Google Maps is a great resource and I think it's one of the very best things that they've done. They've now added a really nice new feature - when you look for a location it brings up an opportunity to explore the area through photographs, video and user contributed maps. They've provided some very useful help on how to contribute your own material. An example of what you'll find is below:
Imagine my surprise when I did an Everton search on Google this morning. Up pops the following:
Quite why they've decided to make this available so very late in the season I'm not entirely sure, but for those of us who are interested in football, it's a welcome step. I do however wonder where they're getting the data from, since they don't say. There is an organisation called Football DataCo Ltd (link to Wikipedia, so treat with caution), which is a company that the industry has granted the power to provide content and allow organisations like newspapers to reproduce that information on payment of a fee. If Google hasn't paid this then they may be in violation, so this particular service might just disappear quickly!
Google accounts for more than a third of UK traffic.
Online intelligence service Hitwise reveals that the top 100 Google Internet properties sent over one third of all Internet traffic to websites in the UK during March 2008. A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited web properties in the UK that are owned by Google Inc. accounted for 36.55% of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in the UK during March 2008, up from 30.19% in March 2007.
The most visited Google property in the UK is www.google.co.uk and, with a market share of 7.77% of all UK Internet visits in March, it was also the most visited website in the UK last month. www.google.co.uk was also the website that sent most traffic to other websites during March, accounting for 27.48% of upstream traffic to all categories. This was followed by www.google.com , which had a market share of 1.70% and accounted for 4.43% of all upstream traffic in March.
One of the things that I'm often asked on training courses is 'how can I find out more information about a particular website?' Google has now added 'whois' as a search variable. If you follow this link: whois philb.com. you'll get to see something that looks remarkably like this:
Now that's vaguely useful because it tells you a little about the site - which is that it's been around for over 11 years. If we follow the link there's a whole bunch more information that's available as well, from the DomainTools site. You get to see title, thumbshot, historical thumbshots (4 in my case), related sites, a lot of SEO material, links in DMOZ, Wikipedia, registry data, server data and so on. Very useful material if you're researching a site. Thanks to Danny over at searchengineland for the heads up.
Google News has started to add in quotes - the link goes to a search for Gordon Brown and shows a quote about the news results. This seems to limited to politicians and celebrities at the moment.
I'm not sure if anyone else has seen this, but it's the first time it's popped up in my results - you can now do a site search directly from Google results. The link goes to a search for Argos and up pops a little box allowing you to search the directly as the image below shows:
I'm a firm fan of Google custom search engines - I've created a lot of them for my site and have embedded them in various places - they're one of the things that Google has done really well. However, when I talk about them on training days one of the questions that often comes up is how to find them. Browsing around today I found Guide To Custom Search Engines (CSEs). This site is not affiliated with Google, and I'm not sure how up to date it is, but it lists a lot of engines in various subject areas, so it might be worth taking a look.
Alternatively, why not use Google to find them for yourself? The base URL is always the same, so you can start with site:google.com inurl:cse inurl:coop This gets you about 48,000 results, and then you can simply add on more terms as needed. Adding 'library' for example reduces the number to 448 engines. I did try librar* as my search term, but Google decided that my search was too similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application and declined to complete it. I got around that by adding in (library OR librarian OR libraries) produced a total of 470 custom search engines.
From the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:. Google has begun crawling through content via HTML forms. They're doing this in a small way, but it's an interesting development, which means that they can capture information that would have otherwise been hidden.
APRIL 1st is the annual day without Google.
Do you think you can manage for a day without Google? This is the challenge being set out by Alt Search Engines, and they're providing you with a a list of different options. I've got a couple of collections of my own you could take a look at - there's the 'Which Search Engine When?' page or the collection of 130+ search engines on my Web Search Engines page.
I'd be really interested to see what sort of experience you have, or indeed if you simply can't cope with the idea of not using the Big G for a day.
gmailspam
Originally uploaded by Philipbradley.
Looking through my Gmail spam folder yesterday I was a little surprised to see that it had identified a Google news alert as spam. Their spam filter does seem to be getting a little flaky, since I'm getting more spam into my account, and there's no doubt at to exactly what it is.
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