I got Gmail invitations for my readers

I got five, four three invitations for Gmail for you. Just email me.
PP: Absolute secrecy for my side, but with the Web ;-)

Lesbrutes.com : A search engine spammer

Check those two results page :
Yahoo result : 169 pages
Google result : 323 pages (201 for real)

Do you see your company name in thoses results ? No ? You see always the same page when you click a link ? This is the purpose of those spammers!

If your company have a french section and you working in; design, hosting, optimization or indexation... You have a good chance to be there, not necessarily in the snip of the search engine result page, but in the hidden code of thoses pages, reveal here by the cached version cached page.

They grab all the information of thoses legitimate sites and code it a way to have a good ranking in search engine using a huge number of links and H1 tags with your content and trademark name!

Update 6 september : They fix it!

RSS Aggregator : Will someone make it more useful ?

Here some quotes of a nice thread of Ponyboy :

Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and… do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!

Totally agree! My RSS aggregator features only sort on date, headline and topic!?!

Where are the extrapolations, based on the data? Where is Bayesian filtering? Why isn’t there auto-correlation between like items? Why isn’t there sorting by link popularity? Or inter-linking between feeds? Why can’t I rank feeds or categories higher than others? Why can’t I rate items and let the cumulative ratings over time determine feed rankings? Why isn’t there some statistical combination of each of the above to put what I’m actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom?

When you read this, the majority of aggregators seem more like FTP programs. RSS and XML are the future of search and the only innovations we see are Web based like the Technorati or other Blogline, Pubsub and MyRSS!

Microsoft will delay his advanced file search capability

Good news for Copernic and bad timing for Microsoft!

Copernic Desktop Search is out

The new Copernic Desktop Search is available for download today!

Wikipedia on Google Data

Wikipedia have made new addition on the Google Data sheet :

According to this estimate, the Google server farm constitutes the most powerful supercomputer in the world, being able to perform at least three times as many calculations per second as the Earth Simulator.

Yahoo News new Election Blog Roundup

Nice Election Blog Section in Yahoo News to have a different view from tradionnal media for the 2004 election.

SEM have now a dedicated radio show

Online live the tuesday morning and with archive section with good interviews with Batelle, Beal and other guys involved in the SEM/SEO business.

Google Index Size : Why after 12 months he don't pass the 2^32 gate ?

Since the month the Google index size has not change! First time, since the launch of Google, the index size is not updating within a year ? Is the 4,294,967,296 pages (2^32) give a problem to engineer ?

In january 2003 Sergey Brin say :

For '03, Brin hopes to expand to catalog the Web's entire 10 billion pages

What's the bug ?

Next generation of search engine : Searching the structured XML feeds

Nice reviews of the major feed search engines.

When we will see the next generation of search engines who gonna make real time aggregation by the pings of structured data ?

Soon if the majors listen to Jeremy Zawodny and if we implements thoses feed in our sites.

Google in acquisition mode ?

The rumors are up and running !
IMHO : I don't think DoubleClick is a very good choice.

Politically correct : Proud of my town...

...And the design firm who operate here! Nice viral and email marketing for the first movie and very good works for the subsequent sites !

How to prepare a relationship with a SEO

Very good points for the first part (point 1 to 4). The three last ones, in my mind, can be a split compromise between the ressource of your company can handle, and the SEO professionnal.

Converting your visitors with website's usability

Nice paper about usability from Mary Elges. Here some keyphrases :

"In short, usability is the ease with which someone can use your website to do a particular task and get the expected results based on what they currently know,"

"In other words, the site has to be intuitive. Still, many companies are not addressing the usability problem at the level they should to avoid website usability pitfalls."

This one may be ring a bell to website managers ?

"When a site is designed with usability in mind, there is a large drop-off in the need for user training, expensive help desks to answer questions from confused web users, and it drastically reduces the need for future rewrites," Elges says. "In addition, usability noticeably increases the lifespan of your website, since most rewrites are due to poor usability issues."

Yahoo - Sina merger ?

Here a snip of ChinaTechNews:

Rumours are arising once more in the Chinese media that Yahoo! has been having secret discussions with Sina about a possible merger, and that their negotiations are finally making some ground.

What the heck is Sina ? Sina is like the CNN of China and the third portal in the world for is traffic, after Yahoo and MSN, and before Google!

THe funny little history of Wired/Web Markerting

Homo Erectus: (1980-90)
modemus 300-1,200 baudus

Content (BBS) : games exchange, messagerie rose (adult-oriented chat originated from Minitel) and forum exchange of all kind used by the wired geeks ("early adopter" what not yet the buzz word ;-) who where using BBS

Marketing techniques : Words of mouth, specialized computer magazine ads

Homo Sapiens: (1990-94)
modemus 2400-9600 baudus

Content : Research and studies, games, some university presence, personal diary, some big corporation and again messagerie rose

Marketing techniques : Words of mouth, campus babillard, computer magazines ads and articles, some media meme and the appering of Excite, Yahoo and WebCrawler

Homo neandertalensis (1995-99)
modemus: 19,200-56,000 baudus

Content : Emerging content from all you can imagine. From casino and porn to guy who put a site on his wall-mart coupon to computer free to navigate the web, with all the stuff we get now. "Free-for-all" period.

Marketing techniques : Altavista, AlltheWeb, Dmoz and Yahoo submissions and good titling, metatag spam, ugly graphics banners and links

Homo sapiens sapiens (2000-2002)
modemus: 56k, 112k hi-band and modem-cable

Content : 404 after the techno-burst-bubble and sites of companies who get realistic business plan. Flash bubble.

Marketing techniques : Titling, contents, links strategy and PPC by Goto and Adwords and the decrease of graphic banner

Homo modernus (2003-2004)
modemus: DSL and Cable (1,5Mb and more)

Content: A lot of good contents and Flash decrease.

Marketing techniques : Contents, contents and content optimization, conversion and usability, heavy PPC campaign, url rewriting, link strategy, blog branding, blog knowledging, semantic and geo-location writing, education, education, education and client formation

Mozilla + Google = Mooglezilla ?

Not a so stupid prediction. First this! Second the Gmail Notifier and Google Deskbar have prove the people at Google can make software with a good integration with Windows OS. Third the Gmail application who use a extensive javascipt library without bugs. Third, the recent acquisiton of; Blogger, Picasa and Hello Instant Messenger picture sharing tool.
Like Jason Kottke also note in his story about it :

A Google Browser would give the Mozilla platform instant credibility and would be a big hit. The peerless Google brand & reputation and their huge reach are the keys here. Mom and Dad know about Google...if Google offered a browser that was as powerful and easy to use as their search engine and didn't scum up their system, they'd download it.

BlogSpot users now open to use AdSense

When I noted the replacement of the AdSense with the NavBar, I got to one of my favorite forum and ask if that move will open up BlogSpot to AdSense! No response in my thread ;-( But this morning Blogger, tadam, open up BlogSpot to Adsense.

This is a very huge new market (more than 1 million blogspot users multiply by the number of pages of each blog = $$$)! Ok let me be conservative. If only 5% is eligible with each one at 10 pages for ads, it still give you half a million pages for ads placement.

Technorati seem to get funding

David Sifry will take that money like a breath of fresh air, if that first round of financing go to the $6.5 millions of new cash like Om Malik told us in his blog! Congrat David!

The Spectre of Dipsie make another comeback

CNN have a paper on The next Google! It is about Eurekster and Dipsie who hope to become the next big thing.

Eurekster is up and running and going better from test to test I performed with the exceptions of is MSN search URL in the results and some feature I don't like (most popular, recent searches).

But Dipsie is a really weird choice to put it in the next big thing ! Here some of a march 2004 interview with Jason Wiener:

You won't be able to search for yourself until May 10, when Dipsie's search engine (www.dipsie.com) will open to the public with 5 billion documents in its index -- about 16.5 percent more than Google's index. (An index is the place where documents are stored so users can retrieve them when they search.)

Oups... Whe are at the end of august now!
Yahoo grab the web and a 2-3 billion documents in a few weeks only after leaving the Google results!

The result is what Wiener describes as Dipsie's "robotic" technology that Wiener said enables Dipsie to locate 99 percent of the documents on the Web -- content that Google and rival search engine Yahoo ignore, Wiener said.

How come nobody have ever see their Dipsie-bot in their log files ? I ask this question in a few forums, I look over a dozen clients log files and we never saw is trace! Also I never see anyone who get any reply of the Dipsie SEO Beta Signup !

I heard you thinking about Vaporware?