Aug20
Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) are designed to be fast and easy to implement, and don’t require any coding, at least for basic features. The Custom Search Engine user interface deliberately keeps things simple, as does the accompanying documentation. It doesn’t take long, though, for the first-time CSE builder to want to exercise finer control over their search engine, and to begin pushing up against the boundaries of the simple CSE control panel. That’s the topic we explore in this post.
This article is not intended as a gentle introduction to CSEs. For that, you may want to start with this overview of Google Custom Search Engines or this article showing how to build a good Custom Search Engine.
Let’s look at an example of customization. With CSEs, it’s easy to say “build me a search engine that searches the entire web, but gives these hand-picked resources (pages, groups of pages, or entire sites – you choose) a ’boost’ in the rankings, so that they tend to show up high on the results page.” In fact, this may be one of the most common use cases, and it’s supported naturally in the basic CSE user interface.
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\\ tags: CSE, Custom Search Engines, google, Search Engines
Aug20
Labeling the World Wide Web
A surprisingly little-known fact is that Google, and some trusted partners, have quietly annotated a large number of web sites with standard labels. The fruits of this labor are quite visible in Google if you search on medical terms like “prostate cancer” or “bird flu”.
The results that you see, with the “refinement interface” prominently displayed above the list of search results, is another aspect of Google Topics, the platform that underlies Google Custom Search Engines. The same refinement UI you see here is available to authors of CSEs.
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\\ tags: google, search engine, tips, Tricks
Aug20
One of the key factors that will determine the long term success of Google’s Custom Search Engine announcement is whether or not users will find value in Custom Search Engines (CSEs). Put differently, will CSEs differ enough from Google’s core search results to be worth the trouble? Users are not going to use these things unless they improve their lives somehow, in some manner that they care about.
We do know that users care about searching. When a user begins a search, they want to find something. Since their real work begins when they are done searching, they want the search to be done fast, perhaps even instantly. We have all experienced it – where we do an initial search, find that the results are not what we want, we refine our search, and try it over again. Fundamentally, this whole process is a waste of our time until we get the result we want.
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\\ tags: google, search engine
Aug20
Overview
Google’s new Custom Search Engine (Google CSE) program enables web site owners to define their own search engines. CSE provides a deceptively simple form-based interface for building a domain-specific search engine on top of the Google search platform. This means that the builder gets to focus on selecting valuable content and tuning the ranking criteria, while Google does all the “heavy lifting” of crawling, indexing, ranking, and displaying results.
The main task of building a CSE is to determine which sites/URLs (including flexible URL patterns) are searched, and to define a set of rules that guide the ranking of results. Specifically, the CSE program allows four major methods for altering the search results:
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\\ tags: google, Search Engines
Aug20
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The world of Search Engine Optimization is complicated for many reasons. For example, it is well known that the Google algorithm takes into account more than 100 factors in ranking a web page. In addition, search engines treat their algorithms as highly proprietary for two main reasons: (1) they don’t want their competition to know what they are doing, and: (2) they don’t want web spammers to design sites to get rankings that they don’t deserve.
Another reason the SEO world is so complicated is that it has changed dramatically over the past few years. What worked in 2003 stopped working in 2004. What worked in 2004 stopped working in 2005. The complexity of this environment, and the rapid changes, have led to many SEO myths. This article identifies the top 10 worst SEO ideas, and provides an explanation as to why they don’t work. Here is our top 10 list:
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\\ tags: Seo
Aug19
Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.
But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Enable pipelining
Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
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\\ tags: Firefox, Firefox Hack
Aug19
This collection of jQuery plugins might come in handy next time you’re building a site. This post highlights some of the more aesthetic plugins online that can add a spark of creativity into your web design.
20+ Beautiful jQuery Plugins for Web Designers
This is a ThickBox. A ThickBox is approximately like a lightbox, but with more effects. It supports content using AJAX etc etc, and is very useful displaying several images in a row.
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\\ tags: jQuery, Plugin, Web Design
Aug19
If your desktop or laptop parts have died or seen better days, you’ve got a friend. All of your Lifehacker editors—and many helpful net denizens—have upgraded or repaired faulty systems, and we’ve rounded up some of their most helpful tutorials.
For all their design emphasis on elegance and minimalism, MacBooks come with rather bulky power cords that aren’t easy to coil up and tuck away. Gizmodo editor Brian Lam travels quite a bit with his MacBook Pro and doesn’t dig the bulk of the cord leading up to the two-prong “brick,” so he details the not-so-tough technique of swapping it out for a lighter, more flexible PlayStation cord, which shares the same adapter at the end. (Original post)
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\\ tags: Hardware
Aug19
Microsoft earlier this week clarified that all versions of Windows, both legitimate and illegitimate, receive security updates – and that policy will carry over to Windows 7.
“There seems to be a myth that Microsoft limits security updates to genuine Windows users,” wrote Microsoft’s Paul Cooke, who works in Windows Client Enterprise Security. “Let me be clear: all security updates go to all users.”
“Not only do all security updates go to all users’ systems, but non-genuine Windows systems are able to install service packs, update rollups, and important reliability and application compatibility updates,” Cooke continued in the blog entry. “In addition, the users of non-genuine Windows systems can also upgrade a lot of the other software on their computer. For example Internet Explorer 8 has numerous security- oriented features and improvements, and it is available to all users.”
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\\ tags: Microsoft, Windows 7
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