There’s been a lot of talk about how Twitter seems destined to be the inevitable winner in real-time search. Not so fast. Google now offers real-time search functionality, accessible through the ‘Show options’ link at the upper left corner of the results page. Just hit ‘Latest’ under the ‘Any time’ part of the column and watch commentary of the entire internet on whatever you have typed into the search field. Wow, talk about stream of consciousness.
In related news, Eric Schmidt thinks that only people who are doing something wrong have legitimate privacy concerns. Damn, I really want to like these Google guys too.

I don’t review items on Digital Media Minute that I haven’t actually used. I also operate under the assumption that even small tips have enough value to post, because the real value is the time I won’t have to take to find the tool or hint that I used previously and was happy to have. Yes, I use this site as a repository for any tech-related tips that I come across. Don’t you? Hey, we are coming up on 2,500 posts, and have been active for over six years now.

OK, with all that out of the way, let me share the easiest way I’ve found to create XML sitemaps manually for any new website you create and for which you’d like to submit an XML site map to search engines. It’s called, memorably enough, xml-sitemaps.com. Enter your URL and it quickly gives you sitemap files in compressed XML, un-compressed XML, ROR, HTML, or text format. Upload to your server then you can tell Google and the others that you did so.

Now having said this, I can also recommend the Google Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold, if you have a Wordpress site. It is simple, and free.

Have you heard that Google is planning to juice its backend, with a new sandboxed version of the search engine called caffeine? As Matt Cutts puts it, they’ll be: “rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure”, with performance improvements presumably being worked into the main site eventually.
This will have SEO folks scrambling, as everyone tries to get a handle on how they have to tweak their methods. Cutts denies that this is in response to Bing being well-received, or the Microsoft/Yahoo alliance, but I don’t remember them fishing for developer feedback so aggressively before (correct me please if I’m wrong).
I played with it, and yes I did check to see that Digital Media Minute still ranks well for some of my main keywords! Didn’t notice any change there, but things are definitely moving around in the SERPs…

Can it be that the Redmond juggernaut has pulled off the unthinkable? Have you taken a look at Bing?

When was the last time you heard the words ‘impressive’ or ‘innovative’ in the same sentence with the word ‘Microsoft’? News about tech innovation seems to be all about companies like Google and Apple, to the point that one might wonder if new Microsoft offerings are looked at objectively. One has to be impressed with the trajectories of Google and Apple in the last 10-12 years, as companies and in terms of their products, but as consumers we can’t forget that we benefit from challenges to the status quo. I just wasn’t expecting such a viable challenge from Microsoft, in search.

Miguel over at RealSoftwareDevelopment.com has done an outstanding comparison of Google and Bing, and makes a very compelling case that Bing does a better job at search than Google in four areas: search results, interface/usability, image search and video search. I assume that the size of Google’s index is far superior to anyone else, but for everyday searches (of the non-longtail variety) that may not be too relevant. If Microsoft has packaged a bunch of compelling improvements to the user experience, it’s easy to imagine people looking seriously at Bing for search, and even an incremental reversal in Google’s growing market share would be an enormous turnaround for Microsoft.

I’d been thinking that Google buying at least part of Twitter was inevitable, and I’m surprised to still see Larry Page resistant to the idea. Well, I suppose that’s exactly what you say if you are interested in buying another business.

I’ll admit that I’d like to see Twitter not get absorbed, into any other company actually. That’s why Digital Media Minute has declined to purchase part of Twitter. Ok, maybe I’m kidding. Seriously, it would have to impact the hunger with which the business was started, and that can’t have positive ramifications for the user experience.

Twitter’s incredibly rapid growth means that search has apparently fragmented along an immediacy-accuracy continuum, and Twitter’s dominance in the former is beginning to resemble Google’s lead in the latter. Of course there are already ways to integrate Twitter results into Google’s serps, and to emphasize recent data from Twitter (or anyone else) by sorting according to post date. This shows flexibility on Google’s part, but is also validation of Twitter: the hyper-recent results will often be preferred and right now they most often originate from Twitter. As mobile computing (or whatever we’ll call it) becomes as ubiquitous as your cell phone, we’ve assumed that finding your friends or a good restaurant would still start with Google. The way Twitter threatens to suddenly blindside this is fascinating.

It’s easy to poke holes in innovations. A novelty lacks the refinement that can only happen through iterations of the original. Also, relative to its established competition, a new approach is without the momentum of usage over time that amplifies acceptance in users of a tool, idea or product.

With these thoughts in mind I played around with the new knowledge engine that is www.wolframalpha.com, which went live on May 15th. I typed questions rather than keywords, and for matters of fact I usually did get my answers, and actually much more info than I requested. I also got the response several times, ‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that’, which was at least amusing the first time. Too many users at the moment relative to resources, I assumed. I resisted the impulse to ask it what was wrong, or negotiate with it.

Wolfram Alpha, per the faqs,

‘generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.’

OK, so instead of pointing me at a list of sites/pages designated as authoritative for a topic by the search engine I’m using, it attempts to answer my question itself, using something that sounds a little like a Google-style index, together with ‘computations’ upon its knowledge base. From the faqs again:

‘It can only know things that are known, and are somehow public. It only deals with facts, not opinions.’

a statement which conveys huge ambition i.e. that it will return only facts, and also a certain profound limitation, that many human concerns are outside it’s scope. Well, better a firm statement of its limitations than an implication that it will wade into gray areas and venture guesses.

One has to be impressed at least at the overall audacity of the idea here, the ‘knowledge engine’, as well as that of Wolfram Alpha taking an approach that’s quite different from traditional search engines. They claim that the tool will improve over time, and as impressed with Google as one might be, competition must be welcomed. Any innovation in getting answers can only benefit we who are searching.

Early last month, Yahoo announced that they were introducing a Robots-Nocontent for Page Sections “microformat”. Simply put you can tell Yahoo! which parts of your page are unrelated to the main content on your page. For example, you might have a navigation bar on your page that has links to other parts of your site, but you don’t want the text of those links to be indexed with the content of your page. This does not mean that Yahoo! does not spider those links, it just means that they will not include that content in the index for the page.

The robots-nocontent is very easy to implement. Simply add a class attribute with the value set to robots-nocontent to a container element and that container won’t be indexed. For example:

<div class="robots-nocontent">Some content</div>


It will be interesting to see if other search engines pick up on this much like they did with Google’s introduction of rel=”nofollow”.  Search Engine Land also has some decent coverage on this topic as well.

Philipp Lenssen has a great idea he is calling Fading Out Nofollows.  Most blog software handles the comment spam problem by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to anchors in the comments section of your blog.  The idea here is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will not follow these links during their spidering process and hence the spammer will not gain link juice from you.

The main drawback from this practice, is that it penalizes people who are posting legitimate comments on your blog.  Philipp’s idea is  a good one.  He suggests a middle  ground, where when a comment is first posted, it has the rel attribute by default.  Then after a specified period of time, the rel attribute is removed.  This gives the blogger some time to moderate the comments and delete the spam that happens to get through your filters (ie. Akismet).

In my opinion, I wonder how much the nofollow strategy is actually working.  I am getting more spam (over 1,000 comments/day) than ever.  About six months ago, I removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute altogether, and the amound of spam has remained consistant.

Wow! Did I miss hell freezing over? Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! – the three major search engines – have United to Support Sitemaps. This can be nothing but good for web developers and content creators. Sitemaps are simple XML files that help search engines determine how to spider your site and how often to do it. For more coverage of this news check out some of these links…

• Yahoo, Google and Microsoft join forces (really !!) behind Sitemaps
• Search Engines Unite On Unified Sitemaps System
• Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol
• Joint support for the Sitemap Protocol

Wink is a new breed of search engine and public bookmarking site that gives you the most relevant and interesting results as found by people! Wink uses Google powered search and applies Wink’s PeopleRank technology to deliver sites that people think are the best for your search. PeopleRank is a feature similar to Digg, where users of Wink can give each link a “Wink” to indicate that the site is good. Wink also makes extensive use of tagging to help find related links.