I’ve noticed that the information in Google Sitemaps continues to improve. For instance in the list of search terms and the average top position which is something that previously was quite tedious to figure out (search and then click until you find your page referenced…) It also gives content analysis of your site, and analysis of incoming links to your site (what words are there.) The average search term rank though is probably the most valuable addition I see. They’ve also….
Category: General Web/Tech
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Google Big daddy update….
I’m greatly delayed in writing about this, but Google underwent a huge search engine change. I want to say the switch over occured around February 1st or second. I had been seeing 1000 or so visits a day prior to the change (well to be fair 600-1200 a day…) and after the change now see 60-120 visits a day. Yes, the change was that big. eweek tells us some about it. All in all many say that this is improving search results. (I suspect I’d think so as well if my pages were MORE prominent after the update…)
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Google Base stretching it’s wings….
There have been a couple of interesting articles lately about the evolution of Google Base. When it came out, I remember thinking I would have to spend some time thinking about how to use it. It has interesting potential to be a VERY powerful tool for Google in their competition for web traffic. One article in particular, tells how in a sense Google Real Estate has started appearing…. “When searching “houses for sale” in a regular Google search, some users might see a one-box that helps narrow down what type of house they are looking for.” Now, Google Real Estate might not be an official product launch, but an example of integration of Google Base information into regular search results.
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Peltor RaceTunes AM/FM Stereo radio and hearing protector
For some time I’ve wanted a good pair of noise reducing headphones for “mowing season”. Ideally they’d have am/fm stereo so I could listen to the radio (or something broadcast from my little FM transmitter…) REALLY ideally, they’d have a way I could patch something directly into them. I’ve found such a thing from Amazon.com in the Peltor HRX52A-01347-BD-GV Racetunes AM/FM Radio Headset and Hearing Protector with Audio Jack and Scanner Patch Cord.
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Adwords Referrals from Google
I noticed something yesterday when I had logged into the adsense page at Google. They’ve now added “adwords” referrals. For those that don’t know – Adwords is the name for the program where you can advertise your site on google, or through their advertising network (such as this site for example.)
The deal seems to be that when someone spends $100 in advertising (within 90 days of signing up) from a referred click (and they’ve never been an adwords user before.)…. then the referring site get’s $20…. not bad. As for adwords itself….
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Internet based filesystem with no transfer fees
I thought this was a great idea…. rsync.net Okay for 2$ per GB of storage per month (or $24 per year for 1GB of storage) you can have your very own secure online storage drive. For you windows users think of a G: drive or a Z: drive that you could SECURELY connect to from a home machine and a work machine…. If you’re concerned about a catastrophic failure of one of their datacenters, then pay $3.50/GB/month for a more geographically dispersed plan (uses redundant data centers..) The best parts (I think) are this…. ssh encrypted connection to your drive and no transfer fees.
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Google explains Google China Decision
The Official Googleblog has an article today about their decision to filter results in China. I took a look at the Chinese version today (I saw an image search comparing Tienamen (spelling?) results in English and Chinese. I also searched for my site and found that I seem to be absent from the Chinese search results. Now you might say the latter is not surprising for a number of reasons, but I’ve found other English language sites showing up in the Google.cn results…. I guess information about computer security is too risky for the Chinese People to find. !!Correction-8:30PM EST!! I had earlier seen Sunbelt mention guiness.com missing from the results and they just noted that was in the results now. Likewise, my site was missing and now is present in the Google.cn results… !!End Correction!!
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Google News graduates
One of Google’s longest Beta-tests… Google News has now graduated from beta status. There is a “suggest news stories” options in the personalized search feature. I wondered if it would ever be non-beta. Somewhere along the line I had read speculation that the holdup was advertising and there was trepidation that targetted ads within Google News would spur a revolt among the news feed providers. A quick look doesn’t seem to show any ads – so that speculation seems to have been a bit off the mark I guess.
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Running Google Earth under Wine on linux
A while back I talked about Google Earth under Codeweavers wine almost working (or at least I think I mentioned it here, I KNOW I tried it…) Well, I tried with vanilla wine as well and couldn’t get it to work, BUT… I’ve just finished a successful run of it. How you might ask? Here are some of the details…
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Dejavu for worldnic dns servers….
It’s been a long day out and I didn’t have but a few moments to check mail this afternoon. I did happen to check stats and saw a lot of people visiting an old article (November 28th) on a Worldnic DNS server outage. I thought it was a bit odd and this evening, now I know why. Incidents.org has some details on the outage.