Saturday, September 29, 2007

Get A Cheap Airline Ticket

Taking off for a week in Europe or a long weekend in the Caribbean may sound exciting, but for a poor secretary, vacations are usually out of the question. However, it is possible to whisk yourself away on an exotic escape if you know how to get the cheapest airline tickets out there.

For starters, you need to know how airline pricing works. In the airline game, there is no set pricing no constant $100 dollars for Row 10, Seat A. Prices are constantly shifting due to supply and demand. If a flight begins to fill quickly, airlines may raise prices on remaining seats to increase profits. Consequently, prices may go down on a flight thats nearly empty. Other factors at play include competition for certain destinations, an airlines market share on desirable routes and more.

Pricing decisions occur rapidly throughout the day and may change without warning. This information is communicated through a set of four central reservation systems, which in turn pass this information on to travel agents, discount travel websites and other ticket retailers. For this reason, you may get the best deal by consulting a travel agent. Travel websites may have good deals, but a travel agent has been trained to work with the reservation systems and knows how to locate bargain flights.

The key to getting a good deal is to be open and flexible in your vacation planning. If youre dead set on going to Paris on October 22nd, you may have to settle for whatever fares you can find. Start searching early (at least 1-2 months) to get the best deals. However, if you arent set on a specific date or time of day, you should be able to reduce your costs most airlines offer lower fares for mid-week travel and red-eye flights.

If youre totally flexible, you may be able to score a last-minute bargain. Many airlines offer deep discounts on tickets in the week before a flight to fill any remaining empty seats. Discount travel sites like Travelocity and Expedia often offer package deals including flights, hotel stays and car rentals. Why not explore your adventurous side by setting aside some vacation time for the future and picking your trip the day or two before you leave?

Check the airport closest to you for small discount airlines that may offer low fares on flights to specific destinations. Jet Blue offers a $49 flight each way from Boston to New York City perfect for a weekend getaway. Also look for smaller airports if you cant fly into Detroit Metro Airport, you may be able to land at the Willow Run or Ann Arbor Municipal airports.

Are you a Triple AAA member? A senior citizen? A student? Some airlines offer discounts for these demographics and bonuses for frequent flyers. You may also find a good deal from a ticket consolidator. These companies purchase discounted tickets directly from the airlines avoiding the reservation systems altogether and may offer them at further discounts. But be sure you buy from a reputable website like Lowestfare.com or CheapTickets.com small start-ups can go out of business overnight, leaving you with an invalid ticket.

No matter what you do, be sure to check for any restrictions on your ticket. Some deals may require a 21-day advance purchase, a Saturday night stay in your location or steep cancellation fees. Always read the fine print before spending your hard-earned money any mistake you make is on your hands, not the airlines. Once youve made your ticket purchase, sit back, relax and try not to gloat about the good deal you got on your vacation.
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By: Sarah Russell

Sarah Russell, aka "The Sexy Secretary," is a connoisseur of living the good life on a budget. Check out her website at www.thesexysecretary.com for more fabulous ideas on how to trim down your expenses without reducing your quality of life.

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The History Of Internet Search Engines

Just a little over ten years ago, if a person needed information they were forced to go to the local library and spend hours entombed amongst shelves of books. Now that the internet is available in almost every home finding information is easier then ever before. Now when someone needs information all they have to do is boot up their computer and type their needs into a search engine.

A search engine is an information retrieval system that is designed to help find information stored on a ca computer system.

In 1990 the very first search engine was created by students at McGill University in Montreal. The search engine was called Archie and it was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. FTPs (short for File Transfer Protocol) are used to transfer data from one computer to another ocer the internet, or through a network that supports TCP/IP protocol. In its early days Archie contacted a list of FTP archives approximately once a month with a request for a listing. Once Archie received a listing it was stored in local files and could be searched using a UNIX grep command. In its early days Archie was a local tool but as the kinks got worked out and it became more efficient it became a network wide resource. Archie users could utilize Archie's services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files.

A student at the University of Minnesota created a search engine that indexed plain text files in 1991. They named the program Gopher after the University of Minnesota's mascot.

In 1993 a student at MIT created Wandx, the first Web search engine.

Today, search engines match a user's keyword query with a list of potential websites that might have the information the users is looking for. The search engine does this by using a software code that is called a crawler to probe web pages that match the user's keyword. Once the crawler has identified web pages that may be what the user is looking for the search engine uses a variety of statistical techniques to establish each pages importance. Most search engines establish the importance of hits based on the frequency of word distribution. Once the search engine has finished searching web pages it provides a list of web sites to the user.

Today, when an internet user types a word into a search engine they are given a list of websites that might be able to provide them with the information they seek. The typical search engine provides ten potential hits per page. The average internet user never looks farther they the second page the search engine provides. Webmasters are constantly finding themselves forced to use new methods of search engine optimization to be highly ranked by the search engines.

In 2000, a study was done by Lawrence and Giles that suggested internet search engines were only able to index sixteen percent of all available webpage's.
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By: Li Ming Wong

Uncover The Brutally Effective SEO Software That "Average Joes and Janes" Are Using To - Quickly and Easily Blow Up Their Bank Accounts, Explode Their Traffic, and Triple Their Sales - With Little Or No Extra Work... Effective SEO Software.

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Search Engine Optimization -how Spamdexing Affects The Searcher

Everyone and anyone who has ever used an internet search engine knows the value and frustration of the searches and search engine optimization, it doesn't matter if you are someone trying to use a search engine to identify a specific piece of information or if you are a business person trying to break into the global ecommerce market, we all have some sort of complaint about internet searches.

These days when we need information we no longer go to the local library and throw ourselves at the reference librarian. Now when we need information we boot up our personal computers, connect to the internet, and access our favorite search engine and type in the keywords that should access the necessary information. Thrilled, we scan the long list of potential hits, it looks like its going to be an easy research project. Cheerfully, you click on the link for the first website, and then the second, and then the third. Each website is filled with gobbely gook that bears little resemblance to the information you are looking for. Taking a deep breath you return to the search engine's homepage and reenter your keywords, jumbling the order of the words, thinking that maybe this time you'll get a hit. Once again you get nothing but a bunch of gobbely gook. You run search after search after search. You try a variety of search engines, other then a few advertisements you get very little information about what you're looking for.

Resisting the urge to throw your computer out the window, you grab your car keys and wallet and head to the local library.

You have just been a victim of spamdexing.

Spamdexing is a problem that drives everyone from the college student trying to write a research paper, to the businessperson trying to make a go of their business related website, to the powers that be at the search engines insane.

Spamdexing is the use of various methods that manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner that is inconsistent with the indexing systems guidelines. The word spamdexing was first coined by Eric Convey in an article he wrote for The Boston Herald in 1996. The article was called "Porn sneaks way back on Web."

Spamdexers are webmasters that take complete advantage of search engines, completely ignoring respected forms of search engine optimization. Spamdexers use a variety of techniques to make sure their websites are in the listed in the fertile first two pages of search results, many times the pages bear little if any resemblance to the original search.

Search engines powers that be understand the frustration spamdexers bring out in people struggling to run legitimate internet searchers. They know that spamdexing can add hours of time and mind-numbing frustration to what should be a simple internet search. Its clich but they really do feel your pain and are trying to eliminate the problem. On January 25, 2007 Google took an active role in trying to stop the spamdexers on its search engine by going after websites that specialized in Google bombing. Several of the major search engines have rewritten their web crawler's algorithms to make keyword stuffing difficult, rejecting any websites that simply made lists of keywords.

Most search engines would like internet users to report websites that they suspect of spamdexing.
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By: Li Ming Wong

Uncover The Brutally Effective SEO Software That "Average Joes and Janes" Are Using To - Quickly and Easily Blow Up Their Bank Accounts, Explode Their Traffic, and Triple Their Sales - With Little Or No Extra Work... Effective SEO Software.

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