seo

Query: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Top+52+places+to+see+in+San+Bernardo

Results: Top 52 places to see in San Bernardo – Google Search

Just keeping this for future reference, to see if this is temporary experiment on their side, or permanent bug.

This is a video which provides a glimpse into the complexity of Google inner workings. A search quality group meets to discuss a proposed change. Google has well over 10,000 engineers, and more than 1,000 person-years have gone into the search algorithm development. You may wonder why only 1k years when there are 10k engineers and Google was founded more than 10 years ago – shouldn’t it be 100,000 person-years, or at least a linear average as the initial number of engineers was 2? Well, search is not the only thing they do.

What is really cool here is that Google has a whole team dedicated to figuring out, implementing, and testing the change that will affect only 0.1% of queries. Even these ‘tiny’ changes with ‘minor impact’ get attention of employees of all levels – from young engineers to VPs.

You can read more about it at official Google blog.

There is a lot of commentary on the web about Wikileaks and its founder, and you can spend days reading stuff and watching videos. I did that. Here is selection of, in my opinion, some of the best videos and links that will make you instantly well informed on the topic – its background, motivation, vision, technology, affairs, legal issues, consequences, freedom, rights…

Background information: Wikirebels (documentary in 4 parts – one hour total)
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I wrote before about the rel nofollow monstrosity. It seems Google guys did finally realize something is terribly wrong with their invention. What Google anti-SPAM engineer Matt Cutts told us the other day is this:

Instead of preventing a “PageRank leak” (read: pathologically saving every drop of the inbound linking credit that a site gets) as can be seen in this “rel NoFollow” article, Google decided to simply exclude the PageRank which is nofollowed from the equation, effectively, reducing the size of PageRank that circulates through the site (and the web). This will, by the way, introduce some global level disturbances in the page-rank matrix, one of the major algorithms in the google rankings (even thought the number of nofollowed links is less than 3 percent, as they mostly come from big sites).

Is this change good or bad?

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Alexa.com toolbar is a web traffic analysis program integrated into your browser. I always knew that services like Alexa keep track of what websites users visit, time they spend there, and similar general statistics. What I didn’t know until today is that they collect very personal information about you, and they also publish some of it. For example, private pages and links that you visit may appear on Google as Alexa may place them in their site analysis section (sites linking to… and similar). Imagine you write a private blog post where you link to some site you want only your friend to know about, and then few days later you find these links on Alexa site and indexed by Google thanks to Alexa not respecting your privacy! Also, did you know that:

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So today I typed a very common word into the search engine — word and, and I wanted to see who ranks the first for such a common word, and to see why would someone be the first for the word and.

I was very pleasantly surprised as I discovered what seems to be a really very good site, and useful site, that among other things also talks about word and. What site would talk about word and? A site about grammar!

Not being native english speaker, I appreciate such a good online resources.

Anyhow, you will notice that word ‘and’ in its title doesn’t have … how would I say it… a fundamental meaning. It is there simply to connect two words, and title may as well be as good without it:

Guide to Grammar. Guide to Writing.

Guide to Grammar in Writing.

or some other variation. Words grammar and writing often occur near each other without word and. For example, ‘proper use of grammar in writing…’ (btw. I am aware there may be a few grammar mistakes inmy posts — I didn’t practice English grammar since high school).

this is the top site.

However, you will notice that next few results fundamentally require word ‘and’ in their titles.
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If you get a comment that sounds meaningful when isolated, but when placed in context of your blog post doesn’t seem quite right or informative, do a search for exact phrase from that comment. Many automated bots post ‘meaningful’ general comments. If the same comment is already indexed by search engine somewhere else, its a SPAM. Delete it.

This simplified model is a nice introduction: Vector Space Model.

More food for thought: similarity measures and original Google architecture.