Kongtechnology.com » Search Engine

Free stock photos and images

Kitkat — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:26:09 +0000

I am sure many of you would be delighted to know that there is a search engine that specializes on free stock photos and images. Yes, Everystockphoto.com is a photo search engine which has indexed millions of freely licensed photos from many photography sources on the Internet. This basically means you can search photos gathered from many photography websites conveniently at one integrated search!

Best is, the website is completely free to use… and it’s very intuitive too! Let’s try to search for “sexy eyes” and see if it returns some eyes that can shock us!

The result it returned was pretty impressive. Lots of pretty eyes… 169 pairs of pretty eyes to be exact. All of them are sourced from Flickr, and the result screen provides some quick but helpful information about those photos, i.e. the license type, the photo’s resolution, and user’s rating for the photo.

The photo details page offers a lot of information about the photo; such as the photographer, tags, license type, a feature to report copyright infringement, and best of all other photos from the same photographer.

Most of the photos indexed by this site are free to use, even commercially. Everystockphoto.com is certainly becoming my source for photos when I need them in my blogs… well, next to Google’s very own images search.

If you took a moment to sign up membership with Everystockphoto, you can do much more… rate, tag, collect and comment on the photos. It’s fun dragging photos onto your photo collection, and removing them by dragging them onto the dustbin. Make sure you check out this website today!

Earn Money As You Search

Sharon — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:35:39 +0000

The Internet is always full of ways to make money online. So it’s no wonder why a lot of people call the Internet a gold mine. Yes, you have the PPC, the Affiliate programs, the E-commerce, the gaming, and others that I’ve probably never heard of.

There is one that I heard of just recently. A friend introduced this ‘Earn While You Search’ program to me because I am on the Internet almost 14 hours a day, doing researches. I don’t usually think highly of these programs but I figured, why not? I’ll just have to search with a search box on my browser instead of going directly to Google. So I signed up with MySearchFunds.

Basically, MySearchFunds is a program that pays you for searching with them. While they are not a search engine, all they need you to do is search through them with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. It’s a shame you can’t control where your search results come from though. But fortunately for me, up till now all my results were returned from Google, my favorite search engine.

To use the service, you will need to sign up (to keep track of your searches and your earnings) and install the MySearchFunds search box. I’m using Firefox so the search box is on the top right corner of my browser. The service is completely free of charge and the earnings will be paid via PayPal, unless of course if you are in the United Kingdom, then you can request to be paid via your bank account. And all accounts will be paid in 45 days after each month ends. Like the example give on the website, for searches done in January, you will be paid in mid-March. I just started a couple of days ago, so I figured I will be paid in July then.

I have searched scams and horror stories in regards to MySearchFunds and they do have their fair share of horror stories. On the plus side, there are also good stories about them too and I also found threads in forums where there were people who provide proofs for their payout. And since I don’t have to pay to use this service, I don’t really see any reasons to not sign up and earn a little extra in my PayPal. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. The image below shows my earnings in 3 days. I always forgot I have to use the search box on my browser.

This program is okay for me as long as I remember to use the search box. Well, if you have used MySearchFunds before or know of anything that is similar to this, do leave us a comment and share your opinions with us.

Huge list of FREE RSS directories and RSS search engines

Kitkat — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:44:43 +0000

I believe most website owners and bloggers have RSS feeds to distribute their content to a wider audience. We have all heard of web directories for regular link submission, but do you know that there are many directories specifically developed for promoting your RSS feeds? And the good news is that almost all of them accept free submissions, and the even good news is that I have painfully went through the 100 plus RSS directories and search engines and stripped out the inactive, slow, poor quality ones.

The following are active directories and search engines that receive visitors and FREE submissions. Yes, they are all FREE and requires no payment and no reciprocal links. You do not need to register first also. Go to these sites and submit your feeds now to get more visitors and readers!

Take a break.

The following RSS sites requires you to register first. But worry not, it’s completely FREE and takes a minute to register only!

OMG, how long did you take to submit all the above? But trust me, it’s well worth the effort spent. Do let me know if I missed out any good RSS directories or RSS search engines.

Google begins indexing the Invisible Web

Arun — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:15:38 +0000

Google recently announced via its product blogs that they have begun an effort to index the “invisible” web. The details point to perhaps a big step in the technology for indexing online content. The announcement refers to detection of online forms and filling them with suitable data so as to generate pages that could be indexed.

An excerpt from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a
element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made.

The Invisible Web refers to the part of the Internet which is unavailable for indexing to the search bots or crawlers in the normal course of indexing.

Wikipedia has a synopsis of what qualifies as the invisible web.

Deep Web resources may be classified into one or more of the following categories:

Dynamic content - dynamic pages which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only through a form (especially if open-domain input elements e.g. text fields are used; such fields are hard to navigate without domain knowledge).
Unlinked content - pages which are not linked to by other pages, which may prevent Web crawling programs from accessing the content. This content is referred to as pages without backlinks (or inlinks).
Private Web - sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).
Contextual Web - pages with content varying for different access contexts (e.g. ranges of client IP addresses or previous navigation sequence).
Limited access content - sites that limit access to their pages in a technical way (e.g., using the Robots Exclusion Standard, CAPTCHAs or pragma:no-cache/cache-control:no-cache HTTP headers), prohibiting search engines from browsing them and creating cached copies.
Scripted content - pages that are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as content dynamically downloaded from Web servers via Flash or AJAX solutions.
Non-HTML/text content - textual content encoded in multimedia (image or video) files or specific file formats not handled by search engines.

Until recently the invisible web was indexed only when the sites were made available through submission. Google’s approach hints to applications of several technologies that they have been researching on for years but have seldom mentioned in their products.

The new abilities of Google’s crawlers to simulate form submissions implies the application of artificial intelligence, language processing and contextual analysis - technologies that have come to Google by way of acquisition and in-house talent. The present process will be limited to forms that use GET for data submission.

What this means is that now Google will be able to more accurately address the questions posed by users. This is another effort from Google to be the one-stop-shop for all queries related to the web - essentially automating the search process at other websites so that the users get a final result page.

8 tricks to Google more efficiently

Sharon — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:18:49 +0000

Don’t You Just Love Google?

Well do you? I know I do. I don’t think I’ve gone a day without using Google. Because of the time period that I spent on the Internet, there are always things to be searched for; Music, movies, TV shows, books, how-to tutorials, you name it, I always end up using Google for my dose of information.

Being a student, Google is my life. 95% of my information for researches and assignments came from the Internet and of course to get to these information, Google is the perfect highway.

But for some people, sometimes googling can be a tedious work, annoying even, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I have friends who don’t use the Google much, and they do lose out on time and good (or relevant) information, time especially when there’s a dateline just turning up on the corner, and they don’t know where to start with Google returning more than 2,000,000 results.

But Google doesn’t only have to be useful to students or to get long-winded information. It can be handy for our daily tasks as well. This article will list out the more popular and useful Google search tricks, tailored to the usage of Malaysian Internet users of course (I hardly think that the “Zip Code Movie” information is relevant to us, it is more relevant to the US users).

1. The “phrase search” method

To start off, this is the more common and popular one, used to search for exact strings or phrases as entered. Just enter your search string with quotation (”") mark. It is very useful, especially if you don’t want Google to search on separate words. It condenses and filters the results into more relevant and useful results.

2. Using the “Site:” method

If you are looking for particular information inside a particular website/URL, it is better to restrict your search parameters within the URL itself. Why go through other websites, when you know the information that you need is inside one particular website? Just type in “parameter site:url” without the quote marks.

3. The Check for Worldwide Time

Don’t bother with checking on other websites if you want to look up the time in another country. Google already has a really cool keyword to look up time in any other country or place. For example, just type “Time London” (again, without quote marks) to check up on London’s current time. Just replace the place or country’s name to get the current time at that place.

Your result will returned the time in writing and also a little clock image. The hands on the little clock image shown on Google also displays the correct time, how cool is that?

4. Google is a huge dictionary

I guess it’s fairly common for you to go to Dictionary.com, but do you know that Google can also help you with searching for the meaning of any particular word? Why limit yourself to one particular website for the meaning of a word when you can see all the different definitions out there on the web? If one definition makes no sense to you, you can always see the second, third or the whole list if you please.

Also, any normal dictionary would prove to be little of use if you are searching for an acronym like PTA and DOS, or the short forms that we use in MSN, like LOL and IMHO. Just use the “define:” keyword.

5. Ask Google to do some maths

Great news! You don’t have to find the calculator from the Start Menu anymore, or have a physical one by your computer. Google makes it all hassle free. By entering the equation into the search box, and click on search, Google will automatically come up with the answer.

You don’t believe me? Try it. Mathematics has suddenly become easier!

6. Currency conversion

Before this, I used to check for currency conversion with Xe.com. I liked this particular website because of the ease of use, especially when I was in the UK and I needed to travel to Europe or to check on how much something in the UK would actually cost in dear old Malaysian Ringgits. But with Google, you can convert the currency by just entering the parameters onto the Google search box.

For example: 10MYR in GBP

Of course, you’d need to know the correct abbreviations of the currency. Like for the example above, RM does not work. Xe.com is always a good place to check for this still.

7. Metrics conversion

You can also do other metrics conversion in Google. Such as from inches to cm, tonne to kg, or Fahrenheit to Celsius (F to c). It is much easier to do it in Google than to try to find a particular website to convert it for you. Or of course, there’s always the traditional method of looking it up in the metrics table.

8. To search for certain type of files

There are times when you can just be looking for a particular file type but the search result that was returned has got a lot of different types in it. Mostly of course, just web pages, linking to the file that you want. If you think that that’s just too much clicking, there is a much simpler way to do things.

You can add the “filetype:” keyword to your search string.

For example, if you are searching for the Internet Security topic in a pdf file for your assignments or research, you can always type “Internet Security filetype:pdf”. This will limit your search to your search parameter in pdf format.

This is also very useful if you are searching for free e-books online. You can search for other types of documents as well, just replace the file type name, for example; doc, mp3, avi.

There are more Google tricks out there, but I think that these are the simpler and useful ones that we can utilize in our daily tasks. Hope you enjoyed this article and will have more fun at Googling! If you have any doubt, you may post them in the comments box below. Of course, if you have other tricks to share, you are welcomed to post also.

How to find DoFollow blogs using Google Image Search

Kitkat — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:17:42 +0000

Last time, we looked at how to use a free software to search for dofollow blogs, I believe this software has helped you tremendously in your link building campaign. If you still have doubt on that, I seriously recommend you to give it a try by downloading and using it today… you have really nothing to lose as it’s free!

Now, I am sure you want to know if there are other ways to find dofollow blogs… although the software I recommend is really the best in finding dofollow blogs and websites, it may not be able to each and every blogs and websites out there… so, it’s always good to try a few methods. This time we will use Google! Yes, the trusted search engine you use everyday!

This method is really simple, just use Google Image Search to search for blogs that have the image that says “U Comment, I Follow”. I believe most of you are familiar with this image, it simply means these blogs support the dofollow movement. Your comments posted on these blogs will worth more value and help build your PageRank. Simple, but you have never thought of that, right?!

(In the above picture, I searched for “U comment I follow”)

Now, give it a try. In Google Image Search, search for “U Comment I Follow”, you will see a substantial list of dofollow blogs. You can of course try some variations, such as omit the double quotes to return more results but probably less accurate. You can also append your keyword (such as “malaysia blogger”) to get more targeted results in your niche.

(In the above picture, I searched for ifollow.gif)

Another variant of this method is searching for the “U Comment I Follow” filenames directly. For example:

ifollowblue.gif, ifollowgreen.gif, ifollowltgreen.gif, ifollowpink.gif, ifollowpurple.gif, ifolloworange.gif, ifollowwhite.gif, ifollowmagenta.gif
ifollow.gif, ifollow.jpg, ifollow.png
utrackback_ifollow.gif
ifollow-blue.gif, ifollow-red.gif, ifollow-green.gif

Of course the blogs returned will not be 100% accurate, a small percentage of the blogs display those images but actually do not participate in the dofollow movement. Some manual work is still need to actually verify if they are nofollow blogs or not by viewing their source code.

In short, the easiest and fastest way to find dofollow blogs is to use the free fast blog finder software. It’s FREE, FAST, and it WORKS!

Do people wear blindfolds when searching on Google?

Tudor Rad — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:09:30 +0000

Age old question covered in a myth thatâ€™s about to be uncovered it seems: is it better to have 1 keyword ranking on the first spot in the SERPs, or two different keywords ranking on the second spot each? If you asked me a while back, I would have definitely gone with the 2 x lower ranked keywords, simply because I didnâ€™t think the difference between the first two positions is really that big. Wellâ€¦ it is apparently, according to SEO Researcher. Check out the following chart which shows the distribution of clicks for the top 10 rankings.

If you look at the image the website provides, youâ€™ll notice the huge difference between the first position in the SERPs and the following ones. Even more so, the difference between the red and orange results and the rest is small.

Now, I’m not contesting the validity of these results, they might as well be true for specific keywords, but I refuse to believe that that many people search wearing a blindfold and simply click away on the first result that pops.

I’ve studied my own behavior and what I do is I wait a couple of seconds, process the first 4 or 5 results, reading the title and the description underneath. This usually gives me a general opinion on what I want to click on. How about you guys, are you blindfolded searchers or processors?

Google Christmas doodles

Kitkat — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 05:44:44 +0000

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, to all my readers and visitors! Talking about holidays, I don’t have any holidays to clear unlike most of you… My leaves have dried up since 6 months ago. I am so envy some of you where you can take 2 weeks or more of leave to do whatever you fancy to do. I have wanted to clean my house and the store room for a long time but haven’t got the time to do it… well, maybe wait until next year.

Anyway, as usual Google introduces custom logos in celebration of holidays, special days and events. This time, the Christmas doodles seems really interesting. Google is showing us how they are decorating their logo in a series of logos which are updated daily.

The complete list except one, can be found here. Check back from time to time to see the last one. Last year’s doodles can be found here.

Update 6pm. 25 December 2007.
Google has released their final doodle for the Christmas series this year. See the 5th logo:

New Google AdSense styles

Kitkat — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:31:02 +0000

I was updating my blog when I noticed a new type of AdSense ad appearing here on Kongtechnology.com. It has two small up and down buttons. I was so tempted to test it but not sure it will cause any unnecessary problem or not so I didn’t do it in the end. Instead I tried it on another site and sure enough when clicked they will scroll the ads. AJAX style.

Check out the following screen shot.

In fact before this I saw another slightly different style where the arrows are in triangle shape and no background color. But blame it on my itchy hand. I refreshed the page and it was gone. Couldn’t take a screen shot and show you.

WP Themes Plugin reported that there’s another variant which scrolls sideways.

Looks like AdSense is testing this new style on a number of blogs and websites. But the most important question is will this be effective in increasing CTR? And impressions? Also, will Google let us select this as an option in AdSense setup?

Wish to appear on top position in Google?

Kitkat — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 04:19:37 +0000

You wish to appear on the top position in Google? That’s the magic question asked in an email from Exabytes (Malaysia’s largest web hosting company) which I received this morning. As usual their emails, or rather newsletters are nicely designed, but what caught my attention was the prove they show that they can make you top position in Google.

Go to Google.com.my and search for they keyword “hosting” and you can see that their website is in the number 1 position.

This is really good… although I am not sure how much you need to pay to Google AdWords in order to be number 1 on the keyword “hosting”. I guess it’s not cheap… considering there are so many web hosting companies in Malaysia bidding for that keyword.

All these investments are only worthwhile if the conversion rate is good because you will need to pay for every click… and if the click doesn’t generate any sales, you lost whatever amount you bid in AdWords. More details on this at a later time perhaps, once I have done more detailed research myself.

Now, before you sign up with Exabytes and get all excited that your website will appear on the first page of Google search, you need to know that it only happens in Malaysia through http://www.google.com.my! If you did the same search on http://www.google.com (not http://www.google.com.my) your website is maybe listed at page number 50! Try using a web proxy to access http://www.google.com.

Go to http://www.hidemyass.com/

Enter http://www.google.com and click on the button “Hide My Ass!”.

Do a search on the keyword “hosting”. Without the double quotes of course.

Now, you tell me where is Exabytes listed? Not on the top position anymore. Surprised? Not quite, mainly because you need to pay much more to get there, and the search isn’t coming from Malaysia now because it’s proxied. In order to get there perhaps you need to bid US$100 on the keyword “hosting”? This keyword is just too popular and too many web hosting companies bidding on it.

By the way, I may have some very good web hosting deals coming up soon, will you be interested?