Subjects:
Wikia Search
As you may have read Wikia is now open to anyone wanting to search or re-arrange results. And it's definitively worth a screenshot for those who haven't disabled Javascript in their browser.
How to influence your Google Results
Matt Cutts demonstrates how by spending a few minutes you can create Google Subscribed Links that show up in your results whenever you enter one of the keywords you want the link to show up for. It's almost like going directly to the site you want to pop up in your results, just a little more convoluted.
Calling a Kettle Black
Who would have thought that Google worries about privacy.
Not For Sale
Mark Cuban, a guy with more money than brains, proposes to pay the top 100,000 sites for blocking Google in their robots.txt, so that Google is deprived of quality results.
Won't happen. Everyone and their sister know that Microsoft is perceived to be evil. For this reason Maciej Ceglowski, who used to publish the Idlewords blog, asked site owners in 2003 to block Microsoft in their robots.txt files to deprive MSN good content.
The action generated instant publicity support, lots of reporting, praise even. But very few changed robots.txt files. Site owners don't want to lose a prospective visitor, even if some know that visitors coming from MSN are almost never qualified, having searched for something irrelevant to their site.
The $1,000 Cuban proposes won't make a dent. The idea needs a lot more zeroes before the decimal point, before it would even become considerable.
Logfile Burning
Phorm is an Advertising crutch, sniffing the user's data stream directly at the provider [who gets a cut] in order to insert advertising into html pages the user requests. Those who notice and disagree can
- change their provider
- trust those people to obey an opt-out [you have to know about this first, though]
- install AntiPhormLite, an application that simulates a browser by requesting html pages across a large variety of subjects continuously [which are discarded without anyone ever looking at them], all in order to confuse the sniffers with meaningless data.
Your accesslog files are even less relevant now.
PR 10 Domain for Free
It's not a perfect ten yet. But then, we all have started somewhere.
Negative Feedback
If negative feedback causes an offer of a bribe to have it edited into something more palatable, it's going to stick.
Feedfetcher Burn Rate
Feedfetcher is Google's RSS feed grabber that's been abandoned and thrown out like an old bone it seems. It leaves a log entry containing the URL http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html. Following that address one gets redirected to Google's Webmaster Help Centre which doesn't appear to anything know about Feedfetcher. The Help Centre search function doesn't help either.
Searching Google itself helps, although the first hit redirects to the Help Centre already seen. Further down the result list is a link pointing at http://scholar.google.com/feedfetcher.html.
Following one more link one finally arrives at http://scholar.google.com/webmasters/remove.html#feedfetcher, where one learns "Since Feedfetcher requests come from explicit action by human users, Feedfetcher has been designed to ignore robots.txt guidelines. It's not possible for Google to restrict access to a publicly available feed."
And there's no way to stop Google requesting a URL that has been entered by a "human user" but which just does not exist. Solid engineering that is.
Move up to your own .EDU
For $US 50 a month you can now run your own subdomain blog on a .edu domain provided you don't do anything commonly associated with the red light district, or worse. Somehow Mr Keller established a "Pickering University" in 2006 and further managed to get pi.edu registered for this very establishment - despite using a Hotmail address. And now he thinks it's payback time big time. Because there's a lot of people out there who still believe that .edu links are better than others, and who still insist that search engine staff are so ignorant they'll never notice. Maybe they don't even have internet access.
Got it!
Took me a while but I think I now understand what Twitter is actually good for.
Waste not, Want not
Sites creating each requested page dynamically are affected most, but even sites delivering static HTML pages can suffer, because Yahoo's spider Slurp appears to have been, like most other Yahoo properties, bolted together without any concern about efficient use of resources [or others]. This is even apparent when requesting Yahoo's Spider FAQ, which is spread out over many pages, and, unfortunately, doesn't stop anywhere if one believes a number or forum posts complaining about Slurp's excessive spidering rate.
The Next Phase
The old digital divide (rich versus poor) still exists. But now, according to those who like to talk, there's a new one. You have a better experience on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed or Upcoming, the more friends that you have online.
What no-one told Scoble, is that you have an even better experience if you spend time with real people away from the keyboard.
Google in every Headline
The headline Google search behind most phishing sites somehow insinuates that it's Google's fault that people fall for phishing, or that Google is somehow involved, when in reality it's ignorance by those running servers, those frequenting some of these servers and most of the hacks reporting on interweb issues.
At least the article highlights that there is a large number of known and actively exploited bugs in PHP, the mother of most shopping carts and CMS.
Thou shallst not be a Hypocrite
Especially not, if you're sitting in the glass house. Doesn't stop some people though, if the french source cited about Sony BMG's use of pirated software is right.
Google realigns Market Forces
Some Marketing-People are miffed at Google's site search function available when the first search result refers to a large or well known brand. They're miffed, because for some reason this doesn't correspond to their expectations. Probably, because the marketing folk have never seen site search, although it's been part of Google almost for ever, and admittedly there is a difference between offering a site search via mouse click and via adding the site:domainname parameter to the query. The former can be exercised by anyone, including marketing people. The latter only by those able to read help pages. That is, after they've found them.
The Magical Mystery Tour
This must be the most convoluted way of saying "sanitise user input before use" without mentioning anything even remotely hinting at the issue. And because the matter is urgent, this guy reports in a manner leaving you breathless.
How to Cloak Legally
Sometimes cloaking seems to be the only way to trick users onto a site, and Google seems to either fall for it or tolerate it, when sites such as the Experts Exchange have answers in Google's search results that are not there when clicked.
Experienced users call up Google's Cache to see why the snippets appears in Google's result list when the browser shows a page containing boiler plate ["All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only"].
Thos who know that Google doesn't tolerate substitution of content on a massive scale analyse the page in the browser a little bit more, and hey Presto! There are all the answers which are found in the cached result page right after a massive block of insertion with all the crap claiming that the stuff is available only to premium service members. Not anymore they are.
Be Afraid of the Googlebot
Some call it "Google Hacking", or a "slick data-mining technique". Yahoo reports that it "triggers security fears". There's nothing sophisticated about it, despite the mysterious undertones used by hacks not knowing what they're reporting about. If you can read Google's or Yahoo's search syntax description [see their help pages] and know, from reading security related lists or sites, what to search for, you should also know what not to put on a public web server, and how to prevent it from disclosing things you don't want it to disclose. If you don't, you can't.
The User Generated Public Perception Problem Fix
Sometimes the solution to real issues is surprisingly easy. Just prohibit the publication of bad behaviour on the web, and no one will be the wiser.
Amazon and the Lost Marbles
Sometimes I really would like to know, how Amazon arrives at the recommendations they make. Is it the sedate progress, the ballast, or the worms, aka weevils, unpredictable elements or what? And yes, it's true, I do own Hownblower in the West Indies. Bought it online. At an outfit called Amazon.
Search Engine Speculation
Lots of stuff you read about on the web is either common sense, sound IR theory or just plain speculation of those without an understanding of the first two. Here are 8 Theories with one click.
Greedy Search
Amazon's search function has never been brilliant. It returns acceptable results when there are plenty of results giving absolute matches. But you misspell, don't know the exact name of an author, or are searching for one who produced very few titles and you're out of luck more often than not, because it ignores word order and doesn't know adjacency.
Now it's been changed. If you're searching for an author it'll present works similar to the ones you were looking for at the end of the list. Not a bad idea if the top of the list offers what you're looking for. But not quite right if there isn't a single match.
Clumsier Mod_Rewrite Method Patent granted
Amazon's A9 has been granted a patent to protect a clumsy way of doing, what is and has been done almost from day one on the Web - first by custom code, later by Apache's mod_rewrite.
Rejoice
Since I bought an Apple Powerbook just over two years ago I've kept an eye on all things Apple as I like their hardware and the software I bought the hardware for [Final Cut and - over time - quite a few associated bits].
Now I read that the american Writers Strike [I didn't know there are organised writers] could cost Itunes subscribers. How so? Because a season of soap operas might be shortened so Itunes users get fewer shows for a fixed prices subscription term [I didn't know people watch soaps on their Ipods, or anywhere else for that matter].
And now that Apple announced movie rentals for their hardware, people are already complaining that the viewing window of 24 hours is too short; they want 27 hours instead.
Don't people know that with a bit of luck you can still buy books for the price of a movie rental? And books remain viewable for a long time.
Social Redefined
Creating content, instead of consuming it, and engaging with people instead of gawping at them, that's all you need to become "socially acceptable". Language evolves apparently.
Impersonation Aid
Compared to Facebook, Myspace and other so called "social" networks aimed at the lowest common denominator Bigsight appears rather classy, attracting a more professional type of user to upload everything, those engaged in "identity theft" will ever need.
Spam Waves
If you didn't know you can now read an explanation, how new pages receive a very short lived artificial ranking boost, and how this has been abused by some for some time.
Another Fence to be Whitewashed
Just last week I mentioned whitewashing fences when Google announces its creatively named scheme "knol" [a unit of knowledge], allowing users to create content. The challenge, so the announcement, "was to find a way to help people share their knowledge". Old folk will remember that we had to make do with the internet for this.
Weight Watch
Here's how to make something that's already bulky even more heavy weight. Sometimes you just need to bring the wrong people together.
Coin.ciden.tal
The german news site Heise reports that Yahoo, owner of del.icio.us, has asked the german operator of the bookmarking site icio.de - a sequence of letters not found in any german word - to please cease and desist. Remember: you can't just copy the internet.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/99299
Bribing one's way
Throwing $400,000 at a supplier to get a government body to use Windows instead of Linux on about 17,000 PCs is called a bribe. Interestingly, it's illegal in the US although the dirty deed happened in Nigeria.
You can fool...
A lot of people will be wondering how on earth someone could possibly justify that kind of money. But then there's a lot of people in China.
Know How Not To
There's a difference whether a teenager downloads an mp3 file from somewhere or a major label provides downloads without having the right to do so.
Phonetics
Reading about Apple's Iphone I came across the term "Jesus Phone". Not knowing why this was coined, I asked Google. I'm not surprised that Ebay has something to say about that.
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.