Last week, Google was doing a different Doodle each day in honor of Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary. A couple days I missed their logo since I usually just search directly from my browser. Since I don’t always get to see the google logo I kind of wanted to see what they had done and while I was searching for what they had used for their various logo doodles through the week I came across an interesting link. I thought this would be a fun break from the recent diet of rogue antivirus removal…..
Tag: Google
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Google Trends Hottrends (Hot Trends) truncated to 40?
Interesting – it looks as though Google may be limiting the number of results in their hottrends search page to just 40 now from the 100 that they used to. I’m not very surprised really…. in the last few weeks I’ve been using the hottrends to see which rogue antivirus was the biggest pain in the neck of the moment, but in doing so I see many rogue sites that are using the hot trends to cash in on the traffic by serving up malware. At one point 6 of the top 10 sites in the results for one of the rogue applications were malware and I’ve seen malware served up from sites that weren’t computer related searches either. I’ve seen one person speculate that it’s based on search volume and they trim it to 40 when there are fewer searches being made. Maybe it is a temporary change.
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Hot Trends – spotting the upcoming searchs and tomorrows news today
The internet is an amazing place you can learn about most anything from carbon nanotubes stopping bullets to a duvet cover. In the last few weeks I’ve learned a few things over at Google’s hot trends page. Basically, about once an hour there is an autogenerated list of the top 100 things people are searching for right now. What I’ve found interesting about it is to see tomorrows news headlines being searched for today. Several times I’ve seen searches in the top 100 that I had no idea what it related to until I saw the news the following day, then it all made sense.
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AntivirusOnlineScan 6 v8? the next Rogue?
I see a google hot trend right now is searches for AntivirusOnlineScan 6 and many of the results seem to be incoherent sites talking about antivirusonlinescan v8. It makes me wonder if we’re seeing the rumblings of the next big rogue security software push. Sure enough http://antivirusonlinescanv8.com/ is flagged as an attack site and has been registered in the last 2 weeks. Fortunately the server is not responding right now. I guess we’ll see tomorrow if it’s the next big thing in rogue antivirus.
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Google Voice Review | I got the golden ticket….
Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….
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Ranking for a Search Phrase in Google
I guess by now you’ve noticed that I’m not keeping up with the 1 post a week rate that I had for a while there. I’ve been thinking that at this point I’m going to be getting in one a month or so. More if the mood strikes, but from what I’ve been seeing that should be more than enough…. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with getting good google rankings for search phrases and thought I would take a moment to give some details…. Maybe I should back up a few steps first though for some background….
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Where did that 404 link Come From?
For a while with Google’s webmaster tools they’ve reported to you which url’s they get 404 errors when spidering your site. Now with the sitemaps and webmaster tools utility they’ll show you where the link was woohoo…. I’m glad to see that I’ve been running into a few 404 errors from time to time and tracking them usually involves trying to skim through referral logs and it can get a bit messy. Here’s the official announcement.
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GrandCentral – One Ring to rule them ALL?
Has Google gone too far with the purchase of GrandCentral? “One number that rings all your phones” (and in the darkness binds them?) There are already great privacy concerns with google. This new acquisition I am SURE will lead to more worries. The idea with grandcentral is that you have a unified inbox for voicemail. All of your voicemail can be accessed in one place. You can get voicemail notifications via sms or email. You can screen calls it looks like, you can have incoming calls ring specific phones depending on who’s calling… it sounds like there are some interesting features including (of course) managing it all online. The service is currently in beta and is taking “reservations” for YOUR unified phone number.
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Web Site Promotion Through Directories
When I first started building web sites I seemed to have very good “google luck”. I designed pages, published and then submitted to 4-5 search engines and a couple directories and the traffic started coming in. The search engines were altavista, google, hotbot and a couple others and the directories were yahoo and dmoz. Lot’s of things have changed though. Recently submissions have been down to Google, MSN (Live), Yahoo and the Yahoo directory and the DMOZ. The DMOZ has been more and more frustrating in recent years as it seems to take several years to get added. So is that all you can do to get traffic for your site?
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Create a sitemap for Google
WordPress has a great plugin available to automatically keep your google sitemap updated, but I’ve done a few static websites in the last few days and just wanted a good, quick, web generated sitemap. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ seems to do the job quite well, it generates a Google sitemap xml, compressed xml, and a ror sitemap (I hadn’t heard of that yet..) It also generates a text file url-list and a html sitemap.