Google is the most popular search engine. That’s where it all started. Now it ended up with dozens of web services and huge popularity. Did you noticed Firefox 2.0 doesn’t detect a grammar error when you type ‘Google’, but it does when you type ‘Altavista’? Go thinking.
Anyway, my point is Google has such an influence on everybody that their past April Fool’s day jokes were actually believed by many people. Click on the joke’s title to visit the original page.
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Unless you have been wandering around with a bucket on your head, you have probably seen that Apple launched a heavily debated campaign last Christmas, trying to prove you once more the multitude of reasons why you’d need a Mac. However, the PC fought back, and the battle continues. This is overall a quite interesting concept and many people have tried to follow.
I have found this funny comic strip that is trying to represent the differences between an iPhone and a Smartphone and which I will be reproducing further. I’m looking forward to hear your comments.
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Now that we all know the hidden pages in Firefox, it’s time to go a bit deeper into tweaking your browser for optimal use. All of the operations will be made in the about:config page, so save your important stuff, open up a new tab, write about:config in the address bar and be prepared. I have gathered four tricks that will improve your Firefox experience, and here they are.
1. Fetch only pages that you click
Firefox mostly resembles to Google from this point of view. It has a built-in feature (enabled by default) that will pre-download the pages behind the links it thinks you MIGHT click. Google anticipates you might click the first result from the page, but how in the world can Firefox anticipate the link you’re going to click? Anyway, in my opinion this is just useless bandwidth usage, CPU power and HDD space. You’re practically downloading and storing pages you are not viewing. Here’s how you stop that in three simple steps.
In the about:config list, filter up your search after ‘network’ so it would be easier for you. Then, find through the remaining list options the key that says network.prefetch-next. It should be set to TRUE. Double click it, and it will turn to false. There we go, now Firefox will stop acting creepy and will only fetch what you click ;)
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Converting files from one format to another is a necessity and you don’t need me to tell you that. A few years ago, software programs that were converting WAVs to MP3s, AVIs to MPEGs,were pretty much popular, although their abilities were limited to just a few features and not to mention the low format support.
Today, they do have some serious competition, and I am going to present you the most reliable options. The main advantage of what I’m going to present is that you do not need to download nor buy any software. They’re mostly free and accessible via your web browser. Some projects may be still in the beta stage of development, but I can assure you that everything goes safe and sound. Try them out yourself, and feel free to share opinions.
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We all know the Google Advanced Search page that lets you refine your searches and find what you need faster. But how many of us understand the complicated URLs the search engines generates?
Well I am not saying that I’m some sort of expert but here are some information regarding the URLs generated by Google. Let’s start by looking at one such URL:
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=nintendo+wii&hl=ro&num=10&btnG=C%C4%83utare+Google&
as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=
You don’t understand much and it looks quite long but it doesn’t have to be this way. Many of the variables included are not even used in the query. Here are the basics:
What you should know is that you always start with: http://www.google.com/search?. This tells Google it’s an advanced search and that there are some variables to come. Besides, remember that all the variables must be connected with ampersands (&; ex. as_q=nintendo+wii&hl=ro) and if you want to use more than one search terms just use ‘+’ (ex. nintendo+wii) between them. Speaking of variables here are the most important tags you can use:
as_oq -> This tells Google to find pages in which at least instance of nintendo OR wii is found
as_q -> This means that you look for nintendo and wii in the same page
as_epq -> Google translates this as a Google search of “nintendo wii”, searches the exact phrase ‘nintendo wii’
num -> The number of results you want displayed, it ranges from 0 to 100. If you set num to 0 you will get the ‘No match found” message
safe -> If you set this to active the Google Safe Search is on and the adult material will be filtered
as_eq -> Use this to exclude a term from your search
as_qdr -> Shows only results that have been updated in the given time interval. Possible values: y (year), m6 (6 months), m3 (3 months).
as_sitesearch -> Limits the search to a specific domain or TLD (.us; .gov; .co.uk; .ro; etc)
as_occt -> This is set by default to ‘any’ but if you change it you can search in: title, url, links
The goal of this article is not exactly for you to use from now on hand-made search URLs but yo better understand how the Google search engine works and if you please to create some URLs for yourself.
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As I was telling you in the first part of this article, I am glad that we’ve got over the basics of Google searching so now we can look into more interesting search options.
First of all there is a part of Google’s syntax that allows you to tell it where exactly to search. This comes in handy when you know part of a URL or maybe a title but you can’t find the exact page.
You can use ‘intitle:’ to search only the titles for web pages, as many of the other functions that are to follow ‘intitle:’ has a variation, namely ‘allintitle:’ that includes all the terms that follow in to the title search:
intitle:”Santa Maria” boat -> searches in title for Santa Maria and does a search on the term boat
allintitle:pirate ships treasure -> searches in title for all the terms
I think you’ve got the idea so here is a list of syntax words that work the same way:
‘intext:’ works the same way only restricts the search to the body of web pages, excluding URLs or titiles
‘inanchor:’ a anchor is the description for a text link: <a href=”http://our-picks.com”>Our-picks</a> here Our-Picks is the anchor.
‘site:’ here you can use bot hosting and domain;this works well with the main page of a site (ex: cars site:co.uk)
‘inurl:’ searches the URL for sites, including subdirectories, it is highly recommended that you remove the ‘http:’ prefix before the search
‘link:’ this one is interesting since it shows you the sites that point to a specific URL, any page of the site not only the main URL
‘cache:’ returns the page from Google’s cache as it looked the time, useful when you want to find something on a page that changes frequently
‘filetype:’ works great with other syntax elements when you need a particular file type, like ‘.pdf’ or ‘.doc’ etc. (ex: planes filetype:pdf)
‘related:’ returns a list of pages that Google considers are related to one another
‘info:’ returns links with more informations about a given page, works well only if the page was indexed by Google.
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The same way you clean up your house before your guests arrive, the same way you should get your website ready for Google’s crawler, as this is one of the most important guests you will ever have. According to that, here are 10 things you should double check before submitting your website to the index. If you want, you can view this article as the correction of the top 10 mistakes made by webmasters.
1. If you have a splash page on your website, make sure you have a text link that allows you to pass it.
I’ve seen many websites with a fancy flash introduction on the index and no other way to navigate around it. Well, Google can’t read into your flash page, and therefore it cannot bypass it. All you have to do is put a text link to your website’s second index, and the deed is done.
2. Make sure you have no broken links
I know this is kind of obvious, but you’ll be surprised to find out how many errors is the Google crawler experiencing daily due broken links. Therefore, you’d better check and double check every internal link of your webpage before submission. Don’t forget that your links are also your visitor’s paths to your content. It’s not all about Google, you know :)
3. Check the TITLE tags
Since you are able to search in title tags on Google and since the title tags is displayed in the top of your browser window, I’d say this is an important aspect you need to check. This doesn’t mean you have to compile a >20 keywords list there. Instead, make it a readable sentence since it’s viewable by both crawlers and surfers.
4. Check the META tags
Rumors about Google not caring about META tags are not 100% correct. Google relies on these tags to describe a site when there’s a lot of navigation code that wouldn’t make sense to a human searcher, so why not make sure you’re all in order and set up some valid KEYWORDS and a valid DESCRIPTION. You never know.
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