I’m not quite sure what I’d do without knowing that ((the loneliest number + the number of horns on a unicorn) / the answer to life the universe and everything) * once in a blue moon = 5.557096 × 10-10 hertz.
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While experimenting with the Google Similar Pages addon for Google Chrome, I tried it on this site:
I blame the addon’s “beta” label.
Speaking of, Google Chrome Extensions are out, and they are great — except for ‘Similar Pages’, of course.
Google has just launched a DNS service similar to OpenDNS, which I’ve written about previously. The service, dubbed “Google Public DNS“, aims to make domain name lookups (i.e. “What does www.google.com mean?”) faster, and is one of the steps in their plan to make the internet faster — or taking control of it, depending on how dramatic you want to sound.
You can test it by setting your computer or router’s DNS settings to the following DNS server IP addresses:
- 8.8.8.8
- 8.8.4.4
For instructions, see the Google Public DNS configuration instructions.
Unlike OpenDNS, which supports itself by providing advertisement-powered search pages for unresolved queries, Google promises that it will never do any form of redirection. A little strange, considering Google runs the largest advertisement service on the planet, but perhaps they genuinely just do want to make the internet faster.
In my tests, Google Public DNS had a significantly faster response time than OpenDNS from my location in Stockholm, Sweden (Europe). If you’d like to find out which DNS servers are right for you, Google also recently released a DNS server benchmark tool called namebench, which tells you just that, factoring in all of the major public DNS services as well as regional ISP DNS servers.
Note that you should never use DNS servers that you don’t trust. DNS providers have full control over what ‘google.com’, ‘gmail.com’, etc. mean to your machine, and can redirect connections to these websites to malicious websites without your knowledge.
A branch called chromiumos was just added to the official Chromium git repository, and the contents of the index files there indicate that Chromium OS, and in effect Google Chrome OS, is based on Ubuntu Linux. From chromiumos.git/src/package_repo/repo_list_image.txt:
71 fontconfig 2.6.0-1ubuntu12 optional utils pool/main/f/fontconfig/fontconfig_2.6.0-1ubuntu12_i386.deb 72 fontconfig-config 2.6.0-1ubuntu12 optional libs pool/main/f/fontconfig/fontconfig-config_2.6.0-1ubuntu12_all.deb 73 gcc-4.4-base 4.4.1-1ubuntu3 required libs pool/main/g/gcc-4.4/gcc-4.4-base_4.4.1-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
Here are some videos from the Chromium OS website that just went live:
What is Google Chrome OS?
Chromium OS Security
Chromium OS & Open Source
Chromium Fast Boot
There’s a live transcript of the Google Chrome OS event speech by Google VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, over at TechCrunch. They have also just posted a video demo of Google Chrome OS recorded at the announcement event in Mountain View, showing off the interface, bootup times, and more.
Update: Ars Technica has just published an excellent analysis of Chrome OS.
It seems very likely that Google is planning to release their own phone; not ‘merely’ a phone based on their mobile operating system, Android, but the Google phone — their take on the iPhone. Michael Arrington thinks the phone won’t be a traditional cellphone, but rather rely on data connections/VoIP via Google Voice entirely. Google already has the technology (they can rebuild him?) to give users of its Google Voice service real phone numbers; it seems like a logical next step.
Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).
There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.
I wonder if Google is having a serious go at world domination right now. First browsers, programming languages, operating systems, internet protocols, Wave, and now phones — where does it end? Oh well; for now, I don’t want it to.
Google is apparently releasing their highly anticipated, lightweight, Linux-based operating system targeted at netbooks, Google Chrome OS, within a week, according to TechCrunch. TechCrunch also thinks we should expect shoddy driver support, which seems like a strange conclusion considering the maturity of the Linux kernel.
There’s really not that much information about the operating system, though it is safe to assume that there will be a strong emphasis on the Chrome browser and all of Google’s web-based services and applications.
Let’s wait and see.
Update: It seems that Google is planning a special Chrome OS event for Thursday, the 19th of November, which will include a demonstration and “complete overview” of Google Chrome OS. The product apparently won’t be released until (early) next year, but the wording “complete overview” gives me the impression that they are just polishing and testing now.
Update 2: Chromium OS is Out, and It is Based on Ubuntu Linux!
Google has just announced the release of a new computer programming language named, quite creatively, Go. It is similar to the C family of imperative programming languages, but strives to be as simple in syntax as dynamic languages like Python and JavaScript. It aims to be very fast (both at compile time and at execution), safe, concurrent, memory-managed, speedy (in terms of developer productivity) and Open Source. Quite interestingly, some of its main authors are programming gods Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.
Here is an example of a simple web server written in Golang:
package main import ( "http"; "io"; ) func HelloServer(c *http.Conn, req *http.Request) { io.WriteString(c, "Hello world!\n"); } func main() { http.Handle("/", http.HandlerFunc(HelloServer)); err := http.ListenAndServe(":80", nil); if err != nil { panic("ListenAndServe: ", err.String()) } }
I’m not sure what I think about Go yet; all of its features look extremely attractive, but I can’t shake the feeling of something being “off” somehow. For instance, I’m not particularly fond of the function name capitalization, and there are no generics/templates in the language (yet). I suppose the former might largely be a matter of conditioning, though.
One aspect of Golang that has really impressed me is how fast it compiles; you really have to see it to believe it. Projects with several thousand lines of source code compile in less than a tenth of a second on an average workstation. Sadly, I think this might mean we won’t be having as many office chair sword duels in the future:
Have a look at the Google Go TechTalk for an introduction to and overview of the language:
Note that Go (or Golang) isn’t to be confused with the Go! Programming Language. Why Google chose an almost identical name, or why they chose such a common word at all, I don’t understand. I’m rather fond of the term ‘Golang’ since, well, it makes sense. Ericsson previously made its own language, Erlang, so it’s only a natural addition.
I have 10 spare Google Wave invites which I’m handing out. Write a comment indicating you want one and make sure the email address entered in the email field is correct and I’ll send one your way! First come, first serve!
All out of invites — thanks for playing!
So it seems Google has opened a new office in Kirkland, with an interesting cantina:
What's that in the back?
If one were to point at a person who knows a few search engine optimization tricks, it wouldn’t be far off if that person was Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team. Matt’s job is to keep Google’s search results clean and thus he has intimate knowledge of how the search engine categorizes and rates different pages and sites.
Matt recently spoke at WordCamp 2009 and previously at WordCamp 2007 about making your blog/website search engine friendly, with a focus on playing nice with Google. Each talk is about an hour long and touches on many of the concerns about optimization that webmasters commonly have. If you’re familiar with SEO and you watch these two talks, you can’t go wrong. You can find the videos and slideshow presentations on Matt’s own website, here:
For a quick overview and future reference, I’ve noted down all of the important points of Matt’s talks and combined them with the conclusions reached in the subsequent Q&A’s. If you have time, watch both of Matt’s talks first. If you’re then looking for a SEO cheat sheet, of sorts, this should be quite decent:
Code & Structure
- Google specifically looks at content in the title, URL and H1/H2/H3 sections
- Dashes/hyphens are best in URL paths, underscores next best, and no space is worst
- Use ALT tags on images (3-4, maybe 5 relevant words) — it can yield a lot of alternative traffic
- .php, .html, .cfm, none of the extensions matter, just don’t use .exe
- In general, TLD’s do not matter (.info, .biz, etc.), but try to go for .com
- When Google sees a hashmark (#) in a URL, it truncates at the hash (and the remainder of the URL is ignored)
- Dynamic URLs (with question marks) are treated exactly the same as static pages. Keep the number of parameters to 2 or 3. If you have e.g. 15, you risk having duplicate text in the URL, which can get penalized
- Google does not check domain WHOIS information
- Make sure your site is crawlable. Don’t use framesets, excessive Flash, etc. A good way of testing is to try browsing your site on your phone or in a text-mode browser like links or lynx — this is basically how Google sees your site
- Putting date information in the URL is fine. Google does not care about the “depth” of a URL/the amount of slashes (keep in mind that /2007/ will count as a URL keyword, however)
- If it’s possible, use the same site for both regular browsers and phones, and make variations via stylesheets
- Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain. People will link to your root domain and your blog, and you’ll be able to easily expand your site further on
- Use ‘blog’ as your blog’s subdirectory, not e.g. ‘Wordpress’. This counts as a keyword — if you use ‘Wordpress’, you’re going to show up in results for Wordpress, even if you’re not talking about WordPress (and disappear from somewhere else)
- Try to use the rel canonical tag (newer Wordpress versions do this by default)
- WordPress specific: Change default permalink (domain.com/?p=48) to e.g. domain.com/%postname%
- WordPress specific: Protect your /wp-admin/ folder, limit access with e.g. .htaccess
Keywords
- Write in plain English, consider what people search for
- Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find relevant keywords
- Don’t use keywords more than 2, 3, or 4 times on a page (unless it makes sense). It doesn’t help to repeat a major keyword 50 or 100 times
- Don’t hide keywords, absolutely don’t consciously mask keywords to artificially improve search engine rankings (this is called cloaking)
- If you know people are going to type in “fun”, “pictures”, “cats” or “kittens” when they search, there are completely natural ways to work this into your text without spamming. Use many different forms of your major keywords, for instance, have “change” in your URL, but “changing” in the title, “Firefox” but also “Mozilla”, “print server” and also “CUPS”, etc. — Synonyms, plurals, singular, etc.
- Use categories that are good keywords, if they make sense
- Use your keywords in the content of your post. Use the major ones inside and close to the title if possible
- The Meta Keyword tag does not really matter
PageRank
- Google crawls roughly in order of PageRank. The more pagerank you have, the deeper and more often Googlebot will crawl your site
- Pagerank is about the quality of the sites linking to you. 10 links from respected sites are better than 50 links from ‘random’ sites
- If e.g. 100 sites link to you, and you link to two sites, each site gets roughly 50 pagerank
Human Factors
- Don’t care about the amount of incoming links. Concentrate on being relevant and reputable
- Write about something you care about
- Don’t worry about small things, concentrate on writing more, good, unique content
- Katamari; start out with a (really) small niche. Build, build, build and expand your niche gradually. Do original research
- Make your post creation dates easy to find. Not so much for the search engine, but people want to know when a post was created
- Don’t try to get search engines to like you to get noticed by the world. Get known, then worry about SEO. Do some whitehat linkbaiting — make some funny videos, iPhone apps, do tutorials, analysis, 13 reasons why something sucks or rocks, etc.
When Changing Hosts
- (Optional) Reduce your DNS time-to-live so your new IP will propagate a lot faster, e.g. in five minutes
- Bring both sites up, so users will see your site at both the old and the new IP address
- Change the domain settings to point to your new IP address
- When you are receiving traffic from Googlebot and users (and your DNS time-to-live has passed) on the new site, take down the old site (try to keep the old site up for the duration of your TTL though). The default TTL is usually 1 hour
When Moving to a New Domain
- Standard advice: Use a 301 (permanent) redirect
- Even better: pick one subdirectory and move that first. If the traffic stays desired, move the rest of the site
- Standardize your backlinks (e.g. enforce ‘www.’ or no ‘www’ on your server, and only link to one variation of your domain)
- Ask people who link to you to update their links
Other
- Don’t do paid posts/don’t sell or buy links. If you want to do affiliate linking, “nofollow” the links
- Use Google’s Webmaster Tools — see what people are linking to, what Google can’t find, check your robots.txt, and so on. Also, indicate your ‘www.’ or no ‘www.’ preference
- Use Google Analytics — having Google Analytics does not affect your search engine ratings
- Use Feedburner and Feedburner MyBrand (host your feeds on e.g. feeds.patrickmylund.com)
- To show up in Google News, you generally need to be more than one person — be a “proper news outlet”
- Report splogs with Google Webmaster Tools’ “Report spam in our index” feature, rather than filing a DMCA. Don’t think of it as a copyright violation, but as spam
- Make great, viral content
