Google

Jun 18 2010

The PageRank formula is changing again. You might have heard that Google recently was granted a patent based on the "reasonable surfer" idea. For those of you in need of a quick refresh, a reasonable web surfer is someone given a random webpage who keeps clicking links forward to other pages without clicking back. This person eventually gets tired and goes to another random page.

Sep 28 2008

Thanks to our own Lauren Mattegat for writing the original drafts of this posting!

When Google launched their new web browser, dubbed “Chrome,” a few weeks back, our initial thoughts immediately jumped back to “they are becoming the next Microsoft, they really want to rule the world.” After Google created the Wikipedia-like Knol, We wondered what their next target was – then came Chrome. Chrome is Google’s very own web browser. It is designed to be a new and innovative tool for the media driven Internet we now know. They described it in a comic about how it will change the Internet, and maybe they’re right. But there is no doubt that it’s a necessary move in Google’s march to dominance in the software space.

Google
Aug 04 2008

A knol is a unit of knowledge, and is also Google’s latest invention. Similar to the popular Wikipedia, Knol is a hybrid of an encyclopedia, article submission site, and link aggregator. It allows users to take credit for their work while submitting their view and opinion of a subject. These Knols can also be edited by other users at the writer’s approval. It allows more than one article to be submitted on the same subject, expanding ideas and views. The real kicker comes in when Google adds in their AdSense revenue split advertising system to the formula. People who write Knols’ can also register for an AdSense account which allows them to profit off of the ads on their Knols. The incentives are high for users who want to create multiple Knols (usually on a similar subject) just so that ads can be placed and they have a higher chance of people clicking them.

Jun 30 2008

The folks at Google announced yesterday that their latest algorithm release will now be able to crawl and index text-based content that is inside Flash files. I love their wording…

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines.

Feb 02 2008

The big news this week of course is that Microsoft has unveiled a bid to buy Yahoo! for $31 per share in cash and stock. That equates to a $44.6 billion offer. As most industry analysts and pundits quickly realized, this is basically Microsoft’s latest attempt to try and stack up in the search market vs. Google.

May 10 2007

Google has provided website owners its Google Analytics website traffic tracking and analysis tool for free for quite some time now. When we heard that they were about to put a new face on what was already an excellent analytics tool I must admit that some of our clients and I were quite skeptical about how such a great offering could be improved upon and remain free. Oh how our skepticism was unfounded!

Analytics, Google
Nov 24 2006

Does your website have a sitemap? A sitemap is a page on your site that lists all the other pages on the site, usually in a tree structure so that a user can easily navigate to any part of the site without rooting around through navigation (here is our sitemap). Aside from the usability service that a sitemap offers your site's human visitors, it also makes a nice place for search engine spiders to go and quickly understand the layout of a website and index all its pages in a fast and effective manner.