I’m really surprised to see my blog getting so much traffic. It has crossed 500 hits a month, for the first time in its life. Its 504 hits for this month now! And there’s 10 more days for the month to end!

I’ve written only 3 posts this month, which is unusually low.

Most of the traffic has come from Google. The search terms that brought most traffic were like,  ‘ubuntu for winamp‘, ‘matlab alternative for linux‘, ‘path variable in ubuntu‘, ‘sahasranaman‘, ‘accel animation recruitment national engineering college‘

Well, I know 500 hits a month is absolutely nothing. I mean, A variable with 32 bit precision wouldn’t be enough to store my site’s rank based on number of hits. But I’m excited anyway. When was the last time you had so many of your blog posts listed in the first pages of Google search results for the first time?

I was traveling in a bus with my brother in Chennai when I firstsaw an aol.in hoarding. I thought it was stupid for America Online to use the .in TLD and decided I would never try aol.in! This was almost six months back.

Since then, I have been ignoring so many ultra-cool TV commercials that I started to get sick! I was really impressed. I knew that Yahoo does some advertising, but I never expected AOL to embark on an advertising campaign that’s this mad!

I started to have second thoughts about my decision, when this really good ad showed up on India Today. That had done the job. I decided to try it and signed into aol.in, and got the first blow. It was build with asp, which is something I have a strong dislike towards. Next, it was taking an unusually long time to load on my linux box. And once it had loaded, the interface wasn’t fast enough! I didn’t want to know anything more.

Their advertising campaign was too good, but I should have known better. I shall stay with Gmail until the day Firefox gets a good email-client addon.

I’m used to Google Search. For a change, I tried Live Search and Yahoo Search, and the results I got were simply pathetic! I wanted to find a circuit diagram to interface custom hardware to the USB port of my computer.

Google gave me loads of relevent stuff and I managed to find what I needed, but look at the results Live Search and Yahoo Search! They’re totally useless! I wonder why they’re still around.

• Here are the Google Results: 11400 results (with a lot of relevent results ofcourse)

• The Live Results: 0 results (Has only the usual good for nothing Eye-Candy stuff)

• The Yahoo Results: 1 results (Thank God they managed to find one result! Live Search would have been number 2 otherwise. :D)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, Image Search, Search Engines

“How is something with three the same vowels to compete with Vista? That name almost is as stupid as Google! Those hackers really can’t think of names, they sound as if it were the first and last sound a newly born baby made when he choked on an apple his evil babysitter gave him.”

~ Bill Gates on Ubuntu forks

A few days back, I happened to come across a really interesting and useful add-on for Firefox. It downloads videos or other embedded multimedia content from the website, directly to your hard disk, in FLV format. Click here to visit the download page.

Looks like the download-every-time-you-wanna-watch days are going to be long and past. But will they come out with some way to block add-ons like these? I don’t have the slightest idea..

Btw, if you have the Greasemonkey add-on installed, you can also check these two scripts. They add a ‘download this video’ link to any YouTube or Google Video video page.

Script 1 - For YouTube videos

Script 2 - For Google Video videos

As you would know, Greasemonkey scripts sure are much more convenient than any other add-on.