Even Howie Could Not Help this Search Engine...

I like Howie Mandel a lot. I think he's a very hard-working and interesting guy (like he never touches anybody for fear of catching germs).

So when I saw this HM commercial on TV for Buy.Com I enjoyed the clip because Howie is such a sweet character.

And a day later, when I was shopping around for a bottle of perfume for my wife, I decided to check out Buy.Com. That's how commercials supposed to work, right?

But what a search engine Buy.Com has! Never seen anything like it.

Usually, when a search engine cannot find what you're looking for, it 'fesses up and flashes a message like "No search results were found -- please try again" etc. And then you try again.

No. Instead, Buy.Com flashed this really sophisticated-looking feedback:



Hmmm... that's interesting...

So I start clicking on these searches to "remove one or more words" from my search and ended up... with nothing.

Here are the pages I got after clicking the first, second and the third search results:







Obviously none of these results has anything to do with the perfume I was looking for.

So why did Buy.Com waste my time by having me click this and that only to send me to totally unrelated search pages? Why is need for the wild goose chase?

Here are some Rumsfeldian questions and self-provided answers:

Is this the last time I'll visit Buy.Com? -- Probably.

Can they improve their search engine? -- Yes. Just tell people "No search results found -- please try again" and they will.

Is there a lesson in this? -- Yes. LESS IS MORE.

The myths that masquerade as facts

The myth: The Width of the Space Shuttle's Fuel Tank is based on a History that Extends Back to the Roman Chariots!

Summary of the eRumor:

This story is a "We've always done it that way" tale.

It claims that the width of the Space Shuttle's fuel tank is only four-feet, eight-and-a-half inches and the NASA engineers could not make them any wider no matter how hard they tried!

Why?

Because the fuel tanks are transported by railroads and the standard distance between railroad rails in the U.S. is four-feet, eight-and-a-half inches.

Why?

Because that's what it was in England.

Why?

Because that's the gauge the tramways used before the railroads.

Why?

Because the tramways were built using the same tools as wagon-builders and that's how wide the wagon wheels were spaced.

Why?

Because the old roads in England had ruts that the wheels needed to accommodate.

Why?

Because the ruts were made by Imperial Roman chariots.

The Truth:

There is no evidence that we could find that this is true.

THE POINT: Everything you read or hear on the Internet is not true. Verify first. Believe later.

Web Sites with Pure CSS and Zero Tables

A great majority of web sites out there are still using TABLES to present content, even if the content has nothing to do with tabulated data.

Yet there are also a growing number of great web sites that contain zero tables. They are built by pure CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Here are three of them: Blogger, Microsoft, and CNN.

The screen shots below display the DIV tags used by these sites. As you can see, there's no end to the complex layouts you can achieve with CSS:

(Click the images to enjoy a larger view.)

Firefox 3.0 Lets You View and Remove Cookies

Do you know what kind of cookies the web site you're visiting is placing on your machine?

Now you can easily see and (if you wish) remove those cookies thanks to Firefox 3.0's great cookie editor.

1) When you visit a web site, click on the favicon displayed to the left of the URL:



2) Firefox will display the following dialog box:



3) Click the More Information button to display the following information dialog box:



4) Click the View Cookies button to see the cookies placed on your computer by this web site:



5) Select and click Remove Cookie to delete any cookie you like.

Black Hat Blogging

Don't you hate it when "black hat" artists grab your articles and reprint them by flattening all your live links and then, to add insult to injury, INSERT their own RANDOM affiliate word-links to the text?

I have no idea why they do it because the result is a terrible stupid piece of text with an impossible URL.

Here is an example how one of my articles was butchered in this fashion:

http://deaqzhjrymekk.blogspot.com/2008/07/3rd-big-myth-of-search-engine.html

The URL is impossible because it is randomly generated by a black hat BLOG GENERATOR software. Not only the URL but the "name" of the blogger is also randomly generated.

And the sad thing is there is practically no defense against this kind of pirating. If I flag this blog and pursue the matter it will be deleted but 10 or 30 more will crop up before they even do so. It's a no-win fight up the cyber creek.

So what do I do? I insert my own "thank you" comments with my live link thinking "if a spider follows the links on this page it just might follow mine too and get me some Google-love"... yet I also know that it is a highly unlikely outcome.

So why do these pirates keep generating these random blogs by reprinting people's articles (most of the time published on sites like Ezine Articles) ? Because they are greedy and inexperienced and they really think they can make some money out of these totally bogus blogs. All they do is pollute the Internet.

USEFUL TIP: To catch such pirated and butchered "editions" of your articles just create a Google Alert account with your name as the keyword. Every time one of your articles is published on the Internet you'll receive a Google -email. Very easy to keep track of. The results may just amaze you.

How Not to Design a Squeeze Page

I did not make this one up folks. This one is for real and is an excellent example of how NOT to design a squeeze page, especially one set up to sell a very expensive web-based service.

The rule is -- the more information you ask from your prospective customers upfront, the lower will be your conversion rate.

How many people do you think have signed up for this "Free software demo" by providing all the following MANDATORY information (all the fields with asterisks)?



What were they thinking?

You have to be really desperate for this software in order to provide all that MANDATORY information before allowed to watch the demo.

The kicker is, they won't tell you WHAT exactly their "service" is all about either. No. You have to give them all that information about yourself (including your FAX NUMBER) and THEN, and only then, they will allow you to have a peek at what they've got.

Good luck!

Rule of thumb: if you'd like to have a good conversion rate, ask no more than NAME and EMAIL address. That's it. Some people are so hungry for your e-mail that they even skip the name.

P.S. The cost of this service that you cannot even sample before giving up all that information is $5,000 upfront for "set up"; and then $300 recurring fee every month. So I guess they are interested only in people with really a lot of cash and a lot information to give up. I hope that strategy is working for them.

Scheduling Posts

Now you can schedule your posts in advance if you are using Blogger.

WordPress had that functionality for quite a while.

I congratulate Blogger for the innovation for a good reason -- whenever I had WordPRess blogs they've been assaulted without mercy by comment spammers.

With Blogger, knock on wood, that has never been an issue and I'm using Blogger since year 2000. I hope one day WordPress developers will also learn how to protect their bloggers against such nuisance.

Something new -- if you're looking for an HTML editor which has a built-in advance scheduling function, try Xsite Pro 2.0. It is the only HTML editor I know (not Dreamweaver, not GoLive) which allows you to schedule your web pages in advance and publishes them according to your schedule. Indexing robots love that time-release stuff.

On the Internet, All is Global

Sometimes web designers get caught up in the illusion that they are building just a tiny little "local" web site, or that their employer is such a "well known" entity that "everybody" knows what their acronym stands for.

Mega illusion.

No matter how "local" your business is, if it's a public site, remember this: it takes the same amount of clicks ("one") to reach it from Mongolia as from Michigan.

So design it as though your visitor would be a total stranger. Otherwise you can frustrate even your local visitors.

Example 1:

I forgot the number of local newspaper or TV station sites which do not even bother to mention the STATE in which they are located!

For many times in the past I read a story I liked in a local publication. I then wanted to give full reference to the story but all I'd see on the page would be "Springfield Herald" (for example" or "Rockville News" etc.

But WHICH Springfield or WHICH Rockville?

If you spend a few minutes clicking on 3, 4 or 5 pages in a row, you eventually find the state but you end up asking yourself "why?"

Why does a local publication be so oblivious to the fact that people NOT from your neck of the woods might be visiting your site as well?

Why alienate them since you never know who will click and honor your advertisers?

Example 2:

Again the issue of acronyms... Some large organizations get so complacent that they simply forget to write the open form of their well-known acronyms.

AARP is a case in point.

I challenge you to visit www.aarp.org and find out what "AARP" exactly means!

If you find it let me know and I'd be happy to note it down. But if you can't, don't feel too bad because I've already spent 15 minutes to find it with no success.

I'm of course 99% sure that AARP stands for "American Association of Retired People" but why turn it into a mystery game and a puzzle?

Why frustrate the visitors who might not be too familiar with your acronym?

GOLDEN RULE: help your visitors easily find the MOST OBVIOUS INFORMATION about your company or organization like your full address, or the full name of your organization.

Frustrated visitors do not make profitable customers or members. They do not come back either.

Google's Killer App

By Brandt Dainow

Google Analytics 2.0 changes everything, and according to the CEO of ThinkMetrics, the competition is dead. They just haven't stopped moving yet.

Death by Google

Google has killed the web analytics software industry with the release of the new version of Google Analytics. The new version was released just under two months ago and is simply a quantum leap above any other analytics product on the planet.

In my opinion, Google Analytics does for the web metrics industry what the Google search engine did for online search: it kills everyone else off.

Google Analytics version 2 is not revolutionary. It does not extend web analytics software by providing new forms of analysis. Neither does it extend our understanding of websites by offering new approaches. What Google has done is simply take every feature in every product on the market and put them all into one system, and then make it available for free.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/Newsletter/15823.asp

Google Analytics - Simply Amazing!

If you haven't tried "Google Analytics" yet you owe it to yourself to check it out right away.

If you have a web site and if you'd like to see who is visiting your site, when, from where (including country and city), how much time they spend on what page, etc. then you need Google Analytics -- which is FREE.

You register with Google and place your custom-generated HTML code inside the HEAD section of all the pages you'd like to track. The rest is taken care of by Google.

All reports can be mailed in 4 different formats both to yourself and to anybody else you like on earth.

You can track the traffic of multiple web sites from one single account.

There are some truly very smart people working out there in Google. They continue to amaze me on a weekly basis.

While Microsoft is trying to protect its hold on the IT sector through all kinds of marketing strategies but weak products, Google is letting their products do the talking.

Copy + Paste is not a simple operation with MacBook

MacBook is a visually stunning gorgeous piece of hardware which makes its software issues all the more so heartbreaking. It's the equivalent of a very beautiful girl belching aloud in public.

I've previously written here about the kind of problems the Mac-native browser Safari has with some Google functionalities that I use on a regular bases (like Google Documents, and Google Pages).

Yesterday I was dismayed to discover yet another MacBook dysfunction, this one much more serious than the Google incompatibility issue.

It is hard to believe but...

If you copy text from your word document, MacBook will NOT allow you to paste it into either your e-mail message or any Google Document file!

The only way you can send that text is to save it as a separate file and then ATTACH it to your e-mail, or just type the whole thing the good-old fashioned way. (I hope, unlike me, you are fast typist.)

I still find that hard to believe... such a glaring shortcoming, and yet, MacBooks are still selling like hotcakes.

I'm praying I'm wrong and that I just missed a very simple setting that will eventually set everything right.

But I tried it both with Safari and Firefox and both don't work. If you copy from a file on your machine, you cannot paste it into your e-mail window.

I have no idea what to make of that but if I cannot fix it one way or the other, I think I am returning my beautiful MacBook back to the store and order myself the new DELL UBUNTU lap top. At least I know most of the things that can go wrong on an UBUNTU system and copy-paste function is not one of them.

POST SCRIPT:

After talking with Mac people, it became apparent that the copy-paste does not woth with OPEN OFFICE but it does with MS Word.

MSN News versus Google News search functions

I find Google's news search functionality to be a lot more accurate and focused than MSN's news search.

Here is an unscientific comparison for a specific key phrase. You be the judge.

TOP 10 MSN News Search results for search key phrase “travel nurse”:

http://search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=travel+nurse&form=QBNR&go.x=13&go.y=6

TITLES of the returned articles:

She's always ready to go Retired nurse packs her bags at a moment's ...

For fliers, fares are still ascending

Summer nights: Rimini

You want screenwriting advice? Ask this writer

Couple creating a refuge for children

Free health screenings in Haines City

Make My Day

Letters: 'Our government needs a serious overhaul'

Transplant Rules to Let Children Stay Home

Missing, found, but in denial

TOP 10 Google News Search results for search key phrase “travel nurse”:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=travel+nurse

TITLES of the returned articles:

Pack up your troubles

ATC Healthcare Revenue Increases 25% for the First Quarter of ...

Jury consultant in nurse murder trial tells lawyers how to dress ...

She's always ready to go Retired nurse packs her bags at a ...

Take Care will contract with individual doctors to oversee nurse practitioners who staff

New Study of Nurses Reveal Sources of Injectable Medication Errors

“Surgery Robots” Mean More Education and Training for both Nurses ...

Hanover works to recruit nurses

Thanks for the miracle

Traveling man

Firefox Works on Mac OS 10 Tiger, well, "sort of"

Firefox browser works better than Mac-native Safari as far as some Google functions are concerned.

For example, one can reach all Blogger controls when posting onto a blog from inside Firefox.

However, Google Page Creator still does not work. The Fox cannot catch Fire on that one item, unfortunately.

If you are planning to edit your Google Page Creator web site you need to use IE browser on a Windows machine.

Is this Google's problem? The problem of Mozilla/Firefox or Apple/OS X team? Or all of them?

It seems like someone does not like us to use Google Page Creator on any platform other than IE/Windows.

That's unfortunate because I really love the simplicity and versatility of Google Pages and have my official site built with it (www.writer111.com). It really works for me except I need to switch to my IE/Windows machine every time I need to edit it.

I'm lucky and I have access to a Windows machine as well. But what about those who are operating only on Linux or Mac systems?

Safari - A Handsome Browser with Google Limitations

Mac's SAFARI browser is a great, sleek browsing machine until you want it to accomplish some specific Google-related chores that you could do easily with Firefox and IE.

One great disappointment, for example, is the way Safari cannot display most of the Google Blogger posting controls. You cannot bold or italic your text, cannot spellcheck, etc.

Also, if you are using Google's great online web builder and free hosting service "Google Pages," Safari does not work AT ALL. Period. Google is aware of the pesky issue and a message page recommends the user to download Firefox. Thanks, really.

But I have to note that, if you are using Firefox on a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, the editing function of Google Pages still does not work. You still need IE on a Windows machine to edit your Google Pages. Consumer beware!

What excuse Apple has to let Safari lag so many steps behind in functionality compared to Firefox and IE? For a company that markets itself as "on the cutting edge," it is unbecoming to rely on a browser that is not totally Google-compatible.

Great looks are great but we need full Google compatibility as well.

10th Year - Happy Blogging!

I did not realize this is the 10th anniversary of the invention of blog.

Wall Street Journal observed the moment with a great piece: Happy Blogiversary.

"The spell check on Microsoft Word has yet to awaken to the concept of the blog. Type in "blogging," for instance, and you will promptly earn a disapproving underscore in red, with the suggestion that "bogging," "clogging," "flogging" or "slogging" (unappetizing alternatives all) might, in truth, be the word you seek."

Here are some famous folks and the blogs they read:

Harold Evans
Editor at large, the Week
Former editor, the Times of London
Favorite blogs: AndrewSullivan.com (political pundit for the Atlantic Monthly); MichaelTotten.com (Mideast affairs blogger); HeadButler.com (news and culture roundup)

Mia Farrow
The Editor in Chief: Me
Actress
Favorite blogs: BoingBoing.net (Tracks nooks and crannies of the Web); GPSMagazine.com (Everything about global positioning systems)

Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner
'Milblogging' the War
Spokesman for Multi-National Force, in Iraq
Favorite blogs: "Around here, folks like to read Small Wars Journal (http://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php), Blackfive (http://www.blackfive.net/) and The Mudville Gazette (http://www.mudvillegazette.com/)."

Newt Gingrich
Former House speaker
Favorite blogs: RedState.com (Republican news and notes); Corner.NationalReview.com (conservative magazine's politics blog); PowerlineBlog.com (covers law and right-leaning politics)

Jim Buckmaster
CEO, Craigslist
Favorite blogs: Slashdot.org (one of the first tech blogs); Metafilter.com (community blog anyone can edit); Valleywag.com (tech gossip site); TechDirt.com (popular tech news site)

Value of a Web Site ~ "Page Views" or "Time Spent"?

Nielsen rating company has shifted from the traditional “number of page views” to “time spent viewing a page” to measure a web site’s commercial worth.

This is a decision that will have a serious impact on all advertising companies that determine their web advertisement rates on the basis of such "objective" metrics.

The new Ajax technology seems to be the main culprit why Nielsen felt the need to adopt this new criterion. Ajax allows refreshing the web content without refreshing the page view. You must have noticed the way a new mail appears in your email window without re-loading the page, as we all used to do in the past.

Another reason why the traditional “page view” is considered losing its relevance is the streaming video sites like YouTube where visitors spend a lot of time on a single page watching one video clip after another.

On the basis of this new measuring stick, Nielsen has announced AOL as the winner of May’s “most popular” web site, with a total viewing time of 25 billion minutes, followed by Yahoo at 20 billion minutes. But by page view alone, AOL would have ranked sixth.

Google, although ranks 3rd by page views, dropped to fifth in terms of time spent since people leave Google screen quickly after a search is completed.

But I believe this new criterion has a serious flaw in this day and age of tabbed browsers.

What if you visit a site on one tab, then open another tab and go to another site, then do it for a third or fourth time? I find myself doing precisely that all the time.

What happens to the site left open for 20 hours on a forgotten tab? Does that mean that I have spent 20 hours on that site? Of course not.

How come Nielsen missed such a simple point is beyond me. I’m sure major advertisers are already grappling with this real issue.

Google Page Creator - “Small Design Stuff” Leads to Frustration

Google has a not-so-bad web site design and hosting service called Google Page Creator. And it's FREE!

I've been using this free service since April 2006 for my own web site www.writer111.com

That is of course not its original URL but I have directed my own domain name to point at http://writer111.googlepages.com/ which is the real URL.

For web sites that do not need frequent updating this service is just great.

But it has one small design flaw that I'm surprised Google's really smart engineers and design team still have not discovered it.

When you are in Gmail, there is no easy way to get back to your Google Page Creator.

Almost every Google service imaginable is one easy click away from Gmail EXCEPT the “Pages” and I have no idea why.

For example, when you are looking at your Gmail main page, you see both a number of links up on the top of your page and also additional links on your drop down list under “more”.

But NONE of those links include “Pages”.

So how do you get to your web site design module if you are in Gmail?

First, you navigate BACK to www.google.com (by clicking the WEB link on top) while you are still signed in to your Gmail account, which then takes you to your main standard Google page.

There, you will notice the all-important MY ACCOUNT link on upper right.

When you click on MY ACCOUNT, that's where you will see the PAGE CREATOR link listed and NOWHERE ELSE.

Click that and voila! you'll be in your web site design module.

Why Google cannot include the PAGE CREATOR link either in the Gmail page top links or inside the “more” drop-down list is a mystery. But the first time you try to go from Gmail to “Page Creator” you will discover what a navigational feat it is. And the more you take that annoying detour, the more you realize how such very simple design flaws end up creating a totally frustrating user experience.

Small things... take care of the “small stuff” and the “larger stuff” will automatically take care of itself.