Number of files on the Internet

How many PDF files are present on the Internet ?

Have you ever got this doubt. 

I have got this doubt and Google answered me. But the answer is not through a direct question.You can not ask Google directly "number of files on Internet" . Even if returns some answer it may be a old number.

Instead of searching directly for the number of PDF files, we can use an operator search in Google.

enter "filetype:pdf" in Google search to find the number of PDFs available online.

Google-file-search

You can try this for other file types also like Jpeg,png images; Ppts; Google earth files etc.

So here are some statistics of number of files indexed on Google

• PPT   -10,100,000 files
• PNG  -10,800,000 files
• JPEG -1,310,000 files
• PDF   -723,000,000 files
• DOC  -83,600,000 files
• TXT   -40,500,000 files
• XLS     -15,300,000 files

This is just one of the usage of search operators in Google.

Know how to search the web with the power of Google

10 Ways to improve your Google search results

9 out of 10 times I open Google to start my web browsing. We are all addicted to Google search. As a result we are some times missing a part of beautiful web.While Google is trying to make the search more easily, we can still use some little tricks to improve our web search results.

 1. log in and search to save your queries : Google will save all your search queries if you log in and search. Go to google.com/history this will help you to recollect your past Google search queries.You just need to login into your Google account , it will show your past search queries.

2.use search operators to get exactly what you want : If you are an engineering student, then you might have know about the OR , AND operators in programming languages. The same can be applied in Google search too.

Try these in Google :  

noodles OR soup      ----> you will get the results from the webpages which have either noodles or soup as a keyword.

noodles AND soup   ---->  you will get the results from the webpages which have both noodles and soup as  keywords.

noodles -soup            ----> all the webpages with the keyword noodles and excluding the pages having the word soup

3.you can specify the file type in the results : This is very useful if you are particularly searching for a keyword in a specific kind of file. Google can search inside a file available on the web. So use this as much as possible to [re]search on a topic.

For example I am searching for "Mahatma Gandhi" in Google.Now I want to search for Mahatma Gandhi only in PDF files. Then I will type "Mahatma Gandhi filetype:pdf" (without quotes)in the search bar to get PDF files which contain information about Mahatma Gandhi.

You can replace the file type PDF with your desired file extension.

4.you can search within a website : We may face a situation where we need to search for a topic within a website. 

For example, you want to search the topic black holes.

Then you can search this as "black holes site:nasa.gov" which will return all the articles on "black holes" available from the NASA website.

With this you can get a quality content from the web as you will specif the website name which will be mostly trusted(by you)

5.Avoid unnecessary words from your search query : Google loves Web friendly words.Don't   complicate your search query with unnecessary words like "A", "the" etc. If you add words like these Google may include some unrelated pages to your search query.

Also there is another use of searching with strong keywords(important words related to your search topic)

Have you ever seen a url with unnecessary words like "a","the" etc. ? An intelligent web content creator won't use these general terminology to index his webpages in Google. So to get quality content from search results avoid using these general words

 

6.Use Google International version : Don't restrict your search results to your region.If your Google page is redirecting to your country specific domain then try google.com/ncr . 
Here ncr = no country specific redirection 

personally I use Google Global add-on for FireFox(Why do I use Firefox ?) to search in Google. This will enable you to show the results from different country specific Google pages. You can install this in Chrome also

7. Use Google to search in your Gmail and Google drive files  : Yes ! Google will directly display your Drive or Gmail content on Google search results page. This is an experimental trial which will be activated after some days of registration.To add this feature to your account visit this link

8.Search similar  websites using a search operator 'related' along with a url

try 'related:google.com' to find some other web search engines.

9. You can use Google to get answers for your queries other than conventional web search.

question Google with the following queries. 

ip address         ------->gives your ip address 

temperature      -------->know your current location's weather details

time USA        -------->know the time of your friends location

usd2inr             ------->currency conversion operator in Google

define               ------> instead of using a dictionary you can use Google to find the definition on the       Google search results page itself. try "define Oneirophobia" to know what it means

sin(45)+cos(45) ------> use Google as your calculator.

you can apply these methods with a number of operators like  flight
numbers, value of shares,earthquakes, world capitals, sunrise/sunset times, movies,music albums, sports scores,package tracking numbers(of FEDEX etc.), medical conditions, and medications.

Using operators is the most powerful way to explore the web through Google. 

Remember that you can always use a variety of operators at a time.

for example, I am trying to study on "corruption in India" 

So I used "filetype:pdf corruption in india OR indian corruption site:.org" to get a lot of pdf files on my topic. 

In this way you can experiment with Google to dig the web as deep as possible.

 Wait !!! I said 10 ways  !! where is the 10th way ?

Hmmm.....Usually Google will answer most of our queries. But if you are still hungry for more web content, then you should point your url to other search engines.

So what are they ?

                                 BING | DuckDuckGo.com | WolframAlpha | Blekko

Google image search redesigned

There is no doubt about the number one rank of Google in search engine market. Still Google is trying to improve it's user interface to display the search results in an easily navigable mode.
For the normal web search,Google didn't changed much the way it displays the results.
But I always disappointed with the navigation of image search results(not with the results !). You can not easily pass from one image to other . You always have to come back to the all search results page and select another image. This will bite a lot of time and sucks more data.

So because of this I used Bing image search sometimes which is far better than Google in terms of navigation (I am talking about image search!!). Bing will show around 25 image thumbnails on the top of a main image.Also there are some good of options to search for similar images and more sizes of same image.It will also show thumbnail images for related searches recommendation on the same page.

So will Google allow Bing to get more image search visitors like me?
No way ! Here is Google coming with the all new image search user interface. It is not yet released(while writing this article), but they have given the screen shot of the new Google image search in their web masters blog

New Google image search interface

ADVANTAGES OF NEW GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH

• We can now see a main image along with other image search results as thumbnails.With this we can easily flip from a set of image results.
• Users can easily navigate from one image to other using keyboard (arrow keys)
• The url is now click-able(previously it was only visible). 
• Google removed the iFrame(of image source website) in the background of the image. This will reduces the page loading time and also reduces the load on source website server.
• We can now directly search for more sizes of an image by clicking "more sizes" button.

with all these options Google is trying to make the image search more convenient for the users.

Hope this will reduce our effort while searching for beautiful images from the beautiful web :)

Happy Googling :) 

Graph search-Is this another money making way for Facebook?

After creating much hype on it's New product, Facebook has finally revealed it's new search tool named as "Graph Search". There is no need to tell about the social networking giant which went for an Initial public offering(IPO) last year.

Things changed for Mark Zukerberg after Facebook IPO listing. He always need profits and regular growth in his company which may not be an easy issue.
Facebook is now more interested in revenue generating. So it has to put ads on user walls. But at the same time they shouldn't occupy more space on user news feed.

So Facebook got an idea where it can show answers for user's queries about his network along with some ads related to the queries.Building Graph search is not a big issue for Facebook by having more than 100 billion user shared data with it.

Graph search may drag many people's attention since it is person based instead of mere information based as in other search methods.As a human being we are all very much interested in our friends and neighborhoods. We are all mentally attached to Facebook.This is why Facebook is thinking to go beyond news feed and status updates.

Of course Graph search may not overtake Google which is enjoying its number one position from the past decade. But Facebook will definitely take advantage of it's new product by injecting more Advertising campaigns in the Graph search results.
Currently Graph search is in beta version available only for US region. But you can join the waiting list to get updates about it.
If you are looking for more details about Graph search , Mark Zuckerberg is waiting Here to explain about his new product from Facebook.

Happy Facebooking :)

Generate your Facebook account report using Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha, Know as a Computational Knowledge engine is now giving you an option of creating your own Facebook profile report. 

Wolfram Alpha-Facebook Report

All you need is a free Wolfram Alpha account and linking it with Facebook account.Wolfram Alpha will access your Facebook account for 1 hour and deletes any accessed information from its memory.So this may not disturb your privacy.

Just now I generated my Facebook report and it looks very cool. Some of the highlights of this report includes :

• Posting activities (Status updates,Links,Photos etc) in neat charts
• Post statistics i.e. number of likes and comments on status updates,shares
• Gender,Relationship status and Age distributions of friends
• Friend network structure (college,family or workplace etc.)  

here is a small part of my Facebook report 

Facebook report showing gender,age and relationship status of friends

Besides I also liked the concept of weekly activities Facebook postings by user.If you frequently uses Facebook, then you must use this from Wolfram Alpha to explore your social statistics.
Be Social :) Be Curious :)

Let Me Google That for You

This one is especially for the lazy people like me. 

Imagine a situation where your friend is unable to search for a topic on Google (due to keyword mismatches!) then you can send him a link and show how to Google for a particular topic.

If you want to see an example click this link

If you want to show your friend how to search for a topic go to LMGTFY

Not only for Normal search, this service is available for image, maps etc. Even this site gives chance to search in Bing also.

choose your search option in lmgtfy.com

 

Enter your query, you will get a link to share it with your friend. That's all.

Happy Googling :)
Read this, If you want to see what others are searching on Google using LMGTFY, 

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