I have stopped looking up words in my Webster’s College Dictionary a while back. I used their online version for the longest time before I started using other super fast means of finding meaning for words in the internet. I have listed them in the order I have found and used them, Google being the first. Here they are:

Google’s Define Query

The simplest and fastest way is to use Google’s search interface. Just type ‘define: voracious’ (without the quotes) in the Google search box to get the meaning of the word ‘voracious’.  It’s simple, fast and you can use the same familiar interface you use to search for other things.

Ninjawords

As geeky as the name sounds, this dictionary is fast like a ninja! Just try it to find out just how fast. Ever since I’ve found Ninjawords, that’s where I go first to get meanings for the words I am looking up.

Definr

Definr is my latest find and I just love it. It is fast plus it is such a life saver if you are not sure about the spelling. It lists words and its variations as you start typing so you can just click on the one you want to look up. Plus, if you are a Firefox user, Definr lets you look up words super fast by these easy ways:

• It has a Firefox extension to add Definr to list of search engines.
• Type definr/voracious in Firefox and hit Ctrl+Enter to get you the meaning for voracious.
• Drag and drop their bookmarklet to your toolbar

OneLook (Thanks Jeanne!)

OneLook has a quick dictionary feature just like the others for quick lookup. But, it is more like a search engine for words and phrases. It has more than 5 million words from over 900 dictionaries indexed! As Jeanne explains in the comments, it is a great resource for anyone trying to build their vocabulary or just plain looking up word’s meaning or origin, etc.

If you are a person who loves to learn new words, the Reverse dictionary feature can be fun to play with! I once had a Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary and had so much fun learning new words.

What do you use for your dictionary needs? Do you find one of these useful enough to bookmark and use later?

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Let’s look at what’s going on around the blogs this week.

• How to Setup up Google Custom Search for your Web Search to Make Money: Maki at Dosh Dosh has a great post on how to setup Google Custom Searchfor your blog search. He shows how you can use it to make money but I would like to set it up just because Google’s search would be much more relevant than the native WordPress search. Kyle just implemented this in his blog and you can read about it here.
• flauntR: Add Photo Effects with One Click: Brown Baron of Brown Thoughts has a post on this cool web service flauntR that lets you add very nice effects to your pictures very easily.
• How To: Create Your Own Feed Flare: Kyle of Kyle’s Cove shows you how to create your feed flare for your blog. Check out how you do this in few easy steps.
• New WordPress Plugin To Help Slow Widgets - Maybe: Stephen of Scratch99 has developed a new WordPress plugin (beta) that sets out to ease the problem we face with some of the slow loading widgets. I was going to give it a try tonight but I might have to wait until this weekend to try. Great effort, Stephen!

Hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did. I have found some of my now regular reads in roundup posts such as this one.

Sorry for the lack of posts in the last few days! I had a problem break out in the blog out of the blue that prevented me from publishing any post and I am working on fixing it. I just figured out a workaround to publish one. Sorry if you saw the post initially without any links in it.

Google Alerts in an excellent service by Google that is not often talked about like GMail or Google Reader. It has to be one of the hidden treasures in Google’s suite of web applications.

Google Alert is a simple service where you get an email alert for any search term you specify. You can choose to have your topic searched in one of the following areas. If a content is indexed by Google, then you will be able to find it with this service.

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Videos
• Groups or
• Comprehensive

You can choose to receive alerts to your email once a day, as it happens or once a week depeneding on how frequently you want to be notified. Spend an extra couple of minutes thinking before you choose ‘As it happens’ as you can very soon get tired of all the emails you get alerted with. If you don’t read the alerts then there is no point signing up for them.

1. Look who’s talking

If you are a blogger, you probably rely on trackbacks to get notified of who is linking to you or talking about you. But, trackbacks aren’t 100% reliable and sometimes you might not get notified of someone’s effort in taking the time to link to you. One great advantage is that you could find out any conversation about your blog even if the other blogger did not link to you. Networking is crucial for a blog to be successful and you really do not want to miss someone else actually talking about you to their readers. Good or bad, I want to know if you talk about ShanKri-la in your blog.

How to: Set up a Google Alert with your blog name and set up a comprehensive search and ask to be emailed once a day or once a week depending on how soon you want to know who is talking about you. Or you could just set up a Blog search to narrow your search to other blogs linking to your blog.

2. Follow your Niche

If you are a Niche blogger, you have to stay current to be on top of the topic you are writing about. You might rely on a few other sites in your niche to stay updated. How would you like to have an email everyday that has current information on the topic you are interested in? As a tech blogger, I like to focus on topics like RSS feed readers, Firefox, Web applications and I have alerts created on each of these topics to stay current.

3. Blog Post Ideas

Are you facing writers block? Set up keywords in Google Alerts that you would like to write on and get a daily dose of inspiration and ideas.

One great thing about the keywords is the advanced search criteria that you use in a Google Search also works in Google Alerts. Just go to Google search’s Advanced Search page and build your complex query. Then just copy that and paste it into Alerts.

4. Watch for announcements

Are you into writing about breaking news stories? Set up Google Alerts in News and subscribe for alerts and get notified ‘as it happens’.

5. Track yourself

Besides tracking your blog, you could just plug in your name and see if you come up in web searches. Even if you don’t appear in the weekly alert you have set up, it is still cool to see what other people with your name are appearing in searches for. You could even set up job search alerts in your area like ‘web developer detroit’.

Conclusion

You could easily create and delete alerts if you already have a GMail account. Or you could sign up for a new account in a few minutes. Play with it and experiment with the results. These are just a few ways I have been using Google Alerts.

How do you use Google Alerts?

Google Reader is one of the popular online feed readers around. With the release of the new Bloglines beta, Google Reader is going to have to innovate to retain or improve their market share.

One of the features missed by Google Reader users is the ‘Search’ feature which is in a way funny for an app from Google! Well, it is finally here. And it is implemented better than the new Bloglines version.

A few other feature improvements with the introduction of search:

• Search by - All items, Starred items, Shared items or by folders
• Hide the sidebar - The side navigation bar has now a button to hide it. This improves the readability of fits a ton, IMHO.
• Unread counts can now go to 1000
• Also, the browser back and forward buttons work like it should.

When I wrote about another web based RSS reader, FastLadder, I mentioned that if they were counting on Search as their core feature then they would have to watch out for Google. And now that Google has come out with search, I wonder how the other players in this area can innovate to compete against the two big players, Bloglines & Google Reader. It looks like Bloglines still lead by the number of users.

If you had switched to another web based reader because GReader did not have search, would this bring you back to Google Reader?

For the rest of us who like desktop feed readers, GreatNews is still the best.

Google Maps has become one of my main everyday search tools. I use it to lookup addresses, phone numbers for business and location at one shot and even sometimes use it to call the business right from the web.

Google Maps have added a couple of new features that I really liked.

Embed Google Maps in your Blog or Website

If you are a blogger, you are probably used to embedding YouTube or MetaCafe videos in your blog by just adding a HTML snippet. You can do the same to embed Google maps. The embeddable maps are customizable. You can select it’s size to a few different preset values or specify your own custom requirements.

This is very useful to everyone trying to share information with other folks through their websites or blogs. A business could just post a embedded map with their address in their site. Or you could share the map of the place you visited last weekend. Here is the map of one of our favorite State Parks in the west coast of Michigan.

Maps with Featured Content

I just discovered this little hidden section in ‘My Maps‘ called the Featured Content. This section features a variety of content that you could add to the map you are looking at, like Real estate listings, Gas prices, Distance measurement, pictures, etc. You can just check the box for the content you wish to see and it appears in the Map.

Here are the contents currently listed in the Featured Content area:

• Google Real Estate Search
• Photos from Picasa Web Albums
• Photos from Panaramio
• Gas Prices from GasBuddy.com
• Distance Measurement Tool

Of all the above, I see the last two being very useful to me. I use GasBuddy to check gas prices before every fill up and I have started to keep track of my mileage and cost of my driving habits using MyMileMarker. Now, I can check gas prices right from Google Maps.

The Distance Measurement Tool is very useful as I can just click on any 2 points in a map I am looking at and find out how far apart they are! I can see it coming handy in situations like when you do not have the specific addresses to find driving directions or if you are trying to use the satellite imagery to see bike trails or hiking paths.

Google Maps is one of my daily used web apps and I love the fact that Google is continuously adding new and useful features to an already great product.

Google Docs get Context Menu

Unrelated to Google Maps, thought I would mention a new feature I noticed in Google Docs. Context Menus. You can now access a lot of the functions in toolbars with a right click. Neat. [via Google Operating System]

It’s time to look at some of the new Firefox extensions making the rounds lately. Without further adieu,

• TubeStop: This extension for Mozilla based web browsers disables autoplay on YouTube videos. It lets you open multiple videos in multiple tabs without them all playing at once. It also works on YouTube videos embedded in non-YouTube sites like some videos embedded here in ShanKri-la. One huge side-effect: Stops the upcoming video overlay ads. [via Kyles Cove]
• OpenDownload: This extension allows you to open ANY file from the internet with the default program assgned for the file type by your operating system. Very nice instead of having to choose the program you want to open with.
• FoxSaver: This extension can turn your idle Firefox into a digital picture frame. Use your own pictures of use your Flickr RSS feed or just use the ones handpicked by FoxSaver. This is a great way of sharing your pictures with friends and families. If they have your RSS set, they can see the new pictures as you update your albums. Plus, you can configure idle time, window configuraion, etc. [via Firefox Extension Guru]
• LeechBlock: If you are lacking in self-control, don’t worry. You can configure this extension to act as your mom and stop yourself from accessing time-wasting websites in the time periods you specify. Ideal for folks working from home, where you can lose track of time in sites like Amazon, Facebook or just that silly online Sudoku.
• Visual-Search: Let’s say you are searching for watches and Google brings up results with weather watches as well. You can just highlight ‘weather’ and hit the visual ‘-’ element and the query gets submitted again with -weather. It’s a very nice way to refine your searches visually.
• Paragrasp: Great extension for those who read a lot of text from your browser. This extension highlights paragraph that you are reading and once you are done you can move to the next paragraph with a keystroke. It helps immensely with your concentration. [via Lifehacker]

Hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup of extensions. Here is my usual plug of the Top Firefox extensions post which I am hoping to update this coming long weekend.

Google has made search possible in a large number of international languages. I just found out today that Google has announced Google Labs India on our Independence Day on August 15. Google Labs India is to showcase their favorite ideas for Indian users.

Now, they have made it really easy to search in 14 Indian languages including my native tongue, Tamil without having a special keyboard or software. They have made special iGadgets available for iGoogle Homepage. Once added, I can compose queries in my native language and search for content in Google!

iGoogle gadgets are also available for Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhala and Telugu.

Google Indic Transliteration

Google has brought this feature over from Blogger. What you can do with this tool is pretty cool. You can type out the words in Hindi phonetically, with an English keyboard and Google converts it into the correct Hindi word. I tried it with my little Hindi knowledge and was surprised at the agility with which it converted most words correctly. For the ones that are wrong, Google lets you suggest the correct version and the algorithm learns as it goes. It is also available as an iGoogle Gadget.

Google has a powerful presence in India employing a lot of engineers and the availability of search in native languages will be welcomed by everyone around the world.

[via Google Blog]