pf » Tag: google on Pete Freitag's Blog

I saw recently on the Google blog that the Googlebot will start submitting web forms.

Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form.

Here's another little known feature about the sitemaps protocol, you can actually ping search engines and crawlers to tell them about your sitemap, or to tell them that it has changed.

Just a quick tip for those of you that are building XML sitemaps for your web sites. You can now add a line to your robots.txt file to include a pointer to your sitemap file, it would look like this:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.

The amount of data out there via API's is increadible these days. For instance you can take an address, and get the latitude and longitude using Google's GeoCoding API.

I am using this API along with some others to build a pretty some interesting stuff (more on that when its public).

I saw this curious line in my log files today:

212.36.25.102 - - [06/Dec/2006:17:00:50 +0000] "POST /suggest.cfm HTTP/1.1" 200 232 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

That's GoogleBot doing a POST operation to suggest.

I just got an email from Google stating that Google Checkout transactions will be free until the end of the year:

From November 8 through December 31, 2006, we'll process all of your Checkout transactions for free, even if you aren't an AdWords advertiser.

I went ahead and started a ColdFusion search engine with Google Coop.

Google's GMail has a nice way of allowing you to add multiple attachments to an email. Rather than showing you 10 file upload boxes at once, the user attaches a file, you can click a button to add another attachment.

Did you know that you can track JavaScript events with Google Analytics? I just found this out... It's pretty cool, because allows you to track things like outbound link clicks, AJAX calls, static files, and more.

I just launched a new site this morning called JobMaps. It uses the Indeed Job Search Engine, and the Google Maps API to show you just exactally where the job your searching for is located. I think the site will be pretty handy for people looking for jobs in a large area (such as an entire state).

I can't help but thinking that Amazon's new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service, and their S3 storage service are being launched to compete with Google. Or at least help decrease Google's dominance (and make some bucks in the process).

Jay Pipes is a co-author of the recently published Pro MySQL recently spoke at Google on MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices

You can check out a video of the presentation on Google Video



There is also a good video from Google called The Paradox of Choice:

Google's blogger service has added audio support for CAPTCHA codes. I have pointed out in the past that I don't like them because they aren't accessible to people who are blind or have poor vision.

There is a good presentation on Google Video called How To Break Web Software - A look at security vulnerabilities in web software given by Mike Andrews to Google staff. Mike's book also happens to be called How to break web software.

Joshua Bloch has a good presentation outline called How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters. Joshua is a Principal Software Engineer for Google, before that an architect in Sun's Core Java Platform Group (he designed several of the standard java API's). Josh also wrote Effective Java.

Here's a great example showing that it takes more than just a higher PageRank to be the #1 result in google for a given query. If you do a search for freitag on Google, you will notice that freitag.ch (the guys that make Freitag Bags, page rank of 4) beats my blog petefreitag.com (page rank of 7).

It appears that Google has expanded on the stats that they offer to webmasters. The stats were previously available only to those with a sitemap defined, but now you can access them just by telling them your url, and verifying.

They also provide more stats than they did a few months ago.

I noticed that google rolled out an update for their pageranks today. The pagerank you see from google toolbar, or pagerank status (firefox extension) are only updated around every two months.

Google does this to keep people guessing.

Here are four things I didn't know you could do in a google search until recently:

Fuzzy Search - Search for ~music player, and google searches for music player, mp3 player, audio player, and other words that have similar meanings to music.

Google has no doubt not suprised anyone with their new Blog Search BETA.

What is suprising is the search result quality. I was hoping the Google would use their immense trust of brain power to come up with a blog search that produces good accurate and relavent results. But they didn't.

In addition to Google Site verification I also noticed today that Google sitemaps is now accepting formats other than their sitemaps protocol schmea.

Google sitemaps now accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds.

I just noticed today that you can verify that you own a web site from within the google sitemaps website. The process is simple - Google will tell you to create a file on your site (something like /GOOGLEea6f95a80579477e.html), then they check to see if its there.

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, thats why I like cheat sheets.

Ignore the fact that this page looks like it was made in 1995, because the content on it is quite relevant. It contains a list of over 100 factors that effect your ranking, either positively or negatively in Google (and they don't hurt your standings in other search engines).

PJ Hyett has discovered that his out of date google sitemap was the reason for his drop in traffic from google. So if you created a sitemap when they first came out and forgot about it, you either want to keep it updated (creating it dynamically would be a good way to go), or remove it from google.

Google recently held a webinar for AdSense publishers. They gave out some adsense optimization tips that they have gathered over the past few years. The transcript is pretty lengthy, so here's the summary:

Ad Location - "the middle, above the fold location perform best.

Google has introduced an XML schema for describing your site structure, and update frequency, it's called the Google Sitemap Protocol. The protocol is offered under a creative commons license.

Jason Fried of 37Signals writes about some of the potential problems that Google Web Accelerator can cause in your web applications, due to the use of Prefetching within the product.

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link.

Mozilla browsers support a feature called link prefetching, which allows a web page to tell the browser to prefetch a url if it is idle. Google has been using this technique in their search results, telling Mozilla to start loading the first result. I also noticed that MXNA 2.

Google has launched a new site called Google Code it is Google's place for Open Source software.

Right now all the projects listed are mostly C/C++, with one Python project.

I just logged into my Google AdSense account, and noticed that they updated the terms, and also are introducing AdLinks.

Ad Links are a new form of text advertising that we're offering to our AdSense publishers.

I have noticed that new web pages don't get a page rank right away, it actually takes quite a while. I checked on a couple sites including my blog, and it looks like it takes about two months to get a page rank assigned to your page.

To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button.