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Archive for January, 2009

Google Search Results “This site may harm your computer”

Posted by simontoffel on 31st January 2009

Hello Guys,

Today, I have search something on Google abd found very strang result as give below:

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  1. Vishal Krishna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    This site may harm your computer.
    14 Jan 2009 Vishal Krishna (born 29 August 1977, popularly known as Vishal), son of noted producer G.K Reddy, is an Indian movie actor who has appeared
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishal_Reddy - Similar pages -

  2. Vishal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    This site may harm your computer.
    Vishal is a first name often found in the Hindu community. It is also a common adjective found in North Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi,
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishal - Similar pages -
    More results from en.wikipedia.org »

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  1. Hotels - Hotel reviews from people like you - Welcome to Hotels.com

    This site may harm your computer.
    Book hotels online with Hotels.com - Browse over 80000 hotel properties, read customer reviews and save with our loyalty program every time you stay.
    www.hotels.com/ - Similar pages -

  2. Hotel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    This site may harm your computer.
    A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel - Similar pages -

  3. Hotels, Rooms, Reservations, Hotel Lodging, Motels - Choice Hotels

    This site may harm your computer.
    Official Site. Choice Hotels provides hotel rooms at great rates. Whether you travel for business, leisure, family vacation, find rooms and suites and book

    www.choicehotels.com/ - Similar pages -

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I have tried many terms but always found “This site may harm your computer.” on each result and when I tried to open any page given below message come:

“Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!

Suggestions:

Or you can continue to http://www.hotels.com/ at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Advisory provided by Google

Can any body else see this ...what is going on with google….

Googlers..what is happing …:(

Posted in Google News | No Comments »

Sagoon Launched Beta Version of Search Engine

Posted by simontoffel on 31st January 2009

Sagoon has launched the beta version of its new search engine for public testing. The key idea behind the Sagoon technology - “Random Vector Model” - is to promote semantic search over the regular lexical search to provide more meaningful information to users.

This is done by analyzing the content of Web data and news documents to find out hidden similarities among them. The implementation of “semantic analysis” requires a series of algorithms and mathematical calculations.
The Sagoon’s results cover a number of resources for variety in the results. The results are obtained from a combination of Sagoon’s index, Yahoo Boss, and some of the larger search companies in the online information industry. Search results organized by ideas and concepts provide results based on Web page content analysis. Search results also offer features such as tabs to clarify subjects, news display groups, and the most relevant queries to explore more topics.

“We are planning an aggressive growth for the company and its technology so that we can continue providing the best search experience on the Web,” said Govinda Giri, founder and chief of Sagoon.

Sagoon’s various services like web search, news search, video search, directory, and classifieds search are novel approaches towards storing resources and information from all over the world. Sagoon is also in the process of developing other niche products with innovative business ideas and approaches which have not been seen on the market yet.

Elixir Web Solutions, a New Delhi based interactive media and Technology Company was selected to develop Sagoon’s technology. Sagoon was founded by two IT professionals Govinda Giri and Shiba Dhakal.

Posted in news, technology | No Comments »

Aegon Religar Life Insurance Deploys Dynamics CRM 4.0

Posted by simontoffel on 31st January 2009

Aegon Religar Life Insurance, the insurance arm of Regilare, has deployed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution to help its sales persons, agents as also reduce call loads on its call center employees. Today, the CRM connects sales employees across 25 branches on a whole suite of applications.

A green field company, it needed a customized enterprise-ready CRM solution. The IT and the business organizations of the company along with implementation partner Religare Technova developed a blue print outlining milestones that the CRM would help achieve.
These included making the CRM first available to the lead management team, keeping it as a separate entity from the core product, it should enable fairly large amount of automation, and an in-built campaign management system.

Plus the company wanted the CRM to integrate with other insurance projects and programmes for newer launches, said Srinivasan Iyengar director (information technology and change management) of AEGON Religare Life Insurance. “We evaluated numerous vendors and solutions, but finalized Microsoft CRM 4.0 because of its ability to scale, easy interoperability, and the ability to integrate. It has facilitated access to accurate, real-time customer information throughout our organization and enabled a quick sharing of knowledge across our enterprise.”

Iyenger said while the company has 200 actual users of the CRM, it wanted the flexibility to hook on external systems and portal available to the sales executives and agents to log their leads and other information. “Around 1,000 people use the CRM everyday.”

The campaign management application has witnessed a lot of improvement. “Almost 40,000 calls get logged and are subsequently loaded on the CRM.”

Speaking about interlinking, Maninder Grewal, CEO of Religare Technova said issues related to customer services such as requests, complaints, etc are logged on the front end. Sections such as policy administration, database for authentication of policy information, etc. are at the back end.

On the services side, it has helped direct marketing. A customized module enables call center employees to track direct sales pitches, said Iyenger. “Holistically, every quote you get, or every customer who logs in links the efficiency with which you deal with his request, and how fast and comfortably you can solve his problem. Integration offered by CRM 4.0 enables that,” said Grewal.

Another project that is underway at Aegon Religare is that of data analytics, where in the data is extracted from the CRM and branched in the form of customer demographic and other information. Said Iyenger, “Our executives can now look at the data in the CRM while talking to customers, and sell more policies or pitch for new ones. For example, if an executive is talking to an elderly person, the CRM branch would also give him information that the customer has teenage or older children, and can pitch for insurance policies as per their requirements.”

Starting January 1, the company launched a customer portal, the information from which will also be stored in the CRM.

Iyenger said while the company is yet to calculate ROI in monetary terms, some of the immediate benefits post the deployment include:

* Better turn around of conversion of leads into policy due to campaign management
* Better turn around of welcome calls into also sales pitches and sales of policies
* Since the CRM is interlinked with the portal, the agent calls to the call center have dropped

Grewal said that overall in the BFSI segment, the industry has to capture what the customer is saying, whether the call is to a bank, a brokerage house or an insurance company. “Are we passive or are we quick to respond is the next step. We should be able to provide value, and that only comes through business intelligence at our back-ends.”

Iyenger said that with the market so competitive, and companies clamoring for space as also a single set of customer, technologies such as CRM differentiate you from the crowd.

Posted in technology | No Comments »

Nortel Telecom equipment vendor Declares Bankruptcy

Posted by simontoffel on 15th January 2009

After years of layoffs and losses, one time telecom giant may be near rock bottom.

Telecom equipment vendor Nortel Networks has filed for bankruptcy protection after reportedly missing a $107 million interest payment that was due today.

Trading in shares of the Canadian-based Nortel (NYSE/TSX: NT), which is listed on both the Toronto and New York stock exchanges, was halted following Nortel’s announcement today.

Nortel is seeking protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code as well as the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (”CCAA”) in Canada. The filing caps years of continuing losses as the embattled telecom vendor struggled to manage debt and emerge from an accounting scandal in recent years. According to a report in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Nortel was due to pay a $107 million dollar interest payment today.

Nortel pledged to continue day-to-day operations while restructuring its business under bankruptcy protection. In a statement, it said the global financial crisis and recession compounded its existing financial challenges and directly impacted its ability to complete a restructuring that began in 2005. The company said it is taking this action now, with a $2.4 billion (unaudited) cash position, to preserve its liquidity and fund operations during the restructuring process.

“These actions are imperative so that Nortel can build on its core strengths and become the highly focused and financially sound leader in the communications industry that its people, technology and customer relationships show it ought to be,” said Mike Zafirovski, Nortel’s president and CEO, in a statement.

Zafirovski joined Nortel as part of its 2005 restructuring.

In addition to rebuilding its core business after the dot-com bubble burst in early 2000, Nortel also was struggling to put an accounting scandal behind it in recent years.

The current global recession hit Nortel hard. For the third quarter of 2008, the company reported a loss of $3.4 billion as well as the loss of its CTO John Roese.

Despite the troubled financial status of the company, Nortel has been pushing forward on some technology fronts. It rolled out new IPTV video technology at the end of 2008 to help capture part of that growing market.

Nortel’s Metro Ethernet business has also been active, recently announcing a new milestone for 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE)technology. Nortel claims that it can t it can run 100 GbE over a single optical wavelength which is different than what competitors are able to do. That said, Nortel already has publicly noted that it was considering selling off its Metro Ethernet business unit.

The bankruptcy filing for Nortel is perhaps the darkest chapter in the 100-plus year history of the company whose roots spring close to the birth of the telephone itself. Nortel was founded in 1895 in Canada as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing, barely 20 years after the telephone itself was first invented in 1874.

Posted in Banking, finance | No Comments »

WorldBank Blacklisted Wipro and Satyam

Posted by simontoffel on 13th January 2009

A World Bank statement yesterday has blacklisted three IT firms, including Wipro and Satyam. The statement was posted on the bank’s official website.

According to the statement, Satyam has been banned for a period of eight years for ‘providing improper benefits to bank staff and failing to maintain documentation to support fees charged for its subcontractors’; Wipro for four years, for ‘providing improper benefits to bank staff’; and US-based Megasoft Consultants for four years, for ‘participating in a joint venture with Bank staff while also conducting business with the bank.’

It might be recalled that Satyam had been defiant in December when the World Bank had first announced that it was blacklisting the IT major.

Posted in Banking, business, finance | No Comments »

Google Testing New AdWords Budgeting Feature

Posted by simontoffel on 12th January 2009

Google seems to be offering beta testing of a new AdWords budgeting feature called “Timeframe,” which allows users to choose between monthly and daily budgeting.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says the beta testing has been confirmed, and points to a WebmasterWorld thread that includes a response from an official Google representative:

ppcbuyers: I noticed a new feature under Budget Options for “Timeframe”, but only see it available in one client account - anyone else?

Monthly: Adjust daily budget based on traffic to reach a budget of $XX,#*$! per calendar month.

Daily: Limit the carryover of your unused budget from low-traffic days. This can reduce your potential traffic for the month.

AdWordsAdvisor (Google Rep): Sounds as if the one account has been made a part of a limited beta test, ppcbuyers. Not much I can add beyond that. :)

Google has a page up explaining monthly budgets and the differences between monthly and daily ones.

“With a daily budget, lower traffic days may mean that your ads receive fewer impressions and have some budget leftover. We don’t use this leftover budget, but we do attempt to compensate for the loss in traffic by serving impressions up to 20% over the daily budget on high traffic days. However, some high traffic days require budget flexibility beyond this amount,” says Google.

“With a monthly budget, we’ll adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. For example, if your ads often receive less traffic on non-business days during a month, we’ll apply your unused budget to remaining business days to take traffic fluctuations into account.”

It is unclear how many people actually have access to the Timeframe feature so far. I would imagine that the feature will be quite welcome by advertisers nevertheless.

Posted in Google News | No Comments »

Top 5 Reasons the “C Word” Should Be Your Priority

Posted by simontoffel on 12th January 2009

I’m not going to tell you that “content is king.” You already know that. There are reasons why your best bet for running a successful online business revolve around your content though.

1. Links

If you provide good, quality content, it is going to attract links period. It is true that this will not always happen without the appropriate attention to site promotion, but once people see your content, they will link to it if it is good. It’s that simple. There are tons of sites dedicated to linking to (what they perceive to be) good content alone. That is their whole purpose.

Look at sites like Drudge Report or Techmeme or even Google News for that matter. While the ways these sites choose what content to display may differ from each other, they are each rooted in what they consider to be valuable content, and everything on these sites links out to other sites. With good content, there is no reason why sites like these (or others depending on your niche) can’t be linking to your content.

When your content generates more links, it is likely to achieve greater visibility right along with them. Whether that be from search engines, blogs, or sites like those mentioned above, more doorways are created for entering your own site. People don’t link to bad content (generally speaking) unless they wish to insult it, or are for some reason misled about what they are linking to.

2. Sharing

Links are really just a way that people share content. But there is no question that as an online entity, you have to consider social networks. People love to share content via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Not to mention the ones that are made specifically for content like Digg and StumbleUpon.

In fact, you might as well give readers an easy way to share your content by offering social links within it. RSS feeds are typically a good idea too. This is just one more doorway for people to get to your content, and an ongoing one at that, should they stay subscribed to you feeds (they will also keep your brand fresh in readers’ minds). Then There’s the fact that feed readers often offer their own sharing features leading to even more opportunities for more people to see your work.

These things are the word-of-mouth of the online world. There’s no reason to rule out word-of-mouth in the physical world either. For example, I might tell my mother-in-law that I read this fascinating article on WebProNews today, and she might say something like, “Hmmm, what is this WebProNews? That sounds like something that I would be interested in. I should check that out. What’s the URL for that?”

But again, if your content sucks, nobody is going to share it unless they intend to insult it. This brings me to the next reason why content should be a priority, and that is…

3. Reputation

If people are out there insulting your content, your brand’s reputation will only be damaged. Remember, word-of-mouth works both ways. This is one reason why reputation management is so important. It’s not just about your own personal reputation, it’s about that of your entire business.

Creating good content establishes credibility. When someone views your content and learns something from it or likes what they see, they will (if even on a small scale) develop some amount of trust toward you (and potentially your brand) as a credible source for information within your niche of expertise.

4. Audience

The more linking and sharing of your content, the more your audience is likely to grow. Isn’t this reason enough to make your content good? When you develop a positive reputation online, that in itself tends to snowball as well. People throw your name around a lot, and you can even become something of a mini-celebrity. Then people will be inclined to check out your content based on name recognition alone. People will see your name referenced frequently, and want to know what you’re all about. If your content is good and appealing to them, they’ll keep reading it and share your content with others.

5. Money

In the end, it is truly money, which we all seek is it not? It’s not all that matters, but in the business world, it’s a pretty good chunk of what matters. That’s why we’re all in it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be businesses. We’d be non-profit organizations.

Well, when you have an established audience and a good reputation, the amount of revenue your business brings in is likely to increase. If your business plan entails selling ad space, there’s nothing advertisers like better than getting their messages out to large numbers of targeted people (in this case, your audience). And there’s nobody that customers like to buy goods and services from (particularly online) than a business with a good, solid reputation. And both your audience and your reputation can be boosted incredibly by the quality of the content you offer the general public.

I’m not giving away trade secrets here. I’m not selling anything other than common sense. I know this isn’t groundbreaking advice. Yet nearly every day, I see people trying to earn a living online using wretched content, and they’re (possibly even unknowingly) only hurting their chances of doing so.

Content can be the road to riches or the path to poverty. That is why if you’re trying to run an online business, it must be a priority.

Posted in Social media, business, marketing, social networks | No Comments »

Developer Creates Google Earth App for Use with Balance Board

Posted by simontoffel on 12th January 2009

Showing an example of how developers can do some really cool stuff with the Google Earth API, Google Earth iPhone Engineer David Phillip Oster has created a program that allows people to “surf” any region on the Earth’s surface using the balance board for the Nintendo Wii.

Oster used the Google Earth Browser plug-in and a javascript API, and the board transmits the person’s movements to the application using Bluetooth. See it in action:

“While it’s fun to use Earth Surfer, I really wrote it to inspire others to write their own programs,” explains Oster. “It’s all open source using the Apache License, so you can use the code in your own programs, even commercial ones.”

This certainly provides some hope for bored Wii owners who lament a lack of new entertaining titles to play. If they know how to develop applications or know someone who does, they might be able to get some more entertainment value out of a console that is otherwise collecting dust (I know many people still enjoy the Wii immensely, but I also know some people that are a little disappointed after a year or so).

Oster notes that “Earth Surfer” and it’s source code will be available via the Google Mac Developer Playground starting next week. The program was created for Macworld.

Posted in Google News, finance | No Comments »

Drawbacks to Google’s Blogging Platform

Posted by simontoffel on 12th January 2009

There is no question that blogging can help improve your search engine optimization efforts. Stephan Spencer, Founder & President Netconcepts talked about some of the reasons why in the following video, but he also said he favors some platforms over others for SEO purposes. Namely, he recommends WordPress or b2evolution as opposed to Google-owned Blogger.

While Spencer may be right about Blogger not being as good for SEO purposes, it raises the question: Why would a blog platform owned by Google itself carry a greater burden for getting good rankings on the very search engine that everyone strives to rank well in? I contacted Spencer to get his thoughts on just that.

“I don’t think it is intentional on Google’s part,” says Spencer. “The developers of Blogger designed it for simplicity and usability (the “KISS” principle). They ‘didn’t know what they didn’t know’ — and that unfortunately included SEO.”

“Believe it or not, the search engines are not expert at SEO,” Spencer continued. “They are expert at search algorithms, which is a very different thing. In fact, several search engines hired us at various times to advise them on SEO, i.e. to help them get their own sites to rank better in Google! The engineers don’t have the deep SEO experience that allows them to make SEO-informed decisions around functionality (like support for tag clouds), site architecture & internal linking structure (e.g. the way they handle pagination), design and layout, etc.”

Spencer touched upon on a few of these things that Blogger lacks for SEO purposes in the above video. He also followed up with me:

BTW, this one takes the cake… the tag pages on Blogger (actually referred to as “labels” by Blogger) are disallowed by the robots.txt file! They are within the search directory, which is disallowed:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Doh!

Spencer also notes in the video, that “it’s really hard to get off of it once you’re on it,” and there are many, many people using Blogger. Even if the platform isn’t great for SEO purposes, there are still some things that you can do to help somewhat. People have offered SEO tips for Blogger in the past.

Posted in Google News | No Comments »

LinkedIn Upgrades Search Interface

Posted by simontoffel on 12th January 2009

LinkedIn puts its current user base at about 33 million, and as such, it’s easy to believe that the odds of finding professionals with even remotely common names are beyond slim. The site’s trying to keep this from happening, though, with some interesting new search upgrades.

The first offering is something that more casual users should like. On the LinkedIn Blog, Adam Nash explains, “[O]ur old search interface had a limitation: you had to use the actual Advanced Search form to target specific fields for your queries. The new LinkedIn Search allows users to easily target specific fields directly from the search results page.”

It takes just a few clicks or pushes of the “tab” key to search for an imaginary Bob Smith who’s a product manager at Microsoft and attended Cornell, then. Or who used to work at Google and for some reason is known to have the word “windsurfing” in his profile.

The second search upgrade may suit a smaller audience. Nash writes, “The new LinkedIn search platform allows any query that can be executed from the user interface to also be executed straight from the query box using the new advanced search operators.”

We’ve pictured a list of them that LinkedIn provided, and not everyone will want to memorize the things (more are on the way). Still, since the economy has probably forced unemployed individuals to spend more time looking for jobs, they could catch on. HR people and perhaps some search pros will become comfortable with the advanced search operators, too.

Posted in Social media, social networks | No Comments »