When starting an online business, large or small, it’s important to know what the media, blogs, and other sites are saying about you. For first, this will help you understand and address user needs and concerns, and you can also take an extra step to try and reach out offering more support and thanks for the helpful review you get.
There are many online reputation tool to use and track anything about your business or brand. For a self entrepreneur however, savings in the starting phase is pretty important, or if you’re just starting a non or low profit blog but are interested naturally in anything said about your blog, and Wordpress Incoming links doesn’t always work as you hope for. For that, Google Alerts may be the best and easiest thing to get started in minutes and for FREE.
Simply login to your Google account, go to the Google Alerts page, and fill up the fields as follow:
1- Search terms: Normally your brand name. For example “BlogAllAlong OR BlogAllAlong.com”. OR is a logical operator here.
2- Type: I would suggest you chose comprehensive to include News, Web, and Blog results.
3- How Often: I select once a day, but this is up to you and how serious your business is. Usually, once a day is good enough.
4- Deliver To: I chose email, you can select also Feed option.
There, now you have daily email alerts of articles about your site or blog. Ofcourse, you can always use it to track your own reputation (if you are such a celebrity ;).
This is a follow up to the disappointing first fix to enforce Google.com as default search engine. While it have worked for few days on all browsers, today and all of a sudden, Google Chrome bar default searches took me back to Google.com.kw. I don’t want you for God’s sake! Do I need to give away my nationality for a decent Google.com search?
Luckily, I have quickly found another way. To do so, click on the spanner icon in the top right corner of Google Chrome. and select Options.
Then, under Basics tab, click on Manage from Default search:
If you see an item here with keyword Google.com.kw, remove it. It would probably have (Default) beside it, indicating it’s the default address bar search engine. Now look for another existing Google entry, or Add a new one if no one exist. In my case, I found and edited this Google entry:
Alter they keyword here to your likings, and the URL to whats shown in the image: “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s”
Click OK when done, select the engine you just edited and click on the Make Default button on right side of the pop-up screen. Close, Close and you should be done :)
For the people so much annoyed with Google forcing them to go to their local domain version, e.g. Google.com.kw or what ever your region is, this is how to switch back to normal Google.com as your default search. Simply go to your local Google home page, e.g. Google.com.kw, and then click on Google.com in English.
NOTE: At time of Google.com.kw launch, this same solution did not use to work as it should. It would take you back then to Google.com, but if you use the browser default Google search engine you would land again on .KW domain. Next day, it was working properly. So I’m not sure if this same link works the same way on domains other than .KW. Let me know how it goes with you.
UPDATE: Bad news. Google.com.kw is enforced on me back again and I assume many others when searching using Chrome Address Bar. Same trick does not work. Firefox Google Search Engine and address bar both dont have the same problem. Looks like we’re gonna need a hack for it ;/. Thank you Google for not doing evil. Thank you.
UPDATE 2: I have tried to contact Google Chrome feedback for reporting this behavior. Not the best place, but it is a place that they will read at least.
UPDATE 3: I found the solution for Chrome Google Default Search. You can read it here.
Following yesterday’s sudden launch and pushing of Google.com.kw on all Kuwait, there was a big strong reactions against it. It turns out most people hated to be forced for Google.com.kw, as they lose some the gadget search it seems along with some other stuff, and what they hated more was the Arabic interface. I’m not sure if it’s something I did, but the force of Google Kuwait is gone for me.
Google today have released and pushed to the people of Kuwait their new Google.com.kw domain. If you have gone already to Google.com, you may have well noticed as I did you’re being redirected to the Google.com.kw domain instead. While this is not a Kuwait only search engine as we intended to do with Q8Ba7th, it is a global search engine biased for Kuwait results. Try searching for “العربي” for example on Google global and Google Kuwait:
Google.com Results
Google.com.kw Result
You can clearly see Al-Arabi sport club showing in first few results in Google.com.kw. Yes it is more targeted, if you wish to have such results, keep it your default search engine. I have to say however, I was not imporessed with Google’s “Do No Evil” way of pushing the new search engine in my face, and with an ugly Arabic interface. The side options link are barely readable, and getting English results from left to right is definitely not the best way to browse the results. Not what fairy tales would tell you about how Google takes +2 points difference in font size as a serious unforgivable mistake. The least they could’ve done is maintained my English interface. That way I won’t feel more confused.
I am also still wondering how can I set Google.com as the default search engine. I can go to Google.com.kw main page, click on “Google.com In English” link. However I want the default Google Chrome address bar to give me results from Google.com. How can I do that now?
WONDER IF: I also wonder if that’s got anything to do with Google.com.sa agent calling me to offer changing my Adwords account to Saudi Arabia billing address few weeks ago as Google has no presence in Kuwait, saying he can manage it that way. Was it an attempt to take away Kuwait Adwords accounts before they can take control over it? Maybe. But I wouldn’t care either ways.
So Google finally launched their SearchWiki service to the public, and right now, anyone who is Googling while logged in to his Google Account should get options to Promote, Remove, and add comments to the specific result.
That may not be something really people wanna do all the time, but sometimes it could become useful when you’re certain you don’t want a certain result which keeps popping up. This however is throwing the intelligent search result customization part on the user him self, rather than what was expected to be a Google intelligent personalized result. I really failed to see any obvious improve in the intelligent Google search result personalization. Has anyone noticed an improve or change? For example while logging in getting better results?
Anyways, what I would really want from this service is unfortunately missing. Removing individual links is a tedious and very unuseful job I believe, rather, I would want to remove a whole domain from my results. There are many domains which require fees to access, or are full of junk, and for quite some time I have been digging for a solution to do what many other people want
They started as perhaps the best technical forum community, and then locked all the valuable content from public, charing anyone who wants to access those answers that were initially contributed by the public, for the public. (I sound like a candidate… vote for me). So I hate how their results keep popping in my face, and I really want a way to stop them. I have seen previous posts about doing it, but for some reason this option is not available anymore. You cannot block a whole domain, and what good would it do if I want to keep blocking each and every experts-exchange page!
I would guess the reason to disallow this is Google don’t wanna get into trouble. What if a site sues them for allowing people to block them. It’s unnecessary headache perhaps for Google don’t you think?
Anyways, watch the video to see what this SearchWiki is all about, and then forget it!
So Gmail have just introduced their new Themes feature, and took it for granted you need a new one. Technically I guess we can’t argue much about it, they just changed the default theme of Gmail slightly to a bit uglier one, and made everyone aware of the new Themes feature.
Frankly, I’m usually not much fascinated by themes as I am by functional features. I did take a look however and I liked th terminal one. Quite geeky, and unusable. I just changed it to planets for now for a change, but I guess with time I’ll just realize plain and efficient theme is what I need. Perhaps just pick the favorite coloring. It would be neat though if there a template that changes frequently (theme does change every day. COOL!), for example new planet picture every day or so. One thing to note also is, middle email composing and reading screen does not excerpt the new theme, and the Settings section as well, which makes it ugly Orange over your selected theme. I guess they either missed it, or they want to maintain the feel for user awareness.
To use the new Themes feature, simply go to Settings -> Themes tab.
and select Options.
So Google finally 
So Gmail have just introduced their new Themes feature, and took it for granted you need a new one. Technically I guess we can’t argue much about it, they just changed the default theme of Gmail slightly to a bit uglier one, and made everyone aware of the new Themes feature.
