ajb{log}: learn something new each day

If you have 45 minutes to burn. This is a Google behind the screen documentary.

–aj

Handling Large Datasets at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions video. Get the slides here.

–aj

RWW wrote a very interesting article today about Google’s plans into crawling through HTML forms.

Quoting an excerpt:

“For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made,” explained Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy in a blog post. “If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.”

Does this mean we now need to add additional access permission for the Googlebot to index our dynamic form results if we wanted to? What about forms with CAPTCHA? What If we didn’t want Googlebot to access our form results and forgot to deny it on our robots.txt file, will it be fast and easy to request removal from the Google.com SERPs?

I wildly assume that most webmasters already know that it takes time to request pages to be taken out of the Google’s SERPs. It sometimes takes days, even weeks.

There’s so much questions right now with this news that just came out. But I guess only time will tell what will really happen when it happen.

What’s your take?

–aj

Yahoo! AMP (Advertising Management Platform) coming in the 3rd quarter of 08. Will this be the “real” worthy Google Adwords competitor?

–aj

I was searching for additional htaccess information this morning when I got a malware warning from google.

Ok. That might not seem weird for most of us, but here is my question. Why do you even show it higher on search engine result pages (SERP) if you already know it is not advisable to go there? If it is malware? It is #2 for the search term “htaccess [L]“.

–aj

I guess I was wrong. The rumor last May from WSJ was true after all.

$44.6 Billion. Wow. I guess the number is so big, we can’t really understand it (especially the value). Our minds are just not hard-wired to hearing such numbers.

I hope it’s good for Yahoo! employees. I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but there are lots of competing products between Yahoo and Microsoft. Someone has to go or move on.

It’s sad for the yahooeys. But I guess it’s the only way to save the company. Now, how do you yodel Microsoft? See? It didn’t sound right eh?

Do you Yahoo Microsoft?

–aj

UPDATE: Getting a lot more interesting every minute. Yahoo may consider Google alliance

Most website owners and webmasters wonder if the site they’re managing is on Google. We often search our domain, our company name, or even our own name and some specific keywords to see if the website we’ve done a few days back has been crawled and placed on the massive index of Google.

Yes, most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals already know these things. However, for the newbies and for the rest of us, here’s a quick tutorial to know if your site’s status is in the Google index or not.

It’s a basic 2-step process to be in the know. But, you can further move forward enhancing your SEO efforts like verifying your domain, adding a sitemap, getting to know your search rank, top keywords search for a specific time, etc. at the Google Webmaster Tools.

Let’s start. Here’s how:

1) Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus

2) Enter your domain on the input box (ex. http://www.mployd.com). Click on the “Next” button

Now, if your website is in the Google index, you should be able to see this notification

And you will be asked if you want to go and manage your website at the Google Webmaster Tool

If your website isn’t listed yet on the Google index, you should see something like this

Google will also suggest that you submit a Sitemap on their Google Webmaster Tools (which will eventually help your rankings on the Google’s search engine results).

Pretty simple huh? Go and check your website now if it’s listed and I hope it is.

Cheers!

–aj

Remember The Milk (RTM) launches a Firefox extension that allows you to manage your tasks in Gmail (complete, postpone, and edit tasks), add new tasks (and connect them with your emails, contacts, and Google Calendar events), automatically add tasks for starred messages or specific labels, and more…

To use it, you’ll need to use Firefox (isn’t mentioned above yet?). Who needs IE anyway?

The guys at RTM are on steriods rapid launching products such as MilkSync (for Windows Mobile), iPhone / iPod touch App, Google Calendar integration, Google Gears Offline access this year and now Gmail integration!

So, what’s next on RTM’s list? Mac Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Live Mail integration? Maybe in 2008.

Sign-up now (FREE) if you don’t have an account yet.

Kudos to the RTM team. You rock!

–aj

Google Zeitgeist 2007 is out. Check out what has been hot (or not so hot) this year!

–aj