Daisy’s Blog

With a layout oddly reminescant of old roguelike games, google’s experiment with keyboard shortcuts should save ‘homerow’ style typists a large amount of time going through search results.

Here’s the scenario I envision for this: You’ve gone to the google hompage to start a search, the cursor automatically focuses onto the search query box when the page loads, so you can start typing your search keywords right away. After hitting enter to start the search, do your fingers drift back to the ‘home row?’ Those ASDF and JKL; keys that mavis beacon and so many other typing tutor programs (and perhaps keyboarding teachers) drilled into your head? I know mine do, its second nature.

With your fingers there, as your eyes scan down the page for the most relevant site or article in the search results, your index finger on the ‘J’ key will select the next result in the list. It will also scroll the page down to the end if you keep going. The ‘K’ will go back a result, also scrolling the page. The ‘Enter’ or ‘O’ keys will go to the URL of the currently selected item.

I’ve been able to very quickly locate what I want in the results with this, and without taking my hand off the keyboard and reaching for the mouse. It may not seem like a huge energy saver if you’re a hunt-and-peck typer or if you prefer to use the mouse to select things, but it is for me. I do many google searches in a day, and as a programmer I am a quite accomplished typist, if I must say so myself.

Keywords, ENTER, J->J->J, ENTER and I’ve found what I want. I had no idea that this feature was ‘missing’ until I found it. A big congrats to the developers at our favorite search engine for thinking of these small things that make life easier. Way to go!

Head on over to Google’s Experimental Search to try it for yourself.

Uncategorized google

Being a new and overwhelmed blog-writer, I’ve been struggling with what seemed like a long delay in getting my spiffy new blog indexed by everyones favorite search engine, Google. I read some on googles pages for webmasters, and the general consensus there seemed to be that waiting was in order. There wasn’t alot of detailed information about how long, wether I was looking at hours, weeks, or even months worth of looking for that first google spider coming to my blog.

Then a websearch brought me to the answer, and I’d like to share it: It might never happen unless I do more than I was expecting to. I added my url and waited, and waited. Aparently though, this only starts one part of a process, that without links from other websites (and not just any old link will do), it may never happen.

I found the answer here, at Smart IT Consulting: Google Sitemaps - The How-To What-Is FAQ

I’d recommend a thorough reading of thier FAQ’s for anyone that’s in my position, wanting to get a site listed on google, or to increase the rankings of a site already there. I sure can’t wait until I’m at that point. Hopefully now that I’m back on the right track, and I know what I can do to make this work, I’ll be there soon.

Blogging, Technology google, webmasters

Working at a web hosting company, I frequently get asked questions about search engine optimization. I’m definately no expert in that arena, infact I’ve offered only the simplest of advice and never gone into detail for a customer that was looking for SEO. What I usually say is to make sure the content is original, and doesn’t look like spam, then use a handful of relevant keywords and a title that describes the page instead of advertising for it.

That has worked surprisingly well for me and for a few of the customers I advised to try it, but its vague. It doesn’t satisfy the people that really need to get into the nuts and bolts of how what they write affects where they appear on the search results pages. I need to get myself more information so that I can be more informative when people ask. Perhaps a bit more informative, but I still feel I’m dabbling in an art that’s more magic than science.

One of the things I’ve been asked, specifically, is about the so-called ‘duplicate content penalty’ from google. As in, multiple pages on your domain that display the same results being penalized. I went in search of, and found quickly and answer for this. It does not happen.

According to Susan Moskwa of Google in a Blog Entry:

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

So, all of those cgi applications, e-commerce programs, and on and on, ARE OK. When they see different urls, for example HTTP GET strings with long series of parameters that can appear in different orders, they combine the results of the duplicate pages, and assign the search engines ‘value’ to the combined page, represented by one of the URL’s. So /store/catalog.asp?cat=turban&color=black and /store/catalog.asp?color=black&cat=turban return the same results, and get grouped together and represented by one of the urls, which gets chosen nondeterministically by the crawler.

Its not penalized! But then again, you can’t choose the url that represents your content that way either. Not so good. What do you do if you want or need to do that? The answer is to use a Sitemap (note the capital ‘S’).

So, if that’s not the duplicate content that does get penalized, what is?

Spam sites, and theft, basically. Sites that scrape content from another site without adding meaningful original content, or sites that don’t differ from one another in any significant way. My next door neighbor in one of the houses I used to live in loved to do Multi Level Marketing schemes on the web, and frequently got new ‘cookie-cutter’ web sites from the companies he signed up with, and tried to advertise them (spamvertise, actually, but that’s another story). This is why that never worked. It was just like the other 99 sites above and below him, and the web just doesn’t need another copy of that page.

So for all intents and purposes, unless you’re scraping and republishing content that’s not original, you shouldn’t have to worry about the duplicate content penalty.

Blogging, Technology google, SEO