www.jacobsen.no / anders / blog / Search Engines Archives

January 03, 2006

Cheap-o Google PCs / 'GoogleCubes' soon to be released?

Not many companies have the bankroll and the motivation to challenge the domination of Microsoft in the home and office PC market. Mac keeps trying, Sun as well, but when it comes to $$, perhaps Google is the best placed of them all to enter the home gadgetry market? [...] MORE...


November 24, 2005

Free Google Wifi @ Heathrow Airport, London

This bodes well for some competition against BT / T-Mobile's rather costly (by comparison) offerings... MORE...


June 06, 2005

Google SiteMaps for Movable Type - now with correct Last Modified dates

The two other stabs at creating Sitemap templates for Movable Type don't take into account that you might want to assign different priorities and scan frequencies to your entries (as described here), as well as correcting 'Last Modified date' to include comment submissions. MORE...


May 17, 2005

Søkemotoroptimalisering & neteffects.no

What triggered me to write this rant on an already too much talked about subject? Last night someone started commenting on my photoblog with the 'name' Søkemotoroptimalisering and the URL www.neteffects.no. I have mailed them about it, saying that despite it just being one comment, the name chosen leads me to believe they are attempting a moderate comment spam attach, and that I will moderate any further comments with links to their domain. MORE...


April 26, 2005

Google Maps UK

This is genius. MORE...


February 15, 2005

G-Wikipedia

Good news: Google is apparently considering making available some servers and unlimited bandwidth for Wikipedia/WikiMedia [...] MORE...


January 19, 2005

Fighting back on comment spam: nofollow

Google, MSN, Yahoo, Movable Type and others have announced a common approach to try to kill comment spam: by applying a 'nofollow' tag to links, search engines will simply ignore them for the purposes of calculating rank and search engine results: [...] Genius! MORE...


December 13, 2004

Google Suggestions, version 1

This is pretty funky: Google Suggests digs out alternative queries / completions of your query as you type; e.g. type 'new' to see news, new york times, newspaper, newsgroups etc listed as alternative queries (ranked by popularity). MORE...


October 13, 2004

Froogle UK - british price comparisons

Google just launched Froogle UK - a localized version of the Froogle price comparison site. MORE...


October 04, 2004

Teen user search engines?

I suppose it doesn't help that UK has seen the rise of brands like PHONES4U etc, but seriously: has online users' grammar gotten so bad that Google et al now need to set 'u' and 'you' equal for the younger generations to find their target content? MORE...


September 17, 2004

On search engine neutrality

Searching for MSN email on Google yields Hotmail as result number 1. Searching for google email on MSN Search does not have the Gmail homepage in any of the first 100 search results! MORE...


June 23, 2004

Spellcheck-by-Google

presumtious, presumptious or presumptuous - what Google says! MORE...


June 01, 2004

Google related searches

2 Google additions: tracking of to where users click and additional related searches. MORE...


April 29, 2004

Google goes public

There's been an increasing buzz and flow of rumours recently. This evening, Heiko has the scope: Google goes public MORE...


April 03, 2004

Google Gmail in BusinessWeek

''[...]E-mail remains the killer app of the Internet Age, providing instant communication between any points on the globe. But e-mail has hit the same wall that search hit in the late 1990s, when the volume of Web pages and the Web's complex structure finally outdistanced the ability of earlier search engines to keep up. Today, most users struggle to keep their e-mail up-to-date and organized. [...]'' MORE...


April 01, 2004

Google Gmail in the newspaper headlines

Photo of newspaper headline from London today (Google's Gmail service taking the whole front page(!!!)) MORE...


Gmail - Google email

You know it's a pretty big announcement when it hits the front pages of London's Evening newspapers (photo coming soon) MORE...


March 17, 2004

Google Local

New Google Local does for US what UpMyStreet has done for UK for years. Neat, but not new. MORE...


February 12, 2004

Weblogs-scanning robot at Deutche Boerse?

The last 8 days someone or something running from the IP address 193.29.77.220, disguising as a user of multiple browsers has been pulling down more than 80 Mb of data from my site in more than 5000 hits. The weird thing is they seem to be using 3 OSes and 6-7 different browsers within 10 second intervals. Not very likely. (please read full story for more details) MORE...


January 23, 2004

The background research leading up to Orkut.com

Instantly super-hot, this article, published last year, reveals some of the background studies leading up to this week's launch of Orkut.com: [...] MORE...


Hello Orkut!

What comes next? Imagine social bookmarking site del.icio.us on drugs and merged with Eurekster-like peer search engine results enhancement functionality! MORE...


January 16, 2004

Google Flight Tracking

Wow! Google for flight numbers for updated news on when your friends and family will arrive at an airport near you! MORE...


December 02, 2003

Search engine = ?

If you search google for ''search engine'' - guess who's on top? MORE...


November 07, 2003

The best just got better: Google Deskbar

Billiant novelties include the option to configure custom searches - if you're a film buff like me, you might want to set up an IMDB search (see sample screenshot here) [...] (Updated with a How-To on how to create custom searches yourself) MORE...


November 06, 2003

What's that site where you can ask the Jews?

Colleague: Hey Anders, what's that site where you can ask the Jews questions? Me: ??? Colleague: AskTheJews or something [...] MORE...


May 01, 2003

What is the $ value of PageRank?

Seeing how weblogs and other personal websites are accumulating more and more Google PageRank, these sites can significantly skew the search engine results if enough high-profile sites link to a certain page. MORE...


April 11, 2003

I'm not safe to search...?

According to the Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch, 2 of the top 10 results and 21 of the top 100 results are omitted by Google's SafeSearch feature if searching for "blog". My blog included. MORE...


April 07, 2003

A day in the life of BBCi search

A thorough analysis of how BBC continuously works on improving users' search-experiences... MORE...


March 04, 2003

How Google uses weblogs to enhance search results today: Google WebQuotes

News from the Google Labs show us how weblogs are and will be used to improve Google's search results in the future: enter the Google WebQuotes! MORE...


February 27, 2003

How Google is making money off Blogger already...

Google can and probably will make a lot of money from advertising on their content sites. Where Pyra was struggling to find advertisers for blog*spot, Google already has thousands, if not millions, of small and large advertisers using their ''AdWords'' system. MORE...


February 25, 2003

Overture buys AllTheWeb

Overture buys AllTheWeb and AltaVista. Is this the end of neutral search results? (Long live Google!) MORE...


February 03, 2003

Why I love Google (part 219)

I was just listening to Faithless' tranquil track ''Drifting Away'', which starts with a beautiful aria. Google, as usual, solves the riddle of which aria... MORE...


December 12, 2002

Google now doing product searches

Froogle means Google has yet another way to make more money: how? Referrals! MORE...


October 01, 2002

Google's new search algorithm

Google never made any promises towards webmasters relying on inbound traffic from them, but a lot of people are upset... MORE...


August 17, 2002

Proof positive on "Googlejuice" for blogs

After I published my series on Optimizing Movable Type, quite a few people linked to those articles, and now, after Google has done its most recent sweep of the web, your truly is on top for many searches... Proof positive that following my tips and tricks may give results for others too? MORE...


August 14, 2002

Weird Internet...

There's a lot of weird people out there... Now, if someone could just explain for me why people come to my blog looking for the following "tidbits" of information...? ... "Cut cocaine recipes" ... "increase penis size through magic" MORE...


August 08, 2002

Optimizing Movable Type (part 3) - get more readers

When you've read the articles on archiving strategies and increasing the ''Googlejuice'' of your site, now is the time to attract new visitors to your site. MORE...


June 19, 2002

How Google Searches Itself

How Google Searches Itself -- "Google has become one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley by helping millions of Internet users search the Web smarter and faster. But how... MORE...