Google Instant Search

Poor old Microsoft Bing.
They spend a fortune marketing, improving and building up their search engine.
They try to convince mr and mrs public that their search is quick, clean and more importantly relevant when returning results the number of users begins to slowly rise again and then BANG! Mr Google from across the street releases Google Instant Search.

I pride myself on not being a geeky developer or blogger (perhaps thats a contradiction of terms though!) but when I saw Google instant search in action yesterday for the first time, I found myself saying to my wife "Look at this it's really damn impressive".

She looked at me and said "What? It's just searching for stuff, isn't it supposed to do that?"

It was at that stage I realised how for granted we take technology these days.

When I heard about instant search I was scepticle about how instant it would actually be, expecting a fair bit of lag but I have to admit Instant search is. . . . . well it's pretty instant.

For those of you that have not tried it yet, it returns and amends results as you type.

So if for example I start typing my name and from the very first letter I get a list of results, it updates pretty much as quickly as I can type until I find the correct results.

This could save up to 350 million hours annually based on googles weekly users of approx 1 billion!

To protect children and other sensitive people google instant search will also block any sites the are deemed violent, hateful or porngraphic.

Google at present handle about two thirds of all internet search results, microsoft and yahoo handle a majority of the rest and with this huge jump google are likely to mop up more of that in coming months.

How will Bing and Yahoo respond? I really don't know. But respond they must and to save their own skins it best be quick in fact in better be instant!

Google Geeks

The guys over at google have released some pretty amazing tools and applications over the last couple of years.
But have you noticed that when you sign up for a google account and complete your google profile there's a question there saying "What superpower would you want the most?"

Apparantly this started as a discussion between some google engineers an developers who decided to open the question up to find out an answer.

What was the winning answer?
Well surprisingly to me it was the power of teleportation.
The obvious such as flight and invisibility were up there too but teleportation won the day.
I then got to thinking . . . . is there actually a superhero tat does teleport? Apart from DR Who who more timetravels than teleports, I can;t think of any but then again superheroes aren't really my thing!

Why your archive may be worth a small fortune.

If you are a blogger or run a website that carries plenty of editorial content, such as reviews, articles and news and you have a good history of content the chances are you have something quite valuable.

SEO agencies are these days snapping up publishers, trying to use their sites as SEO hubs for clients.

How does this work?
Well if you have an article on a niche subject such as holidays abroad, that article gets indexed by the main search engines and ranked well, other companies for example a Travel agents may wish to use your well ranked page to get a link back to its own site. You could contact local travel agents saying the page gets x thousand of hits a month and see if they would like to pay you for a link added in to the article.
By having their url on the article their SEO is improved because it features on a page with an already good ranking.
It's a very simple and effective way to improve their own ranking by piggy backing your content.


The older the better
The other interesting thing about this kind of link is that your older content is therefore probably more valuable than your new content as it has a longer index. I.E. has been trawled by more search engines and achieved a greater ranking.

Your not going to get paid thousands per article but if you have thousands of articles you can quickly see why it could be a big money spiner to have these all available to sell.

Expect to see more SEO agencies popping up on the web in the coming months as people identify the prospects in comparison to traditional advertising mediums such as banners and mpu's etc.

It's been a while

Hi all,
Well it's been WAY too long since I added any posts to this blog.
Both work and family life have been hectic and although that is not a great excuse, it's as much of an expanation as I can give!

So I'm going to try and keep it more updated from now on.

Nathan

Digital Editiors Network Meeting - Preston UCLAN 3rd Feb 2009

Yesterday I attended the Digital Editors Network meeting at the UCLAN buildings in Preston (UK).

I have wanted to attend in the past with my colleagues Christian Dunn and Martin Wright but work commitments have got in the way. Christian and Martin have always felt the events valuable and I was glad to finally get a chance to get in on the act.

I was unsure of how much I, as a developer, would benefit from the event but wanted to go out of interest anyway plus the line up sounded good so off to Preston we went battling through snow drifts of up to ...... well about 3 inches!!

Mark Skipworth, Executive Editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph opened the event and I was impressed with Mark's honesty and openess where he discussed the way the Telegraph work and the challenges they have faced and in some cases still do face in getting people to change their working practices to fit in with web AND print.

Mark made it clear that they are very much a Web First company and do now see themselves as an Internet service first and foremost. With all of their copy being selected for Internet and then copy for print is selected from that list and expanded on where necessarry for in paper.

All subs are trained to put news online first and then subbed again for paper.

Second up on the agenda was Patrick Fleming from the British Library who was going to discuss digital archiving. Unfortunately though Patrick got snowed off which brought a laugh to the room as there where attendees there from South Africa, North America and of course people from all over the UK, who had managed to make it.

So the next speaker was Kevin Anderson, who was in my opinion the best speaker there. Kevin is the Guardian Blogs editor and recently covered the US elections by driving 4,000 miles across the states in 3 weeks updating the world with his journey via a combination of tools. Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and of course the Guardian blog.

His experiences really got me thinking and made me realise just how far we have come in the past 15 years or so.
Back in 1995 I spent a fair bit of time in the United States. My parents where working out there at the time so I went to spend a few months with them.
At one stage a friend of mine and I decided whilst in the States it was only right that we do a road trip. We didn't really look at a map or plan anything we just decided to head West!
Our starting point was a small town in Ohio called Willard. It was a great little town full of really friendly people and from there we planned to get to L.A. via Las Vegas. But that was the extent of our plans! The journey lasted just 12 days, but that journey covered just over 4,700 miles!

What struck home to me though was that apart from some great memories I have no record of that journey I made. Had I made that journey now I would have gone about it's record in exactly the same way as Kevin and would have that record indefinately.

However the beauty of the internet is that I can probably retrace my journey using those same tools which I intend on doing in the next week or two. I'll post the info on here for anyone interested.

Erik Ulken's presentation was hit by the dreaded live link problem of not being able to establish a connection. Which was a pity and obviously hindered would have been a popular presentation. Erik is the former L A times online editor and was talking about various forms of story building. I'll find some links to some of the things he's been invloved in and update on here later.

The meeting in whole was very good. I certainly hope to attend again.
I am not going to say I learned anything new and amazing but what I did learn is that the way we are trying to do things for our company is much the way others are trying to do things too. Christian, Martin and myself are trying to put together a great site for NWN Media and it was reassuring to hear that other larger businesses than us suffer the same niggles and set backs as us.
To hear that kind of thing from the likes of the names above, well it makes me believe we are on the right track.

Can even Google ride the recession?

People see the internet as a living breathing thing. It changes by the second, advances by the hour and more and more people use it by the day.

Many people forget about the goings on of 2000/2001 (read more below) and seem to think that websites, due to relatively low overheads will be more immune to the impending recession we now face.

Well think that at your own peril!

Even google are at present preparing themselves for the recession.
Their share price is at a 3 year low and has halved in the last year.
Every company peaks! And maybe, just maybe google has peaked and is now seeing a downturn. It'll take a while for the boys like Yahoo and MSN to catchup but with google this past month reversing certain "Rules" they had, such as allowing gambling firms to take out sponsored selling and attempting to push You-Tube into E-commerce. They are seriously throwing their weight about trying to bring in extra revenues.

Established websites are cutting their marketing budgets and smaller websites are pushing less into google adwords and more into SEO, hoping the longer term effects of good seo will see their sites thrive or at least survive.

All of this will hit google hard over the next 8 months or so. Maybe they are big enough to ride the storm but the term "The bigger you are the harder you fall." has never seemed more apt!


In 2000 /2001 there was a big "dot.com bubble burst" which saw many websites, which had received millions of pounds of investment thrown at them, go POP!

The stock markets in western nations had watched stock valuations rise faster than usual and with less caution. This quickly turned into a gold rush.
Venture capitalists suddenly wanted a dot.com or a part of a dot.com.
Being dot.com's these companies where nigh on impossible to value, but simply based on the amount of investment received many individuals who had the intitial ideas for these websites, found themselves on paper at least to be suddenly multi-millionaires.

It didn't take long of course for the stock market to step back and look at these sites and realise they where never in a million years going to recoup the tens of millions invested in them. That's when it all fell flat on it's face!

The Dot-com bubble crash wiped out $5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002.

Famously Boo.com set out to become a global online fashion empire. They spent about £100m in a space of 6 months, the site launched in Autumn 1999 and was placed into receivership in May 2000.

Yahoo went from a high stock price of $128 at the peak of the bubble to a low of $4 at the end.

Lycos where the "google of their day" and where sold to Terra Networks for $12.5 billion in 2000, they where sold on for just $95 million dollars three and a half years later.

Infospace stock price hit $1,305 per share in March 2000 but by April the following year the price had crashed to $22 !!

Facebook in the workplace

It seems to be a trend these days for companies to ban the use of sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc. for personal use during the working day. Understandable to a point I would have to say, but I would also add that I think it’s also important for staff to have a certain amount of freedom in the workplace and as long as they still produce results in their respective field a little surfing of the web is a small price to pay for a happier workforce.

The truth is that people will find another equally unproductive way to take up that 10 minutes or so of time, only in that 10 minutes they will moan to the person who they are nearest to about being unhappy in their work and the conditions of the place that they work being unbearable.

A former MD of mine told me that I should try and take a 10 minute break from my monitor each hour and break up the day by surfing the web when things where quiet. He added that in my role as a web developer it was good to keep up with popular sites even if they had no relevance to my work. His philosophy was that if I and the other employees where treated as adults and allowed to govern our own web usage we would A) be happier in our roles and B) be more likely to work overtime (which is generally unpaid in this profession) as and when required.

It resulted in me working 7 days a week at some periods to ensure deadlines where met and clients kept happy, but amazingly I still enjoyed and liked my job and the company I worked for.

In fairness I must add that my current employers attitude to web usage has been quite sensible to date although they have just announced a restriction, not a ban, on Facebook and similar sites.

I think also that Facebook in particular can be used as it was originally inteded as a networking site.
There are a lot of groups set up on Facebook that are good for business.

In my opinion people don’t need Facebook or alternative sites to waste time. They’ve been doing that since well before facebook or the internet as a whole was available to them. Whether it be going for a smoke break or simply chatting to a colleague for 10 minutes at a time there will always be ways to slack off.