Searching for Kiarighat, I Don't Like it One Bit- Yatra.in Page

Screen Shot of the Yatra.in page

I was searching for Kiarighat in Himachal Pradesh on Google. I clicked on the second link which was from Yatra.in. What manipulation it is for ranking high on search engine. I mean they repeat Kiarighat endlessly on that page out of context. Here is a sample-

While looking for 5 star hotels in Kiarighat, such as ITC Maurya, Taj Palace or an Oberoi, our site should be your first stop. Kiarighat is a vibrant city that has a rich past, and what better way to experience that than to stay in one of the heritage hotels in Kiarighat.

I mean hello! Five star hotels in Kiarighat?? Who are you kidding or is it that you understand your product so poorly?

Incredible India!

I have set up a Google news alert for India tourism and that is how I came across this article at a website called domain-b.com. It talks about the Ministry of Tourism plans to spend Rs 20 Crores on online advertising. So far so good.
The article on domain-b also talks about the Incredible India Website. I have always been curious to know what kind of traffic does Incredible India gets. Quoting from the article-

The ministry's Incredible India website, incredibleindia.org, has a daily average traffic of around 10 lakh visitors a day, with the ministry continuously innovating the tools on the site.

Have you ever tried searching for information on the Incredible India website? I have tried many times (I academically also try to write on tourism, hence this fascination with Incredible India) always using firefox. I almost always type Taj Mahal as my key words for search. And I do vaguely remember sometimes getting a result but most of the time the search function doesn't work. Below is the screen shot of the result I got this time if I press the arrow near the search key (enlarge the picture to see the exact error).

Search Result on Incredibleindia.org (3/02/2009) for Taj Mahal when you press the 'arrow' sign near the search box on the front page in Firefox

Search Result on Incredibleindia.org (3/02/2009) for Taj Mahal when you press the 'enter' key in Firefox

I get a different page if I just press 'enter' key (screen shot above) but that too gives no results. I mean we are software outsourcing hub to the world. Why can't we have a decent search engine on the Incredible India website that gets more than 10 lakh hits per day!

Lazy Sunday Photo- Inkfruit T Shirt

Inkfruit T Shirt

Remember the Inkfruit website? I got the promised T Shirt and I must say I liked it. Thank you Inkfruit. And apologies for no taking a better picture, with the weather being what it is many of my folks are taking turns to fall sick! Let us see if I too join the queue.

Do You Have a Flair for Designing T Shirts?

If you have a flair for designing T Shirts you may find Inkfruit an interesting site. They have an ongoing contest where you can submit your T Shirt designs and vote for others too. Here is a FAQ about this T Shirt site and design competition.

Details of the prizes for the winning T Shirt designs can be found here.

I browsed through the T Shirts and actually my nephews liked many of the wacky designs.

Full Disclosure: I was contacted by the site asking if I would blog about them. What do I get in return? Well, a T Shirt of course. I picked this T Shirt design and my nephews immediately told me that they don't like it! They wanted something more wacky but I had to remind them this one for a change was for me!