Here comes the end of one more product by Yahoo! Buzz will remain silent from today in India.

Yahoo! Buzz was started three years back on February 26, 2008. Yahoo! Buzz was a community-based news article website, heavily derived from Digg, which combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control.

@Yahoo! Buzz users were allowed to share links, stories, images etc. It created a hopes that it would drive larger traffic to their site and would give them an advantage over larger online media companies such as Google or MSN, which are Yahoo!’s largest competitors in terms of search engines that provide services and web features to its customers.

One interesting feature of Buzz was it allowed users to modify the content after submission also.

But all these came to end when leaked slide showed Yahoo! Killing Delicious and Yahoo! Buzz.

Well Yahoo has already disconnected Buzz in US on April 22, 2011. But here comes the announcement to kill Buzz in India,

Well that is clear. Say bye-bye to Buzz. Maybe Google will join them soon as Google Buzz is performing very low when compared to Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit.

Please share your thoughts on this.

Browsers, Softwares, Operating Systems, search engines…. Everyday something new is happening around the world of computers. Someone goes up..Someone suffers..Someone even gets some shock!

October statistics of browsers and operating systems are out and as usual some shock is there for you all. Tech18 team has kept an eye on all the latest buzz about browsers and many a times you guys found Google Chrome as our hot topic.

Well there is a reason why we were updating more about same topic. Here we divided October Browser and Operating system statistics as 3 divisions,

#1. Windows XP market share dips below 60%

As you all know Microsoft removed Windows XP from retail shops on October 22 and will continue to support it till 2014. Microsoft’s IE strategy may not be working at this time, but at least the company is seeing Windows XP removing itself.

Market Share of XP continues to lose about 1 point of market share every month. Net Applications listed the OS with a share of 59.07% in October and StatCounter listed XP with 53% market share. Windows 7 started catching market share with steady increment on market share.

#2. Internet Explorer 9 – The Beta King

Shocked right? Obviously. October browser statistics are out and IE blog happily updated about their shares. Official IE blog stated,

Today, with the release of Net Applications’ monthly browser share report, we’re pleased to see that in addition to 10 million downloads, 0.32% of customers worldwide and 1.46% of Windows 7 users are using Internet Explorer 9 as their daily browser.

We must say, Windows XP users are really started upgrading to Windows 7 and reduce in Windows XP share boosting Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9 share. According to Net Applications, IE 9 Beta usage share on Windows 7 grew about 2.5 times, from 0.61% in September to 1.46% for the month of October.

Shocking news is Chrome 8 canary builds and Firefox 4 beta are well behind IE9! IE remains the top dog, with Net Applications 59.3% and StatCounters’ 49.21% in October.

#3. Chrome and its stable share

The only browser that is seeing some movement, in either direction, is Google Chrome, while Internet Explorer, Firefox and the other popular browsers are largely static relative to their market share.

Chrome is the fastest-changing browser since by default updates are downloaded and installed automatically when the browser or computer is restarted. Net Applications released an illustrative graph showing just how fleeting the life of a Chrome version is: six weeks in the case of Chrome 6.

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These are some of the notable changes in October’s market share Net Applications and StatCounter. Well there were some good news and some shocking news. And many new things are expected in few days with Chrome 8, Chrome 9, Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are getting final touch and Chrome 9 already in build stage.

Watch out this space for many more updates!

Do we have to wish Google? Will Google come to our page to crawl if we wish Yes! Let’s wish together with sky touching tone “Happy Birthday Google” Frankly speaking, we are a bit confused from where shall we start explaining about this big boss, Mr. Search Engine Google.

As we all know Google is father of all search engines which has millions of websites indexed in it. Google started it journey with just one popular product search engine and today we can see it has spread its wings to each and every place.

If we start about explaining about Google we may cross the numbers of indexed pages in Google! But on this big occasion we thought everything about Google in 12 points. Hope you will like these 12 points, the life history of Google

1. When “Google Guys” met!

In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about most everything during this first meeting.

Later in March 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford came together to work on research project in Stanford Digital Library Project. Initially Larry Page started exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web and named it as “BackRub”. Later Brin joined him on this project as they knew each other for sometime. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.

Tech tip: A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

2. When Garage became Google Inc.,

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Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.

3. Googol to Google

The name “Google” originated from a misspelling of “googol,” which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. But Enid Blyton, best children’s story teller  used the word decades earlier in “Google Bun” – Chapter IX, The Magic Faraway Tree. The verb, “Google,” was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, “To use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.”

4. 26, June 2000!

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We placed apostrophe (!) in the end to signify something about Yahoo! On 26, June 2000, Yahoo! Inc. (called as Nasdaq: YHOO) and Google Inc. announced they have entered into an agreement that makes Google, one of the fastest growing search engines on the Web, Yahoo!’s® default search results provider.

Google announced the first billion-URL index and therefore Google becomes the world’s largest search engine. In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some market share, yet Yahoo!’s move highlighted Google’s own distinctiveness.

5. Other than Search Engine

Before speaking about what was the second product by Google after the world’s largest search engine, let’s speak about its brief history.

Google Guys Brin and Page were against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an “advertising funded search engines” model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.

Got to know which was the second product by Google? Not yet? That’s fine

On October 23, 2000 Google for a first time released something other than search engine. Google launched AdWords with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback.

In the same year released its third product, Google toolbar to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Google said “It’s a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google homepage.

Tech link: A to Z Google Products.

6. Eric Schmidt the first successor

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On March 26, 2001 Google Inc. announced that Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, 45, has joined Google’s board of directors as chairman. Schmidt succeeds Sergey Brin, Google’s founding chairman and current president. Schmidt’s appointment is effective immediately. Google also announced that Schmidt has made a significant financial investment in the company.

August 6, 2001 Google announced that Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, 46, has been named chief executive officer. Schmidt, who was appointed chairman of Google’s board of directors in March 2001, succeeds Larry Page, Google’s founding chief executive officer. Page was named President, Products and Sergey Brin, the company’s founding president, was named President, Technology.

7. Gmail and its 5 years Beta tag!

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Gmail or Google mail is also one of the best products by Google. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004. Google had provided 50 invitations per users who registered in the beginning. Gmail became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still in beta status at that time.

Finally the service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009. Gmail would be the first online email service with one gigabyte of storage, and the first to keep emails from the same conversation together in one thread, similar to an Internet forum. By the end of December 2009, it has 176 million users monthly.

8. Doodle for Google

The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was first designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. Hwang has been designing the Google Doodles ever since.

On Friday, May 21, 2010, Google created a doodle to celebrate the 30th birthday of Pac-Man. It is their first (possibly the world’s first) playable logo. The logo contains an accurate recreation of the Pac-Man game that can be played in a browser (it contains 255 levels).

9. Google and its Acquisition

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Till 2001, Google was working solely and had got a good reputation in web world. But from February 2001, Google started acquiring other companies to make its share still stronger. Till date, Google has acquired 79 companies! First to acquire was Deja’s Usenet business to implement on Google Groups.

These are the top 12 important companies acquired by Google and integrated in its products,

(Date-Company-Business-Google’s Implementation on)

1. July 13, 2004 – Picasa – Image organizer-Picasa and Blogger
2. August 17, 2005 – Android – Mobile Software – Android
3. December 20, 2005 – AOL – Broadband Internet Access – Search
4. January 17, 2006 – dMarc Broadcasting – Advertising – AdSense
5. October 9, 2006 – YouTube - Video Sharing – YouTube
6. April 13, 2007 – DoubleClick – Online Advertising – AdSense
7. June 3, 2007 - FeedBurner - Web feed – FeedBurner
8. July 9, 2007 – Postini – Communications security – Gmail
9. November 9, 2009 – AdMob – Mobile advertising – Mobile
10. July 1, 2010 – ITA Software – Travel technology – Search
11. August 5, 2010 – Slide.com – Social gaming – Social Networking
12. August 15, 2010 – Like.com – Visual Search Engine – Search

10. Google and its Rivals

It’s obvious that if you start growing you will get many rivals in line. Similarly, after Google has started spreading its wings in many fields other than search engine, they had to face  n-number of rivals.

Here is the list of top 12 big rivals which Google is facing now,

1. Amazon – E-books and Cloud Computing
2. Apple – Smart phones, Online music and Ad-world
3. AT&T – Smart phones
4. Facebook – Social Networking
5. HuLu – Video Streaming
6. IBM - Collaboration tools
7. Microsoft – Search engine, Cloud Computing, browser
8. Nokia – Smart phones
9. Yahoo – Search Engine and email
10. Mozilla – Browser
11. Cisco – collaborative platform, WebEx, and superior VOIP service
12. Twitter - Social Networking and Blogging

11. Chrome – Day before Yesterday

Confused by title? It’s obvious! Day before yesterday just means that, Google Chrome was first released on September 2, 2008 and day before yesterday Google Chrome turned 2 years old. Well similar to Google search engine, Chrome browser also showed great improvement in browsers field.

On August, 2009, Google Chrome overtook Apple Inc., Safari browser for a first time to claim third place in worldwide market share. By then Chrome never stopped growing and we never saw the market share coming down as well.

There are many reasons for Chrome to grow like this. Firstly the newly planned strategy to release all new version of Chrome in every six weeks which give Chrome 7 and 8 by this year end. Secondly the ultimate features in Chrome 6 and awesome improvements in upcoming Chrome 7(which is in Build phase now). Thirdly, like Firefox, Google includes of extensions / add-ons for Chrome which are worth trying and increases the productivity.

12. Finally Google!

Finally we reached our goal of 12 points about Google history This point is totally dedicated to Google. We saw there are many number of products by Google. But does anyone know how many products Google has produced from its birth? Answer is Google has given 45+ products.

But out of these 45+ products, many products like Google Wave have been shut down by Google due to some reasons. Still Google is got lot of changes in 2010. We saw for a first time Google removed shadow from its logo. Its Android phone new features made people to shift from iPhone. New search button was added, fastest Chrome Browsers, acquired many companies to setup new Social Networking site to compete Facebook.

Well there are lots of things happening in Google Inc., and we can expect more from it.

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Here we end our brief and 12 points of  Google’s life. As we said before we can’t explain whole Google in just a single page and in single article. Maybe even we wont be knowing many things. Still we tried our best to explain.

Please wish our Birthday boy Mr. Search Engine “Google“. Do you think we have to say Google to keep growing? Share what you feel about Google. Let others also gain more knowledge as Google does

Well the much awaited Chrome 6 beta version is out in market. Month before the release of final version of Chrome 6, Google has released the beta version for testing.

The interface has made significant evolutionary steps to a much cleaner design and there are notable performance improvements. Chrome 6 broke cover for the first time on May 16 and it has remained, as far as we know, in the longest developer phase of any Chrome version since version.1 so far.

Well here we got the ultimate features / changes in Chrome 6 after comparing with previous version.

1. Default Browser

Google has changed “Set Google Chrome as my default browser” option. Previously chrome used to ask this option after installation. But now the option is available before downloading!

2. Chrome Startup

Google has made it so easy for users that, they can start using chrome right after the installation. Previous versions of chrome used to take lot of time in importing bookmarks and settings after installation.

3. Select the Search Engine

Previous versions of chrome used to provide Google as a default search engine. The latest version give full access to user in selecting default search engine. Chrome provides 3 options Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. User can select any one of it.

4. 3-in-1 button

In place of the Go button (which was positioned to the right of the URL bar) you now see the star icon to bookmark a page or edit an existing bookmark. The stop button has been merged with the reload button: As long as a page is loading you will see the option to stop the process. If the load process is complete, the button changed dynamically to a reload option.

5. Home button removed

The home button is deactivated by default in the latest beta version. The home button, which however, you can easily live without, if you configure a custom start page. Simply open a new tab and you are “at home”.

6. List view mode removed

Google has removed list view mode for the most visited sites. Now user can see most visited sites only in thumbnail mode.

7. History and Downloads

Google has added one click access for history and downloads list. Now user won’t take any pain in pressing CTRL+H and CTRL+J options.

8. Smarter URL bar

Chrome 6 now shows content symbols in the URL bar as soon as you begin typing. Chrome tries to figure out what you are looking for and will offer several options – search queries, URLs, search results in your favorites or your browsing history as well as an option to send the query directly to your search engine. Every option is marked with a symbol.

9. Updated zooming option

Chrome 6 has a smoother zoom in and zoom out option. Google has reduced to single property button. The Page menu has been merged into the Tools menu. Now user can zoom in and out the page with just a mouse clicks.

10. Cut, Copy and Paste

Google has tried maximum to reduced effort and time of the user. It has added shortcuts to many options which previously user used to access with keyboard shortcuts. Google has added cut, copy and paste buttons in options menu in chrome 6.

11. Clear Browsing Data

Google 6 has added one click clear browsing data feature. Previous versions of Chrome used to take lot of time in just navigating to this option. User has to go to Chrome options, navigate to “Under the Hood” menu and then click on there was a option to delete browsing data.

In Chrome 6 there is a shortcut added in Tools option under properties, as shown in the image. And the keyboard shortcut “SHIFT+CTRL+Delete” will also does the same thing.

12. Task manager link

Google has also added a link to open task manager rather than clicking SHIFT+ESC keys.

13. Native PDF

Chrome 6 will integrate a native PDF reader, so you do not need to install the Acrobat Reader anymore. Also, you don’t have to worry about security updates anymore, as Google will update the PDF reader, when necessary, automatically.

14. Security Information

Google has spent lot of time in updating features in Chrome 6. Just before the URL, user can see globe symbol which provides the security information about the website they have visited.

This feature provides 3 informations,

1. Identity: specifies who has owned this site. And also briefs whether the site is verified by any other company.
2. Connection: explains about the encryption and compression information.
3. Your last visit to the website.

15. Shorter URL

If you observe in the above image, we have opened Tech18.com and the URL is not containing either HTTP or WWW. This is one the notable feature or change in Chrome 6.

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Chrome 6 has made overall speed improvements and is now close to be breaking the 300 ms barrier in Sunspider on test system. The current beta clocked in at 311.8 ms, but we have seen previous developer versions that posted results as good as 301.2 ms. Chrome 6 currently has a tag of fastest browser even after the IE 9 preview 4 by Microsoft.

As of now we can strongly say Google Chrome 6 is staying on top with all new cool features. While Chrome 5 was mainly a performance update and Chrome 6 will further improve Chrome’s JavaScript performance. Chrome 6 is really about UI changes and a completely revised form auto-fill feature that lets users define what information should be entered in certain fields.

Last but not least, Chrome 6 supports all the extensions which were available to previous versions. So no need to wait for builders to make add-ons ready to latest version as in case of Firefox

Download Chrome 6 Beta Today

Did you like these features and Chrome 6 is really best when compared to Firefox 4 and IE 9? Share what you feel Cheers!

Welcome back to Tech18.com,today let us know certain things to to write a blog post effectively. A well written blog post can boost your site traffic if done in wright way.

Blogs are becoming popular day by day just because of content. So its necessary for us to know how to write a blog post effectively which can attract more visitors and make a successful blog. Below are few points which are required to know before writing a blog post.

• Post Title
  The title of the post must catch attention of the all users. This is the first reason why your post fails to get traffic. The title of the post must be unique ,creative and specific , So be careful and smart in choosing the title of your post.

• Post Body
  Don’t just start off with your post,write some facts or sentences which makes the visitor to read it further more.This will make you article more interesting.

• Short and Sweet
  The post must not be very much brief ,as the users don’t like lengthy post.But if you are very confident enough of your lengthy post then don’t try to make it short if not so try to explain whatever you want to in short paragraph.

• Post Images
  As picture speaks a thousand of words , it would be nice if you add some pics in your posts or articles to make the readers understandable in a clarity.

• Post links
  It’s a good habit of linking some niche keywords of your post to other posts of your blog by hyperlinks.This makes the user to also visit other section of your blog.

• Post Tags
  These are keywords which you have to insert in your blog post tag options (WordPress ) or labels for blogspot. These can be generated manually by using words that a user would search in the search engines and these keywords must be used in your post to match the keywords.

• Post Grammar
  A very major step in writing a blog post. Never commit any grammatical mistakes and misspelling of words  in your posts , else it gives a bad impact to the user who is reading it. So just after you finish writing the post use spell check function.[/stextbox]

Commensts are Welcome!!!!!!. If you fell any more points need to be needed then use the comment section .Thank  you

Welcome back to Tech18.com,here are some must have wordpress SEO plugins  to seo optimize your wordpress blog.

• All in One SEO Pack : One of the most widely used wordpress plugin, not only the name of the plugin is good but also its features are great.It optimizes your wordpress blog for SEO and optimizes your titles for search engines. It checks and avoids duplicate content in your blog. Click here to download this plugin.

• SEO Smart Links :SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.It automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Click here to download this plugin.

• Platinum SEO Pack : This plugin is similar to that of All in One SEO Pack but with some more features.It has options of index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, nosnippet meta tags to any post/page of your blog.It also gives 301 redirection automatically. Click here to download this plugin.

• SEO Friendly Images : This plugin automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well. Click here to download this plugin.

• SEO Post Link : This plugin makes your post link short and SEO friendly. It removes common words that are unnecessary for search engine optimization of your blog post link. Click here to download.

• SEO Tag Cloud Widget : This plugin displays the tag cloud in a SEO-friendly way, using a search engine optimized html markup. It looks the same as the default WordPress Cloud Tag, but with an optimized html markup. You can put it to your sidemenu. Click here to Download.

• 404 SEO Plugin : This simple plugin will give you a customized, smart ‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message. It will automatically display links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found. Click here to download.

• SEO Super Comments :  This plugin will create a new dynamic page on the blog for each user commment.These commnets are crawled by the search engines and your site’s index is visible to search engines.Click here to download.

• HeadSpace2: This is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.Click here to download.

[stextbox id="info"]Comments are welcome [/stextbox]