Google are playing with a new website design for a select number of thier ‘.com’ visitors today, not too much has changed and they are keeping with the minimalist look, but have changed a few colours and replaced the default browser buttons for some nice blue images.
The biggest change comes on the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) where the navigation has moved from the top of the results to a left hand column
New Google SERP Design
Iif you cant wait for it to be rolled out worldwide, you can get a sneak peak by following these steps
1) log out of your Google account if currently logged in
Internet giant Google have announced a preview of their new upgraded search engine for developers and web masters to test. While the UI is pretty much the same , there have been quite a few ‘under the hood’ changes. Nicknamed Caffeine, the update is mainly to the algorithms and code base used by the indexing giant. It will allow more relevant results and real-time data to be returned by searches.
Microsoft and Yahoo yesterday announced a 10 year partnership to help each other on the web.
Microsoft will help Yahoo by providing Bing to power Yahoo! Search and a return in revenue generated through Yahoo’s many portals, in return Yahoo will become the “worldwide exclusive relationship sales force” for both companies helping Microsoft with its online sales and promotion.
Im not sure if this is a good thing or not, on the one hand its a shame to see an internet pioneer hang up its search engine boots in favour of the blood money it will get from Microsoft for embedding bing, but then Yahoo is a network going nowhere but downhill, used only by those that have used it since the early days or those that cant figure out how set a new homepage, missing out on the new generations as they flock to cool uncle google for their search needs, the revenue they will make from Microsoft will probably help the name Yahoo! stay in the headlights that little bit longer.
Search engine giant Google caused a global slowdown of the internet earlier today when an internal error caused millions of websites to slow down. The issue affected almost all the services provided by Google including Gmail, Google News, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google AdSense, and Google Search.
Google have blamed the fault on a routing error that caused their servers to direct traffic via Asia which caused a bit of a traffic jam as the western world went to Asia and back.
This is another frustrating reminder of how so many websites are tied into the mountain view factory, my own website was experiencing delays while browsers tried to access the analytics’s javascript from the Google servers. This has once again brought up that question of do we rely too heavily on Google and its services?
When an error by a third party causes a major issue with your website resulting in a delayed page load, would you continue to use them and their services? Or is it because the fault was caused by Google we should just ignore it?
I was showing a friend around my website at the time the fault was occurring and pages were taking a long time to load, but when we browsed the site via chrome the page didn’t load at all, I put it down to the internet connection in my office as it sometimes plays up and a lot of other sites were loading slowly. If I had been showing a potential customer around my site or I ran an e-commerce website this would have been a critical blow to my business, in terms of potential sales and what impression would my slow loading website give?
The main cause of the slowdown was due to the analytics and adsence code. As Google host these on their own servers each website that has it installed has to make a call to the Google servers to download the javascript files, as most browsers don’t render a page until it has received the html code, this results in a blank screen if there is an issue including a remote file.
I think we need to change the way we include remote files, I for one am going to change the way my site uses the analytics code so I use an ajax request to trigger the javascript rather than including it on the page. I have noticed lots of sites pause when trying to load analytics in the past and this way my site will continue to work even if Google send my visitors on a trip around the world.
Search engine giant Google has fired a cannon ball into the browser war by releasing a television advert to inform the public of their own alternative to Internet Explorer.
Google is desperate to raise the profile of Chrome as so far only converting 1.4% of internet users to its browser. The clip was originally made for YouTube by a team inside Google Japan, but due to popularity they have decided to release it via popular television networks. Initially only in the US, if trials and uptake of chrome prove positive they may roll out to other countries aswell.
This could prove very successful for Google and I think this will definitely help them push up their market share. When did you last see an advert for Firefox or Internet Explorer when not on a company owned or fanboy site? I think we are definatly going to see an Upgrade to Internet explorer 8 advert very soon.
