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See Fewer Shopping Sites in Google's Results

Google Operating System - Thu, 10/01/2009 - 08:25
Google's toolbelt, the sidebar displayed on the search results pages when you click on "show options", has been updated with new features. There's a new option that lets you restrict results to blogs and an option to see web pages indexed by Google in the past hour (the date range can be customized by changing Google's URLs).

If you don't want to see shopping sites in the list of search results, click on "fewer shopping sites" and Google will remove the results from sites like Amazon, BestBuy, eBay. Google also offers the option to see "more shopping sites" in an interface optimized for price comparison.


If you're logged in to your Google Account and the web history service is enabled, you can restrict the results to the web pages you've already visited. By default, Google Web History only tracks the search results you visit, but you can extend it to your entire browsing history.


Google's toolbelt starts to become crowded and it's not easily discoverable, but it's a better place for refining results than the advanced search page because you can combine filters and see the results instantly.


Categories: Search Engines

A New Batch of Google Wave Invites

Google Operating System - Wed, 09/30/2009 - 13:36

Google Wave is about to open to new users. Starting today, Google will send 100,000 invites to some of those who were eager to use an early version of the service. Google's blog lists three categories of users that will receive invites: Google Wave Sandbox users, those who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google Wave and some Google Apps users. When you receive an invitation to Google Wave, you'll be able to invite other people so you can use Google Wave together.

"Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project," writes CNet.

Like Gmail's early version released in April 2004, Google Wave lacks many basic features: you can't remove someone from a wave, you can't configure permissions or write drafts. The interface is not very polished and some of the options are difficult to find, but it's important to keep in mind that Google Wave is just one of the ways to implement an open protocol. Gmail revolutionized email with an interface inspired by discussion boards: messages are grouped in conversations and it's easy to handle a large amount of messages. Google Wave wants to revolutionize real-time communication by extending a protocol mostly used for instant messaging, XMPP.

Combining email, instant messaging and wikis seems like a recipe for confusion, but Google Wave pioneers a new generation of web applications, where everything is instantaneous. As Google explains, each wave is a hosted conversation and users can edit the conversation in real-time.


Categories: Search Engines

New Web Search Feature Introduced By Google

Unofficial Seo Blog - Wed, 09/30/2009 - 10:33


After the recent attempt of Google to provide more accurate and detailed search results, it has now come up with the latest web search feature. It will help users in keeping themselves updated with the latest trends on the World Wide Web.

 

google_new

 

Everyone is familiar with the Hot Trends, which is known for listing the fastest rising search terms on the search index. This latest trend will allow you to have more information related to your search terms if it reaches to the top 100-fastest rising search terms. The information will be displayed in the form of graph giving details about its popularity, increasing rate of rising and other useful information.

This new trend is available in US and Japan. According to Google, this new feature will help to stay up-to-date with the latest online trend for anything to everything. The already existing Hot trends list has been reduced from 100 to 40 so as to cope up with the latest trend using Google search. This feature is valid only if the searched query matches the top 100 searched list. This will help to focus more to stay on the top with more interesting content.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!


 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

New Web Search Feature Introduced By Google

Categories: Search Engines

Google Docs OCR

Google Operating System - Tue, 09/29/2009 - 12:44
Google Docs API tests a new feature that lets you perform OCR (optical character recognition) on an image. There's a live demo that illustrates this feature: you can upload a high-resolution JPG, GIF, or PNG image that has less than 10 MB and Google Docs extracts the text and converts it into a new document. Google mentions that "the operation can currently take up to 40 seconds" and a small test showed that the service is not yet reliable: it's slow and it frequently returns errors.


The results are far from perfect and you'll find many errors, but the service is free and it's constantly improving. Here's the result of the OCR for this scanned document:


There aren't many free OCR services available, so an OCR service provided by Google would be very popular. ABBYY FineReader Online is one of the best online OCR services, but the free version is limited to 10 pages a day.

Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software called OCRopus, but it's not clear if the online service provided by Google Docs uses OCRopus.


Categories: Search Engines

Google's New Keyword Tool- A Great Strategy For Mobile Advertisers

Unofficial Seo Blog - Tue, 09/29/2009 - 09:33


A recent Seroundtable blog post is talking about the new Beta Google keyword tool, which is more advanced than the current one and will act as its replacement.

As the mobile searches are gaining momentum these days, the new beta keyword tool from Google will be of great help to optimize searches on mobile phones. The good thing is that advertisers are having tools that can easily distinguish between mobile searches and desktop searches. In addition, they have the keyword data to determine the volume of such searches. Keyword data is considered as a successful mobile search strategy.

It is said that this new beta keyword tool will be really a big thing for all mobile advertisers. It will strengthen their business by revolutionizing online advertising.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!


 

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Google's New Keyword Tool- A Great Strategy For Mobile Advertisers

Categories: Search Engines

Another Attempt of Google to Make Search Results More Accurate and Detailed

Unofficial Seo Blog - Tue, 09/29/2009 - 08:48


The Official Google Blog is talking about the new features that have been introduced by Google to give faster search results to visitors. Apart from adding the name anchors for identifying sections of pages, Google has also come up with following additions:

  • Google Sidewiki, which will display the information posted by others for a particular search result.
  • Search Snippets with which you can directly jump to the information you want.
  • Place pages for Google Maps.

Google will be providing additional links in the result block so that searchers can directly move on in the relevant parts of the page. This addition is beneficial if you are looking for a specific information that will be available in a single section of the page. Google is generating deep links by studying the page structure so that these could be displayed for any site. If you want these links to appear on your page, you will have to ensure that all the multi-topic and long pages of the site are well-structured and are divided into logical sections. After this, check whether each section has a relevant anchor text and the page should include a “table of contents” that will be linked to individual anchors.

Google has added two new features that will make it easier for users to find the relevant information buried deep in the page. A search snippet gives an idea of what the page is about by showing few lines on the search result, but it doesn't confirm that the information will be of any help to you. By passing relevant page links within Snippet, Google will make it easier for users to know if the information is helpful or not. If you will enter a generic query, Google will come up with many results giving general information. In case, you enter a more specific query, the specific result will be included in one of the sections of the search result. As the query is more specific, the Snippet will provide you with the option to directly “jump” to the most relevant section of the website. Webmasters, who want to have these links on their webpages can take help from the Google Webmaset Central Blog to know the procedure.

Web searchers have always wanted to share their insights about a particular topic with others who are looking for same results. Google has now made it possible by introducing Google Sidewiki with which you can give helpful information next to the webpage. Google Sidewiki looks like a browser sidebar where users can read and write information. Google has ensured that visitors get to see the most relevant entries first on the page. So, you will not get to see the most recent entry, instead the Sidewiki entries will be ranked by using an algorithm that focuses on most useful and high quality data. Along with this, you entry about the current page will be showed next to the webpage containing snippet of the text. At present, Google Sidewiki is released as a feature of Google Toolbar and will soon be available in Google Chrome also. You can try Google Sidewiki by following Google Twitter feed.

However, there are some webmasters who are not so convinced with the Sidewiki idea and don't want visitors to post comments on their site. Google has yet not officially come up with the opt out alternative, but site owners can block users completely. A webmaster in Google Webmaster Help has talked about the rewrite rule for blocking people with the toolbar.

“Until Google dumps this or provides an opt out, web site owners who'd like to retain control of what appears on their own site can block all Google Toolbar users by adding the following to their htaccess file. The "notoolbar.php" points to a file explaining Google's bad behavior and instructing the visitor to uninstall Google Toolbar in order to proceed. You can create your own file and name it whatever you like, just be sure to change the code below to make it match the file name you've chosen”.

This will block anybody who has Google Toolbar from accessing the site. But, it's upto site owners if they want to go with it or not.

Google has also worked on Google Maps, a great tool for exploring different places by introducing Place Pages. It is a webpage meant for all sharing information about all the process in the world. There are different Place Pages for neighborhoods, businesses, transit stations, landmarks and cities across the globe. If you want to use Place Page, click on “more info” in search results and get ready to see an entire page with interesting details of the place like photos, videos, reviews, a Street View preview and websites related to it. As Google wants every place to be mentioned on the Place Page, it is inviting people to share information. After providing business owners with an opportunity to verify bulk uploaded listings to Google Maps, Google is now giving them opportunity to show up on Place Page. If you run a business, you can enter your business details through the Local Business Center to make the Place Page give accurate and recent details about your business. And if you don't run a business but found a place that is missing on Place Page, you can still add information about it through Google Map Maker or community edit.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!


 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Another Attempt of Google to Make Search Results More Accurate and Detailed

Categories: Search Engines

Google Hot Trends OneBox

Google Operating System - Tue, 09/29/2009 - 03:33
Google started to show an OneBox at the bottom of the search results for the queries listed in Google Hot Trends. The OneBox mentions that a certain query is "#N of 100 most popular searches in the past hour", even though Google Hot Trends doesn't aggregate the most popular searches, which are pretty boring and don't change very often. As Google's blog explains, "Hot Trends lists the fastest rising searches on the web at any given hour".


Google uses the fact that a query is suddenly popular in various ways: for example, to include recent web pages in the list of top results or to show results from Google News and Google Blog Search. Unfortunately, Google Hot Trends doesn't do a good job at explaining why a certain query is popular, so Google should add more real-time news sources like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.


Categories: Search Engines

Welcome to our Think2010 Series

Inside Adwords - Mon, 09/28/2009 - 20:15

In a mere few days, the 4th quarter will be upon us. Seems like just yesterday we were running our Do More with Less series to arm you with tools and tactics to show the 2009 recession who's boss.
As we start wrapping up 2009 and start thinking about what 2010 might hold, we're feeling optimistic. We're hoping we can transition from being your partner through the recession to being your partner through a recovery. That's why we're launching the Think2010: Getting Ahead of the Recovery series. For the next few months, we'll be devoting a weekly post to looking forward. The series will highlight wisdom from Googlers and outsiders alike, and offer opportunities for deeper learning. Over the course of the series you'll see posts on innovation, experimentation, speed, and deeper customer connections -- themes we believe will be critical to 2010 success.
In 2010 you'll likely have products to promote, news to share, and promotions to tout, so you'll need a targeting strategy that is as effective as those messages you have to get out the door. Precision and relevance will be as important as ever as you aim to (re)connect with customers and direct them your way. That's why we're focusing our first webinar of our Think 2010 series precisely on this topic.
Next Tuesday, Oct 6th, we'll be hosting a Think2010 webinar on “Using Data to Better Connect with Your Customers." If you haven't registered, take a look! Our very own Avinash Kaushik will set you out on the right foot for really (truly) making data actionable for decision-making next year -- and right now. He'll discuss core data sources to have in your 2010 targeting toolkit and show you how to capitalize on these tools for refining your targeting approach and honing in on your most relevant and valuable audiences. The webinar will also highlight how free tools like Google Trends for Websites, Insights for Search, and Ad Planner can help you be more efficient and help you confidently make decisions to maximize your return-on-investment.
As you scope your strategy and tailor your tactics for next year, we hope the Think2010: Getting Ahead of the Recovery series will be a good resource to help you charge ahead feeling informed and inspired.
Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew
Categories: Search Engines

Updated Versions of the Keyword and Placement Tools - Now in Beta

Inside Adwords - Mon, 09/28/2009 - 13:38
Feeding off the momentum of improvements we've made over the past year in AdWords, we recently released beta versions of the updated Keyword and Placement Tools.
We've maintained the core functionality of these tools, but have added some new features that we hope will make them more useful for you. If you use English as your AdWords interface language you may have noticed that you already have access to these tools, and availability to all English advertisers as well as other languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks.
The updated Keyword Tool (beta)This new version of the Keyword Tool combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool. This means you'll get keyword ideas based on keywords you enter, your website content, and user searches - all in one place. Also new is the ability to search by any combination of a keyword, website/URL, or category - instead of having to perform each of these searches separately. Additionally, you'll be able to see all match types for a keyword at the same time to help you compare statistics for each match type. When you've got your final keyword list together, you can download a selected keyword, all keyword results in the table, or all keywords (for certain queries).
(click for full size image)

The updated Placement Tool (beta)As with the updated Keyword Tool, you can now search for placements by any combination of keyword, website/URL, or category. For example, you can search for placements that are only on youtube.com that are also video placements and that are also in the automotive category. Under Advanced Options, you can also further filter placements by Country or Language, Impressions Per Day, Included Ad Sizes (those sizes offered by the content publisher for their offered placements), and demographic options.
(click for full size image)

The updated Keyword Tool is available via a link in the current Keyword Tool and the updated Placement Tool is available via a link on the Tools page.
If you see these links in your account, we encourage you to test out the new versions of these tools.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew
Categories: Search Engines

Show Gmail Labels with Unread Messages

Google Operating System - Sun, 09/27/2009 - 05:35
If you have a lot of labels in Gmail, it's difficult to see all of them without scrolling down. In July, Gmail added an option to hide some of your labels, so that the most important labels are always visible. Unfortunately, if you receive a message that's automatically labeled using a filter and the label is hidden, you'll miss the message.

A new feature from Gmail Labs solves this problem: enable Hide read labels and "the visible labels in the navigation bar will be hidden under the 'more' menu when they don't contain any unread conversations".

Since the feature only hides visible labels, you can go to the label management page and click on "show all" next to your labels. If all your labels are visible and Hide read labels is enabled, Gmail will only show the labels that include unread messages.


Google Reader has a similar feature: if you click on the arrow next to your subscriptions and select "show updated", you'll only see the folders and the feeds with unread items.

{ via Gmail's blog }


Categories: Search Engines

Google Street View's Partner Program

Google Operating System - Sun, 09/27/2009 - 04:45
Google has a partner program for Street View. "Do you manage a unique property (pedestrian mall, amusement park, university campus, etc.) that users would like to visit in Street View? Through our Partner Program, you can now request Google to collect imagery of your location. Once the images are added to Street View, people all over the world will be able to virtually explore your property."

For now, the program is limited to properties that are interesting to Google's users. Some of the examples included in the FAQ: "zoos, parks, universities, amusement parks, outdoor marketplaces, stadiums, monuments, tourist destinations, and race tracks".

Here's a Street View tricycle at the Palace of Versailles:



... and another Street View trike at Stonehenge:


{ via Brian Ussery }


Categories: Search Engines

Export Google Sites

Google Operating System - Sun, 09/27/2009 - 04:27
Google has released an API for Google Sites that lets you create or edit pages, upload or download attachments, monitor the activity of a site programmatically. The API could be use to create a new interface for Google Sites, to upload files from other sources or to migrate your data.

Google's Data Liberation team built a Java application for importing and exporting Google Sites. The application lets you export the pages from a site and all their attachments to a folder.

"The folder structure of an exported site is meant to mimic the Sites UI as closely as possible. Thus if exporting to a directory "rootdirectory," a top-level page normally located at webspace/pagename, would be in a file named index.html, located in rootdirectory/pagename. A subpage of that page, normally located at webspace/pagename/subpage, would be in a file named index.html in rootdirectory/pagename/subpage. Attachments are downloaded to the same directory as the index.html page to which they belong," mentions the user guide.

You should only enter the domain name if you use Google Apps. "Webspace" is the name of your site: http://sites.google.com/site/sitename/.


Unfortunately, you can't use this tool to import HTML files to an existing site. The importing option is only useful for the sites exported using the same application.


Categories: Search Engines

Google Does Not Use Meta Keywords To Rank Sites!

Unofficial Seo Blog - Fri, 09/25/2009 - 10:32


According to an official Google Webmaster blog, Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in web search ranking now.The search giant believes that keyword meta tag will not affect how your site rank on a particular keywords on Google SERPs.

 

meta_desc

 

As per Google’s Search Quality Expert Matt Cutts , Google began ignoring keywords meta tags when some webmasters found using them wrongly. It was seen that some webmasters had started stuffing keyword meta tag with irrelevant keywords.

Here is the video to explain more in this regard:

 

But it does not mean that Google does not use other meta tags. They sometimes do use the "description" meta tag as the text for displaying their search results snippets for those websites that appear on Google SERPs.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!


 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Does Not Use Meta Keywords To Rank Sites!

Categories: Search Engines

Chrome Frame, Not Just for Internet Explorer

Google Operating System - Fri, 09/25/2009 - 03:32
Google has recently released a plugin for Internet Explorer that renders web pages using Google Chrome. The plugin, called Google Chrome Frame, is open-source and the code is publicly available.

By looking at the code, it's obvious that the plugin is not limited to Internet Explorer. There's also a NPAPI plugin, which should work in browsers that support NPAPI: Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers. Here's a comment from one of the Chrome Frame files:

"ChromeFrameNPAPI: Implementation of the NPAPI plugin, which is responsible for hosting a chrome frame, i.e. an iframe like widget which hosts the the chrome window. This object delegates to Chrome.exe (via the Chrome IPC-based automation mechanism) for the actual rendering".

A post from the Chromium blog explained the purpose of Google's plugin: "With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions."

Instead of asking users to download a different browser, Google and other companies that develop complex web applications can ask users to install Google Chrome Frame. This way, Google Chrome runs invisibly inside another browser.


Categories: Search Engines

Google Maps Place Pages

Google Operating System - Fri, 09/25/2009 - 03:24
When you perform a search in Google Maps and click on "more info" next to a search result, Google opens a new page that aggregates useful information about places and local businesses. Until now, Google showed an expanded bubble directly on the map.

The new Google Maps pages have user-friendly URLs like http://maps.google.com/places/fr/paris-city and they include a lot data: photos and videos from Panoramio and YouTube, user-generated maps, reviews, related web pages, information from Wikipedia, Street View imagery.




"We think Place Pages will make searching much easier (and hopefully more fun!) for our users, but we're also excited about what it means for business owners. By default, users looking for local businesses can easily view ratings for your business, reviews, related maps, find nearby transit options showing them how to get to you, and take a look at your business with a Street View preview - and it's all on one page," says Google LatLong blog.

While new Place Pages look nice, they have a big drawback: when you click on "more info" next to a search result, Google Maps opens a new page and you lose the context, so it's difficult to compare the results. To go back to the list of results, you need to use your browser's back button.


Categories: Search Engines

Google Sidewiki

Google Operating System - Wed, 09/23/2009 - 11:48
Last year, Google launched a feature called SearchWiki that allows users to customize search results. If you are logged in, you can remove search results, promote them at the top of the search results page and enter comments. While the feature is useful to personalize the results for frequent queries, the "wiki" component was only an afterthought.

Check the SearchWiki page for "google" and you'll realize that the 27511 notes recorded by Google aren't very useful. Comments aren't helpful, even though Google tries to rank them by usefulness.


A similar feature is now available in Google Toolbar. Google Sidewiki lets you enter comments about any web page and shows some of the best comments in a sidebar. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments.


Google notifies you if there are comments about the current page, so you need to send your browsing history to use the feature.


Sorting the comments by date wouldn't be a great idea, because spam and silly comments like "lol" or "cool site" would be prevalent. That's why, Google developed a ranking algorithm that takes into account many signals: user votes, author's authority, text analysis. Danny Sullivan says that "Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports".


Learning some information about a site, finding if a certain company is reputable or reading a comment that corrects some errors from an article - all are use cases for Sidewiki, but it remains to be seen if Google manages to rank comments properly.

As with Knol, Google encourages experts to post comments in Sidewiki: "What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web?" Unfortunately, experts don't have an incentive to post comments and isn't always easy to distinguish experts from opinionated users.

Larry Page once said that Google wasn't supposed to be a search engine. "We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."


Categories: Search Engines

Google Gets Favorable Decision For EU Protected Keywords Hearing

Unofficial Seo Blog - Wed, 09/23/2009 - 09:39


Google has won the EU protected keywords hearing against its long time nemesis, LVMH Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy that had filed a case about Google infringing on European trade mark. Google still continues its advertisers to allow the use of “protected keywords.”

Advocate General Luis Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro told the European Court of Justice that Google doesn’t go against EU trademark law. He also added that if Google uses protected keywords to serve links to specific products, it will not confuse customers.

He said, “It is important not to allow the legitimate purpose of preventing certain trademark infringements to lead all trademark uses to be prohibited. Since the use by Google does not involve identical or similar goods or services, in principle there can be no risk of confusion on the part of the consumers”.

Though, Mr. Maduro gave the decision in favour of Google but at the same time he clarified that Google does not have any right to invoke EU Law unlesss there is a breach in Trademark policy.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!


 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Gets Favorable Decision For EU Protected Keywords Hearing

Categories: Search Engines

A Slippery Slope

Google Operating System - Wed, 09/23/2009 - 07:48
Now that Google launched a Chrome plug-in for Internet Explorer, users will see dialogs that suggest to install the plug-in. The first Google service that will show this message is Google Wave.

"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin. Or, you can use one of these browsers: Google Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5. If you want to continue at your own peril, go ahead."


I'm not an Internet Explorer user and I understand that developers hate it because they have to spend a lot of time finding workarounds for IE, instead of adding new features, but this message is misleading.

"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin." That's simply not true: Google Wave works in Internet Explorer, even though there are some features that require Google Gears or work better in other browsers.

"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use -- each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations -- further complicates building rich Web applications. In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind," explains Google.

Just because you can't offer the same experience in all browsers is not a reason to mislead users. You can inform users that your application runs faster in Google Chrome or certain features are only available if you install a plug-in or a more recent browser.

It's a slippery slope and I hope Google doesn't drop support for Internet Explorer just because it's a good opportunity to promote its own browser. Especially now, when even Microsoft builds applications that don't require Internet Explorer.

"Graceful degradation is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can "step down" to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance," explains Dan Tobias.


Categories: Search Engines

Blogger App for iPhone

Google Operating System - Wed, 09/23/2009 - 05:03
BlogPress Lite is the free version of a blogging app for iPhone that supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad and other platforms. The free version only works for Blogger blogs and it's the only free Blogger app available in the App Store.

The setup is awkward: after entering your Google credentials, the application asks you to enter your Picasa credentials. This is unnecessary since Blogger and Picasa Web Albums are two services connected to the same Google account. Instead of adding the photos to the same album used by Blogger, the application lets you choose one of your albums.

BlogPress Lite lists all the blogs from your account, has a landscape mode with a wider virtual keyboard and an option to label your posts.

Despite promising to offer a rich-text editor, the application only lets you add plain text and upload photos. BlogPress Lite resizes the photos before uploading them, but the resizing algorithm is pretty poor and resulting images are very small.


After writing your post, BlogPress Lite provides two options: publish the post or save it as a draft. Unfortunately, saving the post as a draft doesn't upload it to Blogger, it only saves the post locally. To upload the post the post as a draft, you need to click on the arrow next to the title and disable publishing.

To sum app, BlogPress Lite has a poor interface, doesn't include a rich-text editor, but it's a better way to edit posts on a mobile phone than using Blogger's web interface and it's the only free blogging app from the App Store that supports Blogger. The application has been developed by InfoThinker, with Google's support.

How to find the application? Search for BlogPressLite in the App Store or use this link. BlogPress Lite requires iPhone OS 3.0 or a later version.

{ via Rick Klau }


Categories: Search Engines

Yahoo! Search Revamps Their Search Format

Unofficial Seo Blog - Wed, 09/23/2009 - 04:07


Yahoo! has come up with a major change in its Search Portal. In a Recent post, Yahoo Search blog announced its new Yahoo Search format to demonstrate their innovation in search technology and make your search more advanced to deliver a rich user experience.

The previous changes introduced by Yahoo includes a new Yahoo! homepage, improved Yahoo! Mail, high-quality video calling in Yahoo! Messenger, and a suite of new Yahoo! Mobile experiences.

Here are some key features of the new Yahoo Search page design:

  • Feature-Rich Experience – This is meant for having a quick access to search features such as Search Scan/SafeSearch that help the users protect you from viruses, spyware and spam. Hence, it will be easier for people to the research documents that they have created during searching.
  • Search Assist Expansion – This new design of the page will help the users to avail powerful query assistance that is available directly below the search box. It has also been given on the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. For further assistance, Yahoo has added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.
  • Intelligent Search Results – This feature allows the users to explore results from sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. In the past few months, it has been seen that some more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With this new search page design, Yahoo claims that they have made it easier for the users to experience rich results from an increasing number of sites.

The new Yahoo Search page design not only makes search easier but also has an improved Page load and Perceived load times with a better inline data URI Images.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!


 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Yahoo! Search Revamps Their Search Format

Categories: Search Engines
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