Singular or plural high traffic search terms

In an interesting research by a UK based Internet Research company, Hitwise, analyzed the difference between searches for ‘laptop’ and ‘laptops’. Following snapshot suggests how singular and plurals are being used.

Closely look at the usage of high traffic query modifiers like, cheap and free. I am starting to wonder of search engines are (or already have) reduced the relevance of these modifiers.

The company comes with some other interesting insights like singular is more closely used with laptop accessories. They are also making a point that plural terms send more traffic compared to the singular terms. Read the complete story Plural or Singular search terms?

Skydrive now 5 GB

Microsoft’s not so famous online storage service, Skydrive is now offering a bulky 5 Gb of space. I still remember the good old days of late 90′s when the computer’s used to come with 4 Gb of harddisk space and we all were happy and would think what we are going to do with 4 Gb of huge space.

Now companies like Microsoft and Google have changed the norms and there seems to be so much of online space available that keeping track of you accounts requires some hefty space in your head.

If you’d look at the snapshot you’ll fnd that skydrive is 5 Gb. No points for guessing that I am not using it. The reason is simple, I am not much into microsoft’s online products/services. However, I don’t deny that I like using micrsofts desktop products.

Firefox 3 beta 4 released

Beta 4 release of Firefox 3 happened a couple of hours back. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 31 months. Firefox 3 Beta 4 has more than 900 enhancements over it’s previous beta release.

I am really happy to hear that there has been a drastic improvement in terms of memory usage. At one point of time I could easily relate Firefox as one of the most memory leaking application I came across. But then there was other cousin of firefox, flock that had the same issue. Most of the improvement in beta 4 over beta 3 are based on community feedback. We should be seeing community development and support as the next generation development platform. As a sneak peak check out the address bar.

Zotero-One of the best open source application

Zotero continues to gather acolades as it enters 2 years. The editors of PC magazine have chosen Zotero as one of the years best free software applications second year in a row. For those who have little clue about this amazing utility,probably it’s the right time to know more about this nifty open source extension for mozilla driven browsers like Firefox and Flock.

Zotero is an extension which is extensively used by researchers around the world. What it can do is take information accumlation and storage to next level. From managing your citations to bibliograpy, it easily beats out most of the proprietary softwares like end note. Being a community driven project it enjoys great support. All the features of Web 2.0 like tags and snapshots are integrated in this extension. Personally this happens to be one of my favourite extensions.

Some Action

After some sleepless nights and days of hard work (of course shedding some bucks), I managed to register a couple of domains. I haven’t thought of any plans of how and what this site will feature. But I am sure with time I am going to figure it out. As a start off though let me tell you a small secret (might not be for most of the people).

Let’s say you are looking for some proprietary software that you’ve been dying to use. How do you go about searching it? First let me tell you that for most of the fast downloads (assuming you have a fast internet connection) you must consider buying a rapidshare.com account. Trust me it’s worth it. I’d suggest a 3 months pack to start off.

Now that you have an account and let’s say you are searching for Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate edition (x86). Try something like this:

“vista ultimate” rapidshare.com site:blogspot.com

What did I do here? First, I made sure that vista ultimate is a phrase by putting it into quotes. Next, I made sure that the query also has rapidshare.com (what’s the fun of having an account with rapidshare, if you are not downloading from there). Last, I made sure that my search is restricted to blogspot.com. Reason for this is coz most of the corporate firewalls (like proventia) don’t block blogspot.com explicitly and you find less of web crap (I am carefully using modifier less) when you are searching on blogspot.com.

As an FYI, site: is called as a query modifier.