Category: Women

It is interesting to look back at Thanksgiving history and understand the significance of this uniquely American tradition. Thanksgiving history can be traced back to 1621 when the colonists reaped a bountiful Fall harvest after a harsh winter.

The Pilgrims that had set sail for the New World faced many a trial and tribulation. With the help of the local Native Americans, they cultivated corn and native vegetables to keep them alive. A grand community feast was held to celebrate this, replete with corn, barley, pumpkins and peas, mashed potatoes and gravy, fowl, deer and wild turkey. The Thanksgiving feast is in commemoration of the thankful community feast partaken by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

But a couple of years later, there was drought and the Pilgrims fasted and prayed for rain. As their prayers were answered, they continued to follow the tradition of thanksgiving. It was much later in 1789 that President George Washington declared Thanksgiving as a holiday for all colonies. After much lobbying and debate, it was decided that the fourth Thursday of November would be celebrated as Thanksgiving Day in the United States. A national holiday proved to be one of the effective tools in promoting national unity during the colonial times.

Today Thanksgiving Day is a day of family togetherness, where the traditional turkey and the rest of the meal are savored with near and dear ones. Thanksgiving Day, as the name suggests is a day of prayer to thank God for his bounties. It is also a day to thank those who care for us and enrich our lives with their love. Prayers and church services are held for people to contemplate on their blessings and thank the Lord for them.

Fruits, flowers and vegetables are used to decorate churches. Homes may have a traditional cornucopia, to symbolize the abundance of Thanksgiving. Even today, the turkey finds pride of place on the Thanksgiving dinner menu. You can find corn in some form of the other, be it as bread or side dish. Thanksgiving meal also includes breadcrumb stuffing, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes. Traditionally pecan pie or pumpkin pie finds it way into the Thanksgiving menu.

In keeping with the thanksgiving spirit, our special articles on decorating your home with Thanksgiving crafts and planning the Thanksgiving meal are sure to find favor with you!

Although the concept of customized search engines is not unique or mushroomed overnight, it has taken on new significance after Google’s free sitesearch , Yahoo! Search Builder and Swiki community powered search engine have debuted. We have implemented our own Swiki woman centric search engine earlier.

All such custom engines basically offered search results based on user-set criteria. You initiate a search engine through one of the publicly offered services based on your preferred set of URLs. You can tweak the search results pages and enhance the listings as you go along in the case of Swiki. As the name implies, it takes a life of its own when more collaborators or partners in your community join in and refine the search results.

Google has unveiled its own Google Custom Search Engine ( you will find more details and comments by Google’s Matt Cutts here:

review-custom-search-engine)

What does it offer ?

Does it offer something unique which is not offered elsewhere ?

We wanted to find out for ourselves and what better way than trying it out. It took us barely a few minutes to head to the Google coop and define our own search engine. We rolled out a spanking new custom search engine – Woman centric search engine – powered by Google. You can try this Woman-Centric Search Engine here: Custom Woman Centric Search Engine

As far as we could see in the initial test run, the results are mainly sourced from the regular Google index with perhaps a couple of results thrown in from the preferred list. We deliberately kept our preferred list to 2. You guessed it right – we used our own URL as the first in the list. You can access the preferred list from the control panel -> sites.

We have seeded the search results with keyword phrases which would refine the results to women centered sites, though the results are not in consonance with the avowed motto – provide consistent search results primarily targeted at women. It is only the beginning and so would wait for more collaborators to join in and add to the refinement.

We have been getting quite some positive feedback and referrals from Swiki. Swiki offers easy to customize search results. We are still in the process of evaluating the new Google custom engine. We will share our results in this blog.