Elf Designs» Search

Searching the Internet for the Environment

MJ — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:19:19 +0000

Ecosia is a typical search engine in that it will help you find what you are looking for on the web. The difference is that through searching, Ecosia gives back to the rainforest. The way this works is that if you saw an interesting sponsored link and decided to click it, the sponsoring company pays Bing or Yahoo, who then gives a portion to Ecosia, who then uses it to support the WWF efforts in the Amazon rainforest. Not only does Ecosia donate money, but you can view their business report here, and see all the money they have donated here. By making all of their records public Ecosia believes that this will ensure their credibility. In the first year of operation, Ecosia was able to generate over 125,000 Euros.

The Evolution of Social Buying

MJ — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 04:48:50 +0000

Over the past year, daily deal websites like Groupon and LivingSocial have grown in popularity and have given way to terms such as “social buying.” It is reported that approximately twenty percent of these daily deals go unused, allowing for the emergence of reselling sites such as DealsGoRound, LifeSta, and CoupRecoup, all of which give individuals a chance to sell their unwanted coupons.

Here’s how the sites work:

DealsGoRound.com is free to list coupons for sale. When the coupon is sold, the seller has to pay the site a 10 percent cut. Luckily, there’s no fee for buyers.
LifeSta.com works like DealsGoRound.com but makes sellers pay 99 cents plus 8 percent of the purchase price if a coupon is sold. Again, buyers don’t pay a fee. There are safeguards in place, as the site guarantees refunds if buyers find out within 60 days that the coupon they bought was invalid or was already used.
CoupRecoup.com works like Craigslist and lets buyers connect directly with sellers. If you like a deal, you are able to contact the seller by filling out a form with an offer price. It’s up to the buyer and seller to arrange the payment and exchange of the coupon.

Looking to Save When Travelling?

MJ — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:00:16 +0000

Since it’s summer, many individuals, including possibly yourself, will be travelling this summer. Less people are looking at travel agents to book their trip and get them the best deal. Rather, people are going searching online travel sites for the best deal.
Here’s an interested tidbit of information: if you are looking for additional savings, try searching across multiple browsers. Search Expedia on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. It has been reported that search results can differ across browsers and often some browsers will produce a better deal.
A group of individuals tested this theory out and searched for a flight twice on Safari and once on Firefox. The flight price using the Firefox browser was $718 lower than the price on Safari!
Why is this? Perhaps because Safari was visited twice. A report in ShopSmart Magazine reports that travel sites track your searches. Often, first-time visitors are offered exceptional deals, while returning customers don’t get the same treatment. To avoid this, remove cookies that track your searches.
In addition to searching across multiple browsers, don’t forget to search for promo codes!
Good luck finding a great deal and safe travels!

Google’s New Search Features

MJ — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:26:02 +0000

Yesterday, at the “Inside Search” press conference, Google unveiled some new search features, ranging from mobile to voice and image search to new instant search features.

Mobile Search Features – including icons for local search: icons for “Restaurants,” “Bars”, etc. This gives individuals the ability to search with a simple click. Additionally, queries users search for frequently will begin to show up as suggestions below. Another function is that maps and results will appear in a split screen, with the maps changing as the user scrolls through different results.
New interface for Tablet Searches – The Google search interface will be optimized for tablets, with bigger images and easier to click results.
Google Goggles with Translate – allows users to translate foreign languages as they appear in the real world. For example, if a user takes a picture of a sign in Chinese, a mobile can translate it into the English language.
Voice Search via Desktop – Users who browse via Chrome can talk to their Google page and ask for things like “pictures of monkeys” or “recipe for jambalaya.”
Image Search on Desktop – Chrome users have the ability to drag an image into the search box and figure out information from that image. For example, if there is a flower in the picture, you can figure out what the flower is, where it grows, etc.
Google Instant – gives users results as they are typing the query and these results will change as the user continues to enter the query.
Instant Pages – Some pages will have results loading in under a second. A page with the “old” Google taking a few seconds to load (Google reports, the average page takes five seconds to load), will load in less than a second with Instant Pages-enabled on Google.

Personalized Internet Searching

MJ — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:28:15 +0000

The Google +1 button has now gone public and users can “+1″ directly in Google search results. It’s similar to the Facebook “like” button and is a vote in Google for specific content which could alter the way you see search results in Google. This means that when browsing through search results you can see a “+1″ on sites that your contacts have recommended, which really helps to narrow your search. In order to do this you will need a Google Profile. When you create a profile, it’s visible to anyone and connections with your email address can easily find it. Your +1’s are stored in a new tab on your Google profile.

Website owners can also add the “+1″ button to their website. This will allow any visitors who enjoy your content to recommend it in Google searches. This could be the next step in SEO.

For more details about the Google +1 button, check out the video here.

If you like this article try clicking the +1 button below.

Sports Prevail Once Again

MJ — Mon, 02 May 2011 21:11:10 +0000

The royal wedding was everywhere on Friday. As much as the world loves tradition and fashion, prince and princess, the Internet has spoken – the world loves sports even more.

Akamai, an Internet service provider and traffic monitor reported that at its peak, there were less than 5.4-million page views a minute at about 8:30 a.m. ET on news-focused websites, making the royal wedding the sixth biggest event in the history of the Internet.

The numbers were significantly less than the top event. In the summer of 2010, the World Cup qualifying matches and the longest match ever at Wimbledon happened at the same time and sparked 10.3-million page views a minute. The second, third and fourth spots are occupied with by games. The No. 5 spot is held by the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections, which saw a peak of 5.6-million page views a minute in November 2010. At sixth spot, the royal wedding drove Internet traffic more than other recent major events, such as the night Barack Obama was elected president, as well as coverage of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Even in the most recent news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, there was a major spike in Internet traffic as users flocked to news sites for the latest information. Akamai reports that there were over 4.1 million page views around 11:30 p.m. ET Sunday, around the time President Obama began his remarks. This represents a 28% increase in North America and 24% increase in global web traffic compared to the averages for that time. Surprisingly enough, as news broke, social media sites saw huge surges in activity. Twitter reported over 4,000 tweets per second around the time of Obama’s speech. Even more interesting is the role social media sites play in our awareness and knowledge. It has been reported that over 50% of individuals first heard of Osama’s death through a social media site!

Technology has undoubtedly evolved and plays a huge role in our lives. It is keeping us informed and connected, without boundaries and with little concern of where we are at the time of the event.

Travelling? Take a Look at Room 77

MJ — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 22:32:53 +0000

There are a myriad of sites for aspiring travelers to check out. Have you heard of Room 77? If not, I encourage you to check it out.

Room 77 is a great functional hotel room database and search engine, where travelers can turn to in order to get the run-down on nearly half a million hotel rooms in 18 different cities. Room 77 gives future hotel guests access to a combination of hotel-sourced and people-sourced room information so that travelers can book better rooms. The site and iPhone app returns “Room Cards” matched to user preferences, such as high or low floors, view importance and elevator distance. When the user selects a hotel, rooms are ranked and the best matching rooms are returned accordingly.

Additionally, users can select an individual room to get more details about the room, see where it’s located in the overall floor plan, look at images sourced from Google, as well as read the Room Card, which gives information regarding the bed type, room square footage, etc. At a couple hotels, you can click a “Look Inside” button to see photos inside each room.

Currently, they are working on a pilot project called “Room Request Guarantee,” which is like picking your seat on an airline.

How Social Media is Providing Aid in Japan

MJ — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:17:55 +0000

We have seen how the internet and social media have aided to rally against and spread the word against political protests. It is now evident how the internet is playing a pivotal role connecting the victim’s of Japan’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake with one another. While much of the country is in disarray, the Internet remains unaffected and is being utilized as a tool to contact and connect with loved ones. On Friday, the US Embassy in Tokyo informed US citizens in Japan to use SMS texting and other social media that loved ones may be using.

Both Google Person Finder and the Red Cross’s Family Links website are being utilized to make the whereabouts and conditions of individuals known. Person Finder sites are created during emergencies and enables individuals to leave information about their whereabouts or information about a missing person. About 158,700 records were set up for Japan. The Red Cross site publishes a list of names with contact information of individuals who want to get the word out they are alive.

It is believed that the most common method for individuals is to post from their social media accounts. Not even an hour after the earthquake, there were 1,200 tweets per minute from Tokyo. It was reported that on March 11th, there were over 4.5 million status updates on Facebook, mentioning “Japan,” “earthquake,” or “tsuanami.”

If you run your own website, you are able to use your pageviews and influence to assist people in Japan, by using a couple lines of code from Hello Bar. It is a small bar, which floats at the top of your site, providing visitors with a brief message, as well as a link. You only have to inset the code snippet once and you are able to easily customize the bar with colors and text. Here you can solicit donations for Japan and you can pick which organization you would like to accept donations for (Doctors Without Borders, Global Giving, The American Red Cross, etc). Your message can be something like “Japan has been hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Click here to help and make a donation.” You can then change the message at a later time or you can switch the bar off so that no message is displayed.

Stop Advertising Companies From Tracking Your Online Activity

MJ — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:05:49 +0000

These days, the entire world is online and connected to the Internet. Advertisers are collecting data from users through behavioral targeting. The fact is advertising is 100% necessary on the web to keep all of that content you love and enjoy free. Without it, we would be paying for anything and everything online. Advertisers want a return on their investment and this is where demographics come into play.Behavioral targeting tracks and analyzes your online behavior, tracking what you search for, what websites you visit and what services you use. This could be used to determine what ads are shown to you and where, even having the same ad follow you from site to site, a practice known as retargeting.

Concerned that this is an invasion of your privacy? Here’s how to stop it:
Step 1: Opt Out with NAI
The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), a cooperative of online marketing and analytics companies that are “committed to building consumer awareness and establishing responsible business and data management practices and standards,” allows users to take control of their privacy through their Opt-Out tool. This video shows the NAI Opt-Out tool.

Step 2: Opt Out with PrivacyChoice
PrivacyChoice.org has a more advanced solution featuring a consolidated opt-out bookmark that opts you out of over a hundred ad networks, including those in the NAI. You can view what sites use what advertisers to track you online.

How to Search your Life

MJ — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:37:49 +0000

With such a variety of options available today in terms of social media there may be times when you aren’t sure of where vital information might be. Finding this information can become quite time consuming unless you have already discovered Greplin. Greplin is a service that indexes and lets you search all of your online social stuff: Gmail, Google Apps Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Google Calender, Google Docs, Evernote and many more. Greplin lets you search across all of your emails, Facebook data and Twitter stuff with a single query.

Greplin does have a free membership option that gives you 200MB of storage space. Storage limits are measured by index size, not actual data size. Which means that your index will be far smaller than your actual data. This service indexes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and LinkedIn. The premium service is $4.99/month and has 500MB of storage space and indexes even more social media.