1) To get current time in any city anywhere in the world. Simply type time <cityname>
   Ex: time hyderabad or time sanfrancisco

2) Google’s search box can be used as calculator. Simply type calculation you want, and click on search, you will be presented with result.
   Ex: (5+4)/2*25/23*12.23=

3) To know more about recent earthquake activity around the world. Simply type ‘earthquake’ in searchbox. If you want earthquake of a city, type earthquake <cityname>.
  Ex:  earthquake tokyo 

4) Google can also be used to convert between Unit of Measurements.
   Type “20m in ft” you will get the answer.
   Ex: 130 sq yds in sq ft or 130 sq yds to sq ft

5) To find definition of any word. Simply Type define:<word>, you will get definitions of the word from online dictionaries across web.
   Ex: define:web or define:change or define:information

6) Google also provides currency conversion information. Type “100INR to USD” in search box. You will be presented with conversion result.
   Ex: 100 GBP to USD

7) Looking for a map of any city. Type city name followed by keyword ‘map’.
   Ex: Hyderabad map
   or
   Mountain View map

8 ) To find related sites that have similar content. Type related: followed by <site name>.
   Ex: related:cnn.com

9) Google ignores common words such as and, or, the, what, who etc. If you want common word to be included in search, use ‘+’ sign followed by common word.
   Ex: Obama +and socialist

10) If you don’t want certain words to come in your search results, just put ‘-’ sign before the word, then google excludes this word from search result.
    Ex: obama -twitter

11) By putting phrases(“”) around any word, you can restrict google search for exact word and in the same order.
    Ex: “Barack Obama”
    In search results, whole word “Barack Obama” will be high lighted. If you remove phrases then you will see search results containing either Barack or Obama or both words.

12) Google search allows you to search in a particular site. use keyword ‘site:’ for this purpose.
    <searchword> site:<sitename>
    Ex: Obama site:cnn.com
    will search for word ‘Obama’ in cnn.com
    Ex: twitter site:.in
    will search in all indian sites for word ‘twitter’.
 
13) If you are webmaster or site owner and want to know, how many URLs of your site are indexed by Google, use site keyword followed by your site name.
    Ex: site:creativeslab.net

14) And last but not least simply type your name or name of the person you just met in Google search box. You will be presented with web page search results of that person.

How to let people know about content on your website or blog or portal. Submitting a sitemap to searchengines helps them to crawl site and present content in their search results. But how better your site is getting indexed or crawled by search engines, depends on how accurate and efficient your sitemap is.

Google provides some tips on how to optimize crawling and indexing.

1) Remove User Specific URLs
– Remove session id’s or user id’s or post id’s from your URLs that don’t change content.
2) Disallow actions that Google bot can’t perform
– Use your robots.txt file to stop crawling of dynamic pages or user entry forms like login page, contact form etc.
3) One to One mapping between URL and Content
–  Make sure URLs point to single piece of content. Never point multiple URLs to same content. This case often
occurs in CMS. Use rel attribute if it is difficult to do so.

Go through following presentation by Google Webmasters to know more.
Optimize Crawling and Indexing
 

Reference: Optimize Crawling and Indexing

Inspired by news promotion techniques from popular social networking sites,  google introduced Orkut Promote, where in users can promote news, photos and videos across their friend’s network. Promoted content can be spreaded or reshared by friends of users across their friend circles.

In this way without paying single penny users of Orkut can promote their likes and dislikes across Orkut platform.

Promoted content can also be deleted by other users, to not to show on their profile, if they do not like it.

Orkut Promote also provides tracking information to monitor how far their promoted content reached among Orkut users.

Watch this video on youtube to learn how to use Orkut Promote

Simple to use Get Excerpts with Thumbnail plugin uses meta data of wordpress post, to retrieve thumbnail image. It also uses another plug-in named Content Extract by Rob Shumann, to retrieve excerpt from POST. You need install Content Extract plugin before start working with this plugin.

Inspite of having found numerous plugins to get excerpts along with thumbnail images in WordPress plugin directory. I have written this plugin to reduce number of requests that are made to MySQL database while fetching data.

== Installation ==
Install Content Extract by Rob Shumann, before installing this plugin.
The plugin is simple to install:

1. Download the zip file, from wordpress plugin directory
2. Unpack the zip.
3. Extract zip file and upload directory present in zip file to the `wp-content/plugins` directory on your WordPress installation.
4. Activate plugin
5. Go to Settings -> Get Excerpt with Thumbnail page, to change configuration for the plug-in.

Configuration of Plug-in:

Goto Settings -> Get Excerpt With Thumbnail link in your wordpress admin page.
Following four elements need to be configured.
1) Thumbnail CSS Class -> this is .css class name to be used by this plug-in. By default, CSS class name is displayed as ‘imgstyle’, change this to your desired class name and make sure it is defined in .css file of your wordpress theme.
2) More Text -> link that appears next to excerpt to read full post.
3) Post Length -> Inspite of reading entire post to retrieve excerpt, plugin just reads number of characters entered by you in this field.
Note: Once an excerpt is generated by this plugin, it will be stored in excerpt field of your wordpress post.
4) Excerpt Length -> Length of excerpt to be displayed.
Note: Always make suer Post Length is greater than or equal to Excerpt Length.

Sample usage of this plugin:

while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
$data = getExcerptsWithThumbnail();
echo $data['post_thumbnail'] . ‘<h5>’ . $data['post_title'] . ‘</h5>’ . $data['post_excerpt'] ;
}

In above code snippet, you can see getExcerptsWithThumbnail() function returns an array.
code snippet uses <h5> tag to display title of the post, you can use any of the style you want, for the presentation of thumbnail image along with excerpt.

Screen shot of the plugin, when Thumbnail Image position is used as ‘float:left’

Screen shot of plugin, when Thumbnail Image position is used as ‘float:right’

Get Excerpt with Thumbnail plugin just gives data, presentation of this data on theme pages is left to theme developer.

Reference: see category or tag pages on SearchAndhra.com to check how this plugin is used.

Please place your queries as comments to this post, so that i can reply to you.

Google opened acccounts on Twitter to let everybody know what is happening inside.

Following are Google accounts on Twitter.

twitter.com/Google – our central account
twitter.com/Blogger – for Blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar – user tips & updates
twitter.com/GoogleImages – news, tips, tricks on our visual image search
twitter.com/GoogleNews – latest headlines via Google News
twitter.com/GoogleReader – from our feed reader team
twitter.com/iGoogle – news & notes from Google’s personalized homepage
twitter.com/GoogleStudents – news of interest to students using Google
twitter.com/YouTube – for YouTube fans
twitter.com/YouTubeES – en Espanol
twitter.com/GoogleAtWork - solutions for IT and workplace productivity

Geo-related
twitter.com/SketchUp – Google SketchUp news
twitter.com/3DWH – SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse
twitter.com/Modelyourtown – 3D modeling to build your favorite places
twitter.com/EarthOutreach – Earth & Maps tools for nonprofits & orgs
twitter.com/GoogleMaps – uses, tips, mashups
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap -Android app for the night sky

Ads-related
twitter.com/AdSense – for online publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsHelper – looking out for AdWords questions and tech issues
twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah – Google Guide for AdWords Help Forum
twitter.com/GoogleAnalytics – insights for website effectiveness
twitter.com/GoogleAdBuilder – re building display ads
twitter.com/GoogleRetail – for retail advertisers
twitter.com/TechnologyUK – for U.K. tech advertisers
twitter.com/InsideAdWordsDE – for German AdWords customers
twitter.com/GoogleAgencyDE – for German ad agencies
twitter.com/AdSensePT – info for Portuguese-language publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsRussia – AdWords news & tips in Russian
twitter.com/DentroDeAdWords – Spanish updates from the Inside AdWords blog
twitter.com/AdWordsAPI – AdWords API tips

Developer & technical
twitter.com/GoogleResearch – from our research scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC – Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode – latest updates for Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData – Data APIs provide a standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine – web apps run on Google infrastructure
twitter.com/DataLiberation – our initiative for complete import/export of all data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI – about using Google Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO – Google’s largest annual developer event

Culture, People
twitter.com/googletalks – notes from our @Google speaker series
twitter.com/googlejobs – the voice of Google recruiters

Country or Region
twitter.com/googlearabia – news from the Google Arabia Blog*
twitter.com/googledownunder – Google activities in Australia & New Zealand
twitter.com/GoogleDE – Google in Germany
twitter.com/GoogleKorea - News & notes in Korean*
twitter.com/GoogleLatAm – Latin America (en Espanol)
twitter.com/GooglePolicyIt – Notes on Google policy issues in Italy

So folks just follow these accounts on Twitter and get latest updates on google.

The requirement came when we are developing a theme for our site SearchAndhra.com, where in we need to display latest posts belongs to a specific category, in our home page and also in single post page. After checking various plugins available for WordPress we coded this plugin.

The main motive behind coding this plugin is to reduce number of queries fired against MySQL database, while listing titles of latest posts.

List Latest Posts Titles plugin uses only one query per call, to retrieve titles of latest posts belongs to a particular category.

You can download and install this List Latest Posts Titles plugin from WordPress Plugin Directory.

Post your comments if you require any further information regarding this plugin, we are ready to help you out.

Twitter became so successfull as it is entering into Collins English Dictionary.

According to The Telegraph, Twitter the noun will be defined as “a website where people can post short messages about their current activities” while the verb’s definition will be “to write short messages on the Twitter website.” Interestingly, the term “tweet” doesn’t appear to be included (as it now is in the AP Stylebook), but Twitterati and Twitterverse will be.

The word Twitterati, means users of Twitter and The word Twitterverse means Twitter and its users.

With 1.8 million users in its lap, Twitter is going to list in Collins Dictionary, in it’s 30th anniversary publication later this year.

Download Ptwix from and installation instructions can be found at ptwix site.

According to Google, “Hot Queries is an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web. Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search. Latest Posts on the other hand shows recent posts from popular blogs”.

In this way you can find out what people are looking for on the web with Hot Queries and you can find stories even before people starts searching for them.

Another new feature in Google Blog Search is, subscribing to RSS and Atom Feeds just like in Google Reader.

With the investments of Betaworks and TAG, a small side project twitterfeed became a company now. Lot of things have been changed on twitterfeed.

Earlier when you want to create an account on Twitterfeed, you need to create it with your OpenID, now things have been changed alot, account on Twitterfeed can be created with traditional username/password account as well with google, yahoo and AOL accounts.

As per twitterfeed blog, a Feed dashboard is also available that shows analytics of posts and also you can see how many people clicked on your links.

With twitterfeed you feed your blog to twitter, identi.ca, ping.fm and HelloTxt.