Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

A Treat For Google Lovers: Google Solutions Marketplace

Shantanu Goel

Given the ignorant lazy bum I am, until a couple of days ago I was unaware of this magical place called “Google Solutions Marketplace”. According to Google:

The Google Solutions Marketplace links customers to vendors whose solutions integrate and extend Google’s communication, collaboration, and enterprise search products.

Basically it is a boon for both, google product users who depend on various search, enterprise, search and apps related Google offerings, and developers who develop products and services based upon these. Google Solutions Marketplace acts as a bridge between the two to offer a one stop shop where you can buy (or even get for free, in many cases) the brilliant ideas that have been developed by many individuals and companies based on google’s services.

Google Adsense : Conflict of Interests?

Shantanu Goel

“Google Adsense” has been caught in a conflict of interests with its parent company “Google”. Google piad 140k to teh cause of “Say No to Prop 8” but on the other hand people reported that Google Adsense delivered a substantially huge amount of “Say Yes to Prop 8” advertisements all over the internet, even on sites which are completely out of context with this matter. Not only is this conflicting with the interests of the parent company but also with the “Terms of Use” put forward by Adsense that ads should not have any kind of intolerance or advocacy towards an individual or a group. Irate people took out their frustation on the adsense blog.

Creative Open Sources X-Fi Sound Card Driver…Finally

Shantanu Goel

Creative has finally come to its senses and turned to the open source community to raise its X-Fi series of sound cards from the ashes on the linux platform, which got burnt mostly due to the poor quality of the drivers that Creative was giving out. The announcement for releasing the source code, licensed under GPL v2, was made on their forums. For the announcement and download details, click here.

I guess this is a reason for us to rejoice because of two reasons:

Make Money Out Of Nothing: Add Google Adsense For Search To Your 404 Page

Shantanu Goel

A 404 page is an error page that is displayed when somebody tries to go to a link on your website that doesn’t exist. This could occur when someone linking to your website or typing in his browser address bar mistypes a url, or maybe that page has been moved or deleted by you. Lost opportunity? Maybe. But definitely not, if you follow this advise. Many people don’t have a 404 page altogether, a few implement with an inane message like “Something went wrong”, a few will try to help out the seemingly lost user by giving a few navigation options linking to home page, archives or most popular posts, etc. Definitely the last option among these is quite good to retain the users, but we’ll go one step ahead and turn this into an extra source of cash.

Save Your Adsense Account: Put Up That Privacy Policy

Shantanu Goel

Google is known to be pretty strict with making sure that all Adsense publishers remain conformant to their policies. I’m not very old in this game but had read and heard enough (about google shutting down Adsense accounts without even warning) that I made sure to read their terms and conditions thoroughly. What got my attention was the very last line in the policy:

Hi,

During a recent review of your account we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads on [domain name removed] but do not have a privacy policy posted which discloses how the site uses third party advertising companies.