Use the full version of Bing

The Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history and the image on the Bing home page here is not interactive as in the US version.

To explore the full version of Bing ,go to this page and set English - US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.

Screenshots:

BING in US



BING in INDIA

Test Your Web Pages in Different Browsers with Adobe Browser Lab

Adobe BrowserLab is a new online service that will help you test the layout of your web pages across a variety of web browsers and operating systems.

Comparing web design in Firefox 3.0 & IE 7.0



You can use the Browser Lab service to view the design of your site in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on both Mac and Windows. BrowserLab works by taking screen shots of your web pages in different browsers on different platforms and then displays these screenshot images side by side for easy comparison.

Though the service doesn’t support Chrome, Opera and some Linux specific browsers, the advantage is that there’s no waiting time and it also offers skinning so you can place renderings one over the other to quickly spot the differences.

Skinning superimposes one screen shot over another



BrowserLab can integrate with Dreamweaver CS4 so you can test web page designs from within the WYSIWYG HTML editor without having to publish pages on to an external web server.

Can You Print A Currency Note Using Adobe Photoshop?

Recently I was researching on unconventional uses of Photoshop. While discussing the idea with friends, someone told me that anyone can use Photoshop to print fake currency notes. I told her that its not possible otherwise it would have been very difficult to control counterfeit currency in the market. But I was not sure so I decided to test this statement and started researching on Internet for this.

What I found is very obvious. You cannot print fake currency notes using Photoshop. You can open and edit a currency note image with photoshop, but if you try to print it, Photoshop will refuse to do it and will display the following error,


In fact, even if you somehow manage to bypass Photoshop’s restrictions, you cannot print a fake currency note from any printer or photocopy machine.

Now the question arises that how does Photoshop or the Printer knows that its a currency note image?

This is because the currency note designs include EURion Constellation. The EURion Constellation is composed of five small orange, green or yellow circles, which are then printed across different areas of banknote at different orientations.



All the color photocopiers, image processing software like Photoshop and printers include an internal algorithm, which refuses to print an image if it detects EURion Constellation pattern on it. You can read more about EURion Constellation here.

So the answer is - You can’t print a currency note using any image processing software, photocopy machine or a printer. And that’s really a great news (unless you are a faker yourself )

Wolfram Alpha (The Good, The Bad or The Ugly?)

A few days ago another internet search engine named Wolfram Alpha was officially launched. It was the hottest topic in my friends circle and amongst my batch mates . People were spamming and filling each others mail box. Their main queries were, will this search engine survive in front of a giant like Google? or will this search engine produce better results than Google? Did they implement semantic search? Etc.

I used it for a few hours and found some good and some bad results. I also compared it’s search results with Google. I will explain all of this and more in the latter part of this post. But the thing that interests me the most is Wolfram's profile.

Stephen Wolfram, a British prodigy who earned his PhD in Physics at the tender age of 20 . He published an article on particle physics at the age of 16 and entered Oxford University at the age of 17. He wrote a widely-cited paper on heavy quark production at the age of 17. This same person made a calculation and graphing software package called Mathematica, the only fully integrated technical computing software. No doubt he is a genius but we are here to explore Wolfram Alpha.

Is Wolfram Alpha a search engine?
Search engine is a tool which enables one to find what he is looking for on the Web. For example if you search "geekonnet" on google or on other search engines, it gives all the websites where "geekonnet" is present. If we search the same query on Wolfram Alpha it gives information about geekonnet like daily page views, domain information etc. The site's best trick is its ability to make calculations for certain types of queries. It tries to dissect a question into its components and then performs calculations using its own source materials to compute an answer. The results are presented as a sleek collage of tables, charts and graphics.

It would be unfair if we call wolfram alpha a search engine. Wolfram Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine." In simple word a " question answering system". It is interesting to know that whatever result you get on Wolfram Alpha you can also get the same result on google within 3 to 4 searched result links.

Some facts about Wolfarm Alpha:

1. Wofram Alpha's page is 18 times havier than google's home page: I compared the size and dowloading times of wolfram alpha and google on www.websiteoptimization.com . I found that the homepage Wolfram Alpha is 18 times heavier than Google's home page. The size of Google's home page is 14.449 KB with only 4 HTTP requests. But I found that the homepage of Wolfram Alpha is struggling with a size of 257.411 KB along with 37 HTTP requests. Google page takes only 3.75 seconds to load on a 56Kbps modem. whereas Wolfram Alpha takes 59.93 seconds to load on the same 56Kbps modem.
No doubt wolfram Alpha needs a huge website optimization.


2. Wolfram Alpha is built using Mathmetica: Wolfram Alpha is built primarily using Mathematica; it contains 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code.


In short Wolfram alpha acts like a nerdy accountant who is equipped with the latest set of calculators and endless stacks of books and encyclopedias. Wolfram Alpha is completely useless for me. I don't think I will ever use it. But I am not entirely happy with Google. Google still uses the same old search algorithm based on page rank and key words. If any Google guy is reading this post, here is a question for you : When will you implement semantic search in Google?

PS: Dear readers please write your views and experiences about Wolfram Alpha as comments to this post.

Bing VS Google : Head-to-Head

Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out once. So I am back to keeping one of my promises; as I promised in my last post to come up with the " comparison of search results of Google & Bing".
Hats off to SEO specialist Paul Savage who has made this very basic web service, which lists all the results for your search queries on Google and Bing side by side, so you can compare which one produces the better results for the keywords you enter, on a single page. I played around with it , and this is what I felt:

The comparison:

Main Page Size: Both have almost equal page size, 14KB with 4 http request and 15KB with 1 http request for Google and Bing respectively. Page loading times are almost equal for both the search engines.

UI: I liked the concept of the front cover photo changing every day. When you float over it, you find the hidden "Easter eggs" that lead you on some interesting and unexpected links. So, full marks to Microsoft's Bing.

Web Search Results:
Web search results are almost the same for a simple search query. When I searched "geekonnet" the initial results on both search engines are almost the same.


Image Search: This is a place where bing needs a lot of improvement. When I did an image search on myself, google gave me results from linkedin, Twitter, Facebook ..etc. Bing didn't give me any relevant image search result. Well, bing's mouse over features are good. But the image search is really bad.



Video Search: Almost same, mainly from youtube and other video streaming sites.

Well, Bing reached at 2nd place in the search engine war, after google, ahead of yahoo search and ask.com. I predict that the market share of google will remain unchanged but bing will take away yahoo's and ask's market share. I am definitely not shifting to bing, from google; what about you? Here is a poll on the right side of this post. So, "Are you moving to BING?" "Yes","No" or " I don't care".