BlogAllAlong » Search Engines

It was Ramadan!

Bashar — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:45:47 +0000

I was reading this ResearchBuzz article about searching for duration since Star Trek – Trouble with Tribbles episode was released, reportedly on 29th December, 1967. And not that I ever watched Star Trek or know anything about the episode, I just tried what she did and searched the date 29 December 1967 on Wolfram Alpha when I noticed this Islamic Hijri Date, 27 Ramadam, 1387, which is the equivalent Hijri date of the episode release.

Now that I think is pretty useful, you can use it to easily convert any date to the Islamic date (or any other popular kind). What’s even better is, Wolfram Alpha seems to try and give you the date most relevant to you based on your location. Try that from Kuwait, or any Arab country, and you’re likely to get the Islamic date. Try it from UK address, and you will see Islamic date doesn’t show up.

Try and see your birth-date in Islamic calendar :).

Use Sprixi to find free images

Bashar — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:32:46 +0000

It’s always frustrating for me when trying to find an image to use, and I have to keep searching forever to find a license-free photo. I usually go to Wikipedia and see what they have, and I know of some search engines specific for that purpose, but none seems to compare with Sprixi. What Sprixi does is it searches Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for publicly available pictures, and there is quite great amount of quantity in there.

New searches will initially return unsorted results. Based on your usage and mine, Sprixi will learn and enhance it’s sorting. But the really good thing about it is how it clarifies the usage right of each image for you, and tells you the terms of use, which usually involves giving back some credit. So often do I find photo and keep investigating what rights does it hold. Not here.

The fun part is where the name comes from, which they say is a combination of “picture” and “wiki”. Where the S & X came from remains a mystery even to them I guess :), but I like it as they do.

“The inspiration for the name “Sprixi” came from the words “picture” and “wiki”. We can’t remember how it evolved from there but it had a lot to do with what domain names were available! We think Sprixi sounds fun and a little magical :)”

[via: ResearchBuzz]

Have you tried Google Living Stories?

Bashar — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:49:47 +0000

I heard about this last week and just tried it out. Google is working with New York Times and Washington Post on a new revolutionary way to read the news. Timeline based news called Google Living Stories. Take a look.

Just amazing isn’t it? It’s a lot easier to get in late and know exactly what the news is all about. It’s supposed to remember and gray-out the stories you’ve read, but I don’t seem to see it happening. Also, the one thing that’s easy to notice missing is the search. But perhaps that’s because it’s still in very early stages in the Google labs, and there aren’t many stories to search for anyways.

Just wait till it takes full scale, and Microsoft tries to clone it :).

ImHalal.com – First Islamic Halal Search Engine

Bashar — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:22:13 +0000

For the first time now, there is an Islamic search engine which aims at providing a general purpose search that is free of “haram” content, i.e. offensive contents that contradicts with Islamic laws and beliefs. The search engine is wisely called ImHalal.com, and I bet we will see widely increased interest in such a service from conservative people, and parents who want to keep their kids off the harmful web contents.

To reach it’s Halal goal, the site seems to be using two methods. One is by filtering out “Haram” sites and contents, and this can be seen clearly from the Image search, which is still in Beta. When searching for various keywords or celebrity names for example, results from ImHalal.com are much more decent in this regard than Google and Yahoo in their strict mode.

The other method, which I don’t like as much, is the black listing of keywords, ranking them with “Haram” scale of 1 to 3. If the “Haram” level is 1 or 2, you get a warning plus an option to move forward.

Annoying but bearable. The bad thing about it is, it seems to have no intelligence in it, as it blindly blocks Haram words disregard of the actual context or full search or purpose. Example?

Breast is a black listed word, disregard of what you’re really looking for. Even “Wire Stripper” is a level 3 Haram word for including Stripper. I love wire strippers :(.

And the devil word Haram is also a level 3.

Now here it completely misses the point. There is a difference between doing wrong, and reading about what’s wrong. And trust me, offensive sites won’t use the word Haram anyways. It doesn’t help their marketing. Add to that that you can actually search for Haram in Arabic حرام and it works. I have also managed to pass through several bad words, and reach some blocked sites eventually. So this paradigm isn’t the best. Some intelligence needs to be built-in.

Now as to where does this magic come from, It’s still unclear. Is it an engine built in-house? If so, credible search engines usually list their IPs and spider name for webmasters to allow or deny it. But I couldn’t find anything in my log reports. I wasn’t able also to tie it to any of the famous search engines. Is it powered by any of them, or any other service? Usually there would be some information about the source of those indexes, but not here.

[via Social Media Portal]

Loving the new Google search options

Bashar — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:57:44 +0000

If you tried to Google today (any chance you haven’t?), you would have probably noticed the new Show options link just below the searchbox,

and if expanded, will give you a whole bunch of new features, some of which were previously in the labs only.

Quite a lot of cool features. Ability to quickly flip to Videos, Forums, or Reviews results. You can also filter by time, something people always wanted to have straightforward. You get to see images of the results and some more text if you want. My favorite however is the Wonder Wheel:

Now maybe Lucasarts can see better the cry for a Monkey Island 5 game! If it’s gonna be like the last however, please don’t bother. [Sorry divergence] This feature ofcourse is not a revolution, it’s been done before in other sites. But people usually aren’t welling to go to different search engine just to get this feature, and neither does it replace regular results. Another neat feature coming from the labs is the Timeline. You get to see how your query results have changed overtime.

See, Monkey Island dates back to the 18th Century!

Now I personally like and think will be using those features. But why is this any better than the departed Google SearchMash experiment?

Google have a sense of humor even at failures :)!

I think it’s the seamless integration of the new features into the default search interface, without affecting the regular user experience, and just adding on top of it with the new features. You can use Google as you always loved to, and you can get a bit of extra without any serious change to the way results were displayed, and it all happens in a snap!

Can’t wait to try the Google Squared now.

What’s the most searched for term on Microsoft Live?

Bashar — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:52:44 +0000

Google

No seriously…

And How Many People Do it?

1% of all Live.com Search Queries are “Google”!

And what’s number 2?

Yahoo!

Seems most people just use Live.com to find a way out.

So Microsoft, please just help make the world a better place and default your browsers to Google!

You can file it under a Green Environment initiative, since every bit consumes a bit of energy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/apr/30/google-yahoo

Google Similar Images

Bashar — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:31:32 +0000

This is actually pretty neat feature, and works fine once you identify a specific pretty popular object like the London bridge in the video, or Cars in my case.

But not for places like Kuwait Towers for example.

Maybe they’re still building up their full database. It seems to be taking the clouds heavily into the equation if you see in the first picture.

The service is still in the labs, but you can try it out here. Hope it doesn’t stay there for the next 3 years!

Google Images Color Selection

Bashar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:27:32 +0000

Google Images it seems is adding a new feature which is a color selection, available by adding the URL parameter &imgcolor=. While the feature may work quite well for some close up on animals like cats with black color,

Another example for black cars however would show a much lower success rate, probably due to the large surrounding color mixes.

To give it a try, do a search on Google Images, and then add the parameter &imgcolor=black for instance like this:

http://images.google.com/images?q=cat&hl=en&imgcolor=black

[via LifeHacker]

Neat Live Score feature by Google

Bashar — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:30:19 +0000

Try it for your favorite sport/team.

Google Kuwait can guess your language mixup

Bashar — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:21:27 +0000

Do you ever get this?

When my wife told me Google can autocorrect this for you I said “get outta here”. But then she showed it to me and I realized as someone who just let go the Google Kuwait enforcement, she got this extra feature!

As you type in the wrong language (e.g. Arabic), Google detects it’s all nonsense and tries to find English alternative. If you perform the search I noticed, it does not autocorrect as good as when on main page using the autocompletion correction. So if you find yourself doing that mistake over and over, Google Kuwait might be good for you.

How to force Google.com on Google Chrome

Bashar — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:52:56 +0000

This is a follow up to the disappointing first fix to enforce Google.com as default search engine. While it have worked for few days on all browsers, today and all of a sudden, Google Chrome bar default searches took me back to Google.com.kw. I don’t want you for God’s sake! Do I need to give away my nationality for a decent Google.com search?

Luckily, I have quickly found another way. To do so, click on the spanner icon in the top right corner of Google Chrome. and select Options.

Then, under Basics tab, click on Manage from Default search:

If you see an item here with keyword Google.com.kw, remove it. It would probably have (Default) beside it, indicating it’s the default address bar search engine. Now look for another existing Google entry, or Add a new one if no one exist. In my case, I found and edited this Google entry:

Alter they keyword here to your likings, and the URL to whats shown in the image: “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s”

Click OK when done, select the engine you just edited and click on the Make Default button on right side of the pop-up screen. Close, Close and you should be done :)

Hope that’s the last of it.

How to Switch Back to Google.com from your local domain one?

Bashar — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 13:27:19 +0000

For the people so much annoyed with Google forcing them to go to their local domain version, e.g. Google.com.kw or what ever your region is, this is how to switch back to normal Google.com as your default search. Simply go to your local Google home page, e.g. Google.com.kw, and then click on Google.com in English.

NOTE: At time of Google.com.kw launch, this same solution did not use to work as it should. It would take you back then to Google.com, but if you use the browser default Google search engine you would land again on .KW domain. Next day, it was working properly. So I’m not sure if this same link works the same way on domains other than .KW. Let me know how it goes with you.

UPDATE: Bad news. Google.com.kw is enforced on me back again and I assume many others when searching using Chrome Address Bar. Same trick does not work. Firefox Google Search Engine and address bar both dont have the same problem. Looks like we’re gonna need a hack for it ;/. Thank you Google for not doing evil. Thank you.

UPDATE 2: I have tried to contact Google Chrome feedback for reporting this behavior. Not the best place, but it is a place that they will read at least.

UPDATE 3: I found the solution for Chrome Google Default Search. You can read it here.

Google Kuwait not forced anymore?

Bashar — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:13:20 +0000

Following yesterday’s sudden launch and pushing of Google.com.kw on all Kuwait, there was a big strong reactions against it. It turns out most people hated to be forced for Google.com.kw, as they lose some the gadget search it seems along with some other stuff, and what they hated more was the Arabic interface. I’m not sure if it’s something I did, but the force of Google Kuwait is gone for me.

Are you still being forced to it?

The Real Google.com.kw

Bashar — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:54:29 +0000

Google today have released and pushed to the people of Kuwait their new Google.com.kw domain. If you have gone already to Google.com, you may have well noticed as I did you’re being redirected to the Google.com.kw domain instead. While this is not a Kuwait only search engine as we intended to do with Q8Ba7th, it is a global search engine biased for Kuwait results. Try searching for “العربي” for example on Google global and Google Kuwait:

Google.com Results

Google.com.kw Result

You can clearly see Al-Arabi sport club showing in first few results in Google.com.kw. Yes it is more targeted, if you wish to have such results, keep it your default search engine. I have to say however, I was not imporessed with Google’s “Do No Evil” way of pushing the new search engine in my face, and with an ugly Arabic interface. The side options link are barely readable, and getting English results from left to right is definitely not the best way to browse the results. Not what fairy tales would tell you about how Google takes +2 points difference in font size as a serious unforgivable mistake. The least they could’ve done is maintained my English interface. That way I won’t feel more confused.

I am also still wondering how can I set Google.com as the default search engine. I can go to Google.com.kw main page, click on “Google.com In English” link. However I want the default Google Chrome address bar to give me results from Google.com. How can I do that now?

WONDER IF: I also wonder if that’s got anything to do with Google.com.sa agent calling me to offer changing my Adwords account to Saudi Arabia billing address few weeks ago as Google has no presence in Kuwait, saying he can manage it that way. Was it an attempt to take away Kuwait Adwords accounts before they can take control over it? Maybe. But I wouldn’t care either ways.

Related Buzz Around The Blogosphere:

http://dr-mahbob.com/blog/2008/12/11/google-kuwait/

Bye Bye Accoona

Bashar — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:45:37 +0000

Accoona.com, the site that started back in 2005 have finally given their last breath, admitting the touch competition and how hard it is to maintain such an expensive service up and running. Not that I was a heavy user of it, but I did like their Business Search service.

Fare well.

Google guessing answers to your query?

Cuil below expectations

Bashar — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:38:15 +0000

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.

Google Ads on Yahoo Search Pages Almost A Reality

Bashar — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:47:48 +0000

I left the soccer pitch yesterday 11 PM to see an SMS forward from a friend about TechCrunch Twitter alert, Yahoo-Google announcement 1:30 PM today. This is gotta be about the advertising partnership.

And indeed, I woke up today to read about the Google & Yahoo public joint announcement declaring they are going into an advertisement partnership in which Google Ads will be served on Yahoo search results for the queries Yahoo! see as rewarding for them. So Yahoo! is not giving up completely on their advertising program, but if the estimates of $800 million revenue increase in one year turns out to be true, and my senses tell it’s going to be more, I guess they could change their mind about the partial partnership.

The Justice Department ofcourse is still unhappy and are investigating a possible AntiTrust. However, since Yahoo played it smart, and made a non-exclusive advertisement partnership agreement, which means any other bidders may get theirs ads on Yahoo pages as well, then I guess there is no reason for the partnership to be stopped.

How this will affect advertisers is what makes me wonder however. Yahoo! can select the queries it want to have Google Ads for, and stick to their program for others. So how will this happen, for keyword “shopping” for example. There are two sides here:

- I am a Google Advertiser: Will I have the option to show my ads on Yahoo! search results. This could make sense to avoid possible lawsuits, or it could under the Content Network. If it’s an opt-in, the adaptation rate might be a bit slower. Not everyone is always up to date on those changes. Otherwise, it may be an opt-out option, and I doubt people want to do this really.

- I am a Yahoo! Advertiser: I am bidding for the word shopping. Does Yahoo! tell me “Sorry, go join Google and bid for Shopping word”? What if I don’t want to place my ads on Google because of say, click-fraud cases I’ve heard of. And what if not all my words are powered by Google Ads. It means I have to literally manage two advertising programs, who are mutually exclusive in the budget and tracking, to bid for the keywords I want.

I just hope there will be a bit more easier way to do it, and a sort of integration between the two.

Use Google Suggestion for any search engine

Bashar — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:56:04 +0000

For Firefox users, this is a small hack that I think might come in handy sometimes. Firefox Search Engines support on-the-fly auto-complete, which IE7 as I know doesn’t. This feature however is rarely utilized, but the default Google search engine luckily does use it. It comes pretty useful sometimes, especially when you want to search for something that you don’t know how to spell. Now suppose you want this auto-completion to search for specific product on Amazon rather than Google. You could do that easily without moving your hands off the keyboard as follows:

Start with Google as the default search plugin, press Ctrl+K (Move cursor to Search Engine box)
Start typing what you are looking for, say “HTC…”. Stop right there and you will see list of suggestions, one of which happens to be what I’m looking for. The “HTC Tytn ii”
Move with the Down key to the desired result, say “HTC Tytn ii” in our case.
Click Ctrl+Right key (Select current option). Cursor will move back to search engine box
Click Ctrl+Down key (Browse installed search engines) until you reach Amazon Search Engine.
Enter

That’s it. You can apply this to any other search or search engine you want, without moving your hands off the keyboard.

Soon your Google Ads may showup on Yahoo!

Bashar — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:16:55 +0000

Google and Yahoo! have been undergoing a testing period for the efficiency of delivering Google Ads alongside Yahoo search results. This is to measure how the ad click-throughs are compared to Yahoo’s own ads. Yahoo themselves estimate that Google Ads bring 60-70% more revenue than Yahoo. This is because of ad relevancy for one, and two I’m sure from the large collection of advertisers Google has. The more options you have, the more possible it is to deliver better results. Also, the user won’t get bored from the same results all the time. And when it comes to global market, say the Arabic region for example, or any other non-English site, it’s pretty difficult to get any geo-targeted ads. I don’t see any Arabic ads at Yahoo or any other ad network, while Google is getting more and more every day.

The test was to show Google ads at 3% of Yahoo search results inside the US for two weeks only. How did it go? Both parties have spoken general good deal of it so far. The Justice Department have been officially informed about the ongoing tests, and questions are rising right now about whether a deal between the two would give Google a monopoly over the internet ad market. Frankly, I would love for my Google Ads to show on Yahoo results for two reasons. One, Google is the best advertising program I’ve tried from many others, and gives very strong ad control and tracking. Two, I don’t want to split my money and time following multiple ad programs. Still however, for a multi-billion dollar business that large, I believe Google are over looking certain areas and need to improve on them:

Ad Filtering: Filter unwanted ads on my site. Sex & gambling mainly. Google does a brilliant job catching fraud ads, ads that do not reflect the site content, heck they even ban certain Arabic words if they are about medical terms without valid permit. I’ve had one keyword disabled “عقار” which means both real-estate and medicine. It was banned because it’s a medical term and I can’t promote medical stuff without any proof of permit, even if I really meant real estate. So their filtering is strong when they want to, yet their Google AdSense competitive ad filtering is pretty lousy. I filter a certain site and after 12 hours I can still see the ads showing up on my site. This could be really embarrassing and bad for a business. I also don’t get any chance to disallow gambling and sex sites, which I believe should be a normal easy to implement option. Google already offers to filter offensive content in it’s search, so an option to disallow those sites from advertising on mine should be pretty simple.
Customer Support: How easy is it to contact Google for support? And how long does it take for them to reply. Not what you hope for from a leading company. Google support has always been disappointing to me.
Wire-Transfer: For AdSense, most countries are still not supported for money transfer. Many smaller sites are ahead of Google and transfer to any place in the world. Google is only slowly expanding, and yet promoting the green environment thing.
Money Split: For some reason Google just don’t wish to tell you how much your share is from the click. Many other sites do. The ad is on my site and we are sharing the revenue. Any business would usually include share percentage. Google always gives vague unclear answers about the subject. If it’s bad, then you’re doing EVIL. If it’s good, then say it. One report was published before by New York Times based on announced 2006 Google financial reports estimating 78.5% of the AdSense clicks going to the publishers. Such a big number makes you wonder why wouldn’t Google reveal it. One reason I can think of is maybe they don’t want competitors to know the percentage and start a percentage share war.

All in all, Google remains a very strong source for advertising and revenue that I would like to see expand further. A bit more attention is required hoewever for customer needs.

SEO Using Proper Image Labeling

Bashar — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:30:40 +0000

IMG ALT attribute is an alternative text that is displayed to the user when the image is not found, giving the user a hint about what the image is. Typical example would go as this:

alt=”Google logo” />

In most cases, you normally expect that the image will be shown rather than alternative text, and if you do have so many broken image links, then most likely the alternative text is not going to help you a lot attract many visitors anyways. That said however does not mean one should overlook the alt attribute at all, on the contrary. IMG ALT attribute is used by search engines like Google and Yahoo when indexing for images. The alt attribute is one very strong hint about the content of the image, and proper labeling would sure help the search engine return your images as relevant results to the users, and ofcourse, increase your site traffic.

Having followed that, and taking a look at Q8Ba7th site traffic, I found that over 3% of the total site traffic is coming from image searches, and not any image searches, but rather Google Image searches.

Two nice rules to follow for Image SEO are:

Image Names: Meaningful “-” separated file names, e.g. “Google-logo.jpg”
ALT Attributes: Short, meaningful and related, like alt=”Google logo”

Following such practices helps you get traffic, and the user get the desired images. Oh, and it also makes the job of the search engine a whole lot easier.

UPDATE: 3baid mentioned below the title attribute, which is used to give image description usually that the user sees when pointing his mouse over. It is also used for Image SEO, and while Google seems to be fine with one of them only, it’s probably a good idea for me as well to use both, as some other engines may use only one. I will need to look into how they treat it as spam. Video below posted on how Google treat the IMG attributes.

Is the Google hype over?

Bashar — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:42:34 +0000

Google, the company which started 10 years ago as a Phd project, moved into a garage for a while, and then 6 years later went on public offering, turning half of it’s employees into millionaires over night. The company which was chosen as the strongest brand in the US, and best place to work for last year. That same company for the first time is not living it’s glory days from the start of this year, following several events:

Two executives and several other employees moving from Google to Facebook, just as Google did to Microsoft in the past.
Their stock price have gone down below the $450, after it was $700 3 months back. (This could be a right time to buy if you strongly believe in them. Most Analyst still do)
For the first 3 months in a raw, according to comScore, the number of Google sponsored Ads clicks is declining. This ofcourse is Google’s main stream of revenue, that is feeding everything else. So if that goes down, well, Good bye Gmail, Google Reader, and all other great Google services.
Decline of search volume on Google last month. Even though February was shorter than Jan by two days, and all other search engine volumes went down, in fact Google was the least declining from top search engines, analysts still think there is a decline in the amount of search done on the web. Why is that? Social networks? Blogs? Feeds? No answer yet.
Rise of new search engines. Now I know not every new search engine is a threat, in fact most aren’t. And the reason is that, it’s difficult to convince Googlers why your search algorithm is better. You need to find another way to draw their attention. Two new comers actually did and have been turning some heads on the web. One of them is Mahalo, the human-powered search engine. It’s still new, has lots of missing content. I mean, they don’t have pages for ~~Arsenal F.C. nor Monkey Island~~ (turns out they do now :). Where are you Arsenal and Monkey Island geeks! Well, Arsenal might have enough problems right now, but MI fans, quit playing S&M and do some stuff :). Anyways, I was impressed by the spam-free form of it, and the rich content you can find there for items that do have some content filled up. You can go the their main page and browse from their to the hot topics and results on the web. The other search engine that will draw some market-share I guess if they keep going straight is Searchme. The engine is still in private beta, invitation only (except this very moment, they have limited instant accounts, currently 970 left). What’s unique about this engine is the way you browse the results. Instead of getting text based results, clicking a link, waiting for the page to load only to realize it’s spam or useless page, here you browse images of the page instead of text only. So before clicking on any link, you have an idea about how the site looks like and what you could find there. It’s actually pretty similar in nature to browsing file thumbnails on Apple Finder. The engine is flash based and I assume people with low resources and connection will not find it most useful. I was personally very impressed however from how it works, and am looking forward to more from it.

So what now. Is Google going to die? I don’t really think so, but their growth I presume is not going to be the same as last year. I personally don’t agree with what ex-Google employee said after joining Facebook, that social networks are “Google of yesterday, and Microsoft of the past”. You will always need a search engine (or alternative) to reach your information, and a social-network is not the one ofcourse. Also, social-networks are more like bubbles than any other. People follow the hype, join their friends, want to have fun in new ways. Then suddenly, a new social-network comes with new fancy way of doing stuff. People will start jumping there, and the net-worth of the company will run fast down. Especially when their current social-network is controlling too much sensitive information and keeps abusing it. The other point is what some analyst said. People in social-networks are mostly after entertainment and socializing with their friends, and they are less likely to be interested in some ad on the side. On the other side, people are more likely to click on related ads when they are actually searching for that specific topic. After all, it could be what they need. But it all depends on the quality of the link, which Google’s been trying to push for real hard.

It’s a big day in the history of the web

Bashar — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:30:01 +0000

This tale of this day could really be told for decades to come. It could be a day that will change the web dramatically, with Yahoo Board of Directors setting today on one table to discuss and decide on the Microsoft $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo. Such an acquisition I believe has never happened before in the web. One of top 3 sites acquiring the other. Shall Yahoo decline the offer, Google would be happy to offer all the help their competitors need to get back on their foot, starting with powering their Search (again), and their Search Marketing expectedly.

Google hasn’t been looking at this only however, rumors are spreading about acquisitions of two social-networking sites, namely Bebo and Plaxo. Meanwhile, Ask.com keeps their steady silent enhancement with their Big News release, which is really appealing, and is aided with some video, picture, and Digged news.

UPDATE: Yahoo! says we are worth at least $56.4 billion ($40/share) if Microsoft is interested. While Yahoo! doubts Microsoft would bow to such claim, the door is still open for Microsoft, and this time with a certain target. I don’t think this is the end of it, but I believe meanwhile Google are gonna boast things with their rival in a joint venture, just to show Yahoo! how good it will taste.

Obsessive Flash Intro Pages

Bashar — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:25:55 +0000

During the building of Q8Ba7th direcotory of Kuwaiti sites, I have noticed an enormous number of sites using Flash as their intro page, with or without a real good reason. Flash is just used because it looks cool. People don’t take in mind what message they want to convey to their users, or what their users really want from visiting the site. Many government sites have even some long and heavy flashy intro pages, and the misery rise when there is no link to bypass it. Flash is a real cool technology to insert animation and present demos online. But intro pages were just cool the old days, and no one will visit your site back for some fancy flash you made (or taken from somewhere else). When designing a site, there are many things to keep into consideration, and Flash intro pages should be avoided in most cases for the following reasons:

Load time: Flash sites take long to load, wasting user time and bandwidth.
Bad Experience: The faster and easier I can make use of site visit, the more I am likely to visit it again.
SEO Effect: Flash components are non-indexable by search engines. A front page is the first page a search engine usually sees, and if that page has no indexable content, then the search engine may not bother (or be able) to index the rest of the site. It’s kind of locking the front door from visitors. Ofcourse, search results are one of the great free ways to generate huge amount of traffic, and leaving that portion of traffic means you have to rely on ads and word of mouth mostly.
Flash Support: This is a very low rate I know, but still some browsers and users don’t have Flash running, and you would be denying them access to your site.
Meaningless: Very often, the Flash is simply a moving animation of site name and some text, not sending any message to the visitor. A government does not need promotion it self at all. It’s an official site. One of a kind in each country. Zero competition. Just deliver the content and services the user want. He will come back trust me on that one.

Some may argue they really really need a Flash intro site, or their whole site is Flash based. What to do in that case?

Have some meaningful title and meta content on the intro page.
Always always have a text based Skip Intro link. Leave it outside the Flash. That way, you are giving the customer a quick way to skip the Flash and go inside the site, not having to wait for any Flash load. And, you are also giving search engines an entrance point to the rest of your site, making it indexable.
Try to deliver some side content around the Flash as well. See Snap for instance.
Provide Flash Alternative: If Flash is not supported, provide text based version of the site.
Flash size: Be considerant to the Flash size as this is the first page the visitor sees, and if it takes long, it may be his last. If you can’t avoid large Flash size, then be sure to have progressive loading. Give something to the user as long as it’s ready. This makes the loading transient for him.
Modifiable: Many Flash are just designed or one time and no thought of future modification was ever made. If there is a slight chance this would need to change in the future, try to accommodate for it ahead of time.

Is rounded corner Google Ads fair?

Bashar — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:54:07 +0000

Google Ads come with different size and shapes. One of them, which appeal to me the most, happen to be the very rounded corner ones. Google are very careful and enforce many constraints on the ads, do many changed and monitoring to protect the advertiser from invalid clicks, and do their best to increase the quality of the click for the both the advertiser and end user. Since it’s release I’ve been having doubts about the very rounded corner ads. If you take a look at the sample below, which a snapshot of a real ad.

Notice something? The very rounded corner ads don’t come with the display url of the site. What that means is, before the user clicks he has absolutely no idea where he will end up, and after clicking, he may just end up at the same site he clicked before. If he have seen the URL before, perhaps he would’ve not wanted to click the ad at all. For him, it was a waste of time, and for the advertiser, it was a kind of waste for his money as well. This personally happens a lot to me. I see ads similar to previous ones that interest me, but I’m not sure if I will get to the same site or not. Moving the mouse over the link ofcourse does not show the real address. Sometimes out of sympathy to the advertiser, I just copy the whole lengthy ad url and fetch the domain name to see if it’s the same or not. The example shown above is a perfect example (I somehow got it when I wanted to write the post… Lucky!). Reading both ads reveal almost the same site, however it can’t be as they are showing next to each other. Which one would I click? And if one of the ads show up again later, should I click it? I don’t know if I visited the site before or not.

I know the rounded corner eats some space, but I just wish even snippet of the URL would be shown to give the user small hint. This would increase the value of the click I believe. What do you guys think?

A Live Image Search Review

Bashar — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:30:36 +0000

A very unlikely review from me I know, but I was looking for a Nokia phone brand name one day and Nokia site did not help me. I thought the best way is to search Google Images for Nokia until I find my phone and know it’s name. So I went on, and on, and on. Clicking Next after Next after Next. This was a bit tedious really and wasn’t helping. I wanted a faster way to search mass amount of images, and I thought about Live.com. The fact that you can resize image thumbnails in the results, and scroll down for more makes it easier and more efficient if you need to search huge amount of images. So I did that, and eventually got the phone I want. Result of this I can sum up the Pros and Cons of Live Image Search as:

Pros:

Ability to resize thumbnail size in the result to get more in a single page.
AJAX powered scroll-down for more feature is really nice, especially for the case that you want to scan large amount of pictures.

Cons:

Stability: Sometimes Live search simply does not respond to my queries anymore, and I have to refresh the page to make it work.
Again Stability: Trying to resize images on Firefox sometimes results in scary results, as the one shown below:

It seems to lack in rendering the page sometimes, and then gradually does it resulting in this scary image!

Not convenient in opening result link in new tab. Ctrl+Click image opens the image result in new tab plus the current one. I hate it I have to click back then every time.

It’s really rare that I don’t find my result on Google, and it almost never happened that I find it on Microsoft Search engine instead. So this makes me think, Google must seriously start restudying search result usability. I know they have option to browse results with shortcut keys, and they also have Searchmash, but that one also requires to click Next to fetch the results on the fly. Not easy as Live interface here let’s be honest. It’s more stable though :).

The NoFollow Effect

Bashar — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:21:06 +0000

“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index” (Wikipedia)

So much explains it self. The attribute is part of Google’s efforts to fight blog comment spam which was implemented back in 2005. Ever since then many blog communities have started to adapt this parameter to make it less of use for spammers to gain backlink from the comments. Without ruling out it’s advantages, I have disabled it on my blog as I am filtering out all spam and thus killing the motive behind the attribute it self.

Google’s idea and efforts haven’t been adapted however by other search engines. The least not the big ones. Yahoo for example does not take that parameter into consideration. The net result is huge difference in site results and ranking, for blogs specifically, between Google and Yahoo. Let’s do a small test and see. Say we want to see all pages that link to my blog. This would be accomplished by searching for link:blogallalong.com. See the query applied on Google. 12 results only at the time of writing. Not much hah? I should note however that there are other sites linking in to my blog but for some reason they are not included in the results. Now let’s see the same query on Yahoo. At the time of writing, that’s 1,777 results! BIG DIFFERENCE RIGHT? I should consider defaulting to Yahoo they admire my blog more :).

So what’s that supposed to mean? More links means theoretically higher ranking. Means that when you search for example for Google Checkout Review, which is a post I wrote sometime back and got some good hits, if you search it on Yahoo you should get my post in the results much higher than Google. Initially the post was one of the top on both. When more and more Google Checkout reviews started to come out, mine got pushed back naturally. Surprisingly, even with so many backlinks in Yahoo, if I search the Google Checkout Review as keywords (not phrase) on Google & Yahoo, you will see that Google lists my post at end of 2nd page while I was not able to find my post on Yahoo for the first 6 or 7 pages! Search Engine world is a mystery not meant to be solved. Search the whole phrase and the post will be #6 at Yahoo and #10 at Google at the time of writing. This is because much of the results will be ruled out as we are looking for exact phrase ofcourse.

Now, the two options are available. NoFollow, and the so called DoFollow. Here comes the fun part. Wanna see what you can make with them? Do a link:blogallalong.com again on Google, and you will get mostly the blogs that do not use the NoFollow. You will see that SearchEngineJournal and the legendary Ron Gilbert both don’t use it. HINT: I comment on Ron Gilbert blog! See, you got me there. This won’t work for popular sites like Cnet however, as they have mostly non blog-comment inlinks and the NoFollow effect here is minimal. But what would the same query on Yahoo reveal? It would show you the blogs that I visit and comment on. That’s right. You can track me and see what I’ve been doing. So in a way, Google’s NoFollow respects your privacy more. That’s one more unintended advantage. So maybe we should have a WP plugin to give user option to have NoFollow on his comment or not :).

Q8Ba7th gets its own blog

Bashar — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 07:58:00 +0000

To provide more focused content, and to have one place for update news, Q8Ba7th Official Blog is now available. So what do you expect from the blog? Latest Q8Ba7th update news, as we are just starting, some user useful hints from time to time, and review of useful and interesting Kuwaiti sites that we come across while building our index.

We will try to point some updates on Q8Ba7th here as well from time to time. Hope you like it.

Google Suggest Still in Labs…

Bashar — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:20:30 +0000

I first saw Google Suggest no later than 2005 I’m sure. I was stunned just couldn’t believe my eyes. Google is able to auto-complete my query suggesting from the top results, and that was all happening on the fly. No other search engine could do it at that time. At least not to my knowledge. The service was in Google Labs back then and is still as we stand now. I wonder why all this time to make it the default search. I figured back then it must be for testing and to avoid massive extra load on the system, but by now the service should be ready for full launch. I know Firefox Google Search Plugin does come with auto-completion, but that’s not enough. You know why?

Yesterday only a friend of mine told me “Hey Bashar!, have you seen Yahoo’s new search?. They can auto-complete your query on the fly!”. Ahh, that’s old news I told him. Google has it from long time. He didn’t believe ofcourse they have the same service. He thought I am talking about stored history queries in my browser. When I showed it to him he was kind of surprised. This makes me wonder why does it take Google that long to get such brilliant service out from the labs and to the public. They are just coming with the ideas now and letting Yahoo enjoy the public reputation, when actually Yahoo are just cloning it. Even now, Google Suggest is still better as I see it. Yahoo one looks more compelling that’s true. But it’s only available from Yahoo main page search, not when you go to Yahoo Search results page, that’s for one. Another thing is the relevancy of the search. Take a look at the query result below from Yahoo and see how Google treated it as shown above. When I search for “pla”, 6 years old kid would shot “Y STATION!”, which is what we see from Google results. Yahoo on the other hand has shorter list of suggestions and misses one of the most obvious queries. This is just a quick dummy test ofcourse, but all in all, Google Suggest is capable of delivering more suggestions than Yahoo.

Now, go to the Google Labs to see list of services that have been in there for quite some time and people are still unaware of, like the Google Ride Finder for instance. How many people know they can track Taxis online in the US? This was also available back in 2005 and up till now. Sad thing is, some of those services gets killed while still in the labs, like the Google API.

UPDATE: To the people who like the feature, try AllTheWeb Livesearch Beta from Yahoo!. It’s like the Google Labs but to be honest, I love it. I just don’t understand how the sponsored results at the top are separated from normal results. I don’t see separator or anything.

Contribute to the World’s Open Source Search Engine

Bashar — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:02:34 +0000

That’s the idea behind Grub, the open source search distributed resources search engine. Part of the source code have been made open to the world, and clients are available to download and share your resources to help build the world’s largest web index database. Clients running on PCs all over the world will use the CPU and bandwidth resources to index the web and update the Grub database with the new information. Only that part is done on user machine, real time queries are sent to their server directly.

Do you get paid for sharing your resources? I didn’t think so, no you don’t. But if you are a believer in the open source, want to help build the largest web index, you may like to do so, same as people are doing with Wikipedia. If you are a webmaster also there is an extra advantage. Clients you run will start crawling closer content first, i.e. your sites before moving outside. You will not have to wait for a search engine to decide to include you, you include your self, and see how your website is being crawled. Even though, I think that offering some advantage in return is a must given that we are building their search engine which they will be making money out of. If it succeeds, we are talking about a hell lot of money not only few thousands or millions. Since the client uses registered username, and all his shares resources are tracked, this could be a good start to promise small shares for contributers in return.

As for the Grub site it self, I haven’t been much impressed with it so far, even though I think the idea is marvelous. Initially page did not load any content. Some files are empty, some pages are giving run time errors, and the downloaded client log is full of “Primary exchange with the server failed”. I don’t believe the Wikia sponsored project has come to a good public start. Let’s wait and see how it goes after.

Thinking about what could be the affect of this project shall it succeed. Possible Google threat? It sure is. Some people hate Google, many others don’t like to be locked to single resource, and I really believe competition is healthy. What else? Spammers. I could be running many spam junky sites, and share big amount of resources to ensure my sites are indexed. There is still no details about how spam sites are handled.

Original Source

I know exactly what you are doing online…

Bashar — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:44:19 +0000

Would you like to hear me saying that to you? Most likely not. What if I tell you the government is spying on you. Imagine at any minute, you receive an email saying “I know what you surfed last summer!”. This is what Germany is trying to enforce by saving any connection data be it internet, voice calls, SMS or any other for a period of six months. Anonymization tools and services like Tor are illegal from then on as well. As a reaction, Google have threatened to close the German version of Gmail if the new law is enforced.

I am happy Google have made their official stand early clear, and hope to see other big names participate in the protest as well. If the government has the right to track all my online movements, then in the future we would expect tracking devices attached to us so that they know where we are as well. This is more security right? But it’s also zero privacy.

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Google

No seriously…

And How Many People Do it?

1% of all Live.com Search Queries are “Google”!

And what’s number 2?

Yahoo!

Seems most people just use Live.com to find a way out.

So Microsoft, please just help make the world a better place and default your browsers to Google!

You can file it under a Green Environment initiative, since every bit consumes a bit of energy.

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