New search engine Cuil is underwhelming
I have been reading about this new search engine Cuil that is supposedly the biggest search engine on the web, even bigger than Google. It has been billed by some as a “Google Killer”. I think one of the reasons it’s getting so much publicity is because it is run by a team of former Google employees.
The first thing you will notice about Cuil is its unorthodox appearance. The main page is black and the search is centred in the middle.
Android Android Android!
everyone’s talking about Android
The hype is building and this is both good and bad for Google. When something gets so hyped up it can be hard to meet expectations. People who don’t usually follow techy things are mentioning Android. Let’s face it, everyone loves Google and for a lot of people they have changed the way we use the Internet. For a smaller number of us Google has changed how we do email, how we work with documents and how we stay organized with its plethora of tools and widgets. Google has become the Swiss Army knife for the Internet, so of course we have high hopes for Android.
Apple iPhone, more news than actual interest?
Update June 18th: It looks like the iPhone search volume has completely spiked, surpassing original spikes, but I still think there’s a lot of saturation in the blog sphere. I will do a follow up after the phone is released.
Today I have been playing around with Google Trends and the BlogPulse tools. While trending some of the newest smartphones out there I noticed something odd with the iPhone data. It seems that last week when the new iPhone was announced there was actually a far larger spike in iPhone news than actual interest.
SEO tips for Google image searching
I have been trying to find ways of increasing traffic to my site lately and part of that includes SEO. Ever since I changed my domain name, traffic has dropped off the map and Google’s crawl rate is abysmal. I wrote about this in Where did all my Google traffic go?. That said, one article keeps pulling in traffic and at first I didn’t know why. At the time of this writing my most popular post is my Eternal Sonta Review. Every now and then I give a mini review to games I really like, but it’s a small part of my blog, and rarely generates much traffic, so the Eternal Sonata review really shouldn’t account for so much traffic, so why does it?
WWDC, iPhone mania, and other smartphones
The web is abuzz about the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday and the new iPhone. Rumours have been zipping around and range from the size of the new iphone to the colours that might be available.
Give me Android, Give me “commitment to openness” – Google gets it!
I’ve been following Google’s Android platform on and off for awhile now, but lately the buzz is starting to pick up. For those not in the know, Android is Google’s new software platform for mobile phones.
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.
Where did all my Google traffic go?
I learned a valuable lesson this month. Over the past year that I have built up my blog I have slowly grown my daily traffic, while still not astounding, it was nice to see it slowly growing. My blog used to be blog.imhmedia.net, but it always had my name in the title. I decided I should buy www.ianhoar.com before someone else did and transfer the site to the new domain. Anyway, my traffic instantly plummeted to about 1/3 of what it was before the name change. Google is even crawling and indexing the site much slower than it use too.
Now for some reason I thought that Google would just recognize that it was the same site, but apparently not. After searching around a bit I quickly learned that changing the name / domain of your site is a very bad idea. Now I am slowly building up traffic again and preparing a redesign, but it was a lesson learned, and luckily my site was still fairly new.
How to center Google AdSense ads
It took me awhile to figure out how to center Google AdSense ads. Searches showed that many other people were running into the same issue, so I thought I would share my method for centering.
At first I tried things like margin:auto, center and padding in a <div> wrapped around the ad, but nothing seemed to work. The reason for this is the AdSense box is absolutely positioned. The easy fix for this is to create a CSS class or inline style as shown below.
CSS class
.adSenseCenter {
position:relative;
width:120px;
margin:auto;
}
Container <div>
<div class="adSenseCenter"> adSense code goes here </div>
Or quick and dirty inlines style.
<div style="position:relative; width:120px; margin:auto;"> adSense code goes here </div>
Don’t forget that the width of the <div> must equal the width of the adSense ad. Now you can center your ads.
Microsoft offers $44.6-Billion for Yahoo
This announcement did not leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Right now there are really only three big search engines, with Google being the dominate one; this would narrow it down to two. Whenever Microsoft can’t get something right, they just buy someone who has done it right.
There is a very interesting discussion on Slashdot about why Yahoo is so popular. A lot of the reasons for it’s popularity are things that Microsoft has never really understood, like interoperability. How many of Microsoft’s offerings fail to work properly on anything but a MS platform?
I see the Internet moving away from propriety software solutions. For a long time Internet Explorer was king, but that is all changing, and as web usage moves more and more towards handhelds I don’t see this trend changing. We have this thing called “Web Standards”, and they work.
If this deal goes through, I just hope Yahoo doesn’t end up like Hotmail. For me, Google is king, but I like Yahoo the way it is and would hate to see it become an IE only, or even IE enhanced platform.
