MeraCareerGuide.com

It’s been long since I last updated GeekOnNet. I apologize to my avid readers for this delay. I was very busy with my final Masters Thesis. Finally am a post graduate (BTech. + MTech.) now in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay :) .

Ok, now back to the point. In the past two months there has been a backlog (pardon us for using the IIT jargon) of more than 15 Indian startups with us. The first in the list being meracareerguide.com.

It is a one stop destination for Education & Career related information, aims to address problems of students who are confused and have numerous questions about their particular field of interests. The website is designed to provide a platform to students from 15-24 age group, at the same time it will enable educational institutes to reach out to their target students.Using Internet as its platform, meracareerguide.com reaches out to students in every city and town of India. meracareerguide.com informs, connects and guides these students to a variety of educational programs. MeraCareerGuide.com provides the following set of services to users.

• Information about career that can be pursued after +2 and after graduation.
• Career Tests: scientifically designed assessments.
• Expert chat for career counseling.
• Forums for queries to be answered by community & Experts.
• Course planner that gives information about various courses and colleges across India.
• Interview queries.
• Resume preparation.
• Education related articles.

GeekOnNet team had detailed email interview with Surabhi Dewra (Founder) to get an insight of her entrepreneurial journey.

The Geeks: How did you get the idea to start meracareerguide.com?
Ans: We, ourselves, have been at the crossroads and so we understand the kind of guidance students require in their intermediate stage of education; though I happened to be lucky one to get to BITS-Pilani and then had constant access to great mentors.
During my college days, I took up activity of counseling in schools of Hyderabad and Bihar; and there realized students had many questions about their career and future prospects. Consequently, In 2007 founded MITR – a scholastic students' guide - in Hyderabad and later decided to have a pan India approach. As the web today has become the best medium, we decided to use the power of internet to solve many of educational issues and that’s how www.meracareerguide.com came into existence.

The Geeks: Whats your "Business Model" & "Revenue Model"?
Ans: The website is designed to provide a platform to students from age group 15-24 to use it for their educational queries; at the same time it enables educational institutes to reach out to their target students. So the revenue inflow is from educational institutes whereas the service is entirely free for students.

The Geeks: Who are your nearest competitors? How do you differentiate your service or product from that of others?
Ans: Studyplaces.com, I would say, is providing similar services but execution wise it’s totally different.
We provide a personalized approach. This approach helps students to easily understand how to use information they receive. Counseling and career requirements are very specific to each individual, which is ensured on www.meracareerguide.com through live chat feature where in students are allowed to have live interaction about their educational queries with our experts. We have given maximum attention to ensure that content is easily scannable and in chunk format making it is easily comprehensible and not overwhelming.

The Geeks: How many students or career advise seekers get benefited from meracareerguide.com?
Ans: We have students from various age groups who come to us for finding answers to their concerns regarding Why, How, When, Where and What about their career. In its two months of official launch, www.meracareerguide.com has 50,000 users hitting the portal and using the services.

The Geeks: What background skills, knowledge and experiences help you in your business?
Ans: Like I wrote earlier, I have experiences in counseling at schools of Hyderabad and Bihar. Those experiences have helped me have an insight into the students requirements. Also, my association with educational NGOs like Nachiketa Tapovan(Hyd) and Damini( Har.,Raj., Bihar,Jhrakhand & UP) has helped me understand the way an educational medium needs to be shaped. Where as, the usage of relevant technology to convert the idea into a website came from other founders of the site.

The Geeks: Where do you want to see meracareerguide.com 3 years down the line? Or whats your future plan?
Ans: We are planning to have network of 5000 schools and colleges and where in we can have career workshops. Apart from this, we would be launching a few career centric features on the portal which will help students in taking right decisions.

The Geeks: Advise for future entrepreneur ?
Ans: I have few lines from Rudyard Kipling’ poem ‘IF’, which I came across in my standard 8th while preparing for a poetry recitation competition and since then these lines have been my strength. I would like to quote a few of my favorite lines:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

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How to Choose a Good Domain Name?

In Ranjeet's 100 Blog Tips I Learnt in 2008, Part 1 his number 3 and 4 are buying your own domain name and also getting a domain name that will be the main subject of discussion. Ranjeet asked me over at Web Hosting Search to discuss why domain names are important and why you as a potential new blog creator or an experienced pro should care.
You blog, you Twitter, you Friendfeed, you Facebook, you do all those social media things to bring awareness to your blog. Have you thought about your blog name itself? Is it a good name? Is it a catchy name that people will remember?

There are some Do's and Dont's of having a domain name. For some of you still on the lookout for an available domain name for a new blog, this is THE post for you. Honestly, forget the social media aspect at this moment, if you have a bad domain name, you will have a hard life ahead in the virtual world.

DOs:
Get a name that means something. If your blog is about you and your experiences, get it in your name. If your blog is about a particular subject, get a matching name, like Geek on Net.
Get an easy to understand name. If a name is long and hard to remember or spell, chances are, people will have a hard time typing in your blog URL and telling others. Word of mouth in the real world is still invaluable; get something that will easily stick in a person's mind.
Have a domain name that is difficult to remember? That's okay, buy a more user-friendly name and redirect that to your current blog. I don't recommend to do this all the time but if you notice people have trouble with your site name, then considering getting another one.

DON'Ts:
Do not host your blog on subdomain like .WordPress.com (that's .com), .typepad.com, or anything else where you do not have a domain name of your own. This is especially true if you are brand. Serious websites deserve serious names. Go with ilovechocolate.wordpress.com as a chocolate seller, chances are people will not take you seriously. Neither will Google for that matter. Subdomained sites like this take more time to build up credibility in the search engines.
Do not spell your name in an incomprehensible way. Geekonnet.com already taken? Buy Geeekonnet.com. That extra “E” can cause you a lot trouble as geeek is not a real word. Unconventional spelling will require more elbow grease on your side to get the name out.
Do not pick a domain that is a play on an already known brand. Ilovelouisvuitton.com is not a valid domain name because you are infringing on copyright laws. If you are a blogger that writes about a celebrity or famous brand (like LV), choose your domain name wisely; you could end up with a lawsuit otherwise.

Take a step back and look at your domain name. You may be the most awesome Twitterer, but at the end of the day, a good domain is as important. As bloggers, we all want people to remember us and stop by our site. Make your site name tasty and easy and even more people will visit.

Author: Eva Vesper
Website: http://webhostingsearch.com

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MindCron - Cron your mind: ORACLE after Strategic Acquisitions

MindCron - Cron your mind: ORACLE after Strategic Acquisitions

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Bing VS Google : Head-to-Head

Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out once. So I am back to keeping one of my promises; as I promised in my last post to come up with the " comparison of search results of Google & Bing".

Hats off to SEO specialist Paul Savage who has made this very basic web service, which lists all the results for your search queries on Google and Bing side by side, so you can compare which one produces the better results for the keywords you enter, on a single page. I played around with it , and this is what I felt:

The comparison:

Main Page Size: Both have almost equal page size, 14KB with 4 http request and 15KB with 1 http request for Google and Bing respectively. Page loading times are almost equal for both the search engines.

UI: I liked the concept of the front cover photo changing every day. When you float over it, you find the hidden "Easter eggs" that lead you on some interesting and unexpected links. So, full marks to Microsoft's Bing.

Web Search Results:
Web search results are almost the same for a simple search query. When I searched "geekonnet" the initial results on both search engines are almost the same.

Image Search: This is a place where bing needs a lot of improvement. When I did an image search on myself, google gave me results from linkedin, Twitter, Facebook ..etc. Bing didn't give me any relevant image search result. Well, bing's mouse over features are good. But the image search is really bad.

Video Search: Almost same, mainly from youtube and other video streaming sites.

Well, Bing reached at 2nd place in the search engine war, after google, ahead of yahoo search and ask.com. I predict that the market share of google will remain unchanged but bing will take away yahoo's and ask's market share. I am definitely not shifting to bing, from google; what about you? Here is a poll on the right side of this post. So, "Are you moving to BING?" "Yes","No" or " I don't care".

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Bing : A Google Killer???

Recently, I wrote about Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine. I also wrote about Cuil last year. Definitely they are not google killer. But they have killed themselves by the hype created before launching.

So now we have another new search engine to unveil, this time from Microsoft. But doesn’t Microsoft already have a search engine called Live Search? Yes they do, but they’ll be killing that off in the next few days.

Bing: which type of name is it? I asked the same question to one of my friend who works for Live Search. He replied “Dude I have no idea what does it mean and why they are shutting down live search”. Well, what's in a name? All we want a good search engine.

The most significant change is that Bing now organizes search results into categories. it’s a “decision engine” that will help consumer to make decisions about travel, health, and shopping. Microsoft also launched a new site, Discover Bing, that goes into all the details of how Bing works and the decision process behind the creation of it.

As we can see the snapshots given below, there are mainly 3 columns on its main page. Left most is “Explore”, basically categories like images, videos, shopping, news, maps and travel , The middle one is for searched result and the last one is for “similar links”. I am not sure whether this last column is for sponsored link or not. It also has suggestions (not a new thing for today’s search engines). The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing while Google spent $25 million on all its advertising last year.

To know more about Bing watch this 2.47 minutes video.

Bing is going to be launched on 3rd June worldwide. I am eagerly waiting for that day. Currently I can’t say anything about its search results but I am highly impressed by it’s categorized search. This is something new for search engines or you can say an improvement to the search engines.

I never used Live Search. I don’t see myself giving up Google, especially given the default Firefox browser integration. But after seeing Bing’s features , definitely I would like to use it and also would like to compare it’s results with google’s results.

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Wolfram Alpha (The Good, The Bad or The Ugly ? )

A few days ago another internet search engine named Wolfram Alpha was officially launched. It was the hottest topic in my friends circle and amongst my batch mates . People were spamming and filling each others mail box. Their main queries were, will this search engine survive in front of a giant like Google? or will this search engine produce better results than Google? Did they implement semantic search? Etc.

I used it for a few hours and found some good and some bad results. I also compared it’s search results with Google. I will explain all of this and more in the latter part of this post. But the thing that interests me the most is Wolfram's profile.

Stephen Wolfram, a British prodigy who earned his PhD in Physics at the tender age of 20 . He published an article on particle physics at the age of 16 and entered Oxford University at the age of 17. He wrote a widely-cited paper on heavy quark production at the age of 17. This same person made a calculation and graphing software package called Mathematica, the only fully integrated technical computing software. No doubt he is a genius but we are here to explore Wolfram Alpha.

Is Wolfram Alpha a search engine?
Search engine is a tool which enables one to find what he is looking for on the Web. For example if you search "geekonnet" on google or on other search engines, it gives all the websites where "geekonnet" is present. If we search the same query on Wolfram Alpha it gives information about geekonnet like daily page views, domain information etc. The site's best trick is its ability to make calculations for certain types of queries. It tries to dissect a question into its components and then performs calculations using its own source materials to compute an answer. The results are presented as a sleek collage of tables, charts and graphics.

It would be unfair if we call wolfram alpha a search engine. Wolfram Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine." In simple word a " question answering system". It is interesting to know that whatever result you get on Wolfram Alpha you can also get the same result on google within 3 to 4 searched result links.

Some facts about Wolfarm Alpha:

1. Wofram Alpha's page is 18 times havier than google's home page: I compared the size and dowloading times of wolfram alpha and google on www.websiteoptimization.com . I found that the homepage Wolfram Alpha is 18 times heavier than Google's home page. The size of Google's home page is 14.449 KB with only 4 HTTP requests. But I found that the homepage of Wolfram Alpha is struggling with a size of 257.411 KB along with 37 HTTP requests. Google page takes only 3.75 seconds to load on a 56Kbps modem. whereas Wolfram Alpha takes 59.93 seconds to load on the same 56Kbps modem.
   No doubt wolfram Alpha needs a huge website optimization.
   
2. Wolfram Alpha is built using Mathmetica: Wolfram Alpha is built primarily using Mathematica; it contains 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code.

In short Wolfram alpha acts like a nerdy accountant who is equipped with the latest set of calculators and endless stacks of books and encyclopedias. Wolfram Alpha is completely useless for me. I don't think I will ever use it. But I am not entirely happy with Google. Google still uses the same old search algorithm based on page rank and key words. If any Google guy is reading this post, here is a question for you : When will you implement semantic search in Google?

PS: Dear readers please write your views and experiences about Wolfram Alpha as comments to this post.

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