the life of a web developer » search engine

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

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

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