Back in 2007, I wrote a post questioning if Google Safe Search is really safe. After more than two and a half years, seems like Google implemented real safe search. Here is a video on how it works.

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Not sure, if anyone noticed – Google has pretty much bombed BigAdda.com. It has only ~4K pages indexed by Google (Yahoo has ~160K). BigB’s blog is not even in Google’s index anymore.

Not sure if it is an error on Google’s side or an error on BigAdda’s side (like misconfigured robots.txt – They don’t have one actually). Surprisingly, there is no page rank info available for BigAdda.com as well.

Alexa has been messed up since a few days, but Quantcast shows a huge drop in US traffic, which most likely could be because of the delisting.

Bollywood Mantra also saw a drop of 1/3 of the total pages indexed by Google for a last couple of weeks, but that did not affect any traffic and the number is constant since then. The drop of Bollywood Mantra’s index seems to be part of change in Big G’s algorithm change.

If you have any information about BigAdda or have any conspiracy theories please do share in comments!

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Yet another video from Der Untergang.

I added a video about Twitter a few days ago.

Please watch all the videos with sound TURNED ON

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I spotted a new layout for Google News India using Chrome. Viewing the page in FF shows me the old layout. I believe, I saw the new layout as part of the initial 1% testing. I personally don’t like the current layout more than the new layout. Do you like it? Here are the screen shots.

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Google says “See what Obama, McCain and leading political pundits are reading” and I thought McCain didn’t know how to use a computer…

Does Google mean ‘See what Obama, McCain’s wife and leading political pundits are reading’?

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We have an internal server based uploader that handles uploading of Zip files. The app checks for the type of the file uploaded and then decides what to do with it.

When that app was initially tested, I found a strange bug where ‘certain’ zip files from Vista were failing to upload. I later found out that a regular zip file (read as in XP or Winzip) has a type ‘application/zip’. But the zip files created on Vista (by ’sending’ them to compressed folder) had the type ‘application/x-zip-compressed’. Why? I wondered, but was happy to resolve the bug.

I started having the same problem on Vista again since day before yesterday. XP uploads are fine. It occurred to me that it might be a similar problem. I checked the file type and indeed that was the problem. Now, Vista’s compressed folders have type ‘application/binary’. WTH? I tried zipping up the files on XP and then copying it over to Vista and got the same result. I then tried to upload the file from XP over the network (shared folder) and again got the exact same result. I believe, Vista (or even other OSes) copy file locally from the shared network and then send it for upload. Finally tried to upload the file using XP….and it worked.

I updated my Vista box a couple of days ago with the regular updates from MSFT, I think that’s what caused the change in the type. Now, I need to find if zipping the files with 7-zip has the same effect as ‘compressed folders’.

I wonder who and why that change was authorized/implemented?

Update: Seems like after a few updates it is fixed now. May be was a bug.

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This is super hilarious if you know what Twitter is and what it is going through. via TC.

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Test Ad on CNN,
originally uploaded by gsharma.

Spotted this weird ‘Test’ Ad on CNN. It seems like it is placed by Google.

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Found this on Brijj.com after a couple of minutes of browsing. I wasn’t looking for something like this. I imported and then deleted bunch of contacts. The parameter count, which had the number of people I deleted looked out of the place. In most secure applications it is handled on the server side instead of passing it as a GET parameter and then reading it. Even if it is passed as a GET param due to app limitations, server side processing is done to the GET text to make sure it is what it should be. In this case it should be checked if it is an INTEGER, if not then don’t display it.

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Here is a tip to the companies which send Press Releases – Please get you Press Release proof read by more than 2-3 people.

We recently got a Press Release for a entertainment hub in India, sent by a PR company. One of the lines in the release made me read it again.

“If you haven’t gone out for long with the family or folks to freak out …”

It seems like they want to say – If you haven’t chilled out with family and friends recently, then visit us. But what the sentence conveys is that they are a freak house and invite you to be part of it. Humorous, but not that great for the company. They don’t realize that this release will be published at 100s of web pages. One might think this as a very small error (one line out of probably 150). However, this can turn into something big. It not just hurts your brand when someone reads something like this, but also can add a viral effect to a negative publicity if someone forwards something like this to a email chain.

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