As GoogleSystem pointed out that the new Google homepage will incorporate the Live Search and Yahoo Search button at the bottom of its own search button, which I think is a wise move to offer more competition, there is one message by Yahoo that I think is a brilliant move too.
If you perform search on keyword like Google, Live or Ask, Yahoo will put up special message that ‘advice’ you to stay there, and continues searching. The message is clear but honest and it doesn’t sound to offend other competitors.
Apparently search for Cuil doesn’t returning similar result. Probably Cuil is too early to be considered as serious competitor.
Live search recently detailing how you can check your website if it is being penalized by their search engine or not.
1. Register with Live Search Webmaster. Follow all necessary steps to validate you site.
2. After validated, go to ‘Summary‘ tab. Under ‘Blocked‘ column, (see the sample screen shot as reference) check if there are pages with ‘Yes’. If there is no ‘Yes’ mark, you’re safe now. Otherwise please proceed to the next steps.
3. Before proceed to other step, please identify what block your pages.
- Check if it is related to malware. In Webmaster Center, go to both the ‘Crawl Issues‘ tab menu (review the ‘Malware infected‘ issue type) and the ‘Outbound Links’ tab menu (select the ‘Show only outbound links to malware’ option) for possible malware issues. Please clean them up immediately upon detected
- If malware’s not the issue, please review carefully the Live Search Webmaster Center Guidelines. Pay special attention to the bullet items listed in the section titled, ‘Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results’. Posted there are the basic rules that can cause your site to be penalized. Some time it is your SEO technique or SEO consultant that you hire apply an optimization techniques, that prohibited by Live Search.
4. Once you clean up all the mess, go to the Live Search Support page and request re-inclusion into the Live Search index. Wait for a while before checking back the Live Search Webmaster.
If you use Live Calendar, you can now share and embed your calender to any web page. This simple but useful enhancement bring Live Calendar on par with Google Calendar which has this feature long ago.
It need extra work though, as the code is not auto-generated and need little modification with iframe. (read here to read how to embed iframe).
Any changes made to the calendar will reflected on the embedded calendar. Head to live blog to learn how to get the code.
Early February this year, Live team has introduced POP3 support for live Hotmail. At that time it is limited to users from few countries only.
Today, the POP3 support is opened for all users. That means you no longer need this little hack to enable it.
This setup is what you need to get your Hotmail’s POP3 working. Visit this page for more info.
POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25 or 587)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes
Undeniably, Skydrive is great application from Microsoft. The huge 25GB free online storage is really tempting for those who want to keep and sharing items online. But
it is lacking very critical feature that should provide greater usability; better files uploader.
The way files are being uploaded should be improved. Just take a look at the screen shot. It is quite troublesome when at any time you can only upload 5 files, whereas hundreds more in wait.
Instead of using very ‘traditional’ way of uploading files, why not invent something like Facebook’s java style uploader or Flickr’s desktop uploader which can upload lots of files simulateneouly.
For regular users, they’ll be more than happy if such tool available in the near future. It saves them time and effort!
Skydrive is a free application with a great feature, but without great usability, it could only attract first timer for a while before rival (such as GDrive) take them away.
