Googly PacMan Gadget

This Sunday, I planned to resume doing something which I haven’t been doing much – play video games. I was about to turn on my XBox to play “Star Wars – The force unleashed”.This is a new game and I really would have to spend some time understanding it, to play it. I suddenly started missing those classic arcade games which were “on-n-play” and less brainers.

I recalled PacMan – one of the most popular classic arcade video games. I used to play PacMan at a video game parlour each day (literally), on my way from school to home. My friends used to consider me an expert at it

I started googling for PacMan for Linux. While searching, I got to know that this game is available as a Google Gadget. That’s it. I decided to install Google Gadgets on my Fedora 9 laptop. Thought it would be fun as well as learning and I will install more than just a game.

Google Gadgets on Fedora 9 Desktop

Read the rest of this entry »

Run Google Chrome on Linux – The easy way

As per my earlier blog post, Chrome (Google’s home grown web browser) is not available for Linux. Its release status for Linux, as stated at Google Chrome’s download site is – “Google Chrome for Linux is in development and a team of engineers is working hard to bring it to you as soon as possible.” But seems Linux had not to wait!.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chrome – The Google Web Browser

After lots of news and attention since yesterday, Google’s very own web browser called Chrome is finally available for download now, but only for Windows.

To start with, since I’m on Linux (Fedora 9), the download page http://www.google.com/chrome, did not show me a download link but instead prompted me to subscribe (with my E-mail) to get alerted when Chrome is available for Linux.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Suggest has graduated

While I still haven’t, Google Suggest has graduated and is live at Google.com. Google Suggest is the “type ahead search keyword suggestion” which had been lying at Google Labs for a long time.

Please note that I could see Google Suggest working at www.google.com and not at www.google.co.in (as of this writing). May be it will come to the latter a little later.

If you are browsing from India and you type in www.google.com you are redirected to www.google.co.in. To go to www.google.com click on the link “Go to Google.com” (found on the bottom right, below the search text box).

Once you are at google.com, try typing “open s” technology and you would get suggestions like “open source”, “open source software”, “open suse” etc. along with the number of Google search results these keywords may yield. Saves you from typing and misspells!

Google Suggest gives a type ahead suggestion for known (or well known keywords) along with the search results. That is, typing in shekhar Suggests “shekhar kapur” (famous movie director), “shekhar suman” (TV celebrity) and others but does not Suggest “shekhar govindarajan” (grrrrrr).

Google Suggest (though not at google.co.in) is live @:

• www.google.co.jp
• www.google.fr

Other titbits

• As of this writing. Google Suggest is also not implemented at http://www.google.com.pk/ (Google Pakistan). Its not available for Google Australia and Google UK too, so definitely not a third world treatment.
• The Google Suggest only works on the first page (e.g. www.google.com). When you search again using the search box on search results page, its the same old, “non type-ahead typing-in”. I wonder why?  I’m used to firing a completely different search/keywords based on the results fetched from the first (or subsequent) searches. Perhaps, a type ahead search could be nuisance if implemented across? But let the user decide this via options/preferences (see below)
• Noticed a new option named “Query Suggestions” in Preferences (link on the right side to the search box). This can be used to turn the Google Suggest on or off. But this again works only for the first page (as said above).

Mobile friendly Websites with Google

While browsing the Web on your mobile phone/PDA, you will come across many web sites which are not readable, do not fit in your mobile screen or are graphic intensive. Following is a quick and Google way to see a mobile optimized view of any Website:

Read the rest of this entry »

Using Google as a Hindi to English dictionary

Recently, an employee at a client’s place was trying to understand an article in Hindi. She came across a word मूल्य वर्धित (Mulya Vardhit) in Hindi. She wanted to know its meaning. Me and other people in the room started guessing and arguing, based on the context, in which the term was used. But no one was sure. Leaving others to guess, I did the following:

Read the rest of this entry »

Cuil: A cool Google killer ?

Just read this news item in Google News (what an irony )

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121721408704288951.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Cuil pronounced as Cool is suppose to be a new search engine launched (not a beta launch) which is suppose to challenge Google in the search arena. I quickly checked out this search engine  and following are a few first and quick +ves and -ves

Read the rest of this entry »