Looking up historical PageRank scores
Ever wonder how your home page’s Google PageRank score has changed over the past couple years in comparison to your competitors? There’s a way to go back in time and check, assuming you’ve been listed in the Google Directory for a while. Just use the Wayback Machine and dig up archived versions of your category […]
The end for Google bombing?
Reports are coming in that “Google bombing” doesn’t really work any more. Specifically, the theory is that now at least one of the words in the hyperlink text has to appear on the page being linked to, for the Google bomb to still be effective. But if that’s the case, why is George W. Bush’s […]
The Internet driving people to local retailers?
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were: “home depot” “walmart” “target” “sears” “best buy” Interesting data. But I don’t agree with the conclusion posited on the SearchEngineWatch Blog: These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it […]
Google’s Gmail servers down
I guess it can happen to the best of us.
On Orkut, I feel like a voyeur
This weekend I finally got an invite to Orkut, the exclusive closed social network site developed and run by Google. I feel like a voyeur, inconspicuously ascertaining who’s friends with various mega millionaires like Sergey Brin and Steve Jurvetson. It’s rather surprising what some business people reveal in their profiles — stuff you certainly wouldn’t […]
Spiders like Googlebot choke on Session IDs
Many ecommerce sites have session IDs or user IDs in the URL of their pages. This tends to cause either the pages to not get indexed by search engines like Google, or to cause the pages to get included many times over and over, clogging up the index with duplicates (this phenonemon is called a […]
Move over Copyright, here comes Creative Commons
We’ve all seen websites that say “(c) 2004, All Rights Reserved” at the bottom. Now you’ll hopefully start seeing the (cc) symbol, which stands for Creative Commons, and means that only SOME rights are reserved. Creative Commons is a legal concept championed by the intellectual powerhouse amongst copyright lawyers Larry Lessig. Copyright law is decades […]
Instant throwaway email addresses
Ever needed to supply a seedy person/company/website with your email address in order to get something from them (or perhaps just to placate them so you could extricate yourself from their company) — but you didn’t REALLY want to give them your primary email address? Look no further, have I got the solution for you! […]
These guys are on to it
37 Signals’ redesign of Fedex’s convoluted “Ship Manager” is a testament to their brilliance in user interface design. But the real kicker is: they’re doing it for free, just to show off their intellectual wares and to stimulate dialogue. Fedex would be mugs not to take this advice on board.
