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Vertical Search Engines »

With number of websites, blogs and microblogging sites increasing, how effective are broad search engines like Google and Bing? Even with great page ranking algorithms, over time, I believe search results will become diluted. For example, if you type, “Hospitals in Bangalore”, you will probably see results from Google Local first, followed by Google web search results. In fact, you will see almost all the results duplicated. In order for me to get more effective results like hospitals by their speciality or even by reputation, I will probably have to give more keywords to Google. Now let us move to the mobile world, where typing is a pain in the bottom. What I foresee is that more and more vertical search engines will come up in the future, focussing on a particular domain and region. Searching at WebMD will most likely give better search results about a particular medical problem than doing a similar thing on typical search engines.

Another challenge to search engines are “content farms”. You can read more about content farms here. Here is an interesting article on the impact of content farms to search engines.

Amazon’s CloudFront now supports audio and video streaming! »

Amazon CloudFront now supports streaming of media files stored in Amazon S3. You can now use CloudFront to improve access to your static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so forth) as well as your streaming content. You can read more about it here.

Bing is now on iPhone! »

Microsoft’s Bing app is now on iPhone. After all, we are all good friends! You can read more about it including some screenshots here.

Google Public DNS – OpenDNS »

Google, on 12/3/2009, announced a new DNS resolving service for the public. DNS (Domain Name System) helps in resolving the URL (website address) you type into a IP address. There are other players in this market, like OpenDNS, which is really cool. Google says that because of its infrastructure, its service is faster and more secure.

Google is also in the Advertisement business. So I am not sure what kind of data Google collects whenever we use Google DNS. I am sure it would be tempting for Google to log information related to user usage of the web, like what websites they are visiting etc. But I am hoping that Google will continue to follow its ”Don’t be evil” approach.

You can read more about Google Public DNS here.

Broadband access, a legal right in Finland »

While France declared that internet access is a basic human right, Finland went a step ahead, by making broadband a legal right. Sounds like a cliche,  but internet has made the world flat. What interests me is the way different countries embrace this internet revolution. While some countries are trying to regulate internet access, some are trying to make it more open. In less than a decade, we will see a significant difference in these countries – the rate at which their children acquire knowledge, the efficiency of their businesses, transparency in the government etc.

While it is true that not-so-developed countries, do not have the luxury of making internet access a basic right, they should, however, see the long term benefits in mind and act accordingly. Who knows,  internet might further change the way education system works in the future. Not too far away, children probably won’t have to go to schools for as many years as we did, carrying heavy school bags and doing tons of home work. Hopefully, they will get more quality time and learn things quicker!

First Look at Microsoft Surface in India »

I attended a Microsoft ISV Executive Briefing Session yesterday at the Microsoft Signature Building, Bangalore. Surprisingly, they allowed us to take a peek at Microsoft Surface. It really was cool to see a computer reacting to hand gestures, instead of the mouse and the keyboard. But what surprised me was the size of it. It looked like a big black box with a glass on top of it. So, I am not sure if it can be wall mounted. It is more like a center table.I guess it had cameras or some thing inside the black box.

We were told that it is running on Vista with 4 GB of RAM. Anyway, I am glad that there is some innovation at this end. The UI was really great.

PHP redirection to HTTPS SSL »

If you wish to redirect one of your pages to HTTPS, even when user enters HTTP in the URL, you can use the following lines of code before you load your PHP page.

if (empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) || ($_SERVER['HTTPS']!=”on”))
{
$redirect= “https://”.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header(“Location:$redirect”);
}