BlogAllAlong

Cuil is a new search engine just launched to the public with a claimed index of 120 billion pages. Google on the other hand says they have 1 trillion urls, not all of them are indexes because some are spam or duplicate contents. No specific number on the index size it self. Anyways, doing my first typical search “Arsenal”, my old addiction, the results are column based, which is something uncommon for web results, and on the side a might-come-in-handy categories to search with, such as Arsenal Players, Premier League Players etc. Which is something good to have. I am still not used to the column view though, not sure it’s the best for searching my results.

Trying several other queries though, I lost faith in the index size of the new site. I am not suggesting a fake number of indexed pages here, but perhaps a very bad collection of indxed pages, missing out a huge amount of critical sites and links. The search query for something typical such as “Google Checkout Review” returned ZERO results!

The same query on Google returns how much? 424,000 results!

Maybe this is one very unlucky query, but the number of results on Google makes me lose faith for now in their index. Maybe with time.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Google Knol has just launched, as the Google version of Wikipedia, and online information sharing and editing site. Knol however is not 100% non-profit, writers could allow ads to be run on their site, and editors will be able to earn revenue from their knols (topics). This is a bit encouraging, and I could already see some detailed articles with lost of useful pictures and information.

User also has the option to select the licensing terms of the topic. Is it All Rights Reserved, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License, or Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. So by default, not everything on Knol is open for resue, and that’s something that will give Wikipedia an upper hand for consumers and share lovers. On the other hand, it will attract more the people who like to pertain ownership of the content.

And speaking of wonership, this is where my question comes. Every knol has it’s collaboration model setting, and once you give people the option, it will no longer be as wonderful or as updated as Wikipedia.

 So this will:

1. Make things locked, and much less updated.
2. Make knols Biased: Which is the biggest issue as I see it. Unless there is something I am not aware of, right now I searched for Microsoft, there was no such Knol. I got the option to write it. I went ahead to the edit page. So imagine if I could be the owner, and only editor of the Microsoft Knol. And trust me the knol won’t be on Microsoft’s side. So how does Google plan to deal with such things? Anyone can be the exclusive editor of anything if he just goes there first, and this is so much against the reasons why Wikipedia is so much credible.

What are your thoughts on it? Any idea how Google will deal with such infringements?

Popularity: 23% [?]

Little bit of history, little feature overview, several useful hints to search Google more efficiently. I got this powepoint slide via email and thought of sharing it with view. Pretty useful.

Popularity: 30% [?]

This one is really awesome, thanks 3baid. Google is releasing a new security feature that will allow Gmail users to tell where their Gmail account is open, where latest activity is happening, and logout all other sessions if they want remotely. This is pretty useful when I forget my Gmail account open, go to work, and then notice it’s open at home or vice versa. I can tell if it’s being used by someone else, and log him out.

10/10 REALLY.

To use it, look for the text “Last account activity: 25 minutes ago on this computer.  Details” At bottom of the Gmail page.

Popularity: 33% [?]

You probably came here with high hopes. However I tried to find a good explanation for this but couldn’t.

I found it on the Amazon Best Deals page! It’s seller #83 in Cell Phones on Amazon.

Popularity: 32% [?]

There are probably several down sides to building  a Flash site, out of which I can list those for now:

1- Download Size: Flash sites are normally larger, take longer time to load.

2- Invisible: Search engines can’t index Flash content, making it unsearchable and invisible, thus killing big amount of targeted traffic.

3- Permalinks: With Flash, you get a url to the main Flash page and have to browse from there. Perhaps there are work arounds for this, but normally, you cannot send a permalink or bookmark it.

4- Copy/Paste: Whether that’s good or bad for the publisher, I usually hate the fact I can’t copy any text. Turns out I was wrong (shows how intelligent I am in Flash). You can chose to make text selectable or not.

Bandwidth is getting faster and faster, so point #1 is becoming less of an issue. And now, with the new deal, Google & Yahoo are working closely with Adobe to make Flash sites indexable and visible from search engines, the biggest downside of invisibility is gone!. Somehow, they plan to do this “they’ll use web crawlers to play through all of a Flash website’s possible “states,” and make that content available through their search results”. And by doing that, Flash sites will become even much closer to normal HTML sites, only much richer.

Why are Google & Yahoo doing this?

1- Expansion: The amount of invisible web is very large, and Flash forms a big percentage of it. By doing so they will be adding much greater amount of content to their search results.

2- Silverlight: Thik about. Why Google & Yahoo together? Why now? Why Flash only? Microsoft have just broke Yahoo’s heart by not matching their requested price, and Google were there to hold them. From an enemy, Google all of a sudden became Yahoo’s best friend. I still remember the days Yahoo! were returning a message saying “Search using Yahoo!” if you search for the word Google. Now, they are both working closely on ad revenue sharing model, and want to send a knock out for Silverlight.

In their official blog, Google announced they have already launched a spider for indexing Flash sites, and you can soon expect to see Flash site results soon. Question is, where will the result link take me though. If it’s to the main Flash page and I have to browse my way through, it’s still annoying and users may not find eventually what they want and leave. I’m sure they’ll get to the permalink stage at the end somehow though.

I wonder if  the future of the web is all Flash. Some people claimed AJAX as a temporarily shifting phase, and I am wondering if Flash is really going to dominate, and AJAX sites are gonna look like static HTML sites today. I personally hope dynamic XHTML sites will last, and don’t really see them going anytime soon. I persoanlly like them more, and I am much more better and comfortable building them than graphics Flash ones.

So what do you think? What do you prefer?

Popularity: 41% [?]

“Hello,

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense
Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate
your patience during this transition and here are some alternative
options to consider:

   * Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
   * AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google
products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals
code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

   * Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.
   * Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create
and save all reports related to the referrals program on your
desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign
information

Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term.  For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional
questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Sincerely.

The Google AdSense Team”

Adsense referrals did not seem to work very well anyways. Even though the concept is great. I believe the overhead of manually selecting referral ads to post, and then waiting for few days for a conversion to happen, most of the time it doesn’t convert, and you have to try another new ad. This has made the normal PPC for publishers much easier and guaranteed, rather than having to keep monitoring and updating. A good thing about it was however you get the exact ads you need, if they exist!

So now, start exploring DoubleClick for possible good offers.

NOTE: It seems I mislead some people with the post. What is being retired is AdSense Referral, which is getting paid per action. For example, Google AdWords ad, some clicks it, join AdWords program and spends certain amount of money, then you get your commission. Regular Google AdSense PPC it self is not being retired, this is a cash cow for Google, and it’s the one that is used mostly everywhere anyways. So please do not remove your Google Ads. Someone is gonna come after me with a lawsuit soon if you do so :).

Popularity: 33% [?]