Download PDFs of Out of Copyright Books on Google Book Search

What's new at Google Book Search?

Download PDFs of out-of-copyright books from Google Book Search. Enter your search query, choose 'Full view books' to get a list of books that are in the public domain and may be viewed in a digital format. The ones that are Not Copyrighted may be downloaded from the Full View page that has a download button on the top right-hand side.

Here's an example: Download Shakespeare's Hamlet. PDF: 15.9MB.

Search for books by a particular author with the 'inauthor:' operator. For example: inauthor:Aristotle.

Add a Google Book Search box to your Web page.

- A separate page with videos of Bob Dylan on Google Video.

Nice 2-Liner

Transliterated in Hindi and saved in Unicode format with Baraha IME.*

हुस्न वो हैन जो आये नज़र
दिल को ज़ियादा, आन्ख को कम
~ बेकल उत्साहि

Husn wo hain jo aaye nazar
Dil ko ziyada, aankh ko kam
~ Bekal Utsahi

(Real) Beauty is that which pleases
Heart the more; eye the less

Read Urdu poetry on Aligarians.

* IME: An Input Method Editor allows computer users to enter regional language characters and symbols using an English (standard Western) keyboard.

What's new at Ask?

Ask.com search engine recognizes emoticons and suggests meanings of chat shortforms.

Google Webmaster Central

When did Googlebot, Google's Web crawler/spider, last index your Web site? Find out from the Site Status page at Google WebMaster Central.

Interesting Links

An amazing read - The wonders of the world and the power of self-belief of The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei near Kyoto, Japan. For these Buddhist monks practicing long distance running is not for participating or winning a race, but as a way of life; a part of their Karma in quest of enlightenment.

A fabulous aerial view of Venice—the Italian city of canals. Note: Large file size - 3.9MB.

Search links

- What's the news from Google?

Google provides a Chinese-language interface for its popular search comparison site Google Trends.

Google enables English and Chinese language searching on China.com.

Google reopens signups on Writely, the online word processor that it bought in March this year.

Watch movie trailers on Google Video.

- Find the number of links to your Web site on various search engines and bookmarking Web sites.

Find the number of links to your Web site with URLTrends and Socialmeter.

- Nice wallpaper.

A fantastic wallpaper of Shanghai by night. Pune needs roads like these.

Interesting Search Results

Search for the keyword google on Yahoo! and MSN, and see Yahoo! and MSN search boxes before the actual result for Google. Yahoo! and MSN are paranoid of losing their search users to Google.

MSN search for google.



Yahoo! search for google.



Update: Mon., Aug. 21, 12:05pm.
Did you know? Each day more than half a million searches are made for the keyword google on Yahoo! search engine. The keyword google was searched 17.78 million times (17781943 to be exact) on Yahoo! in July 2006. Source: Overture keyword selector tool.

Create your own customised search engine with Rollyo

Create your own customised search engine with Rollyo. Rollyo allows you to 'Roll Your' own search engine that fetches results from a maximum of twenty-five Web sites.

Register on Rollyo, enter a list of Web sites and a probable list of suggested search terms as tags, name your search engine, choose a category and your search engine is ready to roll results. You may choose to keep it private or get a separate URL and make it public.

I created two search engines on Rollyo.

- My Rollyo Indian airfares and travel search
- My Rollyo News from India search

Search Engine links

1. Google search interface in Indian languages.

Google search interface in Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, and Nepali languages.

2. SEO extension for Firefox.

SEO Extension for Firefox finds Google PageRank and related links for Web sites shown in search engine results.

3. Sites for keyword suggestions.

See the number of searches for a particular keyword on Yahoo! with Overture keyword suggestion tool.

Use Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool to find keywords related to your query. Google AdWords traffic estimator provides the estimated CPC, cost-per-click, for keywords without adding them to an ad campaign.

Digital Point keyword suggestion tool shows how many times a word or phrase was search on Wordtracker and Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing).

NicheBot keyword finder.

4. Reading: Google PageRank on Wikipedia.

5. Interesting search statistics from AOL search results. Almost 90% of users don’t go beyond the first page of search results, and 40% of those click on the first result with 12%, 8%, 6%, 5%, and 4% clicks for the next five results.

6. What's new in GTalk? GTalk offers file sharing, photo sharing, voicemail, and music status with trends.

7. Reading - Social search engines.

A Thought For Today

...Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
~ Good advice in Max Ehrmann's Desiderata

Note: Image taken from the public domain.

Pune needs Freedom from bad roads

Pune needs freedom from:

- Potholes
- Bad roads
- Flyovers under construction
- Roads that can't last a monsoon
- Rain water flooding roads
- Roads dug up for laying cables
- Traffic jams because of bad roads
- People that can't understand the difference between a red light and a green light
- People that don't have patience for the lights to turn green at a traffic signal
- 8-hr to 10-hr load shedding on Thursdays
- Political parties that create traffic jams and road blocks for meetings and functions
- Slow Internet connection speeds from ISPs and frequent disconnections in the monsoon

Independence Day Logos on Google and Yahoo!

Google celebrates India's Independence Day with a special logo on Google.co.in.



Yahoo! India also shows an Independence Day logo.

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Rabindranath Tagore's Where The Mind Is Without Fear holds as good today as it did when it was written nine decades ago.

Click image to view a larger size.

Satellite view of my home

Hi Friends,

Let's meet for a cup of coffee. Come home someday.

Here's a satellite view of my home as seen on Wikimapia. Click the group of buildings in the centre of the image.

So which part of the world are you from and would you invite me for a cup of coffee? Let me know. :) Send me your location on Wikimapia by tagging and describing your city and its locations.

Cheers,
Chirayu

Google has big plans for India

Google has plans of a setting up a server farm in India and an investment of U.S. $1bn (approx. Rs. 4646 crores*) in on the anvil in a SEZ (Special Economic Zone), most probably, in Hyderabad. They have yet to decide on the exact location, although Google says they plan to invest beyond their R&D location in Bangalore, and Google already has an AdWords Back Office operation at Madhapur in Hyderabad. So it seems to be a SEZ near Hyderabad.

What does one make of it? Do they have plans of Local search and regional language searching for India? Say Google India Local, Google India Maps, and Google India multi-lingual search and Gmail in regional languages. All these are possibilities.

A server farm in India means an even faster and smoother Web & image searching, browsing, viewing, chatting, blogging, and emailing experience for Google users from India.

All the best, Google, and hope your plans materialize unlike the last time around when you had to set up a server farm in Taiwan. The Andhra Pradesh government is comparatively more IT-savvy and proactive than say the Maharashtra government, and Hyderabad has always received investment and support for infrastructure development from the politicians in power, whether it was Chandrababu Naidu in 2003 or Y.S. Rajashekhara Reddy in 2006. So Hyderabad seems to be a good choice.

* 1 million = 10 lakh
10 million = 100 lakh = 1 crore

Poetry Site

To read from PoetSeers.org.

A Lovely Verse and a Regional Language Search Thought

Aur kyaa dekhane ko baakii hain
Aap se dil lagaa ke dekh liyaa

What else is there to see
I've seen my heart's longing for you

- Read Hindi poetry on the Internet.

# To do: Post a collection of Indian regional language Web sites on the Internet. Google and Yahoo! index regional language sites that are encoded in UTF-8. Most Indian regional language Web sites are not in UTF-8 and hence are not indexed by Google.

For example, a generic search for say, 'Hindi' on Google doesn't provide more than 15-20 actual Hindi language Web sites, that is Web sites that have content in Hindi.

Google has a search interface in Hindi, but it doesn't have Hindi language search (that is, search for pages written only in Hindi), or in any other Indian language.

To add to the above. An actual indication of Hindi language content on Google can come by trying for a search in Hindi. Use a Hindi keyboard to type for example, 'Vijay', which is a common name in Hindi and also means 'Victory'. Enter it in Google to see the number of pages indexed by it. See there are only 15 results in Hindi for Vijay. This illustrates the above point.

To download and try Baraha IME.

Beautiful Quotes

Quotes on an overcast Wednesday morning that has now turned bright and sunny.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
~ Michel de Montaigne

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
~ Michel de Montaigne


If you press me to say why I loved her, I can say no more than because she was she, and I was I.
~ With apologies to Michel de Montaigne for changing the gender of the original saying.

Rain likes Pune

The skies were overcast but it had stopped raining this morning for about an hour from 8:30 to 9:30. It has started drizzling again. It is going to be another rainy day today.

Update: 10:57am IST. It has stopped raining. It is bright and sunny.

Vidya Balan

Vidya Balan plays the lead role, of a Radio Jockey, in Lage Raho Munnabhai* that releases this September.

* Switch on your speakers or wear your headset/headphone to browse the above Web site.

Rains Continue

Another rainy morning in Pune. The layers have eroded off Pune's roads. It's nice to feel the rains, but the roads have taken a beating. There are more potholes than roads all over Pune.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to find pages of your Web site that are indexed by Slurp, the web crawler (spider) of Yahoo! search engine.

Beautiful Lines

Beautiful lines.

Tere jahaan main aisa nahi ki pyaar na ho
Jahaa ummeed ho iski vahaan nahi milta.

It's not that there is no love in your world
(It's only that) You won't find it where you are expecting it
~ Nida Fazli

I believe in these lines and I feel they are true for me. I have hope. Hope is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

Did you know Google has these many products?

Did you know that Google has 50 other products beyond Web search, Image Search, Groups, News, and Blogger? Take the Google Products Survey on Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped to find which products do you use and how often.

Rainy Monday Morning

Welcome to a rainy Monday morning in Pune. :-)

A Thought for Today

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
~ Louis L'Amour

Heavy Rains

Wow, that's a thunderous start to the day. Heavy rains from last night. It looks so beautiful looking out the window, listening to the continuous pitter patter of raindrops and watching the silent ones fall from the tip of long leaves, one by one. The view is beautiful from my bedroom window.

It's true that if one has a moment to spare each window has a story to tell. It feels good blogging about the rains. There's this tree whose long pointed leaves almost touch my window pane and it looks lovely watching the raindrops hang at the tip of leaves, a few of them don't fall and the others drop slowly one by one. There is joy in the small things of life. I'm an outdoors person. Give me the rains, the mountains, and the wind on my face. I like it. I'm happy. :-)

To conclude, writing about the bad roads would be another story. :-)

If Pune's climate combines with Germany's roads and Brazil's beaches it would be heaven on earth. :-)

Updates: 8pm IST on Sunday, Aug 6, 2006. It hasn't stopped raining and there's more rain forecast for the next 24 hours. 10pm - It has stopped raining and 10:30pm started again.

Friendship—Dosti

On the eve of Friendship Day on 6th August here is a part list of different roles that a friend plays in our life.

confidant, guide, buddy, bro, mate, philosopher, companion, compatriot, associate, acquaintance, aide, accomplice, advisor, counsellor, confrere, pal, partner, ally, alter ego, sidekick, soulmate, classmate, roommate, schoolmate, collegemate, cohort, crony, chum, brother, teacher, instructor, colleague, co-worker, collaborator, comrade, well-wisher, benefactor, confederate, brother-in-arms, partner-in-crime, supporter, office buddy, bosom buddy, teammate, net friend, online friend, chat friend, Orkut friend, saviour, magician, love letter writer, problem solver, seer, fellow traveller, information provider, superman, challenger, motivator, and more.

A friend is a friend in any language, whether one says:

dost, mitr, yaar, bhidu, bhai, bandhu, bondhu, dostaar, kake, macha, da, amigo, bhaijaan, rafique, mohsin, humsafar, freund, freond, amicus, amico, ami, megobari, barát, cara, tomodachi, jingu, péngyou, mik, vriend, vriendje, ven, sõber, prijátel, rafiki, arkadas, or friend.

Friendship quotes that I like.

A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else.

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.
~ Albert Camus

Friendship without self interest is one of the rare and beautiful things in life.
~ James Francis Byrnes

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life.
~ Lee Iacocca

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache; do be my enemy for friendship's sake.
~ William Blake

If I had a rose for every time I thought of you, I would walk through a garden forever.

If I could reach up and hold a star for every time you've made me smile, the entire evening sky would be in the palm of my hand.

In a way, it's fun to have a friendship day for friends, but the truth is friendship lasts a lifetime, and if one has five friends at the end of a lifetime, one has spent a life worth living in its truest sense. Right now, I think I have two or maybe three, and I hope to find a few more.

Click image to enlarge. Photo from InterfaceLift, lyrics from Dionne Warwick's That's What Friends Are For.

Diigo as your browsing companion

Use Diigo.com to collect information, share notes, highlight text on Web pages, bookmark Web sites, post comments, and save links while surfing the Internet.

I used the public and private bookmarking, annotation, and comments features of Diigo and found them helpful and interesting. I will browse through more features and watch the tutorial to learn more. It seems to be a companion in surfing and searching on the Internet and a repository for saving and sharing links and information.

Diigo is Google Notebook combined with Del.icio.us. and much more. I will post a few screenshots once I try all the features of Diigo.

Friday Night

Friday night is the best time of the week. The freedom to blog, browse, and watch TV until three in the morning and the joy of two days of holidays. :-)

Each evening is different. Yesterday evening was, and today evening is.

From next week onward, I hope I never ever have a slow and empty weekday afternoon at work.

A Thought for Today

A beautiful quote.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Thoughts

The difference between happiness and sadness and why happiness requires sharing.

Happiness is happiness only when it is shared.

If you're happy you feel like sharing it with someone, then only is there an emotion to it.

If you're sad you may keep your sadness to yourself, and the world won't care and it won't matter to you too.

Gam to akele bhi seh lete
Khushi baantne ke liye koi dost chahiye

I can keep my sadness to myself
I need a friend to share my happiness

A film to watch this week

I have always liked the performances of Ajay Devgan in realistic (read as—films different from Karan Johar style mushy romantic tearjerkers and Bhatt camp's cinematic concoction of love, lust, action, and music) films like Yuva, Gangaajal, and Apaharan.

A film that I am looking forward to watch this week is music composer Vishal Bharadwaj's Omkara; an adaptation of, The Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare's Othello.

The film is set in the Hindi heartland of north-central (U.P., if I'm not mistaken) India and has an impressive starcast that features Ajay Devgan and Saif Ali Khan among others.

Ajay Devgan plays the role of Othello and is shown as a leader of a gang of outlaws in rural India, Kareena portrays the role of the beautiful Desdemona, Saif Ali Khan is Iago the villain that instigates Othello against Cassio played by Vivek Oberoi; Konkona Sen is Iago's wife Aemilia, and Bipasha Basu as Billo adds sensuality to the setting with an item song.

Omkara is Vishal Bharadwaj's third film as a Director. He has also composed chartbusting popular music for films like Maachis and Satya. Omkara comes two years after Maqbool, which was an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth and had fabulous performances by Irrfan Khan and Pankaj Kapur. Omkara is Shakespeare's Othello that comes alive in the rural, violent, and political hinterland of Uttar Pradesh in North India.

More later over the weekend after watching the film.

I like films with realistic dialogues and that rustic, and if I may say natural and typical, North Indian (U.P-Bihar) feel to its screenplay.

Related link: Read William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.

Rainy Afternoon

Looking out the window, listening to Bob Dylan, watching a rainy afternoon roll by on a Tuesday. The scene looks all green and beautiful, but the roads would be a mess. It has been raining since the last four hours and now one would have to find roads from potholes and not the other way round.

Current Music: If you see her, say hello

If you see her, say hello...
Say for me that I'm all right though things get kind of slow...
If you get close to her, kiss her once for me...

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast
If she's passin' back this way, I'm not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up if she's got the time.
~ Read the lyrics of Bob Dylan's If You See Her, Say Hello.

- Download MP3 of Bob Dylan's If You See Her, Say Hello. Filesize: 4.6MB.

Design links

A dictionary of graphic design terms for my reference and random reading.

To read: Thoughts on design and the process of design.