Rapidig.com – A Rapidshare search engine to help you find Rapidshare links for your desired keywords.

How Rapidig.com works?
Rapidig.com has robots that crawl all over the www and find rapidshare links and update our Rapidshare links database. We have three more ways to update our database. You can find them in Submit RapidShare Links page.

Why Rapidshare search engine?
If you had experience of using rapidshare.com, you know that you can not search links in rapidshare.com. So What is solution?
A Rapidshare search engine like rapidig.com.

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.

A little experience with the CSE, however, shows that the standard amount of “boost” that you can apply often isn’t enough to help your “weaker” pages (weaker, as in lower ranking in a “normal” Google search) overcome the stronger ones that Google normally ranks highly. The standard boost may indeed help them rank higher in your CSE than they would in a “normal” search, but often they’re not boosted high enough, and they can still be lost in the sea of results past the first page or two. Thankfully, CSEs provide a way to custom tune the amount of boost. To take advantage of this feature, you need to delve into the land of XML annotations.

A little Google Co-op background is in order before we go further. Many people may not realize that CSEs are built on top of the extremely powerful Google Co-op Topics “engine.” Some of the advanced functionality of Co-op Topics is hinted at, but not really directly exposed, in the CSE docs and user interface. To get at this functionality, you must understand several more advanced topics, and must also be willing to get your hands dirty with a little bit of XML code.

Specifically, you need to develop an understanding of what’s happening on the “Advanced” page of the Google CSE control panel, the land of context files and annotation files. This is not “rocket surgery” (as usability expert Steve Krug would say), but it’s somewhat more involved than filling in forms. It’s probably on the order of difficulty of creating your first web page, learning basic CSS, or writing Excel spreadsheet macros.

A custom wine search engine

Let’s start with a simple CSE, one that will help us explore the world of wine. If you’re following along, now is the time to go create a CSE just like the one we’re using. To do that, create a new CSE with the following sites. To be sure to get the same results we’ll show here, specify “wine” (no quotes) for your “Search engine keywords”, and check “Search only included sites.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine
http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Home/
http://www.wineloverspage.com/
http://www.wine-searcher.com/
http://www.intowine.com/
http://www.wineinstitute.org/
http://www.winemag.com/homepage/index.asp
http://www.erobertparker.com/
http://www.tasting-wine.com/
http://www.winebusiness.com/
http://www.terroir-france.com/

Let’s try out a query. Go to your new Custom Search Engine’s homepage and search for “tasting” (no quotes). You should see results very similar to those shown below.

Let’s assume that these results seem pretty reasonable, but that when we look closely, we decide we’d like to make some adjustments. For example, the first result under “tasting” is from Wikipedia, and while of good quality, we think that the 5th result, labeled “Tasting wine: tasting techniques…” is a better choice. Since this is a custom search engine after all, we should be able to adjust these results as we see fit.

In order to make this kind of adjustment, we need to roll up our sleeves and take a look at what makes this CSE tick. Let’s start by going to the “Advanced” page of the Control panel, where we find sections devoted to “Annotations” and “Context.” Let’s get familiar with these entities, one at a time. A context contains the structural definition of a Custom Search Engine, viewable in text form (specifically, in an XML representation). It contains almost all of the visible stuff you entered in the “New search engine” wizard, such as the name, description, keywords, etc. What it does not contain is any information about the specific sites you’ve included (dramatic foreshadow: remember this factoid when we talk about “Annotations” a little bit later). The easiest way to see a context is to simply click on the “Download” link (shown just above the yellow “warning area” on the bottom half of the page). When you do this, you’ll see something like this in your browser window:

Let’s go ahead and save this XML to a file. This will allow us to edit the context definition and upload our changes back to Google, giving us complete control over the process of customizing our search engine. To save the context to a file (these instructions are for Firefox; your steps will differ slightly for IE), simply click on File->Save Page As, and choose a filename and directory to save the file in. The filename wine-context.xml is a reasonable choice.

Hint: while the link labeled “download” strongly implies saving a file somewhere, that’s a bit misleading. You can always come back and click on this link and simply display the XML in your browser, as you did a moment ago, without any intention of saving anything. This is often a quick way to see the details of how your CSE is structured. I try to think of “download” here as more like “preview,” which reminds me that it’s an easy way to simply view my XML – a useful function when customizing a CSE!

After saving the context file, let’s once again look at it in our browser. All default context files are going to have a section called <Background Labels> that looks something like the one you’re looking at. Background labels are where you define the basic controls you have at your disposal for customizing your search engine. Think of a context file as a place where you can create new “knobs and switches,” such as one for deciding whether or not a page (actually, a URL) appears in your CSE results, one for determining whether or not its ranking in the result list gets promoted or demoted, etc. Let’s make the connection: if you want to include a URL (or set of URLs) in your CSE, you’ll tag (or “annotate”) the URL(s) with the first label, the one with the mode=”FILTER” setting. This tells the CSE to include these URL(s) in the search results if they match the user’s query. If you want to exclude URLs, they must be tagged with the second label, the one with the mode=”ELIMINATE” setting. We’ll talk a lot more about how you actually go about annotating URLs in a moment.

For now, let’s study the context file a bit more. The background labels that appear in our context file were determined by one of the choices made when the CSE was created (this setting is also shown on the “Basics” page of the control panel, shown below). Choosing “Search only included sites,” as we did, produces the “FILTER” and “ELIMINATE” background labels, labels that are useful for this “gross level adjustment” of including or excluding pages and sites. We can apply these labels to any pages we want, thereby tagging them to either be included or excluded from our CSE.

Let’s see what happens when we instead choose “Search the entire web but emphasize included sites” (go ahead and make this change on the “Basics” page of the Control Panel). Now, viewing the context file by once again clicking on “download” from the Advanced page, we see a slightly different set of background labels, reflecting a slightly different goal. Below we show the context file, with the background labels that result from this choice (if you’re following along at home, your label names, which are generated uniquely for each user and CSE by Google, will be slightly different):

In this case, we’ve told Google that we want our CSE to include the entire web (and this is an implicit function, so there’s no need for a label like “FILTER” to include sites), but we want to emphasize certain sites. For the emphasized sites, we’re going to apply the “BOOST” label. You can see that the “BOOST” label also has a “weight” attribute, and the default value for this is “0.69999999”. This brings us back to our initial requirement: how do we assign a higher level of boost to certain pages? It’s pretty obvious that this is going to be done by changing the “weight” attribute, and it turns out that weights can have values between -1.0 and +1.0. Furthermore, a negative weight is used to imply a “demotion,” that will de-emphasize (in the results) URLs that it’s applied to, and a positive weight is a “promotion,” which will emphasize URLs. So the solution to our problem is simple: to get higher boost, we need to set a higher weight on our “BOOST” label.

Thinking about this for a moment, we can see that it’s not enough to just raise the weight value on the BOOST label, for that would emphasize all of our “boosted” sites by the same amount. Instead, what we need is some granularity – the ability to apply different weights to different URLs, so that we can raise or lower them individually. The solution to this is straightforward: we need to create multiple background labels, each with mode=”BOOST”, but with different weights.

Adjusting the filter

There’s one more subtle point we need to cover before we can assemble all the pieces. It turns out that we glossed over the “FILTER” mode when we introduced it earlier and said that it’s used to include URLs in a CSE. What FILTER actually does is this: it tells the Custom Search Engine to only include URLs that have been labeled with the FILTER label. That is, it’s a strict filter: only labeled URLs show up, and all others are “filtered” out. This is how Google implements the ability to limit a CSE’s search scope to only selected sites. If we look closely at our second context file, we note that it has a BOOST and an ELIMINATE label, but no FILTER label. This makes sense because this is the context file that we would use for searching the whole web (except for those sites that we might explicitly exclude, hence the need for the ELIMINATE label) while “boosting” our selected sites.

To get the fine-grained adjustments we want, it’s helpful to list our requirements out like this:

1. include only URLs that I’ve labeled for inclusion
2. boost certain URLs that I’ve labeled for promotion
3. exclude certain URLs that I’ve labeled for exclusion

Having done this, it’s clear we need three “knobs,” or background labels. We can now write the XML for these background labels:

<Label name=”_cse_vvfrmdvd_ai” mode=”FILTER” />
<Label name=”boost-high” mode=”BOOST” weight=”1.0″ />
<Label name=”_cse_exclude_vvfrmdvd_ai” mode=”ELIMINATE” />

For the moment, please simply accept the label names we chose. We’ll explain them in a few minutes. You’ll notice that we simply used the existing labels from our very first example (the default context file generated when we selected “Search only included sites”), and added a new one with our “custom boost.” Now we can put all the pieces of the context file together, which we show below. If you’re following along with this tutorial, be sure to edit your wine-context.xml file and make it look exactly like this (your label names will be slightly different, since Google generates unique labels for each CSE). All you’re actually doing is adding the line with the BOOST label to your original context file. Add this line exactly as shown.

Once we’ve saved the context file, we need to make these labels known to our CSE by uploading them. As you might expect, you do this on the Advanced page of the Control Panel, in the “Context” section on the bottom half of the page, using “Browse” (to select your modified context file) and “Upload” to perform the upload. Google checks the format and contents of your file, and will notify you whether it successfully uploaded it, or found problems. If Google finds a problem, there’s a good chance it’s due to a missing or misplaced character, typically a “<”, “>”, “/”, or “,” in your file.

Annotating with labels

We’re now going to talk about how to use these labels. This is where we return to the concept of “tagging” or “annotating” that I referred to a few minutes ago. Normally, annotating goes on mostly “behind the scenes” as an implicit part of other activities. If you’ve created a CSE, you’ve already been annotating URLs in one of several different ways, even though you may not have recognized it as such:

1. Implicitly on the “Sites” page of the CSE control panel: including a site tags it with the “FILTER” label, telling the CSE to include the site (its URLs) in results; excluding a site tags it with the “ELIMINATE” label.
2. Explicitly, with the Google Marker bookmarklet, which allows you to apply labels, on the fly, as you browse pages on the web.

Annotation files

It turns out there’s yet another way – one that is far more flexible than the other two, but at the cost of being a little bit more complex and error-prone. You can do your tagging in an “annotation file,” which is an XML or tab-delimited representation of the tag/URL combinations, with a text editor (e.g., Windows notepad). Once created, the annotation file can be easily uploaded to the Google server. Annotations are pretty easy to understand: here’s an example of the annotation we’ll use to boost our preferred wine tasting page in our Wine CSE (XML version).

<Annotation about=”www.tasting-wine.com/*” >
<Label name=”boost” />
</Annotation>

The annotation has two key parts: the URL (or URL pattern) being labeled, which is specified in the about attribute of the <Annotation> element, and the label, which is specified by name in the <Label> element. So this annotation assigns our “boost” label to the “www.tasting-wine.com/*” URL pattern (this pattern matches all URLs on the www.tasting-wine.com/ domain). It specifies that all URLs coming from this domain should receive our custom boost, which is weighted at 1.0 (as defined in our context file).

Individual annotations must be contained within an annotation file, which has a specific format. A complete annotation file is shown below. Fortunately, it turns out that we don’t have to write this annotation file from scratch. As I mentioned, anything you do with URLs in a CSE is really supported, often “under the covers,” by annotation. For example, when you add sites on the sites page of the Control Panel, or through the Google Marker bookmarklet, this is really just an easy way of adding an annotation. These existing annotations can be downloaded and edited in a text editor, in much the same way that we did with the context file.

Let’s go ahead and download the existing annotations that were automatically created for us when we first specified the wine CSE. You’ve probably already anticipated how to do this: from the Advanced page. The link to do this is a little bit buried on the page. Look for the sentence that says “Download all your current annotations in the TSV format or XML format.” at the top of the upper light gray area of the page, and click on the XML format link. As with the context file, the XML is displayed in your browser and can be saved to a file. Do so now, saving the file as something like “wine-annotations.xml”. Using a text editor, modify the annotation file by inserting the <Label name=”boost” /> phrase for the existing <Annotation about=”www.tasting-wine.com/*” > element. When you’re done, the modified annotation file should look like the file shown below (note: except for the “boost” label, which should be identical, your label names will be slightly different because they were uniquely generated by Google). The section of the file that I modified is highlighted.

We should be able to just upload this file, and have it replace our existing annotations. While I was working on this article, however, I found that this action didn’t always produce the desired results (this may be a short-term bug). Just to be sure, we’re going to delete our existing annotations before uploading. To do this, go to the Sites page and delete all sites. (Note: be careful working on your own CSE; once you delete sites from the Sites page, you cannot recover them). Now return to the Advanced page, and using the “Browse” and “Upload” buttons in the “Annotations” section, find and upload the wine-annotations.xml file.

Testing our CSE

It’s now time to try out a search on our newly customized engine. Go to the Preview page and search on “tasting”. You should get results like those shown below, with our preferred wine tasting site boosted to the top of the results:

If all went according to Hoyle, you’ve now successfully tuned your CSE to provide a boost to a particular set of URLs (all those coming from the www.tasting-wine.com domain). You can, of course, tune at an even finer level of granularity, in several ways. You can use more specific URL patterns, including fully specifying a web page and applying a boost to that page. You can also create multiple different labels, each with a different level of boost, and selectively apply these labels to different URLs and URL patterns, as appropriate.

At this point, you have all the tools you need to experiment with different “boost weights.” Adjusting results (promoting and demoting URLs) is not an exact science, but with a little practice and experimentation, you should be able to have the kind of influence over the results page that you want.

John Biundo and Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting both worked in the tech industry for over two decades. Eric’s also the creator of the Custom Search Guide.

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.

See Custom Search Engine Topic Refinement for a detailed tutorial on how to take advantage of the powerful topic refinement user interface provided by the Google Topics platform in your own CSEs.

The labels used in Google’s main search have an additional special property. Unlike the labels you create in your own CSE, the Google labels are public, which means they’re available to be used by anyone’s Custom Search Engine. This turns out to be a very powerful concept. Let’s look at a couple of examples of how you can exploit this power:

• If you build a medical-related CSE, you can use the standard Google medical labels to enhance your CSE. You can, for example, declare that you want your CSE to “boost all the sites that have been labeled ’medical_authorities’ or ’for_health_professionals’ in your results”. With this declaration , your site automatically promotes results that have been vetted by established medical authorities like Mayo Clinic, National Library of Medicine, Centers for Disease Control, and New England Journal of Medicine. Amazingly, you (and your users) automatically leverage thousands of hours of work done by medical experts!
• Or you can use the labels to create the same kind of refinement interface that Google uses in its main search (the UI you see when you search on “bird flu”) in your own CSE .

In addition to the medical domain, Google (and an impressive list of partners) have annotated many other “Topics”, including: destinations, autos, computers and video games, and other areas. It’s reasonable to expect that this annotation will continue – in fact, Google has a program that encourages users to help with the massive task of annotating the web.

More Fun with Standard Labels

In addition to these domain-specific labels, Google has labeled thousands of sites with labels like “blogs”, “faq”, “forums”, “news”, “reviews”, and “stores”. With these labels, and a little imagination, you can do all kinds of clever things, like:

• create a blog search engine in about 30 seconds by telling your CSE to search only sites that have been labeled “blogs” .
• a variation on that theme: create a vertical blog search engine (e.g., search across all SEO sites, but favor blogs in the results, or search all .edu sites, but show only blogs) .
• eliminate shopping sites from your results (e.g., create a vitamins/health food search engine that screens out shopping/stores sites, leaving just
  information/blogs/articles ).

Sample Code

Below are the relevant context files for each of the examples described above, along with some discussion.

Example 1: How to boost all the sites that have been labeled ’medical_authorities’ or ’for_health_professionals’ by the Google Health Topic community in your results.

Sample context file for example 1:

Adding the two labels to the BackgroundLabels section of your context file will do the trick. Be careful about using any “FILTER” type labels in your context file, as these may work to eliminate the Google labeled sites.

Let’s explore this a bit further. Let’s say you have actually annotated a large number of medical sites yourself, which you wish to define as the “universe” of results for your CSE. Within that universe, you wish to promote the Google labeled “medical_authorities” and “for_health_professional” sites. In this case, you will use a “FILTER” type label to limit the CSE results to only those sites you’ve labeled. Within that set, the Google labeled sites will be boosted. In this scenario, sites that you have not specifically annotated will not be included, even if they have been labeled by Google with one of the standard labels.

One final note: the boost weight selected is 0.69999999. The reason for this is somewhat arbitrary. This is the weight Google uses when you generate a default CSE with the CSE “wizard”, and choose to search the whole web, but boost your selected set of sites. There is very little documentation on how to choose the right weight value, and since this seems to be the default number that Google has settled upon, it’s what I chose.

Example 2: How to use standard labels to create the same kind of refinement interface that Google uses in its main search for medical terms.

Sample context file for example 2:

This context file defines a sophisticated topic refinement hierarchy, very much like the one used by Google for health-related searches. We haven’t mentioned any BackgroundLabels in this file, so by default, this CSE will search the whole web. Adding a combination of “FILTER”, “BOOST”, and “ELIMINATE” labels can allow you to very specifically define the scope and rankings used in your CSE, in addition to providing the advanced topic refinement user interface.

Example 3: How to use standard labels to create a blog search engine.

Sample context file for example 3:

This one is pretty straightforward. It simply performs a filter on the standard label “blogs” – causing only those sites to be included in search results.

Example 4: How to use standard labels to create a domain-specific blog search engine.

Sample context file for example 4:

The only difference between example 3 and example 4 is the addition of a second “FILTER” type label. The interaction between multiple “FILTER” labels can be thought of as “intersection”, or “AND”. Only URLs that meet all of the “FILTER” conditions (labeled “blogs” by Google, and labeled “seo_site” by the CSE owner), will be included in the results.

Note that this context file implies the existence of an annotation file where URLs/URL patterns have been associated with the label “seo_site”.

Example 5: How to use standard labels to screen shopping/sales sites from your results.

Sample context file for example 5:

This example proved to be an interesting exercise. If you create a CSE using this context file, and search on “vitamins”, you’ll see that it does indeed screen out some of the commercial sites that sell vitamins (compared to the same search on www.google.com). I was a bit skeptical, so I compared a search on “health food”, and found that a good number of commercial sites did, in fact, pass the screen and make it into my search results. This lead me to wondering what kind of sites Google has labeled as “stores”, and how extensive this labeling is.

To test this question, I created another, very similar, and quite unusual, CSE. Take a look at the following context file.

This context file does two, somewhat contradictory things. It creates a refinement interface that allows me to see all search results, for whatever term I search on (try “health food”), that have been labeled “stores”. It does this by specifying “FILTER” on the refinement label (the Label tag within the FacetItem element). Recall, however, that we also have a background label in place that eliminates all URLs that are labeled “stores”. Since a background label is, by default, in effect for all queries, our refinement would produce no results! Not terribly interesting. However, we can temporarily disable the effect of background labels with the very convenient “ignorebackgroundlabels” attribute (we set it to “true” to disable background labels). Doing this turns off all background labels while we are using refinements (i.e., when we click on the “stores” label in the refinement user interface).

All the above sounds more complicated than it really is. The easiest way to make sense of it is to simply create a test CSE, cut and paste the above code into a text file, and upload it (as the context file) on the advanced page of the control panel. Then try a few queries on the preview page.

After playing with this test CSE for a bit, it seems clear that Google has made a good start at labeling commercial sites, and that this could be very valuable for CSE builders. But it definitely needs more work. The good news is that you can create your own annotation file, using the “stores” label, and it is merged seamlessly with the standard set of Google annotations. So if you want to use this technique, you can simply set up a context file like the one shown in the example, then keep track of commercial sites that show up in your results, and annotate them with the “stores” label, and voila, they’ll disappear like magic.

John Biundo and Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting both worked in the tech industry for over two decades. Eric’s also the creator of the Custom Search Guide.

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.

So here is the promise of custom search engines – if we find one we know and trust, we can find the answer we are looking for faster.

So now that we know what users are looking for, can we deliver it? Yes we can! The trick is to find those things that custom search engines can do better than core search. What I learned from discussions with Google Custom Search Engine creator Shashi Seth, is that Google does not know the user’s context. In other words – if a user types in “Ford”, are they looking for information on the company, a place to buy one, reviews of Fords, information on how they are manufactured, and so forth.

In simple terms, we don’t know if the query is being made by a consumer, a media person, or an automobile engineer. If we knew these things, we might be able to provide better results. However, it gets slightly more complicated – web sites don’t typically do a good job of indicating what type of audience they are tailored for either. So what to do?

Enter the CSE. Google’s Custom Search Engines enable human editors (Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs) to filter Google’s core search results. What this means is that the SME can decide what sites to include or exclude from the results, and they can decide to attach weighting parameters to the results to either increase or decrease the rankings of particular sites.

Using this mechanism, the SME can create a CSE that is specifically targeted to a given audience. For example, they can create a CSE for automobile engineers, that includes only those sites that provide engineering and design related information (design magazines, related patent filings, any sites where relevant forums have been setup, etc.).

This will provide the auto engineer a directly relevant result, without the clutter of sites that are intended for other audiences. Ultimately, this will save them time and energy in going their work.

So now that we have the idea, let’s look at a couple of examples. First a comparison of a CSE designed to provide medical information to doctors, as compared to core Google search (the Google results are on the right):

As you can see, more relevant results have been brought up to the first page of the results, increasing the chances of the doctor getting their answer right away. Let’s also compare the results of a CSE designed for patients with core Google search results (the Google results are on the right):

You see that they both have been optimized for their audiences. So CSEs do in fact address a real problem in algorithmic search. Our experience in reviewing CSEs is that about 10% of the people fully understand this issue at this point. But more and more people will come to understand it over time, and this will create increasing usage.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

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:

1. Which sites will be included in the displayed results
2. Sites whose ranking should be raised
3. Sites whose ranking should be lowered
4. Sites which should be excluded from the results

Conceptually, this program is about allowing subject matter experts (SMEs) to provide editorial oversight of the CSE results. Google recognizes that there are inherent limitations in the use of link based ranking schemes to provide optimal search results. SMEs can now define vertically oriented search engines whose results are manually tweaked.

A key part of this program is that site owners can use more than one SME to build their CSE. In fact, the program includes a collaboration feature, where other SMEs can be recruited to contribute their expertise to the CSE. This adds a “social media” aspect to the building of search engines that is truly unique, and should make for a very interesting dynamic.

Once the CSE is defined, the site owner places a search box on their site. It may look something like this:

When a user performs a search, they are brought to a web page that looks much like the traditional Google search results page. However, there are two important differences:

1. The site owner can choose to have the search results appear in an iframe on their own site (or, alternatively, they can be hosted by Google on Google.com).
2. The site owner can customize the look and feel of the page to make it look more like their existing site.

Here is an example of a results page:

Last, but certainly not least, Google plans to share the ad revenue from the resulting search results pages, through the site owner’s existing AdSense accounts. Many site owners will find this a very attractive part of the program.

There are many interesting implications to this program. In a single stroke, Google has effectively recruited millions of SMEs to help improve their search results. The potential exists for a substantial amount of search volume to take place through highly trusted resource sites across the web, where trusted and recognized experts put together vertically oriented CSEs that provide superior results in their area of expertise.

This program also has the potential to help Google gain market share in another way. You can imagine users arriving at a site with a CSE, having found the site through another search engine, and getting converted into using a Google CSE, due to the power of the editorial input.

Because Google shares in the ad revenues, there is an incentive for them to promote third party custom search engines. This dynamic is critical to the whole notion of Google creating a distributed search platform, which leverages the work of SMEs, while still retaining their ability to monetize search. One should not be surprised to find Google actively promoting, and indeed perhaps even redirecting some search traffic, to the most successful CSEs. Doing so will help ensure a more satisfying search experience, which ultimately will boost Google’s market share and bottom line.

Site owners benefit, because they can now build a search asset for themselves. For companies whose web site is viewed as a major asset, the ability to build the world’s best search engine in their area of expertise will be a compelling idea.

In addition, end users benefit, because they get access to search engine results that combine the best of algorithmic search with editorial input. This will translate into finding what they are searching for more quickly. This is ultimately the bottom line that will drive the success of the entire program.

How it Works

Getting started is actually quite easy. You can build a basic CSE entirely through the use of a 1 page form. It’s a compelling experience:

First, you fill in a text box to specify a list of sites that will receive a increased rankings in your own CSE (that is, pages from this list will tend to rank more highly in your CSE’s results than they would on the regular Google search engine). Other than that, there are only 4 major things to think about:

1. The name of your CSE
2. A description of the CSE
3. Whether you want to limit the CSE solely to the sites you specify, or prefer to include results from the entire web, but simply improve your chosen sites’ rankings.
4. Whether you want third party contributions to your CSE to be by invitation only, or to be open to anyone that’s interested.

It’s a very straightforward process. The challenge for people who are defining CSEs will be to walk the line between adding deep editorial value by truly identifying the best sites, and serving their own commercial interests. We believe that the best CSEs will be those that are built with pure editorial goals in mind. But we will probably see many different variants across the market.

Of course in the end, like any other web service, those sites that offer the best end-user experience and value (the best search results) will have a competitive advantage, attracting and retaining more users. In this way, competition among similar CSEs is likely to produce higher quality results – a good thing for the end user.

Advanced Capabilities

For those who want more control, the CSE program offers more advanced capabilities. For example, an SME may want to provide a particular page or site a larger rankings increase than the default increase they get through the use of the form. Using a type of file known as a “Context File”, the SME can assign different levels of ranking increases, with weighting levels of +0.5, +0.75, or +1.0 (the highest). The form defaults to a +1.0 weighting for selected sites.

In addition, the Context File provides the ability to demote site rankings, with weighting levels of -0.5, -0.75, or -1.0 (the largest level of demotion). This additional control provides the SME with a substantial ability to tweak the final search engine results from their CSE. The format of the Context File will be familiar to those who have worked with the Google Co-Op Topics program. We will provide an article in a couple of days to define how this works.

Summary

Google has always favored the algorithmic approach to search because of the obvious scaling advantages over the human editorial approach. Computer algorithms can evaluate many times more web pages than humans can in a given time period. Of course the flip side of this argument is that machines lack the ability to truly understand the meaning of a page. With CSEs, Google may have formed the perfect marriage between human editorial expertise and scalability, and may be paving the way for a significant change in how search is performed.

CSEs scale by allowing, indeed encouraging, collaboration. Google makes it easy for a CSE owner to open up the editorial process to a whole community. A CSE owner can invite others to participate, and allow their editorial inputs — their votes on whether to promote/demote or include/exclude pages and sites — to flow directly into the CSE. Google seems to be saying this: a custom search engine can be a shared, community-powered asset. All parties who receive benefit from the asset (the web site owner, who can monetize the CSE, and the user, who gets a much improved search experience) are motivated to continue to invest in it.

The potential for a virtuous circle emerges: as the CSE gets better, more people are incented to use it and improve it, leading to better search and more users. Thus, we see an elegant approach for scaling human editorial input to the search experience. While Google may not be the first to attempt it, with CSEs, they’re attempting to build a platform that does it better than anyone else.

For those of us who looked closely at the Google Co-Op program back when it was launched in May, we now have a clear picture about where Google has been heading with it. Custom Search Engines represent a powerful, and novel, new market initiative by Google. Various other players, such as Rollyo, Gigablast, and Northern Light, have already established that there is a market out there for Custom Search Engines. But now you can get it from Google, it’s straightforward to build, it’s free, and you get a rev share of the advertising revenue to boot.

About the Authors

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

John Biundo is a Principal Consultant, specializing in SEO/SEM, at Stone Temple Consulting.

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:

1. Relying on keyword metatags: Deserves the number 1 spot, simply because this stopped working 3 years ago. Search engines rely almost solely on user visible text on your site in order to determine its ranking. Text that is not user visible, such as the keyword metatags, stopped being significant years ago, because the Spammers made them abused them so badly. So take the top few keywords that your page is focused on, plug them in here, and then forget about it.Do implement a title metatag though, because it is user visible, and one of the most important things you can do on your page to improve its ranking. Do implement a description metatag, not because it will influence rankings (because it doesn’t), but because some search engines (such as Yahoo) may use it as the description it shows in your search results under some circumstances.
2. Stuff keywords in invisible text: Definitely deserves the number 2 spot, because it can and will get your site banned. This includes text written in the same color as the background, or that is drawn way off the user visible page. These schemes are trivially recognized by search engines, and are treated as the act of a blatant Spammer. Don’t do it. Ever. Learn The Art of Keyword Selection.
3. Purchase Links: This practice is still incredibly popular, largely because there are many people who get away with doing it, and it helps them with their rankings. The problem is that the it is in the strategic interest of the search engines to defeat this practice, and they are working hard to do so. Google uses three techniques to detect purchased links:
   • Algorithms look for obvious patterns, such as the presence of words such as “Advertisers” or “Sponsors” near the link. Another thing they can look for is a grouping of unrelated links that don’t fit the topic matter of the page where the links are found.
   • Google has thousands of editors in Asia whose sole purpose is to review search results for quality purposes. Part of what they are trained to do is detect purchased links and flag them.
   • Google also accepts reports of purchased links and will send these for review by their team in Asia.

   So what does Google do when a purchased link is detected? They flag it and make it useless from a site ranking perspective. In addition, if they detect flagrant link buying for ranking practicespurposes, they can, and do, ban sites. Use the time more wisely. Take the same time you might have invested in finding links to buy, and find a link you deserve instead. It’s much safer, and it will build your business for the long term.

4. Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it’s one that most webmasters don’t understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites “leaks page rank” from your site. However, the world has changed. Page rank is a minute factor in ranking these days. Establishing, and reinforcing, site relevance is a huge factor in your rankings. You can do this by linking to pages and sites that are relevant to yours. Do link to relevant content.
5. Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don’t swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It’s a waste of your time. However, do swap links with sites that are highly relevant to your business, if these sites would be valuable to your users. Building your relevance in ways that are good for visitors to your site is always good. Of course, if you can get these relevant sites to link to you without linking back, this is better still.Read these articles for a Linking Overview and for Link Building Strategies.
6. Implement duplicate content: I have seen this done in two different ways:
   • Many businesses operate many 2 or more sites that contain similar, or even identical content. These different doorways may have been implemented as different business fronts to enable the business to pursue different methods for marketing their products or services.
   • Many sites have multiple ways of navigating to the same content, yet the content is delivered on a different URL in each case. Usually the URL is a simple manifestation of the path the user used to get there. The site owner has no bad intent and views each URL as being the “same page”.

   The trouble with duplicate content is that search engines want to rank the same content only once. So if you have multiple URLs on one site with the same content, one of these is just a waste of the search engine’s time. Here is a real case where you are “leaking page rank” – you are sending your own precious page rank to pages that will never rank.

   You also need to think about your crawl budget. If the search engine comes to your site and is going to crawl 1000 pages today, and 400 of these are duplicate pages that will never rank, you wasted a significant percentage of your opportunity for the search engine to find good unique content and rank it.

   And if you have implemented “doorway sites” you could be in bigger trouble. Search engines see this as Spamming, and you could get banned.

7. Use Session IDs on your URLs: Search engines makeing indexing decisions over a time period of many months. Getting a new site to rank is a year long process. Because of this, search engines look for static pages. When they see parameters at the end of a URL, the search engine treats them as part of the URL.If a search engine sees one Session ID when it crawls a page on your site today, and a different one when it crawls the same page next week, it thinks it has found two different pages. Neither version of the page will get ranked, and the search engine will view your site as unstable. Session IDs will kill your rankings. Put your parameters in a cookie. Live with the fact that 2% of the surfing public disables cookies.
8. Implement your site in Flash: Probably very pretty. But probably very useless from a search engine ranking perspective. Search engines can read and index Flash (try the following search: “cooking schools filetype:swf”), but you will not find any sites that rank high on competitive terms implemented in Flash. One basic reason for this is that search engines love text, and if you plan to implement a site with lots of text, Flash just does not make sense as the medium to use (movies are visual experiences, not reading experiences). You can read more about search engines and Flash here
9. Use lots of Javascript: Javascript can be used effectively in many ways in web site design. The trouble is that search engines don’t know how to read it. This will likely change at some time in the future. But even when it does, it will still be an inefficient means for communicating to a search engine what your site is about.The best thing to do is to use it sparingly, and when you do use Javascript, use include files and/or CSS to move it out of the way of the headers and text on your web pages. Let the search engine find the unique content on each page first, and everyone will be happier.
10. Cloaking: This is the practice of showing different content to the crawlers thaen you show to the user. It’s really easy to come up with legitimate ideas as to why you might want to do this. But it does not matter. It’s an emotional issue with the search engines, and they do not accept responsibility for determining your intent. It’s emotional because it was a very popular technique with the Spammers in years gone by.Search engines periodically implement new bots that they send out for the explicit purpose of detecting cloaking. There is no known technique for cloaking a bot whose name you do not yet know, coming from an IP address you currently don’t know. These new bots easily detect a cloaking implementation.

    When a search engine detects a site that is cloaking, there is an excellent chance that it will lead to the site being banned. Your intent in implementing cloaking does not matter. So don’t do it. Solve your problem by another means.

So what’s the bottom line? There are really two major things you need to do:

• Learn how to communicate to the search engine what your site is about. Many of the problems listed above relate to common practices that make the search engine’s job harder, or even impossible. Learning how to build your site so that the search engine can easily determine the unique value of your site is an outstanding idea.
• Don’t spend your time figuring out how to beat the search engine. It’s just not a good place to be. You may even succeed in the short term. But if you do succeed in tricking them in the short term, the day will come when you wake up in the morning and a significant piece of your business has disappeared overnight. Not a good feeling at all.Take the same energy you would have invested in the tricks and invest it in great content for your site, and in the type of marketing programs you would have implemented if the search engines did not exist.

This is how you can grow your business for the long term.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

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.

Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.

Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that’s five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.

Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven’t moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.

Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.

Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there’s a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It’s still buggy so isn’t available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you’re willing to risk the odd crash or two then there’s an easy way to try it out.

Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that’s it – you’re running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you’ve a slow internet connection then it may feel like you’ll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that’s not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there’s much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you’re on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

By Mike Williams
http://www.techradar.com

20+ Beautiful jQuery Plugins for Web Designers

Thickbox 3.1

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.

Lightbox

Like ThickBox but with less features. Simpler. For those of you that doesn’t need many features and just want a simple image-display-funcition-plugin.

jQuery.popeye an inline lightbox alternative

Another alternate version of lighbox. But this one stands out from the rest. Check it out to see what can be done!

Sliding boxes and captions with jQuery

This is a multiple-effects-plugin and is very useful if you want to have hidden captions that shows when hovering an image(mouseover).

jPlayer – jQuery mp3 player plugin

Using this plugin you can have your own musicplayer in no time! It is very useful. Almost like your own myspace but with jQuery!

jQuery form plugin

This is a very simple but useful plugin. Have you ever had problems establishing a form? Now you dont.

easyDrag jQuery plugin

With this plugin you can drag and drop any item as you wish! Good for moving content around. And it’s very simple to use.

jQuery accordion plugin – vertical

This is maybe one of the most attractive jQuery plugins out there. Accordion I say! Vertical niceness to the eyes.

jQuery accordion plugin – horizontal

This accordion plugin is the same as the above but with a little twist… It’s horizontal! Very useful displaying larger images. Good for portfolio-usage

Switch stylesheets with jQuery

This is a very small but useful plugin. Using this plugin you can switch the styles of your webpage using different CSS files and this plugin.

Innerfade with jQuery

This plugin alows you to fade any element inside a container in and out. These elements could be anything you wish. Very useful displaying your portfolio in a nice way.

Coda slider 1.1.1

This jQuery slider, I think, is one of the most used plugins on the web. A slider simply slides content from content1 > content2> content3 etc. Very nice and useful effect.

jQuery toggle elements

Simply toggle elements on and off. This one has a very cool animation on the content too, so its not only the toggle effect.

jCarousel – Riding carousels with jQuery

This one shows many images(commonly thumbnails) in a smaller area. You could actually call this a thumbnailslider. Very useful if you have too many images in a too small area.

jQuery Plugin – a Sliding Menu

This menu shows, when clicked on, sliding out from nowhere in a nice animation and does the same when clicked on again, vice-versa.

jQuery Lavalamp for jQuery lovers(and everybody else)

Lavalamp is a very smooth meny-animation-effect. It has a feeling of its own. You need to see it for yourself to know what I’m talking about(my personal favourite).

jQuery colorpicker

Pick your own colours using jQuery! Almost like in Photoshop, but with less colorchoices. You can use it to change the textcolor in a textarea or just let your visitors change your textcolor on your website maybe?

jQuery star rating – Dynamicly create a Ajax rater

This is a star-rating-plugin. Use this to let your visitors rate your content based on what they think of it. You can have up to how many stars you would like, but my advice is to use the maximum of 10.

jQuery – IconDock

Like Apples Dock. But with jQuery. This plugin is very attractive and very useful for everyone that wants a cool effect and look on their menu/portfolio navigation/quickbar navigation/etc.

jQuery – Imageselect

Use this to croop an image using jQuery. Very useful for avatar-crooping and crooping other images that may be used on the web that you want to make a smaller size inside of the browser.

jQuery loopedslider

A slider that slides your images just the way you want! This one has some nice extra effects and many options to choose from.

jQuery – Beautiful slider

Least but not last(or actually, last), the most beautiful jQuery slider on the web(according to me). Has a very nice twist on the caption!

10. De-bulk your MacBook’s power cord

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)

9. Install your own RAM

It almost always costs less to buy your own RAM from a reliable source and install it yourself than to let the Lenovos, Dells, HPs, and Apples do it for you, either when you first purchase your system or as an upgrade. On most systems, laptops included, it’s a beginner-level hardware project to swap out or add on a memory chip. Adam details how to install a new stick of RAM in your desktop PC and took us on a video tour of MacBook RAM upgrading. From what this editor has seen, that process is nearly identical on non-Apple laptops: find where the RAM is kept, unscrew a plate, pop the memory sticks in and out at an angle, then re-seat it to be back on one’s way. Not sure which chips you need to buy? Try the How-To Geek’s guide to determining what kind of memory your computer has installed.

8. Quiet a noisy hard drive

You don’t notice the sound of your hard drives when you first boot up a new system, but over time, the hum, whir, and clicking of all those disks and moving parts can become maddening low-level irritants. A lot of the noise is usually caused by the hard drive vibrating against a metal desktop case, which can be eliminated with small rubber inserts, or, for a nearly complete vibration elimination, suspending the drive from elastic straps. If you’re rocking a laptop, or looking for other ways of quieting any kind of system, try searching and digging around at Silent PC Review, End PC Noise, or check out PC Magazine’s multi-step guide to a quiet PC.

7. Get good at soldering

Most DIY gadget projects, and a lot of computer or electronics repairs, require the use of a hot soldering iron, some solder, and occasionally flux. If all that sounds pretty foreign and new to you, Instructables’ guide to basic parts fusing and circuit mending will be worth every minute you spend absorbing it. It’s packed with good tips and answered beginner questions. Planning to jump into a more advanced, detail-oriented project like the MintyBoost? Aaron’s Homepage has a guide on how to solder on circuit boards. (Original post)

6. Turn a PC into a Hackintosh

Getting Apple’s OS X running on hardware you didn’t buy from Apple doesn’t require magic powers, a 128-character secret code, or much more than just the patience to follow a few work-around steps, really. Adam showed us how to take some gear nabbed from NewEgg and assemble it into a “Hackintosh,” with greater ease of use than his first go-round. If you’ve got a desktop system looking for a few new parts, or you’d like to try out the Mac world without paying Mac premiums, it makes for a rewarding weekend project.

5. Replace a power supply

Power supplies are not something you want to cheap out on, or hang onto if they’re on their way out. They’re often the noisiest component of a desktop system, they’re fickle, and they can bring down other components if they fritz out. Lifehacker alumnus Rick Broida ran down the basics of unplugging and removing your power supply and re-seating a new one in its place. That answers one half of the equation, but how do you know what PSU to replace it with? Online parts megastore NewEgg offers a convenient Power Supply Calculator that figures out power supply needs from the components already installed. Just as with a house, you can sometimes get by with less than you should, but you don’t want to find out what happens when you’re wrong.

4. Install a new hard drive

Every hard drive seems like it will be way, way too big for your uses when you first get it. A few months of willy-nilly downloading later, and you’re looking for bigger digs for your data. Adam broke down the desktop installation process, but for the increasing number of folks jamming all their stuff onto laptops, we offer up guides on MacBook upgrades from the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog and Popular Mechanics’ general laptop hard drive guide. All the techniques, of course, also apply if your drive goes dead and you need to yank it out for a replacement.

3. Replace a busted laptop LCD

LCD screens are often the second-most expensive component of a laptop, so when they go bad, most folks just swing for a full replacement. If you can find an LCD replacement for your model, though, there’s a good chance you can save yourself some pretty serious cash, especially if your laptop’s screen went dark early in its life. The This Is My Defective Kit site runs down a step-by-step process for replacing a faulty display, which is mainly a matter of being careful and not losing very tiny screws. If that sounds a little beyond your powers or patience, you can turn that working-but-not-visible laptop into a headless system that hides away easily. (Original post)

2. Upgrade to a new motherboard and CPU

Replacing the other parts of your computer is akin to attaching arms and legs to a Frankenstein’s system. When you add an entirely new CPU and motherboard to your case, that’s when you’ve truly become a mad scientist. Actually, it’s not all that hard, as Adam demonstrates, and on a system where everything runs well but the brain just needs to move a bit quicker, it’s a relatively cheap and efficient upgrade—and one that instills a lot of confidence in your computer hardware skills.

1. Build a whole computer from scratch

As Gina notes in her comprehensive run-down of building her own PC, from choosing the parts to (finally) getting to a log-in screen, you don’t build your own PC because you want to save a whole lot of money (though you can, depending on the build). You build it yourself because you want complete control over the quality and features of every single piece of it, and you learn a heck of a lot about how they operate together. Do yourself a favor, though, and learn from Gina’s “several WTF moments” before giving it a go yourself.

Where do you turn when you’re looking to fix or replace some hardware? Which hardware projects are worth the time and effort, and which have you left to the pros? Relate your repair tales in the comments, and feel free to offer up other worthwhile hardware links.

“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.”

That’s not to say that non-genuine copies of Windows are allowed to run completely free. Certain updates and software may be blocked at Microsoft’s discretion, such as value-adding updates and non-security-related software.

Bootlegged copies of Windows Vista can still access updates through the Windows Update control panel. A non-genuine Windows XP system can only access updates through Automatic Updates, but not through the update websites.

Microsoft said that it won’t be changing this policy for Windows 7, meaning that pirates will still be as protected as legit users. While this might seem a little strange for any software company to provide software support to pirates, keeping even illegal copies patched up is in the interest of the entire computing ecosystem.

While it may be mildly entertaining to laugh at illegal installations of Windows fall at the hands of a computer worm, an epidemic is still an epidemic – especially if it affects legitimate users who simply haven’t applied the current patches or security software.

Source : Tom’s Hardware US