See what I found on a casual Google search for the keyword – "saholic coupon codes 2012". Google appears to be tweaking this "Saholic" related search to show over 90% of LetsBuy related results which are totally irrelevant to the original search query.

At first I thought this might be because of a Google Bomb. But soon realized that Google was doing could be doing this intentionally. Look at the foot note where I "get to" manually click on the link to get the Saholic results that I originally was looking for. For readers outside India, Saholic.com and LetsBuy.com are competitive online shopping portals very popular in India. Showing the competitor search result would have direct impact on earnings for the other company (in this case Saholic.com).

We think this is cheap.. really cheap doing from Google..  Here’s a hat-tip for the companies involved in there..

Dear Saholic, Take this up with Google …guys, this’ll hurt your business.

Dear LetsBuy, Did you pay for this? If yes, how much?

Dear Google, I am really pissed off right now that you did this.

Looks like they’ve indeed turned on to the dark side. This just adds up to their first and second such evil-doings from the recent past.

[UPDATE 1 -  22nd March 11:00AM] – Some commentors on the Reddit post believe that this could be a "false positive" that Google thinks LetsBuy and Saholic are "related terms" when they really aren’t. We hope that this issue is fixed soon.

[UPDATE 2 - 4th April 11:00AM] – It seems there are other such false positives due to possible bug in Google’s Ranking algorithms.  Google sees a strong relationship between these two keywords (‘Saholic’ and ‘LetsBuy’ here) to think they are synonyms. Thanks @sitakanta for pointing us to these links.

Looks like Google is desperate to get Indians to start using Google+ as their primary social network. Google India has partnered with O-Zone to offer free access to Google+ wherever O-Zone has their hotspots (list includes CCDs, McDonalds, Costa Coffee etc. Complete List).

Although anything free is good for customers, this move sounds more like a desperate attempt by Google. India is one of the top users of Facebook and it looks like Google wants a share of that pie. This is probably the perfect time to refresh the College Humor’s hilarious video on Google Plus:

[via PluggdIn]

With probably the lamest concatenated name ever, Google and Samsung have announced the (duh) Galaxy Nexus, the next pure Google phone from Samsung. With Google’s latest Android version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the Galaxy Nexus features a lot of cool features and an improved UI. Check out the video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_ke3rxopc&feature=player_embedded

You can check out the phone on the official Google site here. Here is how the phone looks like:

Searching bookmarks using Chrome’s Omnibar does not work. They say it does but it doesn’t.

I’ll explain the problem a bit more. Amongst these, there are bookmarks that I open regularly like Google Analytics dashboard and my Bank account. These all are filed under different categories and I have give short codes to them like GA, ICICI etc. I expect the Omnibar to show the bookmarks stored so I can directly access them but nope. I don’t see anything even close.

I also tried a bookmarks plug-in called Quickmarks that lets me press “b” in the Omnibar and search for keywords in bookmarks. It failed as well. Note: I moved GA out of a folder to the front of bookmarks to demonstrate this better.

I don’t use any social bookmarking services. I bookmark websites in Chrome and it syncs them across my computers. If I discover something interesting on my iPhone, I just send myself an email and add it manually. Now those bookmarks stay hidden but I expect them to show up when I look up keywords in title/Website URL but half the time it doesn’t.

It’s really really irritating. Dear Google, please work on fixing this. It’s search for heaven’s sake.

From what I figured out from a discussion on Hacker News, “..” is an operator that is used to denote a range. So if you Google “1..10″, it searches for all the numbers from 1 to 10. As you keep increasing this range the query takes more time as the result set grows. After a certain range, it’s so big that Google refuses to accept it, thinking you are trying to start a Denial of Service attack.

There also are certain range searches for e.g. credit card number range that are also not allowed.

If you find a different/better explanation, do leave a comment.