Category Archives: Google

Google, its products, and its role on the web.

A Tweak Here

Google, Meta

If you have a sharp eye you may have noticed a few changes to the site. The big change is we now have publicly accessible archives. I had removed all archive links because I didn’t (and still don’t) like the URL structure they currently use, but I was getting enough emails requesting them that they are now back up in all they’re ugly query-based glory. Besides, having a weblog without archives is a little funky.

The other biggie is that all the external links have moved to a portal page, which is currently just the same lists as before but will become brutally optimized and reorganized as I begin to use it as my home page, the most revered status any page can aspire to. Anyway I considered simply hiding the links through some sort of toggle mechanism but upon further consideration that would just give me all the added code and generation time of having the links on every page without the benefit of having the links handy. They are mostly for my personal use anyway, though Joe has mentioned to be he has used the list as a launching point on several occasions. We shall see how this works out.

Finally, the Google ads are no longer quite as ugly. Unfortunately aesthetically consistent ads seem to get less clicks. Either that or the ad’s seeming obsession with TiVo for the home page is less than effective. (Of course I probably didn’t help matters much with that juicy keyword there.)

Adsense

Google, Meta

Giving it a trial run, it actually doesn’t look that bad on my site. I’m glad they got rid of that ghastly grey. However at the moment Google seems to think “coconut monkey purses” are particularly relevant to visitors of my page. Go figure. Anyway if an ad looks interesting to you check it out.

Update: The ads are starting to appear more relevant. Maybe this’ll work. They really should allow you to style it to match your site.

AOL vs. Microsoft

Google

In his charmingly caustic way Hixie compares how AOL and Microsoft fared in the recent settlement. I am very disappointed, as AOL using Mozilla would have made things interesting. Around here Mozilla has been steadily climbing in the stats. What about the rest of the world? Check out the Google Zeitgeist. After an amazing climb, they show IE 6 tanking for the first time ever, while IE 5 jumps up to actually above IE 5.5. That’s a little disturbing. Also for the first time I’ve noticed they say “Netscape 5.0+ (including Mozilla)” is represented, but for the life of me I can’t find the purple line. Do you see the purple line?

Moving On Up

Google, Meta, Yahoo

I feel ashamed posting this, but #10 on Yahoo. Not sure why I’m 10 on Yahoo, and I’ve moved from 13 to 12 and back on Google, but does it matter? I get these things from my referrer stats, honest! You can insist on my quest for search engine domination by linking to me with the Matt. Slight variations like “Matt Mullenweg,” “photo matt,” “I love Matt,” and “Matt is a _____ (fill in blank)” should be alright as well.

Hit Diggity!!!

Google, Meta

Click here, right now. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What is Matt making us click now? Maybe I shouldn’t, although that date thing was pretty funny…” Well to save the lazier among you some trouble, that’s the second page of Google results for “matt” and yours truly is at #13. Now before you call me the most narcissistic blogger ever in my defense I was merely vanity surfing my referrers when this popped up. Vanity surfing is not nearly as bad as vanity searching.

Anyway I’ve joked for a long time that the only reason I’m on the web is to become the #1 hit for “matt” on Google, it’s been the brass ring of my online existence. Before this latest Google dance I was somewhere toward the end of the 18th page if I remember correctly, so obviously something has been going right. Better yet, I now have a nice short hit list of people that have to go so I can make #1. 😉

I am so going to start using this at parties!

New Yahoo

Design, Gallery, Google, Yahoo

Saw this via Simon and I must say that I’m quite impressed. The interface is clean, the results are an ordered list and there’s all sorts of nice features and semantic goodness. Plus I show up twice on an image search for “photomatt.” If they had good toolbar this could definitely replace Google as my main search squeeze, unless of course Google comes back with something new, exciting and neat. While we’re on the subject, could someone tell me why I keep getting hits from a MSN search for “google.net”?

Install

Google, Music, Yahoo

It’s that time again, where I’m forced to spend hours and hours reconfiguring everything and installing programs so I can be productive with this computer. I kept a list just for grins, and here it is:

  1. Winamp 2 (To listen to while doing the rest.)
  2. SecureCRT (Gotta have SSH.)
  3. Diskeeper
  4. Roboform (I’m lazy.)
  5. Google Toolbar (Need to find updates and such.)
  6. Photoshop 7 (I’m a very young Jedi here.)
  7. Topstyle Pro (Makes me warm and fuzzy inside. Rumored to prevent eye bleeds.)
  8. Cute FTP Pro
  9. Adobe Acrobat
  10. ASPI Layer
  11. Audio Catalyst (Music habit.)
  12. Office XP (Bloatware at its finest.)
  13. Kazaa Lite (Music habit.)
  14. Personal HOSTS File (Feel free to grab. Tweaked so Yahoo works.)
  15. DeadAIM (Chat me up @ saxmatt02.)
  16. Palm Desktop (Sync it up.)
  17. Studio MX (Gotta pay the bills.)

On Google and the Future

Google

Sometimes things will come up in conversation that bear repeating, but where the barrier to packaging it in a ‘publishable’ form seems too high for whatever your time restraints at the moment. So this is a snippet of a conversation with the inimitable Joe Clark that pertains to his article on Google:

MM: Logical points.
MM: I think Google’s update cycle for all but a few is ridiculous though
MM: it favors fresh content, but it’s out of sync with what’s fresh
MM: I remember one engine, perhaps Teoma when it first started, offered *instant* inclusion

MM: I think a system like what you suggest would be abused, but in a way so easily trackable and correctable it would actually help to weed out junk.
JC: I see.
MM: Let’s say you “ping” Google telling them your page has updated. They check, get newest content, integrate it, the world is a better place and everyone is happy. Let’s say you resubmit the page an hour later, hoping to get a fresh bonus or something, it would slap you on the wrist for having no new or significantly different content.
MM: If the page was, say, 20% different, then it probably should be reindexed, and the old page should be dropped from the index because none of that is there anymore.
JC: Well, that’s making sense.
MM: Plus it can tie this all in with the link-votes pageranking to give instant pageranks to every page, instead of the psuedo-pageranks they often use now
MM: I forsee a day when you hover over a link and it preemptively tells you the pagerank of the linked page in a tooltip or the status bar.
JC: Cripes, kid, you’ve got a visionary hidden underneath there.
JC: Are you gonna publish this s— or what?
JC: then again, you’re not done yet. carry on.
MM: And if the page isn’t in the index yet, get it! Moreover what are they doing with all that juicy information they’re getting from Google Toolbars? I’m sure something interesting could be done with that, a la [that company that starts with an A] but with more relevant ranking than pure traffic.
MM: Publish? Not enough time.
MM: Google is always looking for new things to do with their current data, but they’ve done very little in terms of making their data more timely.
JC: just copy and paste what you wrote and blog ‘er.

It’s hard to say no to Joe, so here I am.

Reset Links

Google, Meta

Just a small request, if you have any links here on your blogroll or link list with the www. prefix, if you could change that to be just photomatt.net I would really appreciate it. I’m not sure how Google is going to handle the 301 Redirect Permanent headers so any help you can give will certainly smooth things over. Old permalinks and such, being permanent, will of course always work. Previously the “www” prefix was simply an alias that worked identically to just the hostname. I’ve come to consider this redundant; yes this page is on the “World Wide Web.” Actually in terms of user experience this change should be completely transparent, except I think I’m going to lose a lot of Google juice because of it—photomatt.net has a PageRank of 4; www.photomatt.net had a PageRank of 6 and was reindexed fairly frequently.

Scum

Events, Google, Rant, Spam

There has been a lot of talk about referrer spamming in blogspace, and while browsing a PHP network query tool I stumbled across this, which looks terrible. What’s even worse is there is some genuinely neat looks scripts on their site, some things that I’ve been meaning to write myself, and it looks like I’m going to have to because I couldn’t support any that sells a product like ReferBomb.

This script will get up to 1000 Google search results for the search term of your choice (we’ve provided a few suggested default search terms), then automatically fetch all of the resulting web pages. What does this do for you? Think “public web stats” or think “blogs who reciprocate referring links!”