Google SEO Guidelines
July 6, 2009 by Lisa Mayer
Filed under Development
For those who don’t already have it, here’s guidelines that will help Google find, index, and rank your site.
Wolfram|Alpha…the anti-Google?
May 12, 2009 by Lisa Mayer
Filed under Development
WIRED Epicenter has an article on the new search engine called Wolfram|Alpha being released this month that will challenge Google in the search arena…
The product of four years of development, Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. Though Alpha’s interface evokes Google ― whose co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram ― it’s more like the anti-Google.
Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser.
Type in “Pluto” and Alpha calculates the dwarf planet’s distance from Earth at that very instant. Bang out a series of letters like “ACTCGTC” and Alpha recognizes it as genetic code and tells you what strand of DNA that particular gene lives on and what we know about it. Wolfram has licensed ― or created ― a whole library of databases and massaged them so the information is pliable. (To date, they include Wikipedia, the US Census, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library,” he says.) Combined with the near-magical abilities of Mathematica, Alpha is a powerful computational engine that can effortlessly answer queries that no one has asked of a search engine before.
Consider a question like “How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?” Google would find the answer only if someone had previously gone through the whole list, matched the birthplace of each laureate with a table of lunar phases, and posted the results. Wolfram says his engine would have no problem doing this on the fly. “Alpha makes it easy for the typical person to answer anything quantitatively,” he asserts.
Search within Google’s Search Results
April 14, 2008 by Lisa Mayer
Filed under Uncategorized
Hey when did Google search results start letting you search within a web site from their search results page? Check out this screen capture I made when looking up EDUCAUSE this afternoon…
How cool is that?
UPDATE: From the Google blog, 3/05/2008:
Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.
Add MIT Directory & Google Search to Firefox
March 14, 2007 by Lisa Mayer
Filed under Uncategorized
For those that don’t have this already…how cool is it that you can add searching the MIT Directory and MIT Google to your FF search options?
http://web.mit.edu/ist/google/searchplugins/
(Thanks, Jeff!)
