Other than search, there are some more interesting uses of the search bar as well.

1. Avoid Spelling Mistakes

If you writing an email inside the browser and are unsure about the spelling of some word, you can simply type that misspelled word in the search box.

Google will immediately offer you the correct spelling as a query suggestion that you can copy-paste into your email message.

2. Clean-up Formatting from Copied Text

When copying content from a web page into an email message, you can first paste that text into your browser’s search box and then copy it to the clipboard.

This will automatically convert the rich text into plain text removing all the hyperlinks and other formatting that you don’t want to add to your email message.

3. Correct Grammar Errors

The search box can also help you fix grammatical errors in your sentences.

Say you sometimes get confused between words like ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ or between ‘advise’ and ‘advice.’ In that case, just type the whole sentence in the search box and it should save you from making that silly grammatical error again.

4. Search Box as a Notepad

The search bar can be used like a notepad as it automatically stores all your search queries until you clear them manually.

This is so useful because you can easily save pieces of text in the search bar that you may repeatedly need inside your browser later.

For instance, I have an airway bill number of a package that I can store in the search box by performing a search only once. Later, when I am on the shipping company’s website to track the package status, I can easily retrieve that number by simply typing the first few characters in the search box — there’s no need for me to hunt for the email that has that tracking number.

5. As your Password Manager

Ever since my Gmail account got hacked, I have switched to a very long and complex password. Now it may be hard for someone to guess that password but it is equally hard for me to type that lengthy string correctly especially when everything in a password field is represented as asterisk characters.

I therefore store this ‘complex password’ in the search box. Whenever I am need my my Google Account credentials, I simply type the first few characters of the password in the search box, the string appears in the drop-down from where I can copy-paste it into the password box. Here’s a demo:

This method saves time but, obviously, it is not recommended for people who work on a shared computer.

Also see: Send Commands from the Address Bar

Do More with your Browser’s Search Box

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

This poster has a list of top 500 common passwords that you should absolutely avoid using with your online and offline accounts.

A printed version of the password poster is available on Etsy. Thanks @BrainPicker.

Related: Calculate the Strength of your Passwords Online

[Poster] Common Passwords You Should Avoid

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Know the Exact Signal Strength

The bars give an approximate idea of the signal strength but, looking at the bars, you won’t be able to determine minor fluctuations in signal that may occur when you move across different rooms in your house or when you accidentally cover the cellular antenna of the phone with your hands.

There’s however an easy ‘cheat code’ that you may use to determine the ‘actual’ network signal strength on your BlackBerry.

Hold down the ALT key on your BlackBerry and type the letters NMLL in the same sequence — the bar graph indicating signal strength will convert into real numbers indicating the exact strength in dBm.

You can key in the same sequence to return to Bar Graph mode. The signal range should be anywhere between –40 dBm and –100 dBm for you to send and receive data /calls. The higher the number, the better the signal.

Blackberry and Antenna-Gate

Also, while you are in the number mode, try covering your BlackBerry device with your hands and observe the signal strength – it if drops, it’s the same antenna problem.

Here’s another cheat code that will help you completely test your BlackBerry. [via BlackBerry's Facebook page]

Find the Actual Signal Strength on your BlackBerry

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

However, if a page on your site has multiple images, Google may have a problem identifying which among them is the most relevant image for the content of that page.

It is therefore suggested that web publishers include an image sitemap (see example) on their sites. This will not only give Google strong hints about your various images that should be included in image search results but will also help them identify the most important and relevant images on a particular page.

How to Generate Image Sitemaps

If you have a WordPress site, you can use the XML Sitemaps plugin to automatically generate an image sitemap with a click.

Once the sitemap is generated, you can either add it to your Webmaster Tools dashboard to inform Google about the new sitemap or you can use your robots.txt file to let them pick it on their own.

Images hosted elsewhere?

If your site images are hosted on Amazon S3 or any other domain /sub-domain that’s different from your blog’s domain, you may have to "prove" ownership of the host(s) for which URLs are being submitted in a Sitemap. This can be easily done by adding the hosting domain to your Webmaster Tools account.

Also, the XML Sitemap for images follows the Sitemaps.org protocol but it is currently not supported by Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines.

Related: How to get your images in Google

Create an Image Sitemap for your WordPress Blog

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Legal Issues associated with Cloud Computing

That said, there are some important legal issues that must be taken care of before you sign-up with any of the cloud vendors for your business.

These issues, discussed below, are more relevant for business owners who are planning to shift to the cloud and may not really matter if you are a consumer who merely uses the cloud for storing emails or office documents. 

1. The Physical Location of your Data

1a. Where is your data stored physically?
Your data could be stored in any country and you may not even know where the data centre is situated. The ‘physical location’ raises the question of legal governance over the data. The customer must be clear so as to the provisions of the prevailing law in that particular nation.

1b. If a dispute arises, what will be the place of jurisdiction?
In case a conflict arises between the cloud vendor and the customer (you), which country’s court system will settle the dispute?

Say you are a business owner in China and your cloud service provider is based in the US. The vendor will definitely prefer settling the case in in an American court but as a customer, do you have the financial means and resources to get the dispute settled in the jurisdiction of another nation?

2. Responsibility of your Data

2a. What if the data centre is hit by a disaster?
It might happen that the vendor’s premises is severely affected due to a disaster. Even the 10-Q filings of Google Inc. with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission mentions such a risk:

Our systems are vulnerable to damage or interruption from earthquakes, terrorist attacks, floods, fires, power loss, telecommunications failures, computer viruses, computer denial of service attacks, or other attempts to harm our systems.

The question is whether you are indemnified by the insurance company for loss of your business or not?

2b. Is there any liability coverage for breach of privacy?
If a privacy breach occurs due to a fault of cloud vendor, is there any liability coverage policy taken up by the vendor? The scope of breach of privacy has widened considerably over the years in the field of cyber insurance. Some insurance carriers offer coverage even for breach of minor information and the customer is compensated on on behalf of the cloud vendor.

2c. What can be done if the data center gets hacked?
Though all cloud vendors try their best to fend off hackers, no security setting is assumed to be foolproof. If the data center gets hacked, can you move against the vendor for claiming lost profits?

3. Intellectual Property Rights

3a. Is your data protected under intellectual property rights?
If it happens that the data is your own creation (like photographs, literature, etc), then is it protected under the intellectual property rights of that country? What means do you have if they get infringed?

3b. How secure are trade secrets?
Your data stored in the ‘cloud’ may have trade secrets or privileged information which must be protected under attorney-client relationship. How secure will such information be in hands of the cloud vendor?

Or consider a reverse situation. If you leak out a trade secret of another business entity, how far will your cloud storage provider go to protect your data when they have been summoned to the court with all your stored data, access logs, etc.

3c. Third party access?
The vendor may grant some privileged third parties access to your stored data. The identity of such parties, if any, must be disclosed to the customer. Here, the third party could be a legal authority or even an internal employee. The customer should always be informed before the vendor allows third parties to access the stored data.

To protect the interest of your business, it may therefore be extremely essential that your read the terms and conditions meticulously before signing up for a cloud based services.

If the vendor provides a standard form of contract (which is a general practice), then you must be must be fully aware of all the terms and conditions. It will save you from nasty surprises and you will be financially, mentally and legally prepared to save your business from unfavorable consequences of cloud computing.

The author Nikita Anand is the editor-in-chief of Mighty Laws where she seeks to explain complex legal jargon in simple English. Nikita is currently pursuing a degree in Law from NLIU.

The Legal Issues Around Cloud Computing

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

A recent story published in the NYT painted a bleak picture of the future for smartphone makers Nokia and RIM, the developers of BlackBerry.

R.I.M.’s share of the American smartphone market fell to 41 percent in the first quarter from 55 percent in the previous year, according to Gartner. The combined share held by [Apple] iPhones and [Google] Android handsets rose to 49 percent, from 23 percent over the same period.

R.I.M.’s sales have been increasing outside the U.S. but the report attributes that rise to the sharp fall in the price of BlackBerry handsets. Here are the latest numbers (U.S. only) from Comscore.

Smartphone Platform Market Share

The changing consumer interest is also reflected in the traffic to these sites.

Google today released an updated list of their top 1000 sites that orders sites based on the number of unique visitors globally. It highlights  three key changes:

#1. Apple.com saw a 19% increase in unique visitors in the past month. The new iPhone 4 and the related Antenna problem may have also contributed to that spike.

#2. The number of unique users visiting Nokia.com and Blackberry.com declined by 12% and 16% respectively during the same period.

#3. HTC, the makers of several popular Android phones, managed to find a place for itself in the top 1000 sites for the first time though Google didn’t specify the percentage increase in traffic to htc.com.

Unlike HTC which launched EVO 4G and Apple which launched iPhone 4, neither RIM nor Nokia launched any major new device during that period so that’s one point that goes in their favor. I also expect Samsung’s site to see a boost in traffic this month because of their new Android based Galaxy phones that have won mostly positive reviews online.

Traffic to Nokia and BlackBerry Sites is Down

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The Indian Government has proposed to the Unicode Consortium that the Unicode character code U+0971 be assigned for the new Rupee symbol. This was revealed in a presentation by D. Udaya Kumar who is is best known as the designer of our new currency symbol.

It may take several months for the Consortium to include the new symbol in the standard character set but once that is done, you should be able to type Rupee using the standard keyboard without requiring any special fonts.

For instance, Microsoft Word users can insert any Unicode character in a document by typing the character code followed by the Alt+x key. In the case of Rupee, they’ll have to type 0971 followed by Alt+x. Currently this combination will output an unused Devanagri character that the Indian government has proposed to replace with the new Rupee symbol.

Proposed Unicode Character for the Indian Rupee

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

For example, assume that Google has assigned a web page some 100 points and there are 5 hyperlinks on that page. Each of these pages will therefore get 20 points from Google. If two of these hyperlinks are written using the rel=nofollow attribute, Google won’t give them any points but the remaining three pages will still get 20 points each as before. The balance 40 points (100 – 20*3) are lost.

So should you use the nofollow attribute at all in your internal links? Google’s webmaster site recommends the use of nofollow in some scenarios:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.

This stand is however completely different from what Matt Cutts has suggested in one of his recent videos (embedded below).

Matt has unequivocally advised that web publishers should not use rel=nofollow when linking to any of their internal pages even if they don’t want to see those pages in search engines.

He didn’t share any specific reason that made Google to change their original stand on the use of nofollow in web pages but, as a publisher, what matters more to us is the current recommendation which is ” no nofollow on internal links.”

Related: Google Experts Answer your SEO Questions

Do Not Use Nofollow with your Internal Links

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you just said yes, Google DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) could be an ideal solution for you. It is a free ad server from Google that lets you sell ad space on your website.

You may choose to run banner ads, text ads or even rich-media (like video and flash ads) through DFP. The tool, which was formerly known as Google Ad Manager, requires no downloads or installation and any website publisher can sign-up for the DFP program as long as they have an active Google AdSense account.

Sell Your Advertising Space with Google DFP

Say you have a news website (or a blog) where you cover topics such as technology, sports, entertainment and so on. An advertiser wants to serve banner ad campaigns on all your tech related pages. He will pay $20 CPM for all US based impressions and you can fill your remnant inventory through Google AdSense ads.

Let’s see how we can easily setup such an ad campaign through Google DFP.

Step 1: Create Ad Units

We need to tell DFP about the advertising space on our web pages. For instance, in our above example, we’ll have to create three ad slots for the 300×250 rectangle, the 160×600 skyscraper and the 468×60 banner. These are standard IAB units though you are free to define custom ad sizes as well.

Go to DFP –> Inventory –> Ad Units –> New Ad Unit. Give your ad unit a descriptive name so that you can easily determine where exactly that ad unit will be displayed and it’s size. Also check the option “Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense.”

Step 2: Define Placements

You have multiple ad units on the same page and there’s a possibility that an advertiser may want to place ads on more than one unit. Therefore, we need to create a placement which is like a group of one or more ad units where an advertiser’s ad can be displayed.

Go to Inventory tab –> Placements –> New Placement and define the placement. To keep things simple, we will associate only one ad unit (the 300×250 one) with our ad placement. Check the option that says “Offer this placement to advertisers” through AdWords and DoubleClick Ad planner to attract more advertisers.

Step 3. Create an Order

Now that we have defined our ad inventory, it’s time to feed in the client’s order. The advertiser will specify where he wants to place the ad, what kind of demographics he wants to target, what’s the price he is willing to pay and how long will the campaign run on our site.

Go to DFP –> Orders –> New Order. Create a company for the advertiser and then fill in the order details under “new line item.” Set the Type to “Price Priority” if you want the highest paying ads to be served on your site. Set Value CPM equal to the price that the client will pay and then add the targeting criteria.

Step 4. Upload the Ad Creative

It’s time for your to upload the “actual ad” that will display on your web pages. You can either upload images, Flash videos or even snippets of HTML and JavaScript in case you’re going with text ads.

Go to DFP –> Line Items and select the “Line Item” that you’ve created in the previous step. Click Add Creatives –> New Creative and upload the image / SWF Flash file. You can even upload multiple creative ads per line item and they’ll display evenly across that site – this helps you determine an appropriate ad copy that performs best with your visitors.

Step 5. Get the Ad Tags for your Site

We are almost done. All we need to do is get the JavaScript code from Google Ad Manager DFP and copy-paste it into our blog’s template.

Click the Inventory tab in your DFP dashboard and choose “Generate Ad Tags” – select the appropriate ad unit (the one that we created in Step #1) and choose “Generate Tags.”  Add this code to your website and within 10-15 minutes, the DFP tool should start serving ads on your pages.

Here’s a narration-less screencast that captures all the above steps in a quick video.

If you ever have trouble serving ads through DFP , just open any page of your website, add ?google_debug to the URL and reload. This will generate a tracing log that should help you debug the problem, if any.

How to Setup Google DFP on your Site — A Tutorial

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The scene is however a bit a different when it comes to mobile web browsers. Most of them don’t support Flash videos but the modern ones do understand HTML5 video that is embedded using the new <video> element.

Embed YouTube Videos in an IFRAME

If people are reading your content on both mobile and desktop browsers, an ideal solution therefore would be that you embed both the Flash version and the HTML5 version of a same YouTube video in your pages. Mobile users can then play the HTML5 video while the Flash video player will be visible only on desktops.

The good news is that new IFRAME based embed code from YouTube can easily handle this switching between Flash and HTML5 based players on its own.

The IFRAME auto-detects the browser /OS of the viewer and depending upon their environment, it will either use Flash or the HTML5 based video player to embed that YouTube video in your web page. For a live example, see this page.

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID"
   width="320" height="190"></iframe>

While all YouTube videos support IFRAME based embedding, you still have to write the embed code manually. Once the preview period is over, YouTube will make the IFRAME style a default for embedding YouTube videos since it offers you best of both HTML5 and Flash worlds.

Also see: Embed Anything in your Web Pages

Embed YouTube Videos in both Flash and HTML5

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.