One of the commonest Web activities involves information discovery and fetching using search engines. It is worthwhile to adopt habits that make that activity a more efficient and productive one. For example, the user can be delivered 100 results per page (in Google at the least). When using GoogleBar, the plug-ins can be configured to get 50 results by default. This is valuable to users on a fast connections.

I am sometimes surprised, on the other hand, by the lacking support for efficient keyboard navigation. Neither Google nor Yahoo use accesskeys in the results page. It always bogs down to having to scroll down (or go to the top of the page) and then aim at the fine numbers to skip to the next page.This is laborious if there are many pages to browse through. Some arrow-shaped buttons exist for that reason in various toolbars, but no keyboard accelerators are bound to them. Moreover, they only accommodate the more basic functions.

I am aware that my request is a ‘power user’ feature, but why not incorporate some keyboard shortcuts (accesskey) to make SERP navigation quicker? It is very simple to implement and it adds just a few bytes to the page. Size-wise, it is affordable even if the large majority of users take no advantage of it.

Related items:

• Universal Accelerators
• Keyboard Accelerators
• Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Navigation

The dashboard (back-end) is the
main enhancement offered by WordPress 2.0

O start off, I would like to spend a couple of paragraphs to accommodate a rant. As I previously mentioned, WordPress 2.0 is intended to be out before Christmas. In reality, there are a few difficulties and many reasons to avoid premature releases. I don’t mean to spoil the enthusiasm. Yet, I truly think it would be a misjudged decision to rush the release. Patience is a true virtue here due to the arguments listed below.

There are several bugs, which are sometimes fatal, e.g. browser crashes. Some time ago I raised the concern that AdBlock for Firefox has conflicts with TinyMCE, which make editing impossible to some. A release before Christmas is desirable (if not both compelling and necessary) because of massive holiday season downloads. However, why give WordPress that dreadful “buggy FOSS” reputation? Needn’t LAMP be respresented with its highest dignity? One must stick to the very same traits which earned version 1.5 nearly 1,000,000 downloads.

WordPress began to be adopted by many large companies. Many such companies run extensive public sites and intranets. Among the big names: Apple, Yahoo, MSN and About. Only yesterday it was revealed that Yahoo would liaise with WordPress for their hosting, which is exciting news indeed.

Why is that particularly exciting news? MSN and Yahoo are search giants, yet their range of applications extends far beyond that as time goes by. They handle the task of information management and thus must (or are expected to) provide rich content. And yet, Google is the largest among the three and much like the others it boasts a huge community of bloggers. Google started with search and moved on to Web-based applications, tools pertaining to information and data mining. Yahoo grew from communities, content, tools, and services. MSN grew from an operating system and a browser that points to MSN by default. All taken into account, WordPress can receive a great deal in return (not monetarily of course).

One wonders: where is Google in all of this WordPress hype? Their official blog is very poor in terms of functionality and presentation. Their main ‘courier’ or ‘messenger’ , Matt Cutts ¹, has been on WordPress for months despite Blogger and Blogspot being available. The Code Manger, Chris DiBona, on the contrary, uses Google’s services rather than his old personal domain. So while Google’s Code Manager, among many others, have settled on Blogspot or Blogger, Matt Cutts refused to do so (or put more politely, preferred to abstain) and registered his own domain (running WordPress of course) where he became a sort of a messager — an oracle — of Google search algorithms. The community that is thirsty for SEO tips syndicates his blog using feeds, of which there are plenty. He is used to writing plenty of items about gadgets, film reviews and the like, but due to the versatility of WordPress feeds, his subscribers are able to set aside the ‘noise’ and get Google inside infomation exclusively. The important fact is that Matt Cutts’ blog is far more popular than these “get your blog among splogs in a 30 seconds procedure” spaces. Google could learn a few things from Matt (Cutts/Mullenweg) and given that they are kings of Open Source, it is surprising that it is them who have not adopted WordPress yet.

¹ Cutts leaks information to SEO-savvy or curious audience of Web developers, much like googleguy in Webmaster World.

ETTING in touch with Google is no easy chore. It has actually become a widely-known fact; even a notoriety to say the least.

Google Groups has is often becoming a gateway for spammers, from which to hit UseNet en masse. The Google Groups complaints address, namely abuse@google.com, has proven to be waste of one’s time. “Dissatisfied with the results” seems to be another time killer that rarely leads to anything productive. I have tried these myself in vain and heard from others about similar experiences.

There are exceptions, of course, which help us ‘little people’ voice our desires and be heard by the almighty Google. Examples:

• Removing pages from the Google index or removing posts from Google Groups, which mirrors UseNet.
• For unjustified site penalties, one can file a reinclusion request. It needs some careful and strict keywords, however, in order to be channelled to the right department.
• The yet-not-so-public Google telephone number: +1 605 330 0100. This enables you to get an E-mail address with a daily passphrase, which gives it priority and makes it be read. For queries about one’s site and a conversation with an actual person, the route (‘code/digit maze’) is presently 5, then 3.

I truly believe that a large company such as Google, whose dominance in IT is undeniable, ought to take user queries seriously and make points of contact more trivial and responsive. If you show you care, others will care for you too. Reciprocity is gold.

Occasionally, communication belongs to Google

A new study contends that, in contrast to the widely-held view, search engines give a chance to new businesses and sites. Traffic tends to be centralised in the ‘high-status arena’, so the study offers a rare contradiction.

A paper questions whether search engines make popular sites more so

THE winner takes all, it is widely supposed in computing circles. Indeed, geeks have coined a word, “Googlearchy”, for the way in which search engines encourage web traffic towards the most popular sites. The belief that search engines make popular websites ever more popular, at the expense of other pages, is now being challenged by research.

Google Analytics will know
even more than the Google cookie

OOGLE have introduced their site statistics service only a few days ago. They teamed up with Urchin who are among the best in their field, if not best in terms of the popularity and functionality of their software package, which analyses log files. With all the enthusiasm, concerns emerge as well, at least in my own mind.

Google continue to spread their wings, assigning innovative projects to their highly talented and Internet-savvy staff. This time, for a change, Google penetrate information that only sites can retain, i.e. in-house data. In that sense, they benefit from inside information, which perhaps leads to unfair, unbalanced competition which puts privacy in greater jeopardy.

Google’s quick expansion frighens me; it passively becomes a Web monopoly. First they stole the thunder from Alex King’s FeedLounge and now it may be Jeff Veen’s Measure Map (among others like Mint). I volunteered to help both projects, so I have seen or can foresee Google’s impact on ‘mom-and-pop’ sites. I have mentioned this implicitly in:

• Feed Readers Everywhere
• Google Print and AI

It all develops into a scary situation as you can never fight or resist scale, no matter how ambitious you might be. Services integration is yet another major factor which elevates the brand. Google can finally take a deeper look that transcends the level of SERP‘s and will be able to see what MSN, Yahoo and the others are up to. Moreover, expect abuse of reports, e.g. fabricated (i.e. spam) statistics that attempt to enhance a site’s image, at least in Google’s perception.

Is it just me who is slightly apprehensive? Are all bases belong (sic.) to Google? Google Base, which was officially launched just a few hours ago, crops to mind. I mentioned its possible impact among my Google pet peeves.

Google Analytics, by the way, is said to provide no statistics as yet. Many people suggest that its state is dormancy. I am not sure if the service is overwhelmed by demand or perhaps it is still in beta, much like most services from Google.

The Google cookie

AST week, amidst discussion in an SEO forum, I raised the prospect of tailoring content based on browser cookies. Cookies may contain a person’s full search history, but potentially much beyond that. As I shall explain in the remainder of this item, it was only short time later that my predication became a reality. This development is bad news, as well as good news.

…People are described by their cookie and Google (can) builds a profile, i.e. history of all searches that an individual runs (and potentially link s/he follows). Sooner or later, for competitive advantage, the SERP we all see may differ.

Example:

Google can tell that you like a lot of pop music. Search for ‘Aqua’ and get the Danish band at number 1. If you are a scientist, you may have a page on the chemical element at number 1.

I hadn’t realised something when I made the above statement. This was bound to become a patent, courtesy of Google.

4. A method of personalizing placed content associated with a search query, comprising: receiving a search query from a user; accessing a user profile associated with the user; identifying a set of placed content that matches the search query; and ordering the set of placed content in accordance with the user profile.

This seems too fundamental to be patentable, which is probably what controversy over software patents is all about. Not in the EU though. Has anyone yet pondered the implications it has on privacy? Might this be as tactless as book scanning, which is damaging to public opinion?

SearchStatus in action

ITE ranks are largely volatile and this post addresses the issue by referring to a few case studies. msn.com has just returned to PageRank 9, having stooped down to PageRank 2 during early stages of an ongoing Google update (Jagger Update was briefly mentioned in the past). Moreover, I have just noticed an Alexa rank (context/what is Alexa) oddity:

If one takes a glimpse at:

http://www.slate.com/

It’s surprising that it bears the Alexa rank of 2, which means that it is (grossly) estimated second in the world in terms of Web traffic.

Surprising, is it not?

Flicking back to MSN (Yahoo has been number 1 for quite some time and Google is typically third):

msn.com bears the Alexa rank of 2 just as well.

Are Alexa ranks not telling the full story? Is that a bug? It is a form of ambiguity, but not quite so. Perhaps Slate Magazine have plenty of traffic, but judging by other traffic metrics such as Netscraft, that is highly doubtful if not impossible. So how can it be on par with MSN? I used to think that Alexa provided a meaningful measure for the top 100 or so sites. Recently, it lost its credibility for a whole variety of reasons. For example, its spying on the innocent surfers recently led to my observation that the Web Archive can crawl hidden pages.

Mind you, the PageRank oddity mentioned above is not to be ignored either. It reminds us all that PageRank should be with a pinch of salt, especially throughout major updates of the indices.