Moving domains – an expert experiments

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Back in April Google guru Matt Cutts decided to move his blog from his www.mattcutts.com domain to another that he owns, www.dullest.com, changing host and ip address at the same time. All things that can have an impact on how your website performs both for visitors and for search engines. Now he’s moved it back, […]

Google’s Wonder Wheel

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Google are rolling out various search options that, in theory, will change the way you search for things. It’s unclear how widely available they are at the moment, but plenty of people are seeing a small ‘show options’ link at the top of their search results, which opens up  a new page of tools to […]

Wolfram Alpha Bologna Conundrum

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Like many people over the last couple of days, I’ve headed over to Wolfram Alpha to see this new engine that will supposedly provide definitive answers to factual queries. An ‘answer engine’ as it were, as opposed to Google’s search engine. It’s early days, and perhaps unfair to start hitting out at the results provided […]

Matt Cutts is a big fan of Google’s ‘Spellmeleon’ – should you be too?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

The head of Google’s web-spam team, Matt Cutts has been talking about some features that are already in google’s search results, though you may not have noticed them. In particular he’s been talking about the google spell-checking features – giving us a glimpse into the internal workings by revealing two different features and their inhouse […]

Learning a lesson from Facebook’s localisation into Hindi

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Localisation is the over-technical term used by software developers to describe the translation of their programs into other languages. It serves a purpose, though, to stress that translation is far more than simply substituting words from one language to another. For a program to work in different markets different cultures need to be taken into […]

Overoptimistic about Twitter search

Friday, April 24th, 2009

There was an interesting article last month about twitter search, which raises questions for any prospective webmaster – given that search engine optimisation is, rightly, a major concern in the design and upkeep of a site. The article, published in twitip.com, will have pleased twitter executives as it – with more than a little hyperbole […]