The Gbrowser a XUL app?
Saturday, March 12th, 2005On Joel’s blog there are some valid points of view regarding the Gbrowser. And as a proof to its arguments he gives also a link. I am very curious from where he got that.
Archive for March, 2005
Presumptions on Google Sandbox
Saturday, March 12th, 2005Beside blogging on various topics (mainly search engines and information architecture), another intention with this site/domain was to observe how spiders and search engines behave with new sites/domain.
First infos were about who’s the fastest spider. The data showed that getting indexed by the major players is quite easy and fast.
Now I will continue with some presumptions which must be regarded only as that.
5 days ago this domain dropped sudenly from Google. What were the symptoms:
- when doing the following query in google:
site:www.razvan-antonescu.info
the result showed ONLY the URL instead of title, no text snippet and no cache
- when searching for my name the page had dropped from first result to nothing and gave only garbage results (I think those garbages will be the topic of another post)
- the googlebot came on a daily basis
Those were clear signs of sandbox effect. But everybody says that sandbox lasts at least one month. Well after only 5 days everything is fine.
Presumptions
- with a new domain make all the necessary preparations to get indexed
- sit untill you get in the index
- continue yor job and avoid constructing too many external links (be it relevant or not, spam or not)
- wait for sandbox to install and DO NOTHING
- if I am correct if you are not caught with overoptimization the storm will end very quick
- after you get back do whatever you think is good for you but use common sense and respect the spiders and the others (that sounds like lame preaching but you got the ideea)
Tags: Google , Google Sandbox , SEO , Search engine optimization
Google Desktop
Tuesday, March 8th, 2005Google Desktop is by now the fastest product on getting out of Google Labs . The beta stage was only 5 or 6 months. I will not talk about the product because more competent reviews can be found here and here.
What is interesting in this version are the plugins. Haven’t installed any yet but at least 2 will get a test drive in a few minutes:
Larry’s Help File Indexer allows you to index CHM files, one of the most popular formats for Windows help files, manuals and ebooks. An alternative to the Help menu – just use Google Desktop Search to find the help information you need.
well …this one looks awsome….just imagine to have all your reference helps just one click away
This plugin is a web spider (”Kongulo” is Icelandic for spider) that crawls websites you specify and makes them searchable via GDS.
Kongulo follows links in HTML frame, image and anchor tags. It obeys robots.txt and knows basic and digest HTTP authentication. It can be run continuously, checking for updates to previously crawled pages, and uses the If-Modified-Since HTTP header to minimize transfers when doing so.
You can provide a regexp to limit crawls to e.g. your intranet domain.
This version does not have a graphical user interface and can be run from the command-line only.
Another one good for quick references. For example if you have a pair of sites that you check regullary for knowledge this plugin makes it easier to get ALL the proper results. Just like your own Google. Still I hope it doesn’t count the external links because your results will be messy than 
Tags: Google, desktop search, Plugins
My 2 cents on the Sandbox filter
Sunday, March 6th, 2005Screw the sandbox filter. And for this remark I have 2 reasons behind:
1. As an end user I am depraved of new quality content and instead I see pages from the 90s. Try doing a research on new software/information and see pages dating back from the stone age.
2. As a SEO consultant…ahem should i continue with clients opinions on this?
Search Engines spam is a problem and even a big one. Yesterday I come across an idiot that was messing the results on a research I was doing BIG time but this is not the solution. They keep out new spam but the old spam is doing well
I think I”ll start a category on this blog called “Idiots Hall of Shame” with notorious cases of search engine spamming.
If Google continues to do this end users will turn to other engines that shows fresh and tasty results
Tags: SEO, Google, google sandbox
Google one step behind Yahoo…again
Sunday, March 6th, 2005A post on Google Blog by Ben Sigelman announces that a weather shortcut is now available on Google.
The syntax is:
weather city (ex. weather Chicago)
This shortcut is available for quite a time on Yahoo and it even does more than Google by showing weather for cities outside US
Ahem….earth to Google, outside US there are other countries…you know?
MyJeeves vs. My Yahoo! Search
Sunday, March 6th, 2005Since the search engines strated taking steps into the field of personalizations of their services I had become a fan of this.
From all the efforts since now, from my point of view only 2 are worth using: A9 and My Yahoo! Search.
Now Ask Jeeves brings up something similar through My Jeeves.
At first look it is very similar to My Yahoo Search but lacks some important features:
- you cannot output to RSS the stored results
- you cannot save to My Jeeves from browser (My Yahoo! Search has both Firefox and IE support in this case)
Still you can email the results and if you are an Ask Jeeves user you will find this very usefull for colaborative work.
Tags: Yahoo, Ask Jeeves,
An easier way to send up to 10MB of photos
Friday, March 4th, 2005Gmail now works with Picasa, Google’s free photo organizer. Use Picasa to easily find, edit and preview your photos. Log in to Gmail directly from Picasa and send the photos from your Gmail account. Picasa even automatically resizes your photos so they’re easier to receive and open. Your friends without such large email accounts will thank you.
And another thing on Gmail, after the guys at Opera finished to make their browser compatible, Google thought of “helping” and now redirects Opera users to a basic HTML page that lacks many of the important functions
Yahoo Directory
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005Few more posts on Yahoo and ppl will start thinking that I am payed to do it (well that would be nice )
So. This morning I was complaining that I see no new things on Yahoo….well there are Yahoo Directory has a new professional look. Still text based but more colourfull
Cute
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005What’s cute? The Yahoo’s Netrospective
Catch me if you can
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005Obviously the big fight is between Google and Yahoo and the most evident moment for that was the almost simultaneous launch of the “Video Search”.
A few days ago Google launched a movie recommandation service and now it was Yahoo’s turn to make the step forward 
Check out the new movie recomandation service from Yahoo
It’s fun, it’s almost accurate and it’s fun
What I DON”T like? It’s a TOO commercial service. 
Still fun though
