Report Search Engines

If last week I was writing a post about web browsers, today I am going to write a report about search engines. Search engines are vital in the modern Internet surfing. Every time one looks for information on the web, a search engine is being used to search for this information. As you have probably already guessed, the most important and well-known search engine is Google, since it is the search engine most web browsers have as de-facto, as well as the most used and popular. However, apart from Google, I am going to report on a total of 5 different search engines that I use more commonly and others that not os often, and I am going to explain their characteristics and what they are specialized on. By the specialization I mean what type of topics they are good to search.

Let's start with Google. Google is mostly a broad search engine used to browse anything you can think of, therefore it is not specialized uniquely in one topic. However, it has numerous features, as one might think, since about 85% of the World Wide Web users, use Google as their search engine. The Google search features include more than 40 options or keywords to modify the type of search. Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google, Inc., and is the most-used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. Beyond the original word-search capability, Google Search provides more than 22 special features, such as: similar synonym words; weather forecasts; time zones; stock quotes; maps; earthquake data; movie showtimes; airports; home listings; sports scores, etc.There are special features for numbers: prices, money/unit conversions, temperatures, general calculations, and so on. 



Next up is Yahoo!. This search engine is probably second up on popularity, and has improved greatly over the years. Like Google, it is a search engine used to browse about everything you can imagine, therefore it is not used uniquely for a certain topic. There are features that the creators of Yahoo! have included in the search engine in order to compete against Google. The first innovative feature added by Yahoo was Search Assistant, an integrated pane that combined autocomplete and related searches. Search Assistant was heavily inspired by Ask.com's left sidebar, but it included a distinctive feature that made it less obtrusive: the pane is only displayed if you stop typing for a couple of seconds or when your typing slows.Probably the most impressive new feature in Yahoo Search and the only one that's not yet live is SearchMonkey, a way for site owners to enrich the snippets with structured information. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

 
Third up is About.com. I personally use this search engine quite a lot, since it provides information about many different topics and this information is usually really well-written and very clear. Most of its information comes from their own site, therefore it has a huge amount of information for the use of its users. Recently, due to its increasing popularity, it has added different sections for different article with different topics, from money, to housing, to science...mostly anything can be found. I personally recommend this for any type of search, of any topic, like Google or Yahoo!. 

Fourth on the list is Linkedin. Although I personally do not use it, I am sure that on the future I am going to use this search engine that it now used world-wide in order to search for jobs. Just last year, 5.7 billion professionally-oriented searches were done in Linkedin. Apart from browsing different jobs or people that have certain characteristics, Linkedin has now updated itself and has several new features, and some of these include: Auto-complete,  that as you type your search term you’ll be prompted with options for what you may be looking for, and the more you search, the better it will get at predicting what you want; Suggested searches that is  when you type in a search term such as “product manager” you’ll see example search queries for people or jobs related to product manager as well as a preview of top results to help you find what you’re looking for in one click, and so on.



Last but not least is Scirus. Scirus is a science search engine dedicated to only searching science-specific content. At the time of this writing, Scirus searches over 250 million science-specific web pages, filtering out those results that are not science related in order for you, the user, to quickly pinpoint what it is that you're looking for. It is used uniquely for science, therefore if you want to find information about any science-related topic, this is the search engine for you.



In conclusion, there are thousands and thousands of search engines. Although Google is the most popular and most used, there are several other, even more specialized in certain topics, such as Scirus mentioned above for science, that can find more specific results. Therefore, the search engine world is very broad, and in the end, one will use the one he most likes.

E-mail Services Report

E-mail has become a huge service nowadays. Everyone, or nearly everyone has an email account. What five years ago, maybe a bit more, was not so much used, is today a huge empire. And what is responsible for this? Well, basically the email services providers. With the continuos updates of the email experience, more and more people, younger and younger, are creating their email accounts in order to stay in touch with people, for work or to share photos or videos. Emails provide a large number of features and email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or Messenger are behind this revolution. In this blog I am going to compare three email service providers: Gmail, Yahoo and Mail, which is used by Apple users.

Let's start with Gmail. Gmail has a lightweight, minimalist design for speed and most of the screen is taken up by the inbox. At one time you couldn’t view the inbox and an email at the same time, but a

new ‘labs’ feature splits the view horizontally or vertically with the inbox in one half and the current email in the other. Folders for organizing messages aren’t supported and instead you attach labels, such as work, personal and family. Clicking a label lists all the messages tagged with it. It’s merely a different way of organizing email, and arguably more effective. It takes some getting used to, but if you know the right commands to enter into the search box, you can do some clever filtering that isn’t possible with rival services. There are many different ways to view email and the default shows messages in date order. Priority inbox puts at the top messages Gmail thinks are important, and this works well. Gmail can automatically sort messages by content into primary, social, promotions, updates and forums and these are accessible on tabs. It’s nice to have lots of different ways of viewing email. There are more interface themes these days, and an option to use any image you like for the background. There are more configuration options than most services and overall, it’s excellent. Moreover, it has a large capacity of storage space to store emails and it rarely has a problem, thus being highly reliable. In addition, you can send email with up to 25 MB of content, something other competitors do not have. 

Let's move on to Yahoo!. Yahoo! has a modern look and feel, and themes are available with plain or

photographic backgrounds. The attractive design is ruined by an advert, but you can go ad-free for £30 a year. There’s a panel with the inbox, sent, spam, trash and other system folders, and a list of email on the right from whatever folder is selected. A preview pane can be added to enable you to browse folders, such as the inbox, and read messages at the same time. Tabs are optional and when turned on they enable multiple messages to be opened on different tabs, and new messages to be created on a tab. It makes it easy to switch from reading to writing to browsing the inbox without losing the current view. Menus under the tabs provide access to all the functions for replying, moving, deleting, flagging messages and so on. Clicking Folders on the left enables you to create extra folders to organize messages. They can be dragged and dropped into folders and there are facilities for creating filters that automatically sort incoming mail into the right folders. Messages can be starred and filters created from them to deal with similar ones. Other email accounts elsewhere can be added so you can see all your messages in one place, holiday responses are available, extra email addresses can be linked to the account and disposable addresses can be created. Contacts with Facebook, Google and other import options, and a calendar is available. 

Last on is Mail. If you have an Apple device, such as an iPhone or an iPad, you will have an iCloud account and email is a component of that service. The web-based version is a bit disappointing and less

functional than the mobile versions. On the iPhone and iPad, Mail can be set up to access other email accounts, such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!, but at the website you only have access to iCloud email. In typical Apple fashion, the service is designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. It has the commonly used three-pane view with email and folders on the left, the inbox listing all the messages is in the middle and the currently selected email on the right. It’s straightforward, easy to understand and looks very nice, but there are no options to customise it. The reading pane can’t be hidden or displayed below the inbox list as it can with Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!. Folders can be created and emails dragged and dropped in them. Rules can also be created to automatically sort messages into folders too. Making a sender a VIP adds their messages to the VIP mailbox, which is useful for ensuring you don’t miss important emails, but it doesn’t have the custom views that Gmail and Outlook have. iCloud is a simple email service and non-technical people will love the attractive and easy-to-use interface. 


Overall, I believe Gmail is the best email service. Although I personally use more Yahoo! since before it had more options than other services and I have gotten used to it, I think Gmail offers the best features and is the most reliable. Rarely one gets an error with Gmail. Plus, its lack of ads, and it huge storage space is highly appealing, and its user-interface is just getting better and better making it very attractive. Therefore, I highly recommend Gmail, although Yahoo is another good option as well.

Web Browsers Report

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. It can be said that without this browsers, surfing on the internet would not be the same. These programs are what have shaped the way we surf the web and are fixed in our minds as directly related to connecting to internet. This web browsers include the following and most famous 5 browsers: Interner Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, in this blog post I am going to compare three of these, which are the browsers I have the most experience with: Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Let's start with Firefox. In 2003, Mozilla's browser, Firefox started competing with Internet Explorer, becoming more popular than Explorer quickly. Due to being a cross-platform browser, working on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, its popularity increases greatly, and it is one of the most standard-compliant browsers. Among its most appealing characteristics are the better rendering of the web pages compared to Internet Explorer, in other word, the speed at which the web pages load, add-ons and extensions that allow you to personalize you searches, session restoration, a download manager por-up blocking. It also features the all-in-one address and search bar. This means that the bar where the URL of a web page appears can be used either for the direct search of the web page by means of the URL or can be used to search as if it were the Google main site that we all are familiar with. However, it also has a separate search bar that you can personalize to browse in Google, Yahoo, Bing or even other websites, like dictionaries, Wikipedia, etc. It supports HTML5, CSS3 and it enable developers to create full-screen content apps. In my personal experience, it is also better than Chrome and Safari at the time of playing application that require Java for their view. In terms of speed, I consider it to be faster than Safari but a bit slower than Chrome.

Going on: Chrome. This recent browser, it was launched by Google in 2008, was meant to rethink browsing completely. It is nowadays the most used browser, and its popularity continues to grow, as it has lived up to the users' expectations. Chrome was the first browser to introduce tab isolation and one box for both addresses and searches, and it started as a faster and cleaner browser. This new characteristics that revolutionized the experience of surfing on the web were promptly copied by competitors due to the great ideas that they were, and nowadays we see these features in every browser. Aside from all of this, it also includes some useful features, like a quick calculation system included in the address bar, or drag and drop downloads and searches, as well as developer resources. it also enables multiple profiles in one window, and allows you to access your printer from any enabled web app through Google and Cloud Print. 

Last up, is Safari. Apple's Safari was initially developed for Mac OS, but it was later introduced to

Windows (XP, Vista or 7). It is the default browser for Mac, but it doesn't rank very high in number users, since most users are those who have a Mac and use Safari as a default user, as well as those with any other Apple product such as iPhone, iPod or iPad. Standards-compliant, browsing with it is fast and secure, and supports HTML5, CSS3 and SVG. An interesting feature of this browser is that it removes advertisements and pop-ups and leaves just the text, to allow you to read any given article without being bothered by these. Like all browsers now, it enables DNS prefetching to allow users to make searches using the address bar. 

In conclusion and in my opinion, out of these these three web browsers, Google Chrome is the one I use the most and which I consider to be the best. Although there has been a point in my life in which I have used the three of them quite a lot, I can say that the best experience has been with Chrome. Although I am a declared Mac user and have used Safari a great deal, I can say that the best experience has been with Chrome. The speed of Chrome is incredible, and it is extremely reliable. It has never given me a problem, and its total integration with Google comes in very handy in numerous situations. Plus, the way tabs are organized, and how it automatically selects the websites you visit the most in order to put them in you main site when opening the browser is extremely useful (although Safari also has this feature). Therefore, I highly recommend Chrome to everyone.

External Memory - Backup Storage Policy

Technology has taken over the world in the past decades, and we cannot conceive a world without it. From schools, to worksites to our homes: everything is full of smartphones, tablets and computers. However, one my ask himself: How do I storage so much information, that in many cases is vital for my work, school or personal life? This is a question that all of us that work with technology should ask ourselves because we all know that nowadays there is no excuse if your computer breaks, since there are many ways to save your files.

In this blog post, I am going to explain what my backup policy is. I understand that everyone has his own personal backup policy, but I am going to explain how I do it, especially for computers, but some applications may be used for tablets and smartphones as well.

First of all, I would like to distinguish between the internal memory of the computer and the two main external memories that exist nowadays. The internal memory of a computer is the one that comes with the computer and which is located inside the computer. The internal memory has several components such as the RAM memory that increases the power of your computer, or the internal hard disks. The internal memory is certainly vital, but in case your computer breaks, the external memory hardware comes into place. This external memory devices, such as mentioned before, include the most portable, which are USB disks such as pendrives, and then bigger and more compact hardware such as the external memory drives that can store large amounts of data, normally 500 GB or 1 TB, but up to however knows.

Once knowing this, I am going to explain what I do to backup my data.

I am an Apple user, therefore I have a Mac. For this reason, I have a wonderful program called Time Machine which comes very handy at the time of making security backups of your entire computer. What I usually do, is once a week, normally during weekends, is opening up Time Machine at the same time that I connect my 500 GB external hard drive to the computer, in order for Time Machine to produce a new security backup of my computer and storing this new data once again, but updated, to the external memory disk. This process can take a long time if you have not done backups in a while and you ha a lot of new information, but if you do it every week, it should only be a matter of 5 minutes or less, and it is totally worth it.

In the highly unlikely chance that both my internal memory and external memory hardware breaks, I once again weekly, store what I consider my most important files in iCloud, therefore I can open up these files in my other devices just in the case of an extreme situation. 

Lastly, in the even higher unlikely chance of a failure in the iCloud server and the breaking of both my internal and external memories, I store the most important files of the week as well in Dropbox, since I have the Dropbox application in my computer, and it is honestly very easy and fast to store those files.

So here is my backup policy. What I believe that everyone should remember is that it is important to do at least one backup a week in at least an external memory drive in order to have your information secure and in hand in the case of an emergency.

I hope you have found this post useful!