Archive for the ‘Google methods & tools’ Category

Google Analytics V2 part 1

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Google’s Re-launched version of “Google Analytics” is becoming more and more appealing for all GA users.

    Most of the GA users already have access to Google Analytics Version 2, which is so profoundly different in conceptual knowledge, providing excellent background of web analytics. Whatever piece of web analytics software used (HBX, Visual Sciences, ClickTracks etc) you’ll be amazed how insightful and intelligible web analysis really is.

    The first thing I’d like to point out is the new immersive data interaction model, which sets a new benchmark for how users really interact with data. From customizable dashboards, overview reports to data presentation on key metrics manipulation. Effective communication of data via a very well thought out UI, which is perhaps the best one today amongst all web analytics tools.

    Enhanced data accessibility is by far one of the best features present in V2, both a blessing and a curse, to the amount of data we have access to. Professional key metrics offered, segmentation options being suggested, with cumulative traffic control displays an overall interesting perspective on how data is stored and discovered. Users can easily switch metrics, from standard to bottom-line to master metric trend to one of the other metrics. Drill down/ up/ around the new UI is a real pleasure.

    Rapid context searching is briefly highlighted for helping users to make the right decisions regarding plugged in context. Google Analytics Version 2 helps users get in touch with relevant context to the performance of their webpage metrics.

One of the fresh attributes that V2 has to offer is that you don’t lose valuable context as you drill down in Conversion rates (for example) for the top keyword from search engines. Comparable data & time periods at high-levels help users see valuable context throughout the console.

The Google Blog Search Experience

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Google did it again! Its innovatory system of spare design sensibility and open standard trademark defines a new page in quality software history.

    Google Blog Search excludes blogs without feeds, distinguishing a blog feed from mainstream news in a personal perspective. Published blogs partial-entry feeds suffer a damaged profile in results because most of them remain uncrawled. So what is Google plotting you might ask?

Running several parallel searches in different search blog engines, I’ve noticed that Google Blog Search automatically prefixes a URL search with the link: operator, defaulting the search to incoming link sources.  This can be a drawback at times, in terms that it doesn’t always locate incoming links as well as other engines do.

Even if Google eliminates incoming links from the same domain, a “Best of…” post, posted on most blogs, do not appear in Google Search results when the URL of a spotlighted entry is placed in the search box.

Users can subscribe to feeds of search results; the advanced search page offering date-constrained searches, URL & title searches in addition to form-based Boolean operators.

Though Google is still faster in returning search results, I am still waiting for more improvements and more detailed features throughout its system.

Google’s Reviews focus

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Google’s future revenues include a professional expertise & multi-million dollar search startup plans to compete with other market giants.

     Google’s network application “Reviews” is a definite winner in terms of movie reviews, the only thing that it covers momentarily. They have been striding for a while now, to configure custom parsers to read the custom markup schemes. It definitely got on the right development track of future review aggregation.

Nevertheless, writing a custom parser for each site that does reviews does not scale to thousands of worldwide bloggers, which are writing reviews in a different perspective.

 So if you want to aggregate all those reviews, what do you do?

One of the advantages of using hReviews comes from the large quantity of services and tools which publish reviews, artists, key events, which wait to be discovered, indexed, linked and served.

By collaborations with high representatives of media giants, Google strive to leave their personalized mark on a design of a simple format that leverage currently published reviews markup inline, without the need of duplication of all that content in the invisible metadata.

Another point to make is that it is an open advanced standard, welcome to outside recommendations by professional developers.

Unlike most micro formats orgasmic chills, Google plans to evolve rapidly throughout hReview to its highest potential.

So if you ever feel like providing a critical non-sarcastic feedback on improving their aggregation standards, publishing, indexing, and review linking, feel free to add your insightful comments.

Google’s web semantics & techniques

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

By far, Google owns the biggest database on the web today, with over 1.5 billion pages.

Google presents relevant results by using mathematical formulas to rank web pages based on the significance & importance of the pages that link to it.

  The philosophy is that high-quality websites point to other high-quality websites.

   Basically when a search is being made, Google determines web pages that meet the search criteria and then lists the most popular sites among high-quality resources at the top of the list.

Google does not seem to support full Boolean AND NOT. However, it does allow the implied Boolean minus sign (-). When multiple keywords are entered, all keywords are treated as “AND” queries. Because Google automatically returns pages that include all keywords, the plus sign (+) and the operator AND are not necessary. Also, quotation marks for phrase searching are not required as Google returns pages with keywords in close proximity.

So far, throughout its Advanced Search Page, Google supports link searching and title, domain and host searching. Using the Image, News Articles, Discussion Groups Databases, and users can search for a whole range of diverse things.

Unlike other search engines, Google offers a cached copy of each result, which can be extremely helpful if the site’s currently not available.

Beware other search engines! Google’s is going to stick around for a long time. Better fasten your seatbelts, or just start creating a professional unique development plan to dethrone Google of its highest peaks!

Validity throughout Google’s homepage

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

Recent web standards confront Google’s homepage with validity issues, in terms that is does not minimize the number of potential visitors, the lack of bandwidth control.

    Recreating Google’s homepage in a valid HTML by reducing the file size and adding several CSS rules and different attributes can be of help.

    Nevertheless, we are talking about a deprecated HTML throughout Google’s services and front page.

Experiment with XHTML Strict 1.0 along with CSS and JS files, by removing all the scripts and all the spacing you’ll end up with a deprecated page of just a couple ok K.  Be aware that CSS files tend to cache much better, especially when the same CSS modules are re-used across the webpage.

   Google isn’t using invalid markup to save bandwidth, but the reasons to why Google’s developers do not implement a valid solution, is still a puzzle to me.

Invalid markup which is also less than semantic makes for an accessibility nightmare. While Google may be easy to use for the majority of its users, using the service with any sort of disability would be a daunting task.

Highlighting bandwidth savings can be a benefit that most users can appreciate.

Google probably doesn’t worry about bandwidth costs. Only those of us who have to purchase bandwidth really care. Google doesn’t use another service provider; they are the service provider.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re not paying for bandwidth. The main point of this exercise is to show that using web standards will not increase file size, as some have argued.

What about real backward compatibility?

There’s still lot of bytes to be saved on the initial page request by extracting the CSS and JavaScript to external files. On top of that, there are lots of bytes to be saved by extracting the script event handle associations from the markup and into the JavaScript itself.

Should Google meditate on this? Of course, considering the fact, that even their mobile phone website, is not HTML valid.

Google’s Cached Pages

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

A sensible and high standard match for user’s query, Google takes a snapshot of each website, storing it as a backup-up. Every search result made includes a Cached link.  

     Be careful with that axe Eugene! Because when you click on a link, you actually go the Google cached version of the website, instead of the current version of the page. This can become quite in handy considering possible & probable overflow of information, the manager’s decision to remove the page from the www domain or just a typical Internet network interruption.

  A certain plus would be that users can access a page’s cached version faster than the page itself, considering the fact that Google has extremely fast servers.

This can be a big help, when visiting another version from a site requiring subscription or registration.

Nevertheless, if the original webpage contains more than 101 kb per text, the cached version will consist mostly of the first 101 kb.

Certain operators can be used to retrieve Google’s cached version of a page. On the cached version of a page, Google will highlight terms in your query that appear after the cache: search operator. 

Google: tips & tricks?

No. Accessibility and control!

Advanced Search Form’s Precision

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

Advanced Search Form can be the perfect & professional answer when seeking for specific & precise fields in your standard search engine.

Google’s Advanced Search Engine can exclude and select pages with like no other mainstream entertainment website.

The Advanced Search form is automatically filled in with appropriate information from your previous query — if you entered a query just before you clicked on the Advanced Search link. If you searched for a phrase, the phrase appears in the phrase search box. If you restricted your search to a specific site or domain, the domain appears in the domain box.

Clinical search requirements include language/ file format/ date/ occurrences support as well as a no filtering safe-search device.

If you’re a nocturnal power-searcher, you don’t need to open the Advanced Search page and fill in various boxes, but enter the refined query in almost any Google search box.

Page-Specific Searches finds similar pages to yours for which you own a web address URL and for finding out what pages link to a particular page. Though links are unidirectional, users can follow links from one page to another, but cannot traverse the link the other way around.

Be careful about the effects of a search operator when you use more than one of them in a standard query. There are certain rules that any other cynical user should respect, by focusing their search by using several search operators, not exclude all results when using certain operators more than once in a query or not use search operators that will cancel each other.

Nevertheless, there are a number of search operators that cannot be combined with any other; Google will certainly not return any matching documents.

However stable and hypnotic the Advanced Search Engine may become, you can choose to search for a website by just entering its address in the search box and Google will return several links concerning Google’s cache of the site, web pages that contain the URL, and all web pages from the site that Google has crawled.

Google reports paid links

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

In its recent official statements, Giant Search Engine Google announced that it worked hard to return the most relevant results for every search, by encouraging site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by search engines and users alike.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites.

“Buy PageRankâ„¢” had been the source for various site owners in their defiant attempt to improve their constant PageRank. This however, violates Google’s quality guidelines regarding technical – quality – specific guidelines.

Google’s algorithmic techniques for detecting paid links are constantly improving by welcoming user information and investigating their submissions.

Basically, it’s survival of the fittest, in which high ranking standards apposes ethical misconduct.

But will your competitors report you if they truly believe you purchased paid links?
It’s not about ethics; it’s about reality and survival.

Though buying and selling links is a natural part of the economy of the web in advertising purposes, this should not manipulate any sort of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated properly.

If site managers use consoles, instead of letting clients click on links of great interest to them, you’re already playing hard to get.

Once those IP blocks start getting registered, sites which don’t buy into PaidRank will have a fairer playing field.

I’m curious how multiple Class C farmers expect to be immune from the inevitable?