The recent Facebook terms of service changes and consequent complaints made me wonder how much privacy really exists if you’re active online. Starting with just a name, sites like 123People, Pipl and Zabasearch can find a phone number, photos, a street address, age, and other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace. With only a […]

I’ve figured out a way in which twitter is quite useful. Summize lets you search what people are saying about things in real time. For instance, during the NBA finals Sunday night I was able to read reactions to the game minute by minute. This can be handy for anything that’s current and won’t be […]

Flash Earth is a simple interface to view satellite imagery from the major providers like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask and NASA Terra. It’s easier to use than many of the providers’ interfaces, and it’s a breeze to compare imagery between services.

Many sites are hard to navigate, don’t have sitemaps and have local searches that are mediocre at best. When I want to find information on a given site, I have to try to figure out what the designer was thinking and where they might have put various links and information. But I recently realized that […]

Fanteja asked me how my site did in the big three search engines comparatively and I didn’t know, so of course I had to check. Once I checked, of course I had to create a graph of the top 10 search phrases and where my site stood on each of the search engines (click on […]

Ben Hammersley recently claimed that Yahoo had become the new Google. He wrote, “Google, it seems, has . . . been overtaken, . . . not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.” I, along […]

I’m a curious fellow, and that curiosity has prompted me to conduct an experiment. There are many resources on the web that discuss the most popular search terms. I wanted to know what would happen if I wrote a little paragraph that just happened to be chock full of the hottest words around. Would it […]

The next time you’re searching for something on the web, you may want to stop by Phil Bradley’s list of sites to find information. It’s a list of sites he uses on a regular basis when he’s looking for different types of information and there are quite a few sites on that list that are […]

A new search engine called Brain Boost is different than other search engines. It’s designed to answer any question you ask and not only provide a link, but extract the answer from the web site and give you an answer to your question. I haven’t tested it extensively, but of the questions I asked, it […]

The referrer spam in my web stats page has all but ruined my ability to see who is linking to my site, so as I see it, I have two options. 1) Find a solution to referrer spam or 2) Find another way to track backlinks. Find a solution to referrer spam A benefit of […]

I’ve noticed a recent surge in new search engines, but who can blame them? They’ve seen how successful Google has been and want a piece of the pie. Not only are new ones cropping up, but existing search engines are trying to add new features, like RSS feeds on MSN or Yahoo’s desktop search. I’m […]

I’ve received several e-mails from owners of web sites asking me to link to their site in order to boost their Pagerank on Google. The sites were unrelated to mine. I politely but firmly informed each of them that I have reported them to Google because of their request. I do this in the hope […]

Snap is a new search engine (still in Beta) that’s joining the fray of Google competitors. The tour is helpful to understand how the site works. I must say it’s the search engine with the largest font for search phrases. It’s huge! One of the main features they advertise is the ability to order the […]

I browsed around Google Labs the other day and found Google Sets which seemed quaint but not all that useful. Then I read about how other people suggested using the service and I found a few cool applications. It can be used to recommend new musicians. You put in your top three favorite artists and […]

There are some interesting results on whitespace regarding search engine referrals. It shows how dominant Google is right now, much like Internet Explorer in the browser arena. I added mine to the submissions and thought I’d include them here as well, just for kicks. Both sites get around the same amount of traffic from search […]

In the past, the only way to determine a site’s Google Pagerank was to install the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer and go to the site in question. In fact, that is almost exclusively why I used Internet Explorer, until now. Proogle Prog lets you see a site’s page rank from any browser your heart […]

In search beyond Google some interesting questions are posed regarding Google’s dominance. It also provides information about what other companies (like Microsoft) are doing to improve in this area. Be forewarned, the article is long, and I only perused it, but it made me curious about some of Google’s competitors. For instance, it mentions two […]

My coin collecting site used to be #3 on a google search for “coin collecting” but now it’s at #29. The odd thing is I didn’t change anything on the site, it just dropped on its own. I could understand if it fluctuated around a bit, but dropping by 26 spots seems excessive. Triggered by […]

Google recently added a new feature that allows you to search for the definition of a word using “define:”. It also works for acronyms. For instance, a search for define:afaik would give you the meaning of the acronym AFAIK. It’s a handy feature to have.

I got a message from an email address at a0l.com. At first I thought it was a typo or a fake, but my reply didn’t bounce, so I knew the domain was valid. That sparked my curiosity about other domains with 0’s instead of O’s. I checked g00gle.com but it was blank, so I used […]

If you create a new web site and want to get listed in Google, it would be wise to fix any potential problems. How can you tell what problems there might be? By using the poodle predictor of course. (via evolt) One of the reasons I prefer not to use frames, javascript, images, or flash […]

Ever since Google’s purchase of Blogger, hundreds of bloggers (as well as major news sites) have been speculating. I’ve read some ingenius ideas, and can’t help but wonder if the folks at Google are reading them too. Maybe, just maybe, Google bought Blogger on a whim. They’ve got the money, they like blogs, so why […]

Alltheweb.com has changed their design to look strikingly similar to another search engine which will remain nameless, but rhymes with ‘bugle.’

I rarely use Altavista to search the web but I often use babelfish to translate, so it’s of some interest to me that they have added some new features. The list is not very impressive and as far as I can tell they didn’t do anything to improve babelfish, so their efforts were nugatory. The […]

Keyword meta tags are no longer being used by search engines. It was too easy to add unrelated keywords to a page, so they use the text of the page to determine relevance. It’s actually nice, because that’s one less thing webmasters have to do for search engine optimization.

I can’t believe our dear friend is 4 today. Why, it seems like just yesterday that it was a newborn.

Too bad I didn’t get to attend the Google Dance in San Jose. It took place during the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. Google figured “it was only natural to invite everyone to come up to the Googleplex to get acquainted and get down with the Google team. The Google Dance — named […]

Someone at google must be reading my blog. I recently mentioned that they weren’t crawling blogs anymore (at least on a daily basis) and today I checked and saw dan.hersam.com/ – 25k – 30 Jul 2002 – Cached – Similar pages Kind of ironic that it cached the day I said Google wasn’t caching my […]

I’ve noticed that google is no longer caching blogs on a daily basis, but I don’t know why. Googlebot doesn’t appear to be spidering blogs as much as it used to either. Has Google lost its taste for weblogs? Did we overstep our bounds with the google bombs or is the Googlebot just tired of […]

It’s not what you might think. Google has plenty of servers to mirror the content, but alltooflat.com has done something a little bit different.

After reading that Dave is the top Dave on google, I googled Dan. With visions of grandeur, mixed with a touch of introspection, I scanned twelve results pages until I finally found myself. Google is not only a search engine, it’s an aid in your personal vision quest.

How search engines look at links – Explains how the big boys rank sites.

Google gets the most traffic. This article corroborates my theory of a few days ago. Given that information, it’s natural to want to get a good listing and I’m here to help. I pulled the above link from a very helpful article on evolt.org. I would also highly recommend reading the webmasterworld post which the […]

Does anyone use other search engines besides Google anymore? I updated my search engine submission page and realized that I haven’t used another search engine to find something on the web in months. There are a lot more paid submission sites now too while Google remains free. What search engines do you use?

Google starts answering questions – This seems to be straying from the core competency of finding results on the web. I don’t know if I’m too keen on Google spreading themselves out like this. In the past they’ve said that they do one thing and do it well. Paying experts to find answers for people […]

I think I’ve figured out the way google indexes blogs daily. It checks its list of possible blogs each day. If the site is has changed, it will update the cache with the latest version. If it is the same, then the cache goes back to the last month’s spidering of the site. It appears […]

Google says they’ll stay honest – I can only hope this remains true in spite of commercial pressure to do otherwise. The search engines who sell the top spot to the highest bidder have turned into paid advertising. You’re not getting the most relevant site, you’re just getting the site who paid the most money […]