Search Engines || Information Architecture
We have re-enabled the “Add Profile” feature for a limited number of Google Analytics customers. These customers will be able to add a limited number of profiles to their account. As we continue to expand capacity, the limit will gradually be increased up to the original limit of 50.
It was about time….
Pimp Your Search
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Almost every user and especially peoples from the SEO field, make at least one daily visit to Google. In time all the power searchers feel the need to enhance their experience with useful addons. Fortunately Firefox users have the chance to tune their favourite search engine. Using an ego search, here is my personal list of Google steroids:
This will give you acess to Google Personalized Search. Using this you will get:
- View and manage your past searches.Browse and search over your past searches, including the web pages, images, and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can remove items from your Search History at any time.
- Create bookmarks you can access anywhere.Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in.
After you log in start tagging your search history, and the labels you use will show up on page results helping you to quick locate the results you have used before.
More details about this on:
This will enhance not only Google but also a few other search engines:
According to the official homepage, BetterSearch is :
An extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com (web results), AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.
This extension will allow you to open search results in the same page for a quick overview using an iframe. See screenshot.
This extension has just been released and it offers a lot of useful features like:
- Customise Google. Google is extended to include a diverse range of specialised search engines, optionally remove commercial results, and enable new methods for digging deeper into promising results.
- Sidebar: Notes & Searching. A discreet Firefox sidebar grants you rapid access to Google or MSN, and gives you space to make quick notes on interesting pages you’ve found. Notably, it also introduces two highly unique search techniques for finding additional worthwhile webpages - related to a group of pages you’ve already discovered. Thus letting you search confidently at your own pace, whilst locating pages you would not normally uncover.
This short description shows only a small part of the full functionalities it brings to the user. Check the screenshot for more in depth details.
I also liked a particular line from the extension’s homepage:
Respecting Websites
Bumble Search is in the relatively unchartered area of modifying websites (such as Google).
We recognise that utmost care must be taken to respect the needs and intentions of the original authors.
In the case of Google:
- The modifications benefit everyone.
- Google does not lose visitors to competing search engines; and people can see Google’s benefits in comparison.
This ethic side is something that another popular firefox extension should learn. You cannot base your business on screwing those that feed you. Especially by giving users a broken condom (blocking Google Analytics will not protect web users privacy).
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.
After you have installed it, go get some scripts to enhance your browsing from UserScripts.org. You can find all the Google Scripts here. One of the most useful scripts and which is used in th the screenshot is Google Counter. This script will put a number near all the results allowing you to quickly determine a website position in SERPs. To get the full use of this you can tweak Google to show more than 10 results per page.
After 4 simple steps you can consider yourself now a power searcher.
Enjoy your searching!
Note:
All the Firefox Extensions mentioned above fully work on Firefox 1.5 but haven’t been tested on previous versions.
christmas wishes
Originally uploaded by FreeMySoul.
Happy Hollydays for all the regular and ocasional readers. It has been a fun year and Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and all the other new comers have done their best in providing us with nice services and fun gossips.
I wish for 2006 for the web to stay the same fun and creative place 
See you in January
Microsoft Office 12 Beta mailing list just announced a list of blogs written by Microsoft Program Managers:
Why this release is so cool? Here is what Paul Thurrott has to say on it:
Making a bold move–rather than “painting the pig” as they had with previous versions–Microsoft elected to dramatically change the Office user interface for the first time ever. It seems the menu and toolbar-based interface had become obsolete somewhere along the way.
Don’t forget to check the screenshots galleries also.
Update:
To make it easier for you tro subscribe to the blogs above I have created an OPML file conatiuning them. Use this link or point your aggregator to http://razvan-antonescu.info/office.xml
Fresh from the Google labs come out 2 new Firefox extensions:
Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous. That’s why it’s important to browse safely with Google Safe Browsing. By combining advanced algorithms with reports about misleading pages from a number of sources, Safe Browsing is often able to automatically warn you when you encounter a page that’s trying to trick you into disclosing personal information.
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.
Blogger Web Comments seems like a fun and usefull tool. It also has an “Add Comment” option wich unfortunately works only if you have a blogger account. I just hope that Technorati comes up with a similar extension with a more flexible blogging functionality (allowing multiple blogging platforms)
Both Google News and Yahoo News are theoretically free of splogs due to manually check of any source (at least in the approval stage). Unfortunately it seems that both news channels started to put a greater accent on quantity instead of quality.
A few moths ago I have used Google News and email alerts for certain keywords but I have gave up due to the great amount of duplicate news created by splogs allowed in the system. One site in particular it was the most annoying. I am talking about addict3d that even for a blind brain dead person looks like a splog but unfortunately not for quality checkers at Google.
Today, to my surprise Yahoo News sent me a IM alert from the same .02 website.
Why this sucks? Well…for the following reasons:
1. Real news producers are left out and don’t receive the deserved traffic
2. It shows a lack of interest from the news channels
3. It makes people gave up on service that it might be useful, and in turn news channels will quit developing further
4. It just SUCKS
It’s sweet to see how sometimes a hoax can raise you from zero to hero.
I think I should find a good one soon…let’s see nothing new on the Google Wallet, maybe the blogosphere needs another rumor.
Silicon Beat puts an end to a stupid hoax that lasted for about 24h regarding Google Calendar.
In fact, a Google rep got up to ask one of the panels a question and specifically said he was not there to make product announcements.
The hoax was based on a page that contained the calendar.google.com part. The problem is and very few noticed (me not included) that the same page was seen also without the calendar part.
What is funny is that alot of well known bloggers took it for real
Today, Mozilla.org launched a new generation of theor popular browser Firefox.
Together with this came a new GUI for the website, and a pack of new extensions that use the new renedering features of the browser.
From the feature list:
- Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
- Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
- Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
- Improvements to popup blocking.
- Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
- Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
- Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
- Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
- Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
- Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
- New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
- Many security enhancements.
Just received an email containing:
Welcome to the Microsoft® Office “12″ Technical Beta program. We’re looking forward to working with you to make this the best version of Microsoft Office ever, and this Technical Beta represents an important milestone on the road to shipping a great product.
Enough said
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