Hungerford Web Design

It’s started….according to the previous itteration of the Google Chrome user licence “any Content which you submit, post or display on or through” the browser is owned by Google.

Nice, that means I can now say that my blog is owned by Google :D, well one of the posts anyway.

Apparently it’s a boilerplate text which should have been modified but wasn’t. It’s been updated to reflect that users “retain copyright and any other rights” that they already hold on the content they submit or display using the browser.

Be careful what you agree to, it’s all part of Google’s plan to take over the world (insert evil laugh).

Technorati Tags: Blog, Boilerplate Text, Evil Laugh, Google

Google have launched their new open-source browser as a windows beta, you can download Google Chrome now.

It’s currently only available to Windows users, imports IE settings if you wish and allows a very configurable interface for your search.

I’ve included some initial screenshots:

 More to follow shortly:
Download link: Link1

Technorati Tags: Beta Download, Blog, Configurable Interface, Download Browser, Google, Google Browser, Hwd, New Windows, Open Source Browser, Screenshots Gallery, Windows Beta, Windows Download, Windows Users

The last post I made was a bit of comedy. I made it, submitted it to digg and then googled it.

Google Search

It was listed within a few minutes. In the post before the comedy one “Are you in it for the long haul” I said the indexing is getting quicker, I also believe that Matt Cutts said that in some cases, content is indexed within half an hour. I find it pretty incredible that Google has/is already:

a) Noticed i’ve made a change

b) Updated it’s index

c) Displaying the page in it’s results

Now I appreciate that this may not translate to it’s cache etc but it’s still a pretty decent feat considering how many sites are updating content at any one time and that in the grand scheme of things, my site is not important to Google.

It might warrant some more experimentation.

Technorati Tags: Comedy, Few Minutes, Google, Google Search, Grand Scheme Of Things, Half An Hour, Long Haul, Matt Cutts, Scheme Of Things, Warrant

A common mis-conception is that SEO is a ‘fire and forget’ solution to increasing your rank and conversions. It’s common in the sense of the general public. Unfortunately, it’s very far from the truth and can require a lot of understanding on behalf of the person trying to get their head around it.

SEO is an iterative process. Whilst some search engines may publish their algorythms, many don’t. This means that it’s often a case of trying something to see what affect it has.

This dates back to times when your meta tags were deemed to be one of the most important factors of SEO (probably before SEO was even termed as a phrase). Making changes, watching for weeks or months to see what difference it made, then make more subtle changes in an effort to creep one step higher. Patience is key and that is as true today as it ever was.

I think that the time factors have probably reduced. As a test, I made a post containing a word that isn’t used too often, it was listed in google within a few hours, so it is possible to be able to assess the impact of changes quicker (albeit depending on the site and how often google/other search engines check it out).

The process of SEO also requires more thought than ever before, a set of requirements, a clear plan of changes to be made as well as a monitoring program are all key to success. This becomes more evident when dealing with the differences between what some search engines want and what others will penalize you for. Sometimes it’s a fine line which you have to balance to both get the rankings and keep them. I was reading a blog the other day (a female web developer - pink developer or something - let me know if you know the blog name as I forgot it), she was pee’d that at some point google had randomly decided that her site had failed to meet their “quality guidelines” but that icanhascheezburger.com was perfectly acceptable (a very funny site - particularly for geeks). HEr site was well written and with good content so I can see her frustration.

It just goes to show that even when you get it right - you can get it wrong without even knowing it. SEO can be a thankless task, more so when it doesn’t go exactly right. Ultimately, the people who make themselves a success at it, do so through many hours of constant trial and error. If you are just starting out, take your time, it won’t be a quick fix.

Technorati Tags: Array, Conversions, Female Web, Funny Site, Geeks, Google, Google Search, Important Factors, Iterative Process, Long Haul, Meta Tags, Monitoring Program, Other Search Engines, Patience, Pee, Phrase, Quality Guidelines, SEO, Subtle Changes, Time Factors, Truth, Web Developer

It’s probably no secret (although it was news to me).

http://www.googlr.com

Yep - owned and operated by Google. Googlr is a common typo as the QWERTY keyboard has E and R next to each other. The traffic it received prompted Google to run exactly the same search engine from it.

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Technorati Tags: Amp, Brain, Fingers, Gl, Gogle, Googel, Googl, Google, Googlr, Googlw, Hurry, Letter E, Misspelling, Nb, Possibilities, Qwerty Keyboard, Search Engine, Spelling, Target, Traffic, Typical Result, Typo

Not heard of Browserank? You’re not alone, despite regularly trawling blogs, news sites and being a part of a number of focus groups it was news to me until a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft have invested heavily in improving both the exposure and code behind it’s Pagerank rival . In fact many people are unaware that Microsoft (who have introduced Browserank) have been offering a small suite of webmaster tools for Live for quite some time.

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Well, in our article “That is so not Cuil” we showed how a bunch of ex-Google employees got together to produce “Cuil” which they believe shows the way forward for search engines. Then along came Yahoo who have released BOSS (Build you Own Search Engine) which allows 3rd party developers to build apon a Yahoo api and produce their own search engines. The Cuil developers spent a great deal of time, effort and money producing Cuil, so what did Sam Pullara do? Well in short, the answer is in the name:

http:/www.4hoursearch.com

It took him 4 hours to write it, 4 hours to go from 0 to 20 hits/second and 4 hours to get the domain name.

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Technorati Tags: Applications, Blog, Boss, Caption, Cuil, Demo, Domain Name, Google, Money, Party Developers, Running, Search Engine, Search Engines, Source Code, Speedy, Time Effort, Web Design, Yahoo, Yahoo Api, Yahoo Search, Yuil

Knol is fairly under-subscribed in terms of the number of users aware of it’s existence. Knol (short for knowledge? not according to Google) is a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia.

So what’s the difference? The biggest thing for me is the lack of anonymity. In Wikipedia you can edit an article and short of your IP address, there is no way of knowing who you are. Not in Knol you old pirate! Knol requires a valid login. You can also only edit your own articles (I’m not too sure what this means for Duplication).

It all starts getting a little messy now in SEO terms. (continue reading…)

Technorati Tags: Anonymity, Conflict Of Interest, Content Writers, Copyright, Encyclopedia, Existence, Experiences, Google, Ip Address, Knol, Knowledge, Messy, Online Encyclopedia, Pirate, Sure What This Means, Trusts, Valid Login, What This Means, Wikipedia

In June this year, Adobe and Google announced that Google would be reading and indexing Flash content. For years, Flash was shunned by SEO’s as it just wasn’t indexable (is that a word?). I can imagine that accessibility officianados have a healthy problem with flash as well. Flash as a single element to a site is a nice visual representation of content. 100% flash sites tend to be large, have little-no accessibility and force you to view the site one way and one way only..

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Technorati Tags: Accessibility, Arabic, Flash Content, Flash Sites, Full Swing, Google, Hebrew, Index Text, Markup, Search Engines, Seat At The Table, SEO, Speak Arabic, Speak Hebrew, Swf, Swf Files, Text Content, Vain Attempt, Video Files, Visual Representation, Western Language, What This Means, Yahoo Google

Not heard of Cuil? (pronounced “cool” - apparently)…

A bunch of people who left google, decided that what Google can do, they can do better. When I first heard about this I thought it was a great idea and perhaps they could add some really long-awaited improvements.

Some of this functionality includes images and media to add context to search results (arguably useful). Unfortunately, cuil served up it’s users with a bunch of adult images (with absolutely no relevance to the search results). The following link (provided by theregister) is not safe for work - Cuil NSFW. It doesn’t strike me as the best way to launch a new search engine - or perhaps it is, as everyone is talking about it.

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Technorati Tags: Adult Images, Cable Tv, Column Layout, Cuil, Functionality, Google, Google Images, Google Users, Improvements, Layout Design, People Images, Promise, Quality Content, Relevance, Rubbish, Search Engine, Theregister, Unrealistic Expectation, Window Space