1) FreeRice: This site was created in October 2007 and it is a vocabulary game where you try to guess the correct synonym out of four options. 20 grains of rice are donated for every single answer.

2)  Ripple: It is a charitable site which earns money through clicking and searching and the guys behind this site are also associates of Boston Consulting Group. The users have the freedom to choose their preferred form of  charity out of the option of four.

3) FreePoverty: This site is pretty similar to Free Rice in a way that you do play some game on this one too. You locate places which are asked on a world map and you receive points on the basis of accuracy of your answers. The points then convert into cups of water which are donated by the site.

4) Carbon Grove: It is a Carbon Reduction Reminder Service where it will remind you about small things that can make a big impact in saving environment. You also get to plant a virtual tree and the site promises to plant up to 250,000 real trees in deforested regions across the globe. The only problem with this is that you have to use Internet Explorer to do this.

I would like to mention another site called Charity USA which has many daughter sites like The RainForest site, The Hunger site, The Breast Cancer site, The Child Health site but it’s a for profit organization which means it donates only a share of its revenues.

There are quite a few more sites but I didn’t had many reasons to believe in their claims.

-Oscar Wilde

There are blogs and many more blogs on blogosphere and not everyone is lucky enough to receive comments day in and day out. This has also led to the creation of some spam bots by the bad guys on internet. These people send you comments in a way that you might approve of and thus it helps them to crawl your website and get linked to your blog. They might use the same ip address or id to bot the blog with links for other products and service.

Following is an example of such spambot:

I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.

Jennifer Lancey

OR

Hello there. I was sent a link to your blog by a friend a while ago. I have been reading a long for a while now. Just wanted to say HI. Thanks for putting in all the hard work.

Jennifer Lancey

You can actually search Jennifer Lancy  on google and see for yourself some 40,000 links related to it.

My exams are finished now and that’s one reason why I was ‘missing’ from the blog since last one month. So when I was returning from my university after my last exam today, I saw the advertisement of this internet company called myquest.in. It was a new name and a new search engine which is only focusing on New Delhi NCR at the moment. The home page is not simple (unlike google or guruji) and it seems inspired from yahoo as it displays local weather, local events with live cricket scores and a list of top searches. A neat box which displays categories might assist you in getting the information you seek easily. It all sounds good because google is too international and a need for solid local search engine is sometimes desperately needed. We have seen some local search engines who are focusing only on India and thus the results on these sites are sometimes more relevant and useful than you get on google or yahoo. And it is needless to say that it also saves your PC time which you might use on doing other important things on computer.

The only trouble for myquest is that there are already some sites who have been going local since some time back and thus they are more likely to win in the race to become India’s Google. Guruji is a complete copycat of Google and it has some serious backing in the form of venture capital from Sequoia Capital. Sulekha is another website which focuses on Indians around the world and the site does a good job in local searches. But the question remains how myquest is better than the two sites I mentioned just now. I tried to search with some common keywords across the three sites to see the number of results they yield for you.

Sulekha is a site which owes a lot to its users (a significant American Indian population) for the content on the site and thus its reach is huge in India and U.S.A. while venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners also helped. The real competition for myquest would be guruji because both of them have to take things in their hand . The kind of results that myquest provided (see the box) against guruji are certainly worth an applause considering that it has just started. I do have problem with the user interface of the myquest mainly because the user interace on guruji is smoother. I also felt problem with the loading of myquest last night but I do think that the new kid has the meat to take on guruji. Somebody get the news to some venture capitalist please.

is now

This is the way gmail is loading now since last few days.