cuil sucks
That new search engine, cuil, you know the reputed Google killer? It sucks.
From England I typed in “Small business news” and got served a dish of useless American websites – useless to me anyway. Why do I sit in an office in (Old) Hampshire and wish to see small business news from Cleveland, New Jersey, Michigan and Alabama? For the $33 million of venture capital that was reportedly spent on floating this search engine, I expect better.
Cuil is as daft as its name is – which is also French for arse is it not?
Cuil is dead, long live Google.
Google Chrome
Rumour has it that Google’s new open source browser, Chrome, is out today. Infact it’s not just speculation, Google made an official announcement on their blog.
Google’s Chrome browser is accompanied by a 32-page Scott McCloud comic book detailing Google’s thoughts behind the release of the new browser which lands in a market dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and constantly chased but never equalled (in terms of market share anyway) by Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock and others.
The Google Chrome book is a neat & friendly way to introduce punters to the new browser, making a nice change from the usual stuffy instructions you might expect.
So let’s see what happens later today when the Google Chrome beta is released…
ALA Survey
A List Apart are running their 2008 survey for people who make websites. I took it and so should you 
The results of last year’s survey (1.7Mb PDF) makes good reading. From my own perspective it’s interesting to see that the majority of the 2007 survey’s respondents were:
- mainly developers (I class myself as a web designer)
- younger than me
- educated to a higher degree
- working for MUCH bigger companies
- only recently into blogging
- mostly getting excited by the web design field
- working less hours
- fairly “green” in the web industry
- not having as much holiday
- earning less but getting pay rises
FF3b5
Firefox 3 Beta 5 is out and, although it’s a nice bit of kit, I only really wanted to post about it because of the awesome piece of design on the FF3b5 welcome page.
The gorgeous picture accompanying the FF3b5 homepage is of a giant retro robot being built in a utopian setting – very much Sky Captain style but with more colour 
IE7 Pageload Sound
This isn’t a design post, but more of a tip to stop you being driven insane whilst you have to use IE7.
Does anybody else find the sound that IE7 makes when it loads/reloads pages really annoying? It’s that irritating “tick” sound when you open a new tab and load a page. Or when an application you’re running in PHP reloads every 10 seconds and you get that constant “tick………. tick………. tick……….”
I was working from a Vista laptop this evening (I know, I was in a hurry to buy a cheap laptop for my SEO work and the only one that fitted the bill was a Vista machine *slap*) and the constant noise really got on my t*ts.
To fix it you need to go into CONTROL PANEL > SOUND > SOUNDS and scroll down the list of sounds until you reach WINDOWS EXPLORER. At the foot of this section is the START NAVIGATION.wav sound. Either a) completely kill the sound off by selecting (NONE) from the drop-down list or switch to another, less infuriating noise like WINDOWS BALLOON.wav (It’ll sound like you’re being scanned by radar but it’s far less aggravating than the default irritation)
Et voila – no more annoying IE7 pageload sound.
MFA is Dead
With the new post over at the Google AdSense blog could this be a sign that Made For AdSense (MFA) websites are dead?
Basically Google are re-stating that deceptive practices, whereby AdSense ads are under titles (that indicate they are not Google AdSense ads) or are “hidden” amongst navigation systems to look like part of the site, are against the AdSense TOS.
And I really hope Google start policing this a bit better becuase there are too many sites spoiled by the fact that they are FULL of AdSense ads, hence the term MFA.
Let’s hope the MFA site is dead.
Photoshop Express
Photoshop is now available as an online service in the form of Photoshop Express. I’ll be back soon with some more info once I’ve tested it out…
Top Tools
There’s probably a million lists out there detailing the top tools for webmasters, developers, designers and SEOs but none of them are mine, so I created my own.
Actually, I created this list because I run at least 5 machines and I needed a place where I can remember what the hell I plugged in and where I got it from.
Firefox Plugins
- Greasemonkey – Run scripts to customise how webpages display
- SearchStatus – PR, Alexa, Compete data in yout status bar. Also has a great feature to highlight “nofollow” links.
- ShowIP – Shows the IP address of the site you’re viewing in the status bar.
Greasemonkey Firefox Plugins
- Google Search Compactor – Compacts and lists Google search results
- Statistics Detector – Shows what stats package a site is using as you browse
Analytics Benchmarking
Google Analytics has become the weapon of choice for one of my clients as it does an admirable job of splitting their paid and non-paid traffic, particularly helpful seeing as they’re runnning an Adwords campaign or two.
Today I noticed in Google Analytics’ menu there’s a Benchmarking (Beta) button under the Visitors heading.
“Benchmarking is a service that lets you see how your website’s statistics compare against industry verticals. Use benchmarking data to gain a broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.”
Getting further into the Benchmarking (Beta) I had to allow Google to anonymously collect & share data and I’ve enabled Benchmarking (Beta) for the client’s site. When I attempt to use the service, Google’s now telling me that benchmarking data is being collected & combined and that
“Industry statistics will appear in this report within two weeks”
Tres cool, now I just have to sit and wait for up to 2 weeks to see how this site is performing against industry verticals. And this is where I’m very curious… Not knowing how Google knows which industry you’re in I did a little search amongst all their FAQs and it appears that you have to set the industry vertical yourself… by going into “Open category list” and selecting a category… and yet I’m not seeing that function either in Firefox or my IE6 browser.
This is going to be interesting comparing visits, page views per visit, bounce rate and average time on site with others in the industry… I wonder how we will fare? I’ll keep you posted.
Google’s New Webmaster tools
We’ve been clamouring for Google to revise the Google Webmaster Tools for some time now, and taking the webmaster tools user survey seems to be paying dividends.
The toolset so far has been fairly simple but it looks like Google are listening to webmasters and putting out some really useful, really helpful new webmaster tools
I noticed yesterday that G’s toolset now includes some very useful Content Analysis features…
Under the DIAGNOSTICS tools there is a CONTENT ANALYSIS section that looks at:
Title tag issues
- Missing title tags
- Duplicate title tags
- Long title tags
- Short title tags
- Non-informative title tags
Meta description issues
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Long meta descriptions
- Short meta descriptions
Non-indexable content issues
These are all really burning issues that many SEO people want to know and by pinpointing problems with title tags, meta descriptions and non-indexable pages it looks like Google are giving us what we want in order to make our sites more competitive.
Like they say, fixing these issues may help in addressing the negative impacts that incorrect title and meta may cause, so listen to Google, fix the problems and report back on whether their guidance was a wild goose chase to simply keep people busy or whether you’ve had any real successes in the serach results…