Google Directory
Google is primarily known as a search engine, but it offers good browsing, too. You search Google with keywords, and you browse topical categories in the Google Directory. (You may also use keywords in the directory, in which case all results come from directory listings.) Searching is for when you know what you’re after; browsing is for when you’re in a less demanding mood. Searching is like going to the store for a gallon of milk; browsing is like strolling through town looking in all the windows.
Google Directory represents a landmark achievement in human cooperation and virtual cataloguing. Google takes its basic listings from the Open Directory Project database, a large volunteer organization determined to assemble the largest and most useful classified index of Web sites. More than twenty thousand real-life editors evaluate and select Web sites for this project, which was started in 1998. Listings created by Open Directory Project are used by certain other Web directory sites, including Google Directory (as well as Lycos, AOL Search, Netscape Search, and HotBot). Google takes Open Directory as a kind of raw ingredient, and cooks it by adding PageRank formulas. The result is an enhanced directory experience.
Up to the minute, more or less
Google puts a time stamp on every message it displays and every message it archives. The time stamp indicates the date and time (in Pacific U.S. time, regardless of where you’re located) when the message traveled through Usenet and hit Google’s newsgroup server.
Keep in mind that time stamps for the same message differ from server to server. Also, Google has a reputation for being slower than ISP (Internet service provider) servers. Since the great overhaul of Google Groups, I have monitored latency (which means the time delay between posting a message and seeing it appear in Google Groups) with uneven but improving results. When this beta test was first launched, the latency was a disastrous nine-teen hours according to my testing, which compared selected newsgroups both in Google Groups and in a dedicated newsgroup reader. (That reader accessed the newsgroup server of a large national Internet service provider.) Since then, Google has really snapped to it, dramatically improving server performance. Delays are measured in minutes now, not hours.
Googling the Day’s News
Google News is awesome — in certain ways. At the time of this writing, Google News had not become involved with RSS news feeds, which represent a distinctively useful method of gathering news from many sources into one window on your screen. But Google News is, itself, an extraordinary portal that pulls news from many publishers, without any effort on your part. Furthermore, Google News furnishes keyword search of articles from an astounding number and range of publications.
There’s a good reason why the Google Toolbar contains a dedicated button linking to the News section. After you get a taste for Google’s news delivery style, you’ll go back for more throughout the day. The front page is a good place to turn for headlines or in-depth current events. And I don’t mean just among Web sites. I prefer Google News to TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. No other news portal approaches its global scope, intelligent organization, and search ability.
Saving Yourself from TV News with Google News
We have more ways of receiving news than ever before, online and offline. Nearly every print publication runs an online edition, and a new breed of amateur journalists publishing Weblogs adds a powerful new voice to professional news reporting and commentary. In addition, the mechanics of news distribution have evolved rapidly over the last ten years. New, free tools such as RSS feed aggregation and podcast downloading have made it ever easier to receive a highly customized selection of news sources onto your screen (and into your ears). Don’t worry if you aren’t aware of RSS or podcasts; you don’t need to know them.
Google News is a virtual newsstand of astounding scope. It was revolutionary when first introduced, and now, if not as novel, it continues to be as important in the areas in which it specializes. Google News is a completely automated search engine for daily news. That automation sets it apart from a major competitor for your eyeballs: Yahoo! News, which uses a combination of news crawlers and human editors. (Google News is not 100 percent automated, because humans can add sources to the engine. But the selection of stories and the arrangement of those stories on the Google News site are accomplished entirely by software.)
My Visitor
Categories
- Auto
- Blogging
- Browser
- Business and Economy
- Business finance
- Business franchise
- Business Online
- Business plan
- company
- computer and Internet
- Corporations
- Education
- environment
- Food and Nutritions
- game
- Heatlh and Beauty
- Home
- Horoscope
- Insurance
- Investment
- Knowing competitor
- Law
- Lifestyle
- Loan
- Partnerships
- Professional image
- Recreation and Sport
- Relationship
- Service
- Software
- Special Event
- Special website
- Success entrepreneur
- Technology
- travel
- Uncategorized
- You Tube
My Archieve
- March 2010 (1)
- February 2010 (1)
- January 2010 (17)
- December 2009 (9)
- November 2009 (32)
- October 2009 (8)
- September 2009 (7)
- August 2009 (10)
- July 2009 (45)
- June 2009 (14)
- May 2009 (3)
- April 2009 (21)
- March 2009 (8)
- February 2009 (6)
- January 2009 (7)
- December 2008 (7)
- November 2008 (2)
