How To Get The Right Drivers For Unknown Devices:

Anyone who has had to maintain their own Windows PC has come across the issue of missing drivers. Matters get worse; especially Windows XP and Vista, when the operating system (OS) slaps you with an “Unknown Device” ticket and does not even tell you what drivers it needs. The situation happens more often than one would think, usually the consequence of an ill-planned, fresh windows install, or non-existent driver discs. Then just when think you are in the clear after the OS has been installed, you are left with a list of unusable components in your newly refreshed computer.

Sometimes, you get lucky and simply googling the computer model to figure out which device drivers to download from the vendor’s website does the tick. Other, more instructions, individuals will actually pop the case open and examine the innards to look for the vender, make, serial numbers, or other identifiers on components. Folks with IT  smarts (or the right tools) employ an easier method to determine the identity of those pesky unknown devices. Mike’s Halfdone  Development has, for years, graciously provided Unknown Devices (or UKD) for free so that PC users don’t have to squint around the inside of a system. Unknown Devices- the application, not the situation- is a piece of software that scans a Windows system for all connected devices, and reports which devices do not have drivers. It is pretty basic, but usually identifier at least the vendor for the particular device, after which, a Google search manages the rest.

Start by downloading UKD from the website, halfdone.com/ukd, and extracting the zip file to a folder, Run the application in administrator mode; the system will be scanned in a matter of few seconds, if your Windows system is lacking drivers for certain devices, UKD will display it in a tree hierarchy under the category “Other devices” (as illustrated in the screenshot). Right-clicking the item will bring up a pop-up menu that offers to copy the identifier (in this case, Nexus one), or directly search the web for the information. Of course, users can manually Google the vender or device name for related driver information, or visit the vendor’s website and search for the relevant driver to download and install. Straight from the USB flash drives of system administrators, UKD is simpler and more convenient than digging through stacks of CDs and trying each driver until you hit the right one, and also keep you from having to pry open computer cases.

How Search Engine Works ?

How Search Engine Works ?

Though the working of different search engines vary from each other, they all perform some basic functions, Essentially, all search engines work in an orderly fashion, performing three main operations-Web crawling, indexing and searching.

Web Crawling: Before it can give you the information you want, a search engine has to find the information you are looking for. To find that information, search engines, which are basically WebPages that respond to search queries, “crawl” the web. Web crawling or spidering is one of the basic functions of a search engine. Spidering is achieved by retrieving stored information from WebPages by means of a bot, referred to as a Web crawler or spider. A web crawler is a computer program that navigates the internet in an automated, organized manner and retrieves the information directly from the page itself. It makes a copy of every link on each website visited, and analyses the content for indexing. Websites and URLs are not the only entries that spiders indentify; they also take note of words within pages and where they were found, through means and techniques could vary from search engine to search engine.

Indexing: One the spiders have collected all the information, it needs to be stored, compiled and organized so that it is accessible for users and available for searching. To be more than a website that lists links, search engines often store additional information including the frequency of the occurrence of words on a page, and the importance given to them (for ranking). Some search engines also assign “weight” to each entry-measuring the differing value of words as they appear on a certain page. The entire information is then compacted and stored-ready for indexing. The most efficient means of building an index is by creating a hash table, which assigns a formula to the numeric value of each word, and consists of a hash number and a pointed to the actual data. This arrangement makes the indexing and storage system effective for quick search results-even in cases of complicated search.

Searching: This process is the first instance of the user’s interaction with the search engine. Step one, build a query; step two, submit it. Once the query is submitted, it is processed by the search engine, which then extracts the information from the index.

King Of Search Engine:

Google: Google is the reigning king of search engines-nothing groundbreaking there. Not only is its current market share approximately 65 percent, but it is currently the only search engine whose name has been recognized as an actual verb in English language. Spider tested the search engine and its features to see what makes it number one. However, with the updates being introduced in the engine at an impressive rate, it is quite possible that more features are added by the time this review it’s published.

Presentation and Features: “Less is more” seems to be the philosophy behind Google’s minimalistic homepage, with its various features neatly tucked away. For those who prefer a bit of zing, a neat button at the bottom left provides the option to change the background image for the search engine. Unlike Bing, the advanced search button is present on the homepage, giving user the option to specify search conditions beforehand. Upon searching a query, results accumulated from different categories are displayed in the main page. Apart from the regular categories such as Web, Videos, Images etcetera, Google also includes Updates that not only provide second by second real time updates (From Twitter) related to the entered query, but also includes its timeline, from where you can get results from a specific date, minute and second.

The customization/filtering features available for each category are extremely elaborate. A few filtering features that completely bowled us over were “Translated search” in Web (Where you can get search results from different languages translated in English/default language), ‘closed captioned in Videos (Retrieving results with only captions), ‘custom location’ in Updates (restricting the Twitter feeds to a specific region), ‘ custom range’ in Books (Specifying the publishing time period of the book searched) and of course the ‘ wonder wheel’ in Web which provides a funky, illustrative way to show related information.

Searching at the speed of thought-this is what Google’s new predictive search feature, Google instant, is all about. Google instant basically modifies results as you type the characters, and combined with the search suggestions that it provides, it saves you from the hassle of tediously typing in the entire keyword.

Search Performance: While Google outranked Bing for the most part, the results were not their ups and downs. Although our basic search tests saw Google score two perfect results out of five, Google’s database searches performed poorly comparison, with only one exception. Acknowledging that some of our test expressions were particularly grueling, however, the database searches functioned well within their parameters. Search results were mostly spot on within top four items on the page if not the whole. The veteran search engine also excelled at vague searches and semantic searches, presenting results and exceptional accuracy and relevance, thanks to its skilful data extraction ability. Querying variations of certain expressions-using synonyms or natural language construction-also returned steady results. The inclusion of Google Squared in Search engine results pages (SERPs) allows them to offer direct answers in addition to detailed results, and works well with semantic search presentation.

It also seemed to us that, where proximity relevance was concerned, Google had an unfair advantage over Bing, Users from Pakistan are automatically directed to the .pk ccTLD Google page, which priorities results for Pakistan, where as Bing is yet to have Pakistan on its list of countries. In any case, local search results are further elevated by clicking the “Pages from Pakistan” option to the left of the results listed. On average, Google also returned results 65.5 percent faster than Bing, at a speed of 40 milliseconds during the tests. There are big numbers, but it is generally a matter of less than a second’s difference and really only notable on internet connections slower than 512kbps.

Engine of Choice:

Spider conducted extensive tests to analyze how two of the major search providers performed under certain controlled conditions-the browser used was Google chrome in incognito mode, and the internet speed of a steady 1500kbps of dedicated bandwidth. To ensure neutrality, we turned off search suggestions and cleared the cache for each query, to avoid results being affected by the image, video, blogs, news, shopping, reference/academic (dictionary, encyclopedia, maps). The table below represents the sum of the results of Spider’s tests. The results of the tests reflect searches made on a particular day and the state of the search provider’s index on that day-which may change as time passes.

	GOOGLE	BING
Basic Search	83	54.5	Out of 100
Vague Search	73.33	41.33	Out of 100
Regional Relevance	4	2	Out of 5
Semantic Search	4.5	3.3	Out of 5

From the aggregate scores for Google and Bing, Google is clearly the better search performer of the two. But that’s a rather macroscopic view of their individual performances. While the generalization holds true, with Google scoring two nearly perfect results according to our tests, there were certain things Bing performed extremely well at, which we will discuss in our next blog. The one thing we held as a rule, was that what mattered to a search user would be results, and not the technologies behind the search.