Should I say more? Ok, it`s in beta but it already has at least 7.5million (content from partner library) books. Most I guess are just a preview with links where to buy, but still the preview is nicely done!
Visit: Google Books Search
Today I noticed two new Google products at Google Labs - Image Labeler and Related Links.
Google Image Labeler is like a game. You are connected with somone other on the internet and have to give labels for images. You get scored when you and your partner have guessed the same labels. Fun and something
The rumor is over, the deal has been accepted. Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars.
I really don`t care about their copyright problems as long as that doesn`t influence the end user. All videos should be for free!
By the way Google should buy Yahoo with it`s Flickr, as It`s a tough decision to choose between Flickr and Picasa for photo sharing. Now I decided to use Flickr (my Picasa album is full, and I cannot expand it from outside US) as Flickr is more flexible, but I know that someday Google will make Picasa better and better and someday we could switch..
In summer I created a website Celebrity Gossip. Time has come to move on. For that time I chose a domain name celebrity-gossip.org which was really for the keywords. Optimizing every single bit for keyphrase “celebrity gossip” soon I was #1 on MSN and got almost 1000 unique views daily from MSN Search alone. Time passed and MSN lost its users, so that still I was #1 on MSN but received only 20-100 unique visitors daily. But Google had increased importance of my site that I had ~1000 uniques per day.
IT JUST WENT LIVE!
Search public source code. We already know searching by filetype (e.g. “filetype:as” for actionscript files). Will this beat phpclasses.org and similar?
read more | digg story
Email protection comes to your mind whenever you`re writing something on the net. There is always caution for posting your e-mail address online as spam robots cruise your site and other sites that you leave comments on. While analyzing Google Groups I noticed a nice implementation of securing emails. When you post a message containing an email address (e.g. “denied@recordings.ru”) the email address is changed replacing part of it with “…” (e.g. “den…@recordings.ru”) where these dots are linked to “unlock” page where you enter letter/number code from distorted image. If it is correct, you are brought back to the previous page and see the email address normally. Pretty smart :)
(Sorry if this is old news :P)
I was reading some articles about Flash SEO (like this) and some of them recommended using SWFObject to make some text visible to search engines. The trick is that you put text in HTML format inside <div> layer and then you put your flash over it (SWFObjects javascript code changes innerHTML of the <div> layer). While this works and I am still using this technique at sites like djnet, the technique is also kind of cloaking - showing one text to search engine, other for the user. Spammers can implement this method in their sites and sooner or later Google will create algo that will ban these sites. And the good ones too.
While this problem persists, you can put TITLE and DESCRIPTION in your flash files - in Flash IDE choose Modify > Document (or Ctrl+J). This is the part that gets indexed by search engines. Though this is better than nothing, again using SWFObject hides the flash file from search engine, thus making this piece of metadata useless.
I`m still thinking of rebuilding my best project (djnet) in php, just for SEO purposes. But what I know fur sure is that search engines will try to give better support for Flash because it won`t go away in the nearest decade - Internet cannot live without Flash video (though internet should get rid of flash advertisments).
Microsoft has started a new service - Soapbox. It`s a YouTube future follower, as Soapbox is still in beta and available to limited invitations (you can go to the site and request an invitation). Funny, that once again Microsoft announces a product way before it`s ready, and once again only a product that follows some other market leader. For example, previous it was (maybe still they hope) for Adobe Flash, which Microsoft tries to compete with its Avalon products. Check out - on soapbox.msn.com the video player is in Flash! I have no idea why is Microsoft spending so much money on probably worthless products, though they still keep a big part of internet users on MSN.
Just my 2c.
Animated favicon is supported only by Firefox, for now. (Are you still using Internet Explorer??
)
Animated favicons are stored in .gif image. You can see an example of animated icon at information security awareness blog , it shows in the address bar and on the tab. You can create it yourself using some gif animation software or exporting from Adobe Flash (I do it). When you have your gif icon ready, upload both “favicon.ico” and “favicon.gif” to your web root folder, then add this code to your webpage somewhere between <head> and </head> tags:
Google search engine results depend on some defined behaviour or algorithm. There have always been some clues in patents on how these algorithms work. There have been thousands of patents and you never know if they will be implemented in search engines algo, but you can definitely see the direction that Google is going - human editorial approach.
To get better SERP (search engine result pages) results, algorithm will not count on links or page rank only, but on human reported sites like Dmoz.org directory entries and others. so the system is semi-automatic.