Tag: Search

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News

The Most Dangerous Keywords Searched Online

McAfee recently released a report on The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms. The report describes how cybercriminals are making the most of the popular search terms online, and entice searchers to download files carrying malicious software, as a result, exposing their personal and financial data.

The reports also indicate that with the economic slowdown, malicious search results have risen, as the number of hits on free products, work from home options, etc. have increased.

Topping the list of some of the most high-risk searches on the Web today is “Screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1%. “Lyrics” and anything that includes “free” has the highest risk percentage of exposing the users to fraudulent websites and malicious software.

Statistics

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McAfee searched for more than 2,600 popular keywords and more than 413,000 unique URLs (web addresses). Here are some highlights of the report:

  • The categories with the worst maximum risk profile were lyrics keywords (26.3%) and phrases that include the word “free” (21.3%). If a consumer landed at the riskiest search page for a typical lyrics search, one of four results would be risky.
  • The categories with the safest risk profile were health-related search terms and searches concerning the recent economic crisis.
  • The riskiest set of keyword variations was “screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1% and an average risk of 34.4%.
  • Surprisingly, searches using the keyword “Viagra,” a popular keyword that is a frequent “visitor” in our spam filters, yielded the fewest risky sites.
  • Keywords popular in non-US countries were significantly riskier than those popular in the United States. 14 countries had keyword lists that exposed users to a higher maximum risk than average, including the Czech Republic (14.2%) and Brazil (12.1%). And 12 countries were overall riskier than the average, including Mexico (1.9%) and India (1.8%).

Work from home scams

The chance to make good money while you “work from home” lures many people. And with the economic slowdown, and with many people losing their jobs, people end up giving these scams a try, which is a huge gamble. Work from home searches can be as much as four times more risky than the average for all popular terms. And on average, these searches are 50% more risky than other popular terms.

So what have you been searching for online lately? Unfortunately, today, mere reliance on intuition or knowledge of past risks is not enough to stay safe on the web. Even technically sophisticated users are at risk. It is very important to have security suite installed on your PC and use safe search tools. Let’s be extra careful!

Link: McAfee report

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Reviews

Navify: More than just a simple Wikipedia search

Here’s your chance to get the most out of Wikipedia. With Navify, a new online service, you could enjoy Wikipedia with images, videos and comments!

Navify is a visual encyclopedia that provides an interface for viewing not only Wikipedia articles, but also helps in viewing related media that goes with them. It is built on Wikipedia’s platform.

For example, you could:

  • Listen to full length songs via music videos from an article
  • Watch movie trailers, documentaries or TV clips
  • Browse photo galleries of celebrities and current events

For instance, a search on The Beatles gives us the following:

The related Articles, Videos and Images (along with the option to comment.)

Articles:

Images:

Videos:

You might want to keep this in mind the next time you are searching for something online. Navify could help you save time and effort, and even give you even better results.

Link: Navify

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Tips

Use Google For Direct Downloads Instead Of Torrents

Torrents are fun. Downloading from swarms however has a negative side. The download speed may be capped, there are port forwarding issues. Upload is mandatory and you may not have a good seeders to peers ratio.

Continue reading “Use Google For Direct Downloads Instead Of Torrents”
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News

Search Historic Images using Google Life Photo Archives! [New Feature]

Recently Google revamped the looks and features of its Image Search Engine, by introducing, photo search option. But this evening, when I landed onto Google Image search, I found Google featuring another new feature – Life Photo Archive which claims to search the best images having historic importance, doesn’t matter how old the face/image is.

It claims to search even for photos of the 1750s. According to a statement of Google, this initiative is in collaboration with the Life team.

Here is what Google has to say about this new feature:

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

So, if you believe this statement by Google, just go and view the images that were never hosted before, on the world wide web.

Links: Google Image Search | Life Photo Archive

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News

Google Showing AdSense Ads in Image Search Results Permanently!

Sometime back I came across few stories suggesting Google displaying AdSense ads in their popular image search results. Many bloggers captured screenshots of AdSense ads being served in Google Image search results last year. Even I saw AdSense ads sometimes back but today almost every image search I made displayed AdSense ads.

Another thing I have noticed for most of the queries ads are being displayed on page 1 of image search result only. Also ads are shown only at the top (may be considering width of my widescreen monitor! :P)

Anyway below are some screenshots of Google image Search for some top queries. It looks like AdSense for Image search results have less takers as only one ad slot out of three/four is filled most of the time.

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Tips

Google Quick Search Box for Mac

Google released a new open source app for Mac Leopard users – Quick Search Box, based on interface and functionality of one of most famous app for Mac, Quicksilver.

Google Quick Search Box makes Google searching easier. By default, you have to press cmd key twice to bring search box on top. Apart from searching it provides many features of Quicksilver like launching apps, gadgets, address book contacts, opening files and folders in finder, etc.

Reason for similarity between Quicksilver and Google’s Quick Search Box is Nicholas Jitkoff, Quicksilver’s creator and now one of the developers of Quick Search Box.

Unique feature for Quick Search Box which I liked is integration with Google Docs and Picasa web. You can add any number of Google accounts whose docs and pics will be fetched into search results.

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Two advanced features I like are:

  1. Type (TAB) to restrict your search to the selected results:
      "wikipedia.com (TAB) toy" will return matches from wikipedia
  2. Type (TAB) to see actions for the selected results:
      "CONTACTNAME (TAB) email" will show the "Email" action

You can control search places and other settings by visiting preferences.

Those Mac users who finds Quicksilver more advanced, can enjoy this less simplified and enough powerful tool form Google. More information about this cool offering form Google can be found here.

Link: Google Quick Search Box for the Mac

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News

Google Image Search Just Got Even Better

Few days ago, Google announced the launch of a new feature in their Image Search Engine, using which one can search exclusively for faces and later on they released photo search feature. But now, they realized to do something even better and the output is what I am going to write about.

Now Google have included features to search for Line Drawings and Clip arts as well. So, if you are looking for some specific formats or types of images, then you can now easily locate the images you are looking for using these new options in Google Image Search.

To check out these new options, I personally tried searching images using the different options for the Keyword ‘Christmas’ and here are those images.

 

If you remember, few days ago I mentioned a feature in Live image search using which we were able to find images using similar images. This new updates by Google, seems to be a reply to those guys at Microsoft. 🙂

Link: Google Image Search

Related: Use Images to Find Similar Images

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Tips

Now Easily Search Your Friends On Orkut!

Actually this is not technically a new feature Orkut has introduced, but this recent small change will make an old feature more usable for sure.

As you can see below, there is a new search box on your Orkut Homepage now called search friends in addition to old search orkut…

Now lets do a quick analysis of these two search boxes:

Search Orkut

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This is good for searching entire orkut. Results are gathered from all orkut profiles, communities and also topics posted in communities.

It support AJAX interface or in simple words, suggest results as you start typing. Suggested results are restricted to friends, so this can be used to search friends as well!

Below are 2 sample searches I made. You can see how easy to find your friend using old box too, if you are searching by their name.

Search Friends

You might be wondering why do you need this as we just used old search-box to search our friends nicely. Well if you are impressed with AJAX-based-suggest feature then its available with this new search box too!

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But as I highlighted above, old search orkut box can be used only if you are searching your friends by their name. It doesn’t work if you want to use different search criteria.

Consider this… You are free this weekend and like to go for a new date. So why not search some good options in your city, right in your Orkut friend list!  😉

If you get 189 results like me you can narrow it by using additional keywords! Check now…

<p></p>    <p><a href="https://devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2008/12/image19.png"><img style="border-right: 0px;border-top: 0px;margin-left: 0px;border-left: 0px;margin-right: 0px;border-bottom: 0px" height="354" alt="image" src="https://devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2008/12/image-thumb17.png" width="254" align="right" border="0" /></a> One things I have noticed with this <strong>“Search Friend”</strong> feature is that results are slightly older. Some people I have removed from my friend-list 3-4 days back are still appearing while some recently added friends are missing. </p>    <p>Another thing I didn’t like is placement of two search boxes. They are too close to each other, disturbing aesthetics of homepage where you spend most of your time. Also the width of search friend box is more than needed. I found two ways where search friends box will look better which I have highlighted in mock screenshot at the right.</p>    <p>Finally, search friends feature is important for orkut users who have large number of friends. I myself have more than 650+ friends. I just can’t imagine browsing through all of them manually!</p>    <p>So this is our complete analysis of new search friends box. Actually this feature was there, without AJAX-based-suggest, from long time on <a href="http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#FriendsList.aspx">friend-list page</a>, reachable by clicking <strong>“view-all”</strong> link. <em>(not highlighted, but can be seen at bottom in screenshot at the right)</em></p>    <p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw/enjoy-holiday-season-on-orkut/">Orkut Apps and Features you can use this holiday season</a></p>
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Tips

Use Google Search as it was in 2001!

In honor of their 10th Birthday, Google put oldest search engine index available online for use which dates back to 2001. This means you can use Google search as it was in 2001. It is not just home page or logo but also search result will be served from 2001.

Just out of curiosity I tried searching “Rahul Bansal” but I failed to get any result pointing to me! This is quite expected as in 2001, I did not know much about computers and Internet. I got my first computer at the end of 2002 and it was 2006, when I created this blog and my first web presence. More about this is posted on about page.

It was nice searching back in time. I experienced true time-travel as it was entirely different world. Of course, I could not follow most of the result. Search results are served from wayback machines archives.

If you are a techie or student of computer science/engineering, you will also like this powerpoint presentation which describes Google’s System Architecture. I had case study of Google as part of my M.Tech. course. Unfortunately, I failed to find other presentations which have details about Pagerank algorithm and general working of Search engine. Anyway below is what I found, rest you can always Google! 😉

If you are a Google fan, I am sure you will enjoy it.  Just out of curiosity, wanted to know if anyone here used Google Search back in 2001. 🙂

Link: Google search in 2001

Related: Interactive Timeline of Google History