Come Back

March 29th, 2006

Now we’ve completed the plan of giving the programmers a false sense of security, our lunchtime pool tournament now stands at:

Programmers 2 - 1 Marketeers

Google testing new search interface?

March 28th, 2006

I found this over on arstechnica.com - It appears that Google are working on a possible new search interface. You can try it out by visiting www.google.com, and then copying and pasting the line below into the address bar.

javascript:alert(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:
LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com”)

Note: the string must be a continuous, single-line entry (you’ll need to take the carriage return out before LM). Additionally, the portion “domain=.google.com” should be modified to whatever Google search server you are using (e.g., google.co.uk; we have verified that this works with the UK and US servers… it may work with others)

Hit return, and ignore the message that pops up. Then try searching for something and see the new interface!

What does this mean for us though? Well with this slight redesign, Google appear to be trying to draw attention more to their niche search options, and by putting them on the left, allow space to add more options to the list in the future. It also allows the search listings to start further up the page, which can only be good for sponsored listings which now appear to be more prominant.

Whever this new interface will ever see the light of day? Only Google knows that I guess. This isn’t a revolutionary change, but I quite like it.

The Playing Field

March 27th, 2006

In an effort to provide the best possible product for our clients, we have been working hard producing a document based around SEO friendly design for the programmers and designers. Although we have always designed sites that work well with search engines it is not possible for the graphics and programming team to keep up with ever changing SEO standards. It took me about 4 hours to create a 5,000 word document which now lives on our intranet and is updated every couple of weeks. The advantage of this is we have a “living” book of SEO that everybody can reference with projects.

There is definately a fine line between functionality, usability and visibility. Together they are the core of good web design but they are useless without the each other.

Big Problems at Big G

March 24th, 2006

It would appear Google is rolling back its datacenters! Although I’m sure they will never admit it! There has been widespread problems with Google listing large website’s pages as supplemental results, rather than full pages. We believe as part of the process to fix this, they have rolled back their datacenters, here’s why:

I’ve been working on a brand new site which went live on Monday, within 3 days I found myself sitting happy at the top of Google for my some of my keyterms. Imagine my disappointment when I found tonight that my site is no longer even indexed on most datacenters! Would could have caused this? A quick visit to yourcache.com confirmed that my site had been indexed by most datacenters. So why wasn’t it showing? To investigate further, we did a cache check on one of our older, larger sites which has around 50,000 pages indexed in Google… It now only has 690 pages indexed on almost all datacenters and the cached pages are six months old! Funnily enough, these datacenters are also the ones which have “de-indexed” my new site..

C’mon Google - come clean!

Progress Report

March 23rd, 2006

The Big Daddy update is on all but 1-2 data centers now and it looks like the changeover will be complete within the next 2 weeks.