seo

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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FINAL UPDATE: this turned out to be a false alarm! do not panic!! self-referential canonical link is fine, and doesn’t cause problems. You can still read the post and comments below to see how I got confused.

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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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sea, sand, and sun

Who wouldn’t want to go there for vacation!

The bigger dilemma is would you want to live there, and maybe have a house like this:

dominican republic real estate

Would you give up all the urban life of the weather changing Chicago, and buy a Dominican Republic real estate? Would you really consider it so seriously, and would go through extensive listings of real estate properties?

Would you need an expensive villa, or would you opt for a private beach with a cabin? How much money would you be willing to invest? What would you do with your Chicago business?

Thinking about real properties questions doesn’t really make sense without actually looking at some dominican republic real estate properties first, and having an idea of the range of the prices? Maybe Dominican Republic real estate turns out to be beyond the reach of your budget, but maybe living in the Caribbean turns out to be so affordable and luxurious that you decide to contact a real estate agent today!

What would be the deciding factor for You if you were considering leaving your current city to live in the Caribbean?

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.

Google searches and the number of results they give on October 28, 2008.

chicago developer about 414,000

chicago web developer about 72,100,000

chicago web designer about 9,110,000

chicago designer about 439,000

Can you solve this puzzle? Why more specific queries give more results when they should give less?! Why are there more of civil engineers, than (all) engineers? Why are there more chicago web developers than (all) chicago developers?

I am curious to know your hypothesis that can ‘explain’ above results.

Update:

Since no one replied so far, I will give my hypothesis:
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This simplified model is a nice introduction: Vector Space Model.

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

Next step of social media will include real time video conferencing! That is a reasonable assumption, but it is not really the reason why I am writing this.

I read an interesting post today, with the same title.
Author of the article argues that the very design model of social media is responsible for a bad content sometimes being rated highly. This happens because people like to be friendly and to vote for their friends, which is all nice, but if you don’t really like that much your friend’s bookmark selection, then effectively, infinitesimally but accumulatively, you are contributing to the lowering of the quality of the voted content. Since social media exists thanks to users submitting the content, you do need to keep users happy, and allow them to rate each other in some way. So how do we find a solution to above problem?

Lets go back to the title: the next evolution of social media. It is always a challenge trying to figure out what will happen in the future. One good way to go about it is to figure out what is wrong with the present, as someone will definitely try to correct it. Well, one of the wrong things was mentioned above.

I think that one of the causes for mentioned user behavior is social media segregation. Continue reading »

Here you will find answers to 2 questions:

1. How to select information sources worthy of your time and attention. After all, in the information overload we are facing today, who wants to spend time reading lies and misinformation?
2. How to fight back media puppets (not corporations themselves)? Continue reading »

This blog is not about politics, but I find this person so important that I wanted to make a post about him. If you don’t know who he is, be glad because you will be a happier person once you learn a little about him. Just Goolgle his name. Many people do, proving that biased media trying to ignore him is not successful in preventing people from getting the information they want.

Click on image to see marks, or see current plot here.

UPDATE: ronpaul2008.com now has a list of endorsements

So just go there and see a looong list.  No need to read below, except if you want to see some YouTube videos of people endorsing Ron Paul.

Endorsers of Ron Paul:

• Sociopolitical commentary and comedian Bill Maher
• award-winning American comedian David Letterman
• Stephen Colbert – one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2006
• analyst for Fox News Channel former Judge Andrew Napolitano Continue reading »