Want your very own web site address, but don't want to mess with pay-for hosting packages or server configuration? Today you can buy a domain name for around 10 bucks a year (or less) and map it to a variety of free web-based apps for no-mess and no-cost hosting. Typical commercial web hosting starts at around $100 a year and comes with clunky webmail and apps you have to set up yourself. Instead, you can have a full-featured web site with multiple spacious email accounts, blog or static web page hosting, and other services for free. You don't have to lease server space or run your own server to have your own URL. Let's take a look at how you can set up a complete domain name backend for free.

Read More »

The huge number of splogs (spam blogs) on the internet means search results you get from Google's Blog Search engine can contain a lot of noise in the form of duplicate information that you really don't want. The Google Operating System offers steps to show how to optimise Google Blog Search's settings so that you get the best results you can. In a nutshell:

1. sort the results by relevancy
2. restrict the results to a recent period (last day)
3. restrict the results to English (or another language)

4. if you really have to sort the results by date, remove the posts that follow a spammy pattern (for example, add -"google alert" -site:blogspot.com -site:.info to your query), but make sure you don't remove important results
5. check the posts that contain "References"

If you haven't been using Google Blog Search, I'd highly recommend it. It's an excellent tool for finding both late-breaking news and to get an idea of what people are saying about a topic—especially if you know how to increase your signal-to-noise ratio using tips like those included in the Google Operating System post. If you have been using Google Blog Search, let's hear what kind of uses you've put it to in the comments.