How to perfectly Integrate Google Custom Search in your Wordpress blog
I wanted to replace the default Wordpress search with Google Custom Search because replacing the WordPress’s default search feature with Google Search allows you to use the years of search experience and power of Google. Besides, it also lets you earn from the sponsored results.
I found this guide on Dosh Dosh but it is quite basic and doesn’t have all the details that are required to integrate Google Custom Search to your Wordpress blog properly, I will tell you the proper way to integrate Google Custom Search with your Wordpress Blog like I did mine (you can try it from top right search box)
First you need to create a WordPress page where your search results will show, to do that go to your Wordpress dashboard and then go to write–>Page
Exciting new feature added to Google search
Google Search keeps on getting better and better and this time the Google team has added a cool feature to Google search which shows suggestions in the drop down box as you type in real time.
To try it out Open Google.com and type few letters and you will see suggestions related to your typed query in the drop down box, if you cant decide the right keywords to search for or if you don’t know the correct spelling of what you are looking for then this comes handy and this also saves you a bit of typing, the suggestions also show the number of results for that specific keyword in the drop down box.
Wow! Google now indexing One Trillion Web pages
The Internet is getting bigger and bigger and so is Google’s Index, According to the Official Google Blog Post Google is now indexing a mammoth 1 Trillion web pages, Yeah! even the people at Google got surprised, the Google bot has indexed 1,000,000,000,000 Unique URLs so far and this number is growing at a huge pace, The number would have been even huge if Google would have indexed the duplicate Content.
here is the exact excerpt from the Google blog post on how the indexing works:
How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
Google is the most used search engine on the web and I sometimes wonder how are their servers able to survive so much load whereas ordinary websites cant even survive the “digg effect” but now I get my answer that is distributed infrastructure, Google has many server farms all over the world and all the servers process the data and then interact with each other making the process faster.
So head on to Google.com and start searching from those One trillion web pages if you don’t already do!
Changes to GMail Contacts Manager
One thing I like about Google is that they keep on adding new features and improving the current features frequently, the latest being the changes to the contact manager, earlier when you used to send email to someone he would be added to the contacts list so that when next time you want to send an email to the same person you type first few letters of his email address and a bunch of suggestions show up in auto complete list (which is a good feature) but now the problem is that if you send a lot of emails to different people then they all get added to the contact list and the auto complete list grows huge with time making it less efficient.
The Gmail team in a bid to fix this have modified the contacts manager and sorted the contact in to three categories that are as follows:
- “My Contacts”-these are the contacts you have manually added or contacted a lot in the past
- “Most Contacted”-the people you have contacted the most, if number of times you have emailed a certain person increases he is automatically added to My Contact (at least five time)
- “Suggested Contacts”- all the people you have emailed are added automatically in this category
To access the contact manager click on the contacts link under Gmail folders and above labels box on the left sidebar:
as you click on the contact button you can now see the Gmail contact manager which looks like this:
Gmail Contacts Manager
More on the official Gmail Blog
Open Search Result using Your Keyboard In Firefox
If you are a keyboard fanatic you must have found it annoying to switch to your mouse every time you search anything with Search Engines if yes then you are the right place, I came across this post over at Firefox mastery site and I think it is useful for keyboard obsessed peoples.
There are many extensions built for this purpose one of them being the Search Keys Extension which hasn’t been updated for one and a half year and I don’t expect it to be updated for FireFox 3 either.
When you search something on On search engine the first result would be labeled 1, the second result is labeled 2 and so on, pressing the corresponding key on your keyboard will open that search result in the same tab. Pressing ALT+the corresponding number will open it in a new tab and pressing SHIFT+the corresponding number will open it in a new FireFox window
The keys comma and period are used to navigate between the search results pages. This doesn’t seem to work in all search engines. A quick test revealed that all keys are still working when searching Google while the comma and period shortcuts are not working in Yahoo.
