June
An article originally posted on TechCrunch
“Is Microsoft’s vision to compete in search and reinvent itself as an advertising company nothing more than an attempt to get back into its familiar position as Top Gun? Should Microsoft, Google and everyone else just give up on search and outsource to Google? That’s what Tim O’Reilly argues in a blog post today, and I don’t think he could be more wrong.”
Read the full article at www.techcrunch.com
Starting from what seems like a misunderstanding, both Tim O’Reilly and Michael Arrington exchange interesting views on the importance of competition in the search market.
I agree with Michael that competition is important in the sense it drives innovations otherwise unexpected in a monopolistic situation. However I personally think this competition could come from an outsider as evolving technology is making search engine building easier and easier. In a near future competition will only be about innovation - provided you have sufficient ressources to implement it.
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May
An article originally posted on Search Engine Land
You know what you’re doing, right? We are all rational beings. We are all blessed with huge neocortexes and use them on a regular basis. This is especially so when we do something as thoughtful as use a search engine. Our rational loop is kicked into high gear. Right?
Read the full article at searchengineland.com
Very interesting post showing that most of the time, search engine users tend to click on first results unconsciously, while they will give rational explanations on why they did so. When searching for information on the Web, it really has an incidence and our advice would be to spend some more time visualizing results pages before clicking on some. They might learn lots of valuable information already. And choose more relevant results.
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May
An article originally posted on Phil Bradley's weblog
“Now, this is very useful. For pages that don’t have an RSS Page2RSS will basically create one for you. Simply type in the URL of the page that you’re interested in, grab the feed, add it into your favourite reader and you’re done.”
Read the full article at philbradley.typepad.com
It is a great way to monitor static pages.
Though there are many other monitoring tools available on the Web, this one doesn’t require any login, it works well, and it is just as simple as a click.
I found one limitation though: it doesn’t watch the page as regularly as it should. It only checks for updates every 4 hours (well, not so bad I assume). I thought that refreshing my feed would automatically generate an update from Page2RSS, but it is not the case…
So my recommendation: use it for pages where content is not changing too frequently.
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April
An article originally posted on Google Webmaster Central
“Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.”
Read the full article at googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
It’s good to see that Google is still innovating in the web search field. This opens up a world of new possibilities for SEO’s and accessibility of hidden web content. I’m still wondering how they will handle all the corner cases of submitting forms with robots, from looping links to side-effects of posting random content on websites…
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