Razvan Antonescu » google

Google Books updates

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:57:50 +0000

Beside the Google Books Settlement, Google Books is one of those Google projects that doesn’t receive too much attention despite of its usefulness. But, apparently things are about to change. This year, Google Books received a new, and more useful, interface, ability to create different shelves to categorize your books and I’m getting more and more results on regular searches. Another enhancement, is posting items from user created shelves to the user’s Google Profile.

Most likely, this will be a project that will receive more and more prominence in 2010.

New Google Layout

Razvan Antonescu — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:59:25 +0000

Tonight I was searching with an anonymous proxy on Google when I got a new (at least for me layout). The new choice of colors is way more pleasant than the old colors and there are also a few other changes (icons and labeling) on the more options sidebar. Hope that this test passes and we will see a general rollover

New Google Layout (March 2010)

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) errors

Razvan Antonescu — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:32:36 +0000

As I previously mentioned, a few days ago I was testing some new features on Google CSE. Unfortunately nothing worked as expected. I tried using the forums and directly contacting one of the CSE team members with no results. Today, using a new account, I started fresh and everything worked as advertised.

Looks like Google’s Achilles Heel is client support and this doesn’t look like a issue to be fixed soon as Google is betting on crowdsourced support rather than investing in it. Short lesson: if something doesn’t work in Google and is not vital (gmail/adsense/adwords) create a new account and start from scratch

Photosynth in Google Street View

Razvan Antonescu — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:31:02 +0000

Google LatLong blog is anouncing that now Microsoft Photosynth is available on Google Maps’s Street view. Oh wait, is not Photosynth is only Picasa integration

Looking how similar the products are I’m curios how long it will take until the patent lawsuit appears. And who will win…

RANT: Google Indexing

Razvan Antonescu — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:35:16 +0000

1. Even though the last post here was on 22nd March, Google stopped crawling only in May, and that’s the date of the last cache. I’m curious how long does it take to resurrect a crawler on a hibernating site/blog. Results will be posted soon.

2. For some reasons, one of my websites has received a set of penalties on Google’s July update. Instead of submitting a re inclusion request (I wasn’t really with anything on the dark side), I completely changed the URL structure to something that I see now more appropriate. I rebuilt the XML sitemap and resubmitted it. While I wasn’t expecting any second day miracles, I wanted that the associated Custom Search Engine to show the correct results. Event though they say that they process in a max of 24h any new sitemaps, now after 30h I’m still seeing the old results

UPDATE: Just immediately after this post, crawling was resumed and the blog started ranking for same high traffic keywords. In short, if you have an old site/blog that doesn’t receive traffic due to lack of updates, don’t worry. Google will be right back at you once you start adding content