Thought Garage

Every now and then I get curious about what Indians are searching for on the internet and go to Google to have a look. This time, I am totally surprised to see that Manipur tops in number of searches beating all other IT curious states.

Top Search Keywords in 2009

The following screenshot lists out top 10 keywords originated from India in 2009. Note that these key words are not exactly what is being searched for, but these key words are part of searches.

News, Jobs, Electronics and Travel

For instance, ‘India’ is part of the following searches that tops the list. News Papers top the list, compared to ‘movie stars’ last time I looked at this kind of data.

Next most searched for was “Songs”

This doesn’t surprise me at all, the next most searched for is a place to access, play and download songs.

Manipur tops the list

This is totally surprising to me, that Manipur tops the list beating those IT curious states in keywords related to India. Andhra Pradesh is not even in the top 10.

What are you searching for on Google? Share you thoughts.

I wondered last night why NDTV.com is so desperate? Desperate enough to put Advertisements right on top of content and those ads won’t let you read content unless you click on them.

This morning, out of curiosity I checked how NDTV.com is doing by looking at traffic on the site at Compete. And this graph may explain the desperation.

Unique visitors to NDTV.com dropped by 40% in 2009.

Source: NDTV.com Profile on Compete.com

However, the site was able to maintain number of page views more or less the same. So, it sounds little obvious that as they are loosing on unique visitors, they may want to monetize those still visiting and make up for the difference. May be!

Or that Ads on top of content may be just a bug. Hopefully.

Google is really obsessed with "Speed". Google’s browser Chrome is already the fastest browser in the world (2X the nearest competitor) and here is some news that will just blow your mind. Your web could get 2X faster. Wow!!!!

Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

…

So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance – pages loaded up to 55% faster.

Source:Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

Recently Vonage started offering Unlimited Calls to India under its $24.99/m existing plan. Good thing is that the plan includes both landlines and cell phones all over India.

If you are already a Vonage subscriber, make sure you have Vonage World plan to get this great deal. Not sure whether it is automatically done. For me, I did convert to this plan explicitly.

If you are not a Vonage subscriber already, think about it. For $24.99 you get unlimited calling to India (and about 60 countries) and have a landline number to make unlimited calls within US.

Get ONE month FREE.

Vonage initially offered 2 months FREE when you sign up for this service. But now it is back to its original offer of ONE month FREE offer. Get ONE MONTH FREE if you signup by clicking on the image below. If you pay whole one year upfront, you may get an additional 20% off.

Click here to get the ONE MONTH FREE offer.

Its funny how Experts are made in America. Rule No.1 : You can become an Expert on anything just by claiming you are already one. So much for dreaming big and believing in yourself.

And once you are an Expert (or rather once you claim) you will be treated like an Expert !!

BTW, an expert’s observation on Cloud Computing. It is really funny. Please read.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud is a place you go to in order to build your applications. In the process, you are very likely to use Visual Studio, the .Net Framework, SQL Server in the form of Azure SQL Services, and Microsoft SharePoint, then run the resulting cloud application in Azure itself.

So is Azure just a super sales site for Microsoft products? No, no more so than Google’s AppEngine is a sales site for PHP tools, even though you will write your application in PHP if you want to take advantage of the AppEngine.

- Charles Babcock at Information Week’s Cloud Computing Section

If you are wondering is cloud –> marketing jargon to promote tools that build them or when did Google App Engine started supporting PHP, you hit the nail right on the head.

I am not saying they are not experts on the cloud.

Remember Rule 1.