Google has just introduced a new operator to search for synonyms. You use it by adding a tilde (~). If you search for "friend" google will look only for the word friend. What if you want google to also consider "friends" and "friendship" and similar words? type ~friend instead of only friend. That's it. Yes, sometimes life is really that simple!

Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. There are limits. It doesn't appear that you can edit an alert, either the query itself or the address to which it goes. Instead you'll need to delete the alert and start over with the new one. (Each alert e-mail comes with instructions for deleting that alert.) You may have a maximum of fifty alerts per e-mail address.
http://www.google.com/newsalerts
You can use the advanced search page on Google News provides a number of ways to fine tune a search to eliminate unwanted results. You can incorporate these techniques in your Google news alert settings by selecting the conditions you want on the Google News advanced search page, then clicking the "Google Search" button. When the results page appears, copy the text that appears in the search box on that page and paste it into the box on the Google News Alerts home page labeled "News search."
So, what kinds of topics make for interesting News Alerts?
Anything that's interesting to you is a good subject for a News Alert. Many News Alerts are set up by people who are:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• tracking medical advances
• getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team

I noticed a few minutes back (2nd August 03 at 2:00 A. M.) that when I type google.com I am automatically taken to google.co.in site. It means google has finally set up an office in India and probably have staff too! (Other than Google robot). But now (after an hour) when I go to google.com I am not redirected, instead I have an link to "Go to Google Australia" on the google home page! Why should I go to Australia to search for Indian Curry? Funny!
Well now after an hour I am finding a link to "Go to Google India" on google page. But it has stopped redirecting me to .co.in site. If I type the address, I can access google pages in Marathi, Hindi, Gujrati etc. I clicked on Marathi. It did not work. What all I see is non readable characters on the screen. If I click on Google in English, I am taken to the main google.com site and not google.co.in where I can change the language.
Ridiculous!

Google introduced several new gadgets in its popular toolbar for Web browsers on Thursday, June 26, 2003 that lets people block pop-up ads and easily update their blogs as they surf the Web.
Where will I get the google toolbar?
http://toolbar.google.com/index-beta.php
What changes should I make to the google toolbar?
Choose Options and then select the following features..
"Options" Tab
Select Page Info menu. It will allow you to check the "Cache Snapshot", similar pages and will allow you to translate the current page into English.
"More" Tab
Under Search Options:
Use Google as my default search engine in Internet Explorer - This is a simple way to set your Internet Explorer browser to search using Google if it can't find the URL you entered.
Under Web buttons:
Up - Enables you to navigate up one level in the site you're currently visiting.
Next & Previous - These buttons take you to the next or the previous result for the current search without returning to the Google search results page.
Category - If the page you are viewing has a related category in the Google Web Directory, clicking this button takes you to that category page.
"Autofill" Tab
The AutoFill tab in Toolbar Options enables you to automatically complete forms on the web.

Googling for a keyword is easy. Type "saddam Husain" and click on search. But what if you want to find what does the sites like cnn or bbc say about saddam? Each of them have their own search facility. But I don't have time to use the sites' search one by one. So I type Saddam Husain site:bbc.co.uk OR site:cnn.com OR site:news.com OR site:nytimes.com OR site:timesofindia.com to find more info only from those sources. Google, unfortunately, doesn't let you construct queries that are longer than 10 words long, which means that you can't search more than 9 sites at a time. Yahoo and All The Web both support searching through as many sites as you want.

Here are a few reasons...

• Its fast: The home page as well as searches are very fast.
• Relevant results: The first result is normally what you are looking for. You will hardly need to go to the second page!
• Simple design: There are a very few links and graphics on google home page as well as search page.
• Focus on search: Google is search. It's not a portal. At a time when all the websites were trying to provide everything (for e.g. mail, calendar) google focused on search. It was a risk, but it worked.

There are some reviews those say that google name itself has helped to create the brand. I don't agree. I have seen many people typing the wrong spelling to reach to google. for e.g. goggle.com, goglee.com

Thus the "confusing name" is the weak point of google. Now Yahoo has refrained it's search to take on google. It has introduced a new Yahoo! search on April 8, 2003.
http://search.yahoo.com/
Revolutionary concept:
Users can now save their preferences through their Yahoo! ID to use Yahoo! Search the way they want from any computer. for e.g. if I normally search for english pages and open search results in a new window, I will set it up in the preferences. Now whenever I search (while logged in) I will get the english pages only.
This revolutionary step towards user identification will immensely help yahoo to provide more relevant results. And I think this is going to be the next wave on the net after google.
Yahoo knows too much about me. My birth date, location, credit card number all is there in the yahoo database. Now all they need to do is find out the pattern of search queries by saving all what I am looking for. Try to learn what I mean and don't just throw results based on keywords typed.
Is it difficult? Not at all! Let's see if yahoo is willing to do it.

Google has bought Pyra Labs. Pyra Labs is the creator of the Blogger software and runs the blogger.com and blogspot.com services. In weblog fashion, founder Evan Williams reported the news on his weblog in the middle of the Live from the Blogosphere event.
This is one of the coolest things to happen internetwise in a long time.

http://www.kasei.com/google/browse
This lets you browse Google recursively, finding connections between sites. Enter any URL, and then follow the arrows to see other related sites.
For eg. if you type http://www.microsoft.com you will get intel, cisco adobe etc. You can click on the arrow next to intel to see other similar sites like HP, compaq.

Google has updated its index today for the month of January. It's call "Google Dance". You see different results on www1.google.com and www2.google.com during this process of few hours. I am happy that my site does not show up when you search for "advance unix commands". As I have removed those pages.

When you update information on your site it does not automatically update instantly in Google's index. Rather, Google's index is updated approximately once a month.
It's surprising that it takes them a whole month to update the links in the directory! I was not expecting this from a company like Google.

Here are a few webmasters around the world have to say about this process..

1. I'm having an issue with caching - I have corrected a problem on my site but it doesn't appear to have been corrected within Google. How often do you guys update? it's been fixed for nearly 3 weeks now...
   for shame.
2. I had my website modified before the apparent update (I assume it happened on August 15th looking at other websites) and my website did not update - it still has the dead links cached, and shows no update date under my description (which is incorrect as of now). Why is this happening, why do some sites not get updated and others do? When will my new site get updated?
3. Google seems to keep cached pages a long time. I have completely redone my site. How can I get them to update my site?
4. Prior to December 15th we had a construction site page up at our URL (flagpal.org). On Dec. 15th we published a 32-page web site, replacing the construction page with our new home page. As of today, January 1st, a Google search of our URL still brings up the construction page information. Is there a way to get Google to revisit the page and change the description?

Simply "not expectable". I will like to see the latest information instead of browsing through the Google Cache. I have updated my website around 15 days back and even today if I type shantanu oak in the Google search, I am getting the cached pages from my old site!