my attention, because of its placement.

When Google launched Chrome, I saw it running on my friend's computer, I dint like it. I chose not to download it on to my computer. But guess what Google did to persuade me to get chrome, it placed that ad in the right place, as a text ad above gmail inbox, after it showed up for a series of sites where this ad was chasing me, all of those places are where I avoided ads. Look! this ad followed me till my gmail inbox and finaly I clicked on to see what the heck this chrome is all about. There comes the funneling strategy, showed up a good squeeze ad page for Chrome and finally I downloaded it.

I wonder what would happen to the music industry if content distribution is not controlled, well is there a way to control distribution? I'm not thinking about the possibilities like digitally preventing copy theft or something like that. But the large user base held by peer to peer software users could be controlled to some extent but cannot be eliminated. In India, the ISP s never do anything to prevent the spread of illegal music, up in the Internet cloud, probably because they have enough bandwidth to feed their hungry downloaders. But this situation will change when more people get connected to the Internet. There will be a time when an ISP X who slows down P2P downloads and another will make it by not doing it and gain market share. I'll probably choose the second option :-)

Quest for search Thursday, October 2, 2008

This was originally posted on Vidya blog - Digital Information Archive at Amrita

Here's the post for blog :-)

Quest for Search Ended

All this started when I met Ajai Narendran sir(Vidya's architect and amrita.edu's webmaster). For the first time, it was just a normal meeting. I always wanted to have a search engine that works for Vidya, a huge archive, which makes life a lot easier. Sometime when I met him while talking in general, I told him that a search engine for Vidya must have a place where you can add new archives so that they also become searchable. He replied me something like "human imagination has no bounds", he was right and that was imagination at its peak. Because I've been into search engine optimization for the past one year and I had the background on how search engines work and how to make a web site that show up on search results. I knew I could try solving this problem of finding a search engine for Vidya. I was sure that once I find a search solution, Ajai sir will let me deploy it on Vidya. Knowledge is not enough. We must apply! He is always open to new ideas. I went ahead to find a solution, taking this not so seriously but just like I explore any other thing. I took this also on the exploring list.

Being practical, I did not move on to write a search engine on my own. It was clear to me that there are open source products on Enterprise search. I analyzed products like Nutch, from Apache software foundation. Google, the king of search engines has a product that fits into an Enterprise and makes all documents searchable, not for free as on Internet. It costs a $2,995 which is the minimal Google Search Appliance, a hardware plus software product. It is a monster with 16GB of RAM and tera bytes of storage space. An amazing product at an amazingly large cost. Then I stumbled upon a product called simplexo, downloaded it, its a open source startup company from UK, offering and enterprise search solution. Having this in mind. Hey wait! I asked myself what is the equivalent of Google search appliance by Yahoo? These giants compete each other in a big way. There comes the answer, I googled for "Free enterprise search" and Google showed me the results that took me to a product called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. There was nothing surprising at first because it was yet another product that I stumbled upon. Downloaded it, deployed it on Linux. The installation was just by three clicks. Never before, there was a search product that is so easy to install. The next day I made OmniFind crawl 4000 pages from Wikipedia, it was more like downloading the whole web site. I tried some search queries and the results where perfect, very relevant to whatever I searched. The next day I crawled many thousands of pages and surprisingly, after indexing 8000 pages the collection occupied only 400MB. I found this incredible. I couldn't wait to tell him about what I've found. I can keep talking about its features, there are a lot more and its free! After onam holidays, I made a demo to Ajai sir and he also found it awesome. We deployed it on one of Vidya's server class machines. We freed a 25GB partition to store the index of the crawled data.

The day one, after installation just after 12 hours of installation, it indexed 15,000 documents on vidya. It includes all content inside the pdf books and not just the file names. Its when I found this server coming alive. It acted like a living being(my pet!!), always working and crawling files then stays idle for a while when it re-organizes the data to make optimal storage size. I looked at the crawler statistics whenever I got time, looking forward towards the launch of search engine. A thing that could make the Vidya's user experience better than ever and a lot of people will find it useful. It took two days to crawl 200,000+ documents and still crawling more files. I really love the way this search engine works, its easy to manage and gives good quality of search results.

Here I am today on Gandhi Jayanti, spent the whole day with Ajai sir working on one more thing that I've promised him to do along with search engine. Its to bring blogging into Vidya for sharing knowledge. It took me a week to figure out how to work with an unfamiliar environment which was Windows 2003 server. Today I've finally used all the learning about the server. Carefully and successfully installed wordpress, a blogging software and a server-side program. The blog's theme after we customized it for Vidya is something beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. The blog is meant to be a platform for knowledge sharing.

This evening while walking with Ajai sir, after a day's work, with a sense of satisfaction from a job well done. I was able to figure out that Ajai sir felt the same everyday since 2001 when he started building Vidya. I would say Vidya is "built with passion and love" for knowledge sharing. I wonder what would have been the joy of doing a great job with a passion. It was exciting to work with him, for an array of reasons. He is a friend, teacher and sometimes he takes a parental perspective. Owing to the openness, he is like this "If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it". Lot of learning happened when unexpected problems popped up while installation, in fact he was also learning new things with me. I've never worked on such a large data set until we deployed the search engine on Vidya. I owe thanks to Ajai sir for giving the opportunity to work on Vidya's server for which he trusted me.

So its finally launch day tomorrow, we're taking search engine and blog public on Vidya. I'm thrilled to see the search engine in action. You can reach it at http://vidya/search .

Have a good day. Happy Searching!

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." - Albert Einstein

End of post***

Opening Minds Sunday, September 28, 2008

This article was first published in Anweshi, newsletter for Amrita School of Engg.

Open source is becoming increasingly accepted worldwide and gaining momentum. This essay evaluates key benefits of collaborative model over traditional development. The following discussion is meant to be a “mind-opener” and identify specific obstacles that need to be addressed in the using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development.

BROOKS' LAW VS. LINUS' LAW

Not introducing ourselves to open source is often the result of limits and boundaries in our mind. In order to understand,explore and overcome these boundaries, we discuss two competing paradigms.

The traditional method of collaborative development is often called the “Brooks' Law” (after Frederick P. Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month ) which can be summarized as “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. This paradigm assumes a small and select circle of experts innovate,design and create software where most of the developers are expected to give little or no feedback to improve the overall design. Brooks argues, when there are N contributors involved,the work performed also scales to N, complexity and vulnerability to mistakes also rises to N square,considering number of communication paths between contributors. Conversely, Brooks' Law predicts “a project with thousands of contributors ought to be a flaky, unstable mess”, as Eric Raymond states.

On the other hand, open source paradigm assumes that quality is a result of massive collaboration. It did overcome the limits postulated by Brooks' law. The explanation lies in the “Linus' law”,in honor of Linus Torvalds, who took open source to mainstream by developing the Linux kernel, the success of the open source model in developing the Linux kernel shows the result of collaborative development. Linus' law in its informal version stated as “Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow”. The key to success in collaborative-development model is the identification of solutions for quality and distribution of tasks over large population rather than the usual hierarchical approach.

Contrasting characters of traditional and open source approaches

Traditional Approach	Open Source Approach
Brooks' Law	Linus' Law
Hierarchy	Network
Experts	Peers
Teams	Communities
Cathedral	Bazzar
Perfection	Improvement
Construction	Evolution

CHANGE TOWARDS OPENNESS

The conceptual foundation of collaboration can be clearly illustrated using the Indian fable of blind men and elephant. In this, a powerful leader summons a group of wise men- all of whom happened to be blind- to his castle, to confront them with an elephant, an animal which none of the wise men has encountered before. They were asked to touch the elephant and describe what this creature resembles. Each of these men are able to perceive only some part of the animal and described that as the characteristic of the whole animal. This led to a fierce argument between these men and everyone was convinced that he is right and everyone else is wrong- because none of them was able to perceive the whole animal and view his part as a portion of the whole animal. It is obvious, the need for collaboration and sharing information.

MOTIVATIONS TO CONTRIBUTE

User needs software both work related and non-work related. Most of the time the innovation is community driven and not a result of research by a corporation. The top single reason to contribute to projects is based on enjoyment- related intrinsic motivation: “Project code is intellectually stimulating to write” and improving programming skills stands the second reason. These are motivations apart from the leading giants like Sun Microsystems,Red Hat,Novell and many others,Google contributes a lot to the open source by its Summer of Code contest which acts as a medium for students being mentored by the open source companies, these corporates also have employees paid full time on open source projects while sharing their work with the peers and continuously improve the software. This model works on Linus' law in first place, also there is a dedicated team working on the same software which brings clearly defined work flow and collaboration to the fullest extent.

Lessons from community driven innovation

1. Keep it simple – The procedures of within the community is to be kept simple

2. Find passionate people. To drive change, you need passion. You need people who understand and are excited about the change.

3. Involve me, and I will understand. Cultural change cannot be forced; it can only be facilitated. Nothing is as powerful a teacher as first- hand experience.

4. Start small, grow fast. Start small with a limited scope and the mission to solve a concrete

problem. Demonstrate value; then grow.

Open Source is the Heart of the Internet

There would be no Internet without open source. You might not notice that every time you use Internet you use open source directly or indirectly. It is being used in the critical parts of the Internet, which includes mail routing,domain name system and the key component of TCP/IP stack.

TCP/IP, the core protocol code of the Internet, is distributed under a Berkeley open source license and included in Windows and IBM mainframes as well as UNIX and Linux.

Sendmail was written as open source in 1975 and is still the most used mail server program.

BIND, the program that maps server names to IP addresses, has been an essential component of the Internet since 1981.

Apache is the most used Web server, with approximately 60 percent share (Netcraft).

Linux is the operating system used by most Apache servers.

Mozilla Firefox, the browser that was formerly Netscape, is the #2 browser in

use (after Internet Explorer). Google's Chrome is just released and is open source, competes with other browsers in the market.

Dot Coms

Name any giant on the web, these companies have been heavy consumers of open source starting with apache and lot of others,

Amazon.com is an extensive Linux user, having converted from UNIX. The main online Amazon system is developed in C++. Amazon also uses Perl heavily for data integration.

Yahoo! is a heavy FreeBSD user. It also uses PHP and Perl languages, moving more to PHP, and the MySQL database. The high-volume Yahoo! Mail is all open source.

Google uses thousands of small commodity servers running Linux. Their home-grown systems management is written using the C++ and Perl development tools. They also use Python extensively. Google also started making use of Open Solaris.

Akamai is the company which drives most of the Internet. The thousands of servers that Akamai has placed around the world to cache and accelerate content all run on Linux.

Why not consider alternate operating systems?

...or why consider Linux a developer platform? Its for desktop users also!

The latest Desktop and Enterprise versions of Linux distributions have a GUI interface for almost everything and often looks very much like Windows Control Panel. Linux is more up-to-date than you expect. The user experience is “cool” with Linux's Compiz desktop effects are as competitive as on Windows Vista. It is possible to turn desktop workspaces into a rotating cube(in fact you can have a wallpapers on bottom and top of cube also) ,painting fire across your screen,making rain drops fall on your desktop and flip application windows like the cover-flow in iTunes and iPhone. The quality of applications is very good and the performance is great, for example Ubuntu 8 having all desktop effects enabled,in idle state will consume just around 330MB or less of RAM which makes linux efficient also, bunch of viruses which affect the windows platform could cause no harm on Linux. Not everything available on Windows is available in Linux, but the gap is closing in with an improving software called Wine(winehq.org) that allows users to install and run windows executables and installation files.

Wouldn't it be great if you'd just pop open magic software finding-utility and select the software you need and it install itself instantly. Linux has long offered software repository, an easy way to find and install new programs. Most distros(A distro

is a version of Linux,each having different set of applications, mostly from different vendors) ship with their package managers, a popular one is Ubuntu's synaptic package manager. Most of all, there are lot of Linux distros like Fedora,RedHat, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and lot of others, you have the freedom to choose from any one of them. Open Solaris is also an option, its a UNIX variant from Sun Microsystems. In fact there are nearly 300 Linux distributions released officially all of which are special in their own way.

Future or Fad?

Open source is likely to face threats from product advertising by giants, we haven't seen them advertising yet , they could build myths by advertising. This could be done in many ways, implying that

1. Open source is insecure

2. Open source is like theft, like illegal download

3. Open source destroys jobs

At this point we have a problem, because there is almost no advertising budget. In fact open source has not grown through branding. How would open source pay for such a fight?

We cannot conclude that open and closed systems are equal. The OSS phenomenon has enormous potential that will act as a catalyst for new organizational model and networked economy and the key facilitator bridging the “Digital Divide” .

Reasons why windows sucks! Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I can't stand anymore or go back to windows at any cost. It really sucks. What I intend to do here is consider the accessibility and usability part of windows and why it sucks. I haven't dealt with the copycat part of windows which is to be made a full post like this.

Windows is the biggest scam in the computer world.

I feel windows has contributed to the productivity paradox. It many times remained the cause for the paradox.

This time parasite takes all your time

I'd say the paradox is because of the time you waited for it to boot up or restart after some crash, You must have spent a lot of time watching the windows installer's progress bar to finish installation.

You also might have spent a lot of time on whatever problem that you faced. Lot of them are conflicts. Windows was the real time waster in my business.

Further proof:

Growing bigger and faster

How many times windows updates are automatically installed on your computer. You know it. Do you ever wonder if those updates and upgrades have increased your productivity or did they ever speed up your system in any means?

Truth about updates

The reality is that you waste bandwidth by allowing updates which make no real changes to the OS. By default windows allocates 20% of your Internet bandwidth for automatic upgrades. What if you turn off automatic updates? There are no updates installed but also the bandwidth is also not given back to your normal internet connection. 20% of your Bandwidth is wasted at last.


Wake up People!

Its time to go for a faster computer and a better operating system. Microsoft is making money by selling the latest and greatest operating system.In fact windows does not ship a single useful application with its OS and its the inefficient operating system which makes your computer look like the dumb and slow duck.It's all a part of the scam.

Computer CRASHES are not normal

Believe me, your computer is designed to run for weeks together without crashing and your Intel or AMD processor is just great! Crashing everyday is NOT normal. It is accepted normal because of windows.

How many times did you use windows help and support?

Windows help is pretty useless.What a time waster. How many times did you have had a problem and windows help had an answer? Also I have never solved a problem I had using the Windows Help Troubleshooter.

WinXP help tries to be smarter by taking you to Web but sadly some are broken URLs.

What new features?

Microsoft harps on the new features that they provide with each release. Features that are hardly ever used. I want the computer to remember the last directory I opened and hate opening My Computer and navigating again. This is just one feature that most computer users want. The latest release Windows vista does not even provide it.

Still more there was a feature called spotlight in Mac OS 10 which gives instant access to search files stored on hard disk. Guess what? You must have seen a search bar in the start menu in Vista. After all the big old copy cat has no ideas of its own and including new features from OS X. There are more stuff copied from it. This is the most popular one.

Do you think vista had made life easier? A feature is something that makes the user feel better, not lost in a forest.

Idiotic Behavior

Why does windows blame the user for all the times it had crashed. It also insists checking the hard disk for errors. Meanwhile it also says that the system was not shutdown properly. What a great way to make the user feel something was wrong with their usage.Its not the user's fault that windows crashed. Microsoft take responsibility for its buggy OS.


Windows has a registry

It has such a great thing called registry and its the best and worst part of windows architecture. The best part is it stores all the settings and the worst part is that if your system is infected by a virus you delete something that your anti-virus says. Guess what removing the registry entry makes the system throw an error each time the system starts. It is really annoying if there is something deleted from the registry by mistake.

Busy work

It makes you wait by showing the sand clock most of the time. Windows is busy when you want to get something done. There is no option other than to wait and watch the sand clock disappear. You must have used the search feature in XP which takes all the time of its own to list a few documents.

Viruses are tiny and invisible. They affect the system in big ways. Can you tell me which is the best anti virus? Did you spend a lot of time deciding that? There is no answer. But it depends on the type of virus that infects your system.I'm sure there are millions of viruses out there.

I still wonder how such an OS is in existence. Might be because people did not look at the alternatives.It owes its existence to microsoft's monopoly and marketing strategy.

Its time to look at this page where I mentioned alternatives using free softwares.

SEO and Me Tuesday, July 1, 2008

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and it means optimizing the web sites for its pages to appear on SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages). I would call this rocket science more or less because SEO involves a large set of parameters that determine the page rank. I'm not speaking about the SEO factors here. It runs to a huge list having 100+ parameters.I'm speaking about the unknown side of my business.

You cannot produce instant results

Unless you are running a site that updates news, 3-5 times a day. You cannot see instant results with SEO. In short a web page published yesterday will not show up on the search results today.In terms of long term profit business one who does SEO cannot show results to their customer in a short time. Its up to the people who run the business to convince them about their efforts to their clients.There are some web sites out there who promise "high Google rank"
in two weeks. These are people who either lie or someone who owns a 7+ page rank. The second possibility might not be true because everyone who does SEO is after instant benefits and they undoubtedly commit some mistakes while they don't notice them.Finally its the major corporates whose official web sites fall under the 7+ category.You can be pretty sure that the content you just added to your web site will show up on search engines only when its a news
agency site or your site needs to be 2 or 3 years old with no bad remarks from Google. In fact they never tell you the remarks, they just add it to their knowledge base.

Google is Against us.

Meet Mr.Matt Cutts the head of Google web spam team.He and his team is ruthlessly working against web spam. When Google's web master guidelines are breached to a large extent. Its what they call Web Spam. There are a "LOT" of people around the world working on SEO. These guys are professionals just like me. But there is not CMMi level certification awarded even for those who produce best results. Some companies get a CMM levels for their software and show it up for SEO. Thats a bad thing. There is not standard method of doing sEO. Everyone of these SEO will have their own practices for doing it. But no matter what we do, Google always is against manipulating itself for high rank.No one of us wanted to be manipulated or even cheated and so is Google. They punish web sites if they try some methods to trick the search engine robot for getting a higher rank. They're right on their part. So what is the solution to all this work againsts. Some of the successful people in getting higher ranks( I don't mean SEO guys) are those who followed the Google web master guidelines either intentionally or just a part of building their own site.Wikipedia is one such example. To me right now SEO means following Google's guidelines. In fact following this would give a lot of benefits both for Visitors and Google.

SEO is not Super Easy Optimization

What does it mean? If you start a blog today and slap some ads on it with your "imaginary" visitors and look for income,it doesn't work.Eventually you lose the interest and stop working on it.This is not such a business. I'm working on it for more than a year and its only now I reap the benefits. Believe it or not Yahoo took six months to take one of my pages to top ten in search results. I hate yahoo for doing this. These guys are just too strict,can't blame them for it because they look at quality of the page and put you in a sandbox for long time. Its six months inside the sandbox and I'm out of it now.Google's pretty fast and I'm getting a lot of visitors from Google Search results.

We face problems same as search engines

You type in some query and Google produces a list of sites that are related to that term. Most relevant based on their algorithms.But what runs in the mind of someone who searches is not known. Might be search engines deliver results to you based on your earlier queries.This does not solve the problem.If I want to get a page for the search term "USB driver for P2P". The result pages look as if Google functions flawlessly, yes it is flawless but what goes in the mind of the person who searches is different from the algorithmic results. The person bears in mind the
driver that is used to connect two PC's using USB ports. But the results produced are for the P2P file sharing over the Internet.Any search engine fails on this account. Might be some geek at Google will solve it soon just like they solved the mistyped word with the "Did you mean" feature. This problem with the user's context meaning is also applicable to us. When someone lands on my site and gets content that is not desirable the user experience degrades. This is a small problem when considering the ratio of good vs bad results. But the problem is not solved in anyway.When you start optimizing for some keywords, the combinations that are not wanted are also produced.Take this example "Google is Good. Microsoft Sucks". If I place this on the title of my page. There is a possibility that the page appears for the search term "Google Sucks". The person who authored the page did not mean it. But still algorithmic results suck in this way also. I mean all search engines suffer the same problem as this.

Algorithms keep changing

Google does not have the algorithm same as in 1998, these guys keep revising the algorithm at all times.And this is a problem when SEO starts deviate towards the "Black Hat" kind. Search Engines eliminate black hat techniques as each time the algorithm is revised and this the learning happens cumulatively. Apart from their algorithm their Sand boxing technique changes. In spite of these changes, you try tricking the bot in a big way, you're done, they block your site depending on the penalty that you receive.


How long will SEO survive?

It will survive as long as Internet and web design survives. It is increasingly becoming the integral part of web site design itself.So there is much more opportunities experiment with search engines.With experience it makes a lot of difference to your online presence.Some time in the next 100 years some technology might replace Internet. Till then its good time for people like me.


So,What is SEO?

SEO is advertising for free. I'm not telling its free money,its free advertising. You pay some bucks to Google to get place your ads on the side of search results each time it appears on the results. Why not spend money to be on the search results for infinite number of times. Contact me if you want to apply SEO for your site.

Another SEO tactic,
I just want to know how long does it take to index this post by search engines. So I use this word nivashification which is not on any other page on the web. After this page gets indexed type in nivashification will show up this page.

Hello World! Saturday, June 28, 2008

This is the first program written in any programming book. This is no programming but still I feel a compelling need to say Hello World! I've started this blog on blogger because I never had an active blog on blogger services. I'm not new to blogging but new to blogger services. I've been doing search optimization for long and so there is an unavoidable keyword stuffing that I do on whatever I write. Including my exams nowadays. Its an easy way yo fill your exam paper.I've been using wordpress as my blogging platform for long and its a great software in all ways.

What is this blog all about? I've been doing niche blogging on SEO and stuff like that but never had a blog for myself to express myself. A blog speaks a lot about anyone, includes me. Its a personal brand strategy in professional language. Now am I here for branding myself on Internet, Yes its not the only purpose of this blog but a great deal of knowledge sharing could also happen. I also want to have a qualified set of visitors to my blog and that is a part of the marketing strategy during blogging.

What do I mean by sharing? Have you heard of this parable? "Human knowledge belongs to the world". I believe it. Are we born with all knowledge we have. It is what we took from this world in a lot of ways. This idea has taken me to the "Open" world of softwares. The Open Source development and the business model had made a lot of difference in the software marketplace.