http://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summaryWed, 04 Oct 2006 01:28:13 +0000http://www.dotcomicide.com/patrickBlogger115http://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112567543739429244Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:48:00 +00002005-09-02T10:38:31.993-05:00A few days ago I noticed that the Yahoo home page had changed: If you notice, suddenly there's a "Start on Yahoo" link to the left of their logo. Put this in combination with the news about the Yahoo Instant Messenger "upgrade" which takes a page straight out of the spyware creators, and forces the installation of the Yahoo search bar, changes the default search and home page, and scans your IMhttp://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/09/yahoo-attempts-to-increase-user-base.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112489419206465448Wed, 24 Aug 2005 14:14:00 +00002005-08-24T09:43:16.076-05:00With the launch of Google Talk, Google has simultaneously jumped into the instant messaging and VOIP marketplace. With a slick, simple signature Google style interface - it is a nice-looking, unobtrusive piece of software. It even includes the GMail notifier, which means that you aren't adding another program to your start-up list so much as switching one for another. The one feature I can't http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/google-talk-takes-swipe-at-skype.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112471524442651485Mon, 22 Aug 2005 12:23:00 +00002005-08-22T09:05:56.380-05:00Google has rethought their desktop search tool and attempted to create an all-around useful tool, called Google Sidebar. The new Sidebar integrates a RSS reader, new mail notifier (works with Gmail and Outlook), custom weather, custom news headlines, custom stocks, image search, and Quick view - a list of frequently viewed documents and files, and, perhaps, the handiest feature - a little http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/google-sidebar-desktop-search.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112459639583898393Sun, 21 Aug 2005 03:41:00 +00002005-08-20T23:01:34.163-05:00Google definitely seems to be shuffling out a new index, and some of the changes seen in Google Update Bourbon seem to have been rolled back. The main thing I've noticed so far is that one of my sites that has had a double listing for years, and lost it in Bourbon has suddenly shown up in its serps with a double listing again. Since this is the 3rd Google update of 2005, (the previous two were http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/google-update-cutts.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112416386007903980Tue, 16 Aug 2005 03:51:00 +00002005-08-16T12:42:55.320-05:00 Recently Yahoo announced that their index now contained over 20 billion "web objects", specifically 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. At first this number was blithely accepted, but within hours, the impact began to sink in... 20 billion is a lot, and far outstrips Google's current claim of 8,168,684,336 web pages. Google pushed past the http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/yahoos-20-billion-web-doc-index.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112394917826577789Sat, 13 Aug 2005 14:29:00 +00002005-08-13T19:10:51.740-05:00 There have been suspicions for months that Yahoo has been hand-editing results for competitive search terms, however I recently stumbled across a pair of search terms that essentially prove that these suspicions have foundation. When searching for a particular popular commerical single word search term (over 400K searches a month, according to the Overture keyword tool) and a two-word related http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/hand-edited-results-in-yahoo-point-to.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112371188115176144Wed, 10 Aug 2005 21:51:00 +00002005-08-12T00:01:34.373-05:00If you attend the Search conferences like Webmaster World's Pubcon, chances are you've met Matt Cutts, one of Google's principal software engineers. He is not only a nice guy that always has a moment to listen to a webmaster's problems, he's now started his own blog where he has promised to publish some of his most frequently asked questions. I think it's a good thing when a company like Googlehttp://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/matt-cutts-blog.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112309148864895854Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:51:00 +00002005-08-05T09:09:22.423-05:00With 3 major news stories in this week, one on the imminent launch of Yahoo's contextual advertising program and then today's news about MSN's paid search program, and finally the announcement of Ask Jeeve's CPC program, it's obvious that everyone is gunning for a slice of Google's advertising pie. What will Yahoo Publisher Network, a competing contextual advertising program, do to Google's http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/yahoo-and-msn-vs-google.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112300606217281582Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:58:00 +00002005-08-03T17:39:23.636-05:00Martinibuster recently made an interesting post in his blog: Scraper Sites are Good for You - Surrender Your Content. I've pretty much been on the same side - as far as I am concerned, scrapers are just another free link to my site. The latest Yahoo update and a mini-update at Google both seem to be targeting the oft-maligned "scraper" sites. We know that Google is definitely targeting the http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/08/war-against-scraper-sites.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112170627014680592Mon, 18 Jul 2005 16:47:00 +00002005-07-19T12:44:29.093-05:00I was an early Orkut invitee. I tried it out, invited a few people, and even founded the "Mexico" community. But these online social networks aren't really for me. I got bored and eventually stopped logging in. One of my friends (stuntdubl) mentioned that he had been amused by my recent change I had made to another community that I founded that he was a member of. I hadn't logged in for at http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/07/whats-wrong-with-orkutcom.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/112059897448459620Tue, 05 Jul 2005 21:08:00 +00002005-07-09T13:36:45.186-05:00I had to send in my Dell laptop for service, and had the "pleasure" to be helped by Dell's crack team of outsourced techs in India. So far I've spoken with "Steve", "Paul", "Mark", "Sharma" and "Nikita" (who all spoke with Indian accents), honestly, all in all, just fine for answering general questions. However, I apparently threw the call center techs for a loop by using a different city and http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/07/call-center-service-from-india-sucks.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/111985584204424344Wed, 29 Jun 2005 06:28:00 +00002005-06-30T00:06:22.620-05:00Storytime at Dotcomicide. About 150 years ago, just about anything liquid that was worth saving in a bottle was stoppered with a cork. This of course, lead to the existence of a few very powerful cork distributorships. The easiest way to sort the corks was to dump them all into a nearby lake, at one point their were about 8 billion of them, bobbing this way and that, just waiting to be plugged http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/06/finest-handmade-corks.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/111759143080162221Tue, 31 May 2005 22:56:00 +00002005-06-09T14:13:11.730-05:00With the recent closing of the Open Directory Project's Status Check Forum, search engine experts like Danny Sullivan have suggested that perhaps it's time to change their name to the Closed Directory Project. Transparency issues aside, the ODP (aka DMOZ) has gone through some rocky times, ironically its fate tied to Google's decision in 2000 to mirror the ODP's content on their http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/05/did-googles-success-overwhelm-dmoz.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/111739393645072890Sun, 29 May 2005 16:37:00 +00002005-06-09T09:35:09.226-05:00The Bourbon update started around May 20th, 2005, and 10 days later has yet to settle down. This officially makes it the second longest update since Florida which lasted almost 20 days. What has Bourbon filter/algo adjustment gone after? So far it looks like: Non-thematic Linking Duplicate Content* Fraternal Linking Run of Site Links Low Quality Reciprocal Links * Google Bourbon seems to have http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/05/google-update-bourbon_29.htmlpatrickhttp://www.blogger.com/feeds/6916400/posts/summary/111816866055099532Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:37:00 +00002005-06-07T13:27:20.306-05:00Are people tired of outsourcing? While checking the logs for one of my new sites, a directory of web designers - I was amused see this entry: In general, you can certainly get a website done cheap by getting it from India or what have you, but there is a definite disadvantage when you divorce the optimization from the planning of a website. From what I've seen the bulk of the outsourcing http://www.dotcomicide.com/2005/06/outsourcing-web-designers.htmlpatrick