Microsoft Founder Promises Better Search Engines

"We were in internet search before Google was founded" - Bill Gates

Bill Gates has promised that search engines would be 10 times more sophisticated in the future and computers would be far better able to recognize the voice of their user...

Full coverage here.

Google Adds New Feature To Cached Pages

Last week Google added a new feature to how they present their cache of pages from their crawls - you can now see the cached text only of any page - for instance, below is the header of their cache of Yahoo's home page.

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.yahoo.com/.
G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.
The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting.
This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the cached text only.
To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com
Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.

Basically any cached URL which has this appended to it - &strip=1 - will show the cached page with no images, and any alt tags - and without CSS formatting.

Theories vary as to why - I think that perhaps this Google's shot across bow to let webmasters know "we see you".

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Now featured at Research Buzz.

PageRank ™ For Sale

Everyone and his brother wants a high PageRank ™ on their site. Newbies seem to think that PageRankV and the rank of their page are somehow related.

As more experienced promoters are fond of pointing out, if PageRank ™ was everything, Yahoo and Google would be number for every since.

However this proliferation of PageRank ™ "envy" has lead to a flood of websites advertising links from high ranking sites - PageRank ™ for Sale.

A simple search for "improve PageRank" in Google shows Adwords for companies promising "No Fees to List, Trade or Sell Boost Your Page Rank and Profits!" and "We have a huge selection of high ranking relevant sites."

But will the buyers get what they are paying for?

That's up to Google.

Gmail-mania

I can't believe how many people are selling Gmail invites, and Gmail accounts with trade terms...

For instance - here's a Gmail eBay auction for the name Collectible@gmail.com.

Actually that seems like a pretty good one. Some of the other names are pretty lame "BeastieBoysRock@" and "BrittanySpears@" (misspelled, nonetheless!).

Pop Client For Gmail

Now that Gmail accounts are becoming more common, it might be a good time to mention a handy tool for (Windows) users with Gmail accounts, PGtGM - Pop Goes the GMail - a handy tool that allows you to use a mail client such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Opera etc.

I have two Gmail invites just sitting here, by the way...

Put Microsoft's MSNbot On a Leash

Many webmasters have complained that Microsoft's Msnbot crawler for its as yet vaporware search product have been chewing through way too much bandwidth, and way too hard. In fact many large site, including WebmasterWorld.com have taken to blocking the bot altogether.

A MSN search tech has now posted a solution - the MSNbot will now respect the following robots.txt command:

User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-Delay: 20

This will cause the bot to wait 20 seconds between each page request, which will certainly alleviate the server load for larger sites - assuming they want to allow a bot without a search engine to chew up their site.

MSN promises that their search will be ready "real soon now"...

Mozilla's Googlebar, Now with Page Rank

If you use Mac or Linux, and you promote sites, you probably have resorted to checking your Page Rank with a friend's machine - or even a "dedicated" PC especially for checking your Google Toolbar Page Rank.

1. Download FireFox browser from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

2. Install the GoogleBar Mozilla extension from http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

3. Install the PR indicator extension from http://toolbar.nickstallman.net/

Bling - now you can see the Page Rank indicator just like windows users - without touching a PC - ya aloof bastards! :P

Yahoo Sues Google For Online Bidding System Patent Violation

Yahoo's Overture division is claiming patent violation for Google's implementation of the Adword's online bidding system which was put into place 7 months after the Overture system was patented.

More at: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8836209.htm

Googleblog Update - Secret Sauce

As I previously predicted, Googleblog has now posted one of Charlie Ayer's secret recipes.

Now if only Googleguy would post the algo. ;)