Digg, the popular social bookmarking site had utilized the feature of Shout.This allowed its users in order to share their links with one another and it was the only communication tool. Now the feature of Shouts is replaced with Facebook and Twitter.

Microsoft has released the Beta version of Bing (formerly known as Kumo).Bing is expected to replace Microsoft’s Live Search.The full launch is scheduled for June 3rd.

Google has released its second version of Chrome internet browser.The first version of Google Chrome was released nearly 8 months back.Google has succeeded with bringing forth the second version by collecting immense feedback from the user and making further improvements.It has been claimed that around 300 bugs have been fixed by Google before the release of this latest version.

One of the major areas which Google has focused on is speed of the browser. Google claims that a page-loading increase of 30 percent is what Google claims it has included in the latest browser update, version 2.0.172.28.Though Google has improved in the speed factor,it still faces a tough competition from Mozilla which has drawn the support of communities due to its immense add-on capabilities.

Google has launched the new iGoogle gadget known as “What’s Popular”.This gadget displays the most popular content from the web.This gadget bears a resemblance to Digg, Reddit or Yahoo Buzz,as one is able to vote the web pages. In other words ,it is possible to rate items that you like or dislike by just clicking the ratings buttons displayed close to each item. Later if you change your mind, then the ratings can be changed anytime. The What’s Populargadget ultimately searches what users liked or disliked in order to improve its ranking of interesting items.Also ,it is possible to add content that the users find interesting.What’s Popular utilizes algorithms in order to search interesting content from a combination of submissions and trends in aggregated user activity from Google services such as YouTube and Google Reader.Three categories such as stories, images and videos are available and usually all the pages are sorted according to the algorithm.

At times, when we searched for our name in Google, we might have been dissatisfied with the results. We usually see that other people who share a similar name dominating the results.Google’s new “Profile results”that was being launched recently provide a solution for this.Google has integrated Google Profiles into their main US name search results.As an example if your searching for a name “Sandra Jose” in Google,at the end of the results ,you will find a picture of Sandra ,brief description as well as links to Google profiles,MySpace,Facebook etc. Upto 4 profiles will be displayed at the end of the page.This kind of Google cross-integration helps to make Google Profiles an extremely competitive product all of a sudden.

In this way,we find that Google Profiles are being extended beyond Google’s own services.They are being promoted as a method for people to convey to the world who they are and to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results.To start off ,create a profile in Google in www.google.com/profiles and follow the guidelines.

Yahoo adds additional features for its service in building custom search engines,BOSS.Delicious,Language Capability as well as News are the new features added in Yahoo search Boss.

The popularity of Delicious has let to several tools from Yahoo and the Delicious community browser such as add-ons, APIs, and Search Monkey applications.The Delicious data which is available today through BOSS includes Delicious saves, top tags including count information.BOSS has included the Advanced Language functionality to enable filtering of specific language results for a given market.Yahoo BOSS presently supports Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese.BOSS News Service can now be sorted by a date or a specified time range of days, weeks, or hours.

The social bookmarking site Digg has improved significantly.The main aim of digg is to deliver the best stories at the top of the results.In addition to the improved user interface,the following additional changes have been implemented:

1.A faceted model for filtering results means that it is possible to cut your results by factors like Digg count, topic, time, etc. It provides sufficent information about your query and enables you to drill down to your result much more effectively.

2.Advanced shortcuts enable those who are searching for stories with specific promotion characteristics to filter in an effective manner. Include +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.

3.Widely used search tricks like putting your query in quotes for an exact match and adding a negative sign before the term (i.e., -term) to remove that term from your results is possible.

4.Digg has ensured that search is faster now too.

5.A graph depicting the relative number of search results by month for the past several years provides some visibility into the trend of a particular query term over time.

Microsoft provides the option of downgrade for Windows 7 Customers. The options are available to Windows Vista as well as to Windows XP. Microsoft intends to offer n-2 downgrade option with Windows 7 to enable customers to plans their migrations from XP. Thus this download option is a good news for users of Windows Vista and Windows XP.

The Vista version of Windows was not received well by many Microsoft users. Microsoft doesn’t usually provide active support for more than 2 versions of Windows. Hence there has been a great deal of apprehension about the loss of XP support when the new OS was announced to be released soon.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team has delivered an explanation regarding the Webmaster guidelines provide by Google.This was one of the suggestions provided by the Search Engine Giant..”Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.”

Here are some reasons Matt Cutts cited why it is better to maintain the number of links less than 100.He went on to explain that previously Google indexed just around 100 kilobytes of a page.In case the page exceeds 100 links, it usually exceeds 100kb and the remaining links will be completely ignored or truncated by Google.Suppose, there are more than 100 links on any page ,people who reach the page might be completely overwhelmed and may be unable to find what they were looking for and might decide to leave the page.Google classifies this as a “bad user experience”.

However, in some situations, where a large resource library is provided ,it is absolutely necessary to maintain a page with more than 100 links.In these cases Google won’t consider these pages as spam,instead Google will either choose to exclude these links from being indexed or might tag them as nofollow.