the life of a web developer » T’Internet News

Google open a fresh pot

Gavin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:24:55 +0000

Google last night announced they have completed their migration to their new web indexing system known as ‘Caffeine’.

This new system basically allows them to push anything Googlebot finds into the main index in seconds rather than weeks.

Previously Googlebot would crawl the web, find a site, then submit its content to another system for processing. This other system would then sort and process the content and work out what its all about. It would then pass it to another system for inclusion in the index. This was a time consuming process and was also done in batches, which means your site would have to wait for all the other sites in the same batch to be processed before being submitted to the index.

The new system is different, rather than doing things in large batches, it will work on smaller portions, more portions at the same time and submit them all to the index straight away, allowing users of the search engine to see information much much quicker, and this is just the start!

Image copyright of Google

There are several rumours floating around about what lies in store next for Google users and their shot of caffeine. But for now we will have to wait and just enjoy our new “real-time” search results.

You can real the full article on the Google Webmaster Blog

What happened to the design?

Gavin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:12:53 +0000

Today, one or two of you may notice the site looks a little different. That’s because the style sheets for both my site and the blog have been removed for one international day (that’s about 48 hours to you and me) to celebrate CSS Naked Day.

Every year, website developers across the world remove their style-sheets and show off their to help promote web standards. Its a great opportunity to double check and show people that your website is written for and accessible to all.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Google trial website design

Gavin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:16:55 +0000

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

2) goto http://google.com/ncr

3) type the following javascript into your address bar to add a cookie to your browser

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com"); alert('cookie added');

4) reload the page and you should see the new design…

Googles Nov 09 Redesign

UPDATE:

if you would like to remove the cookie from your browser, them enter the following into your address bar

javascript:void(document.cookie='PREF=20b6e4c2f44943bb;path=/;domain=.google.com;expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2000 00:00:00 GMT'); alert('cookie removed');

googles new search engine

Gavin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:36:13 +0000

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.

You can preview the new search engine by visiting the sandbox at – http://www2.sandbox.google.com

If you would like to test country/language specific results you will need to edit the query parameters

Bing to power Yahoo

Gavin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:50:21 +0000

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.

You can read more on the Yahoo! corporate Blog or the special site set-up to answer your questions.

Google error causes Internet slowdown

Gavin — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:47:29 +0000

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.

browser war continues…

Gavin — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:05:45 +0000

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.

Not seen the advert yet? here it is…

new search engine, a rival to google?

Gavin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:12:16 +0000

A British physicist, Stephen Wolfram, has announced today that he plans to release a new search engine that is so powerful that it has been suggested by a leading expert as “so powerful, it could be as important as Google. The search engine is due to be released in the next two months ( may 2009 ) and is his attempt to resolve the failures of search engines available today.

“A rival to google” is a big claim to make and this has been claimed by the makers of every search engine released since the boys and girls at the mountain view chocolate factory positioned themselves top of the pile, remember cuil.com anyone?? So we will have to wait and see what happens with Wolfram Alpha, but i do hope they come up with a better name…

you can read the blog post @ blog.wolfram.com
and view the new search engine (you cant search yet though) and signup for latest news @ www.wolframalpha.com

and the time is….. 1234567890

Gavin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:38:49 +0000

At 11.31 pm GMT yesterday UNIX fans across the globe celebrated and partied into the night as the “epoch time” clock reached the historic time of 1234567890.The clock was started on the 1st January 1970 and is used to measure ‘Coordinated Universal Time’ on all UNIX based systems.

While the majority of fans are celebrating this anniversary, there are those that are looking to the future and the issue of what happens whenepoch time runs out!

The system was designed to measure time in 32bit, which means it can olny store 4,294,967,296 seconds or 136 years. So on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 UNIX systems will effectively restart their clocks. This is being referred to as the Unix Millennium Bug, due to the similarities with the Millennium Bug caused by the date roll over to 2000. Not that big a deal you may think, nothing happened in 2000, but as UNIX servers run everything from ATM machines to air traffic control systems, not to mention the most part of the internet, I for one am glad a few computer scientists are looking into the problem.

Plans are already in motion to upgrade the system to use 64 bit, which would last for about 293 billion years giving future generations something to worry about.

You can read more on this story on the following sites;

the times online

Google makes a ‘Boo-Boo’

Gavin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:57:54 +0000

Someone at Google will be looking for a new job this weekend after accidentally adding an ‘/’ to the list of malware sites identified by StopBadware.org The search engine giant uses StopBadware.org to identify websites as containing malware, by adding a ‘/’ to the list it ment any website with a ‘/’ in the address ( that would be all of them ) were incorrectly marked as infected.

At 3.30pm yesterday, anyone searching google for any kind of search term were prompted with a warning that the site may possible contain some “dodgy” software and may harm their computer. While it only lasted for 40 mins while their “rapid responce team” removed the affending item ( 40 mins to remove a ‘/’ not that quick if you as me ) it kind of asks the question, should we really place all our SEO eggs in Googles basket??

Now I admit I’m not a real fan of Google as the biggest hypocrites on the internet but they do what they do well so you have to give it to them, but we must remember that they aren’t the only search engine around and if something were to happen to google, e.g. their servers shut down again, those that only focus on google will be left in the cold.

Webmaster tools, analytics, adwords all great but remember both yahoo and micro*cough*soft*cough* (find it hard to say that) also have their own versions.

Anyway enough of me follow the links below to read and make your own minds up