Google has announced that its spiders will now begin including scanned documents in its search results. In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results. Google said they are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that they find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets them convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found.
In the past Google has indexed documents saved as PDF’s but scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. From now on Google searches will include the text within these scanned images in normal search results. When you encounter a scanned document you’ll be able to view it in its original form as a PDF, or as a converted text file (click “View As HTML”).
To see the new system at work, click on search queries below. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the ‘View as HTML’ link:
[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]
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David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, keeps tabs on more than 45 million weblogs. So you’d imagine he probably knows what makes a good blog:
1) React quickly. Commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin draw megatraffic with immediate rebuttals to A-list pundits at The New York Times and Fox News.
2) Make your posts easy to read. Italian comic Beppe Grillo broke into the Top 10 by setting his key points in boldface.
3) Link, link, link! It’s counter-intuitive, but the busiest blogs in Technorati’s index are those like Insta-Pundit.com that link prolifically to other sites. Linking works because most bloggers reciprocate by sending their readers your way.
4) Optimize for search engines. Put the name of your blog (even if it’s just your own name) in the main URL and the title tag of your site. On Technorati, identify your blog with search topics, like “politics” or “sewing.”
5) Post, post, post! Chinese actress and director Xu Jinglei has the most popular blog on the planet. At first we thought it was a glitch in our system, but it turns out she’s a real-world celebrity who makes time to post almost every day. What’s your excuse?
Source: liambyrnes.co.uk
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Google can be your phone book.
Type a person’s name, city, and state directly into the search box, and Google will deliver phone and address listings at the top of the results. The feature works for business listings too.
Google can be your calculator.
Type a math problem into the search box and Google will compute it. You can spell out the equation in words (two plus two, twelve divided by three), use numbers and symbols (2+2, 12/3), or type in a combination of both (ten million) *pi, 15% of six).
Longer is better, but shorter is ok.
Google is designed to return high-quality results even for one- or two-word queries, so you can keep your searches short. But adding a few more words often yields better results.
Use quotation marks when precision matters.
Typing “the search is over” into Google will return web pages about the rock song by Survivor – but leaving off the quotes will produce an assortment of unrelated pages. The reason: adding quote marks phrase as it was typed. That makes quote marks especially helpful when searching for song lyrics, people’s names, or expressions such as “to be or not to be” that include very common words. (more…)
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