OH HAI GUYS! I have perfected my LOLcats speak thanks to Danny at Sphinn who decided he'd be so kind as to share the LOLcat translator with us. Great. Now I'm in trouble.
Search Engine Roundtable Themes
Did you know that Friday was Moon Day? Or that Monday was Hot Dog Day? Well, if you're only reading our site through your feed reader, you probably didn't realize that we changed the Search Engine Roundtable themes for these celebratory days.
This was our design on Monday:
This was our Friday design:
What do you think? Will Barry put up a theme for me for my birthday? (psst... it's in January.)
Search Engine Watch Redesign
Speaking of themes, Search Engine Watch has redesigned their site entirely. It's gone from dark to brighter. I must say I like it a lot. Great work, guys.
Yahoo Search Assists You
Yahoo is trying out pretty cool functionality called Yahoo Search Assist. It guesses what you're searching for by opening a box of the most frequent searches -- especially if you stopped typing. It also shows related searches when you find the results. Pretty cool. Search Engine Land has a lot more information about this feature.
Digg Drops Google, Grabs Microsoft
Digg and Microsoft have signed up for a three-year exclusive ad deal to begin in August of this year. No more Google? That's right. Will the Digg users start preferring Microsoft over Google? It's possible. Everyone loves Kevin Rose's choices.
Green Google
Did you know about Google's Solar Panel Project? Apparently, neither did a lot of people. I know it was covered on Boing Boing in October of last year, but even the guys at Digg didn't know about it until May. Where's the solar pride?
Some Business People Just Get Lucky
Business.com was sold for $345 million this week. Can we say rich? These guys bought the domain for $7.5 million dollars in 1999 and were ridiculed for wasting that amount of money. Well who's laughing now?
The Lisa Spots Something New
My BFF found something awesome yesterday. Google Maps has apparently added a popular searches feature to every search result. For example, if you search for something in New York City, you'll typically find that other people are searching for a Duane Reade pharmacy (because there are hundreds of these in Manhattan). Famous landmarks and other popular locations often show up for a particular map location. Here, try it out.
SES San Jose and RustyBudget!
First of all, we got kudos in TechCrunch over the weekend for our new project, RustyBudget. Essentially, this is an author and writer's budget that allows easy management of multiple topics. But Barry and I were talking about the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, and he suggested that we use the budget for conference coverage. And that we did. Yesterday, I added all the sessions to the budget, and our conference reporters (me, Barry, Kim Krause Berg, David Wallace, Steve Krull, and Carolyn Shelby) started grabbing the sessions. I mean grab in the literal sense, too. Here's how we manage our conference coverage with RustyBudget. The video is sweet too. By the way, Ben Pfeiffer won't be at the conference as you may have noticed in the screen caps, but we'll miss him!
Good to Know
Apparently, if Google AdSense impressions are not inflated by bots such as Snap.com or Ask.com. AdSenseAdvisor confirms that the reports are accurate and that such crawls will not negatively affect you.
Yahoo Update, July 2007
It has been confirmed that Yahoo did a July 2007 update. There has been a minor change in rankings and the Yahoo Search Blog discusses the algorithmic changes related to crawling, ranking, and indexing.
Microsoft Supports Sitemaps, Reads it from Robots.txt
Guess what? Now Microsoft is supporting Sitemaps. Microsoft will also employ autodiscovery to find your sitemaps file if it's included within your robots.txt. It's real this time!
Google Forcing Advertisers into Pay Per Action
It seems that Google is opting users into PPA without their consent. But why? Nobody knows, but everyone seems to be pretty disappointed.
Google Drops Supplemental Results Query
Goodbye, Google's Supplemental Results Query. You can no longer do a search that will show supplemental pages. Is this the end of supplemental pages?
Matt Cutts Wants You to Suggest Google Webmaster Central Improvements
Matt Cutts posted on his blog that he's looking for suggestons for Google Webmaster Central. He has a poll which you should all vote on if you haven't already. So far, there are over 2000 votes.
Hyphens and Underscores are all Treated Equal
Google has confirmed that it is now treating URLs with hypens and underscores equally. This was broken by Matt, of course, at WordCamp last weekend. Now, you no longer need to worry about how you delimit your URLs; Google will treat both naming conventions the same.
BAI EVERYONE! HAS GREAT WEEKEND!
