Have you noticed those small colorful icons on the top of the browser page, when ever you visit a popular website? Yeah, those are called as favicons. These are small icons which can be used on every websites (to signify the website).

These images are available at google.com/images/icons/product/blogger-128.png
[Replace blogger with other google products & you can also tweak the size such as 16,32,48 etc]

If you see the Google products page you will see different smaller icons. These icons are relatively smaller in size about 5px. There are larger versions of the same available (up to 128px wide).

Here is all Google favicons in 128px:

I found this awesome infograph about ‘how finding stuff on the internet became a $20 Billion industry‘. Here is the History of search engine on the web.

Via BoingBoing

After Google launched its new real-time search, one thing the interface missed was the style. The real-time results from twitter & Facebook were in the middle of the search results and looked ugly. Now the Google team has come up with a new-nicer look for the real-time searches.

You can hit – http://www.google.com/realtime/ to start searching in real-time. This new interface is almost the same as the Google.com interface.

Here is how the real-time homepage looks like:

And the results page:

The results keep updating themselves as and when there is new information available, just like the twitter stream!!

Still confused? Yeah! Google thought so too… they’ve made a video, check it out!

If only the world was a Social Network (Oh yeah! Your facebook, twitter or Myspace). Here is another infographic of world map showing the size of social networks based on their number of users in 2010. These numbers come from information collected by USA Today, Alexa, Compete, and other sources.

The map also includes legends such as “The land of social networks disappeared,” “Sea of personal information” or “The U.S. territories of Wikimedia”, etc.

Click for a larger image

Via Mashable

As I discussed before…. the Internet grows continuously and the number of websites increase every day, one problem seems to be closer than we thought. The internet is running out of IP’s & that’s the TRUE fact!

Internet giants are addressing the issue. For example, in June Google held a conference on implementation of IPv6, in which Facebook announced that it had started using this IPV6 protocol.

We can find some similarities between Y2K problem & the IPcalypse!  Now, there is a twitter account created to countdown the IP-Apocalypse day!

Try following @ipv4countdown for daily updates about the dying ipV4! Accordinng to the latest tweet, there is “Approximately 279 days until IPcalypse. 221,936,466 allocatable IPv4s left.”

The most important thing for anyone to run an online business is good search engine traffic. That’s the only thing that keeps the website alive and running. And search engine traffic depends on the amount of page rank your website has in views of Google.

Here is a simple graph to understand Google page rank.

Click for a bigger image

Do you have more points that I haven’t covered here? Share them below

Like any big company, Google has not only had success with its various services BUT also failures. Here is an Infograph made by wordstream about TOP Google Failures.

Click for a bigger image

I see lot of bloggers getting addicted to Twitter. Most of the famous bloggers are on twitter and all they do nowadays is to just keep sharing links on Twitter and searching for new inspirational content!

I’m sure twitter is going overcapacity with all the information, but really bloggers? Common, we’re all awesome at blogging about new stuff and I think we need to stick to the basics instead of just tweeting all the time

Here is a nice illustration of Google blogger saying “Tweet Less & Blog More”!

We all love Google and we also know that Google doesn’t like people who sell links and penalizes the sites which do. So I’ve figured out way of selling links and still NOT be penalized by Google .

Of course, as Jeremy Sussman, Google’s Product Manager replies to a question saying:

“I can assure you that the last thing we (Google) want is for the business who hires the best SEO to win a better slot.  But, the SEOs are, unfortunately, pretty good at what they do, and so sometimes they out smart us (hopefully, only temporarily).

Keeping that in mind, these are only ideas and do not mean that Google will not penalize you, but it makes it more difficult to identify:

* Always check the text and the URL of the link manually (without using scripts)

* Link to related content Sites only

* Link to sites that do not seem to get banned

* Prohibit links in the footer or sidebar

Google tracks code to identify linking schemes and penalizes and filters accordingly. It’s more sophisticated and continues. Oh well, just my opinion of seo tricks

p.s We do not share or sell links here!

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing you website for best performance and helping search engines see your site more clearly.

Optimizing images is a required to make you sites load faster and display pages faster, which brings benefits to improve the navigation of the reader, reducing load time. The traditional way is to use a graphics editor like Photoshop or Gimp. However, Yahoo! has a very convenient alternative image optimizer called Smush.it.

Smush It is a simple application that allows you optimize images on a massive scale. You can specify the images from your hard drive or from a URL, the result is a zip file with all images optimized.

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. After Smush.it runs on a web page it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page’s images and provides a downloadable zip file with the optimized image files.

The optimization depends on the image size, but typically ranges from 10% to 60% and the quality loss is barely noticeable. This is simply an awesome, quick alternative if you need to optimize large numbers of images.