ajb{log}: learn something new each day

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

In case you haven’t noticed, Yahoo! recently had another redesign of its homepage. Placing the logo at the center just like the old times.

(March 25, 2008)

(October 17, 1996)

Seems a lot cleaner than the previous ones. Do you like it? I do!

–aj

Stumpedia recently launched and claims to be a human-powered search.

Initial use proves that the search engine is fast (not super fast but OK fast). However, it still lacks content. Probably due to the fact that users might have to submit a site to be added to their database plus you need to signup to do that. Not sure if they have a bot to crawl after you added the main domain though.

One thing I noticed on the front page. Stumpedia is using Friendster’s old image from 2003. While that image probably made Friendster popular in the Philippines. Copying and re-using it on your website will just not do you any good in many ways. In fact, it’s probably better to clean up the frontpage of Stumpedia.

Here’s an image from Friendster taken on February 2003

And here’s Stumpedia’s homepage

And although that plagiarism is the greatest form of flattery, I think the site a lot better without Friendster’s image. It reminds us of how uber slow Friendster at that time.

Besides, you might get an email from Friendster to take the image down.

We’ll see where this goes.

–aj

There’s a newly launched website called Crgslst (mind you, without the vowels).

What is it? It’s an ajax-powered search tool to search items in craigslist. They also claim to scour multiple cities quickly - a feature craigslist doesn’t yet have.

Well, how do they do it? They dynamically fetch RSS feeds at Craigslist when you search.

There is something I don’t like with the service (for now, hope they improve it). They don’t have other locations aside from some popular US areas. The site can only be viewed optimally using a wide monitor. If you have a small monitor, you will see horizontal scrollbars as you search. It works on small monitors though if you don’t mind the scrollbars.

Overall, the site is very simple, easy-to-use and pretty cool. Notably because of it’s no-browser-reload (ajax) functionality.

The site’s developers (superhero.es) did a good job keeping the user interface as simple as possible.

Kudos to you guys! Hope to see other locations soon.

Cheers!

–aj

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

Yahoo! just launched their OpenID service. 248 million users will now have the ability to login to any website that supports OpenID 2.0 authentication (link) and that my friend, is a huge boost to OpenIDs initiative.

Here’s Jeremy Zawodny and Allen Tom discussing OpenID at Yahoo.

Visit http://openid.yahoo.com now and setup your account. When I get the time, I’ll implement OpenID to all the sites I maintain. Should be a very cool addition to any site. Jump in the bandwagon now!

–aj

Yahoo! has a cool new project. Fire Eagle.

According to their site, Fire Eagle is a new way to share your location with friends or with other websites and services. It’s built on open APIs so that developers can build all kinds of applications that respond to your location.

Sounds really cool! Can’t wait to be a tester.

–aj