Just found a way to check which pages of a website are in Google’s supplemental index. Might be handy because if your pages are in the supplemental index, that explains why that don’t show up in the normal results.
For example, see how many pages of digg.com are in the supplemental index:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.digg.com%2F+***
So, how does it work? Just perform this query: ” site:www.domain.com/ *** “
Interesting post over at Google blogoscoped, people have found a blacklist and a whitelist which is probably used for Google’s ‘safe browsing’ functionality. All that time I was thinking that Google had this ‘smart discovery’ for phishing sites, now it turns out that it is just a good old blacklist!
Oh, but wait, the fact that they also need a whitelist must mean that they do use some auto-discovery. Apparently it works a bit too well occasionaly, so they included a whitelist for sites that are known to be safe. Still interesting though.
Update: more about the lists can be read at the mozilla wiki, might be handy if you plan to use the lists in your own application.
Just came across an announcement of Xtech 2007.
The theme of the conference for 2007 is “The Ubiquitous Web”. A keynote will be delivered by Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”. Among other things XTech 2007 will cover:
– ubiquitous computing and mobile devices
– linking real life artifacts into the web
– how the web and open data is affecting communities, businesses and science
Sounds really interesting so I think I will try to be there.
According to australian research, sex and pornography are no longer the most popular search topics on the web. Professor Amanda Spinks from Queensland University of Technology’s says that business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, are currently more popular than sex.
The research was performed in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, together they analysed up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile. Apparently they didn’t make use of AOL’s logfiles that were are available online.
A few explanations that Prof. Spinks has:
– “More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.”
– “The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 90s.”
– “Back in the 90s, there wasn’t as much business information on the web.”
To be honest, I’m not really convinced. I would love to read a more detailed paper about how the research was performed. Looking at the statistics of one of the major Dutch search engines (where I happen to work at), I can only draw the conclusion that sex does still dominate the search topics.
So, you’ve been a crocodile hunter for most of your live. Never afraid, even not for the biggest crocodiles. Then, when you enjoy the beautyfull underwater-world of Great Barriere Reef, you get strucked by a stingray and die. What a story.
A couple of days later, Steve Irwin (the crocodile hunter who we are talking about) is almost dominating the web. His own website can’t deal with the high number of requests and is seriously offline. In all of the major search engines, “Steve Irwin” and “Crocodile Hunter” are among the most executed queries. A tribute to Steve is one of the most viewed videos on youtube. This weeks most popular story on digg is about Steve as well.
It’s also remarkable to see the huge power of consumer generated content. The wikipedia page about Steve Irwin is already completely up-to-date, where MS Encarta doesn’t even seem to know who Steve Irwin is.
So, what lessons can we learn from this?
a) never come too close to a frightened stingray
b) become a crocodile hunter and die tragically if you really (and I mean really) nead a lot of traffic to your website
After some posts as guestblogger here and there, I decided the time was right to start a blog of my own. So I grabbed the latest wordpress version, did some slight theme modifications and uploaded it to my webserver. Ready to rock.
Then it happens, you enter the admin of your blog and see this default tagline: “Just another wordpress weblog”. Right, they do have a point there. This is just another weblog, having changed the tagline doesn’t make a hell lot of difference. So why even bother?
Well… mainly because I enjoy blogging. I’m reading and discussing the webnews day-in day-out, why not discuss it online as well? Besides that, I think that blogging on a regular basis will force me to think about things that I would have skipped otherwise. Last, but not least, I really hope to learn a lot from the discussion with readers of my blog.
Alright, time to study the wordpress widgets a bit more. Anyone who can recommend me some tagging & social bookmarking widgets?