Search

Who likes advertisements? "Not me", I hear you say? Well that's why I installed Firefox and then installed Adblock Plus (and recommended that you should too in a previous post). A recent article brought this little known plugin into the limelight. The predominant business model in the internet world depends on revenue generated from advertisements. This means that companies earn when someone clicks on an advertisement shown on their website (you must have seen the 'Ads by Google' box on many websites). Most search engines earn by showing targeted advertisements alongside your search results in the hope that you will find the advertisement interesting enough to click on it (look for the 'Sponsored links' bar to the right of your search results). In both cases, the advertisement provider charges the company whose advertisement is shown, and when the advertisement is shown on a website, passes a part of the cost to the owner of the website. You can read more about Google Adsense and Adwords here. Google raked up USD 10.4 billion in FY 2006 and has earned USD 7.4 in Q1+Q2 2007 only from advertising (source).

With so much at stake, Adblock poses a potential problem and though people are not shouting from the tops of Manhattan buildings about it, it gets popular by the day. Some cheeky person started a website 'WhyFirefoxisBlocked.com' to encourage people to block Firefox users from visiting their site and even provided a script to automate this. The online community got back by creating a parody site 'WhyisFirefoxBlocked.com'.

Getting back to the point, Google (and many other companies for that matter) stands to lose a lot if Adblock Plus gets popular. But, lets face it - the average Joe internet user does not even know that Firefox exists, let alone Adblock Plus. Heck, there are numerous tools for blocking advertisements directly in Internet Explorer. But, no one seems to be interested in using them. Like television, people are dulled into believing that advertisements are a part of the Internet and nothing can be done about it.

Personally, I don't mind Google's style of advertisements and even if Adblock Plus would let these through, I'll view them gladly, even click on some if the text is appealing. But it's those flashing banners that declare that I've won 10000 bucks and the laughing monkey that I have to punch to claim my bonus prize that drive me nuts - and no I will never use the next generation of smileys - I don't even chat. While I'm at it, I'd also like to tell Yahoo Mail to take a crash course in subtlety - the huge banners really annoy me (of course, I haven't seen them since a long time ;).

What do you think? Should ad-blocking tools be allowed? Leave a comment to let us know.

Ever been in a situation when a page that you would like to view is not available, or has been changed and the information that you need has been removed? Ever wondered how the design of pages that you now see have varied across the years or how the products and services that we use have evolved over time?

Fortunately, the Internet also has the solution. There are a number of caching sites available. The most easily accessible is the Google Cache. Just type "cache:<sitename>" (without the quotes, replace <sitename> with the site you wish to access) in the Google search box (or click on the "Cached" link that follows a Google search result. You can also select the "Cached Snapshot of Page" button in your Google Toolbar). The Google Cache only offers the recentmost version that was crawled by the GoogleBot. Older versions are overwritten.

Another alternative is the Wayback Machine offered by Archive.org. Archive.org caches sites regularly and indicates when changes have occured on the site. This service is really useful for studying the evolution of a product/website. For example, here you can checkout how Google's homepage has changed over the years (something that I witnessed live through the years). You can also see how some products/companies have evolved and view historical data that is no longer provided by the websites.

A third, and somewhat geeky, method is to use the Coral Cache. Just affix ".nyud.net:8090" to the complete URL you want to visit. For example, to visit the cached copy of the Google homepage, point your browser to "http://www.google.com.nyud.net:8090". All links appearing on cached pages are automatically relinked to the corresponding cached page. Though very extensive, Coral Cache is very slow as compared to the above options. It offers the recentmost working version of a website.

There also some speciality sites that mirror particular and fast updating sites and their links. For example, MirrorDot caches the content and first links of SlashDot and DuggMirror does that for Digg. There are also some extensions for Firefox that insert links to the above mentioned caches when and where you require. Let me know in case you are interested in finding out more about these extensions by leaving a comment.

Yahoo released a Web 2.0 version of their homepage this week. You can read more about Web 2.0 and the technology that drives it in my previous post. There is a lot of critique regarding the concept of Web 2.0 on the Internet. I don't much care about what you call it, but the kind of interfaces that people are churning out using AJAX are worth praising.

After Yahoo! email, Yahoo!'s home page has also undergone a makeover. It is currently in preview mode, and may go live soon. Here are my initial thoughts:

Pros:

• The overall length of the page has reduced. The earlier page was quite cluttered. and long.
• The roll-over Mail, Messenger, Launch, etc. buttons to the right are quite useful. Very easy to use, and don't take up space until you want them to.
• The dynamic shifting between different search options (web/images/audio/local etc.) also appears helpful as compared to Google where each option has a separate starting page. (This has been a part of Yahoo's interface for quite some time now.)
• One hidden feature is that the navigation pane on the left is dynamic. Buttons that you click on more often will grow in size to help you locate them.
• The tabbed interface for all services is very intuitive.
• Currently, there are NO advertisements.

Cons:

• Behind all the hoopla, Yahoo! search remains the same.
• I hope they make the homepage customizable (something like My Yahoo!). There are things on this webpage that I will *never* use. Things like the small business portal or the Marketplace tab. This does not mean allowing me to change the color and theme of the page (you can do that by clicking on the 'Page Options' link on the top right).
• Considering the fact that very few people use Yahoo! search, Yahoo! will have to figure out other ways to attract people to their homepage.
• Yahoo has this bad habit of showing obscenely huge and glaring advertisements. Let's hope they figure out a way to tone this down.

The homepage might not be the turning point of Yahoo!'s popularity or market share (22% in April 2006). However, Yahoo! might just have set the ball rolling for dynamic interfaces for portals, where Yahoo has always been the pioneer. It will not be surprising to see other websites follow suit.

Google's latest granted patent (US Patent No. 7,027,987) describes searching by voice. The basic methodology is as follows:

• Voice input of a user is captured (say from a microphone or during a phone     call).
• Probable words are extracted from the voice input using speech recognition.
• The probable words and variants are searched for in Google.
• Probable results are presented to the user.

The speech recognition can be customized based on the locale and/or accents. The results can also be categorized based on the probable words.

I'm a little confused about how Google will implement voice searching. In the presence of a keyboard, entering information would be more precise (albeit a bit slower) as compared to voice input. The accuracy of the results would, of course, be much better. I have yet to use a speech recognition engine that can construct a sentence based on what I say.

The obvious implementation appears to be in mobile devices such as cellphones, PDAs and the recently launched Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which still offer clumsy keypads. Further, this service would be most useful for single answer searches - such as flight tracking, FedEx package tracking, currency conversion, etc.

Maybe someday, Google will be able to tell you where your car keys are. All you will have to do is to ask the right question.

Point to be noted: Monica Henzinger, one of the inventors, looks surprisingly like one of my friends.
Further reading: US Patent No. 7,027,987