It has been commonly observed that user accounts are easily compromised through phishing schemes, trojans and spywares. As a starting point, the following steps are recommended:-

• Avoid sharing your username, password and personal information secret and better chane your password regularly. Use a password combination (with a minimum password length of atleast 8 characters) with an uppercase, lowercase, a digit and some special characters making it much harder for someone to guess your password.
• Never paste a URL or a javascript when logged into orkut regardless of what it claims to do. Never click on links in emails that claims to be from Gmail or Orkut.
• Don’t enter your Google Account username and password on sites other than orkut.com and other Google networks sites.
• Sign out when you are done: Don’t forget to click the Logout link at the top of the page when you’re done with using orkut. This should be strictly followed when using a orkut from a shared computer.

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Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs.

To use this extension you have to download the extension available from the website. Google Gears (BETA) is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X(10.2 or higher) and Linix OS.

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Newsmap  is a whizbang, Flash-based treemap representation  of the stories flowing through Google News. The Newsmap home page describes it best:

“ Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe “

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Whenever you search for more than one keyword at a time, a search engine has a default strategy for handling and combining those keywords. Can those words appear individually anywhere in a page, or do they have to be right next to each other? Will the engine search for both keywords or for either keyword?

Phrase Searches

Google defaults to searching for occurrences of your specified keywords anywhere in the page, whether side by side or scattered throughout. To return the results of pages containing specifically ordered words, enclose them in quotes, turning your keyword search into a phrase search , to use Google’s terminology.

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There are many outside news sources that are dedicated to Google and the world of search engines. Here are a few news sources that frequently have information about Google:-

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You can use Google to find information about anything in the world, even Google itself:

Google Blog

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The Similar Pages link is interesting although not always tremendously useful. Clicking this link starts a new search for pages that somehow resemble the original search result. Sorry to be vague, but Google isn’t very talkative about its Similar Pages formula.

The results are interesting and more diverse than you might expect. You’d think the search would yield a narrowed set of results, but my experience is to the contrary. Search for Britney Spears, for example, and you get a solid set of results including fan sites. Click the Similar Pages link under britney spears.com, and you get a far-ranging assortment of pages, including unofficial fan pages and sites dedicated to other singers and bands.

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A cache (pronounced “cash”) is a storage area for computer files. Google maintains an enormous cache of Web pages. Actually, for practical purposes, it doesn’t matter whether you confuse them or not, but they are different.

The index is a database of Web page content, stripped of its formatting. The cache contains the pages themselves. By and large, clicking the Cached link provides a quicker display of the target page because you’re getting it from Google’s computer instead of from the Internet at large.

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