Google

Ok, Matt is really starting to hammer us with information today.

Matt Cutts has posted for the 4th time today - this time, his post concerns the new Google datacenter called Bigdaddy. The Bigdaddy datacenter is now 100% live and Google is calling for user feedback. By providing user feedback now, changes can be made before the main search engine is changed over to Bigdaddy and you can prevent a potential drop in your rnakings if you catch spam pages now. This is a must read for all of those who are dependant on their rankings for revenue.

Geez Matt, slow down! Matt Cutts has posted again today - this time concerning HTTP 302 Redirects. What exactly is a HTTP 302 Redirect and how does it differ from a 301 Redirect? Matt explains this as:

Q: Time out. I’ve got a question. What’s the deal with 302 vs. 301? What does that mean? What’s the difference?

A: The “302″ refers to the HTTP status codes that are returned to your browser when you request a page. For example, a 404 page is called a “404″ because web servers return a status code of 404 to indicate that a requested page wasn’t found. The difference between a 301 and a 302 is that a 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location, while a 302 status code means that a page has temporarily moved to a new location.

Matt Cutts, who is on a posting spree today, has posted a guide to understanding the results when doing a inurl:www.mydomain.com search using Google's search engine. As Matt states - "The inurl: operator is one of the most misunderstood features of Google, especially when discussing hijacking".

Matt seems to be posting all this information in preperation of people bombarding him with people asking about the move to the Bigdaddy datacenter. Make sure to read through his inurl FAQ. Of note for me, I didn't know that a combination of inurl:www.mydomain.com and -site:www.mydomain.com would yield all the results where mydomain exists in the URL, but that aren't parked at mydomain.

Matt Cutts talks about URL Canonicalization and its effects on how Google crawls your website. In addition, he offers some friendly tips for making sure that your site gets crawled in exactly the manner that you want it crawled. This is a great tip for all of those webmasters looking to improve their site's appearance to Google's automated crawler.

After reading Matt's piece, you should check out my personal guide to Canonical Domain Name issues

The AdSense Blog talks about publishers potentially making the switch to link units espeically with the new year. What are link units you ask? Well, the Google AdSense FAQ states that link units are:

Link units are a new form of text advertising that we're offering to our AdSense publishers. Using the same contextual targeting algorithm that targets Google ads to your content pages, link units display a list of topics that are relevant to your page. Each topic, when clicked, brings the user to a page of related advertisements.

The Official Google Blog talks about their year of blogging and offers some highlights from the year. What I find amazing is that they generated over 4 million unique visitors to their blog (tracked by Analytics for only half the year!!!). This shows the power of corporate blogging to disseminate information to the masses - a trend that I am sure we will see more of in 2006.

BetaNews reports that Google has teamed up with Opera to be the default search engine of choice on their Opera Mobile and Opera Mini applications. Even though Opera trails dramatically in the desktop browser race, Opera does have a strong foothold in the mobile arena and Google, recognizing that mobile computing through cell phone usage is the future, has already staked their claim. However, the partnership very wisely for Opera, only is for a single year. 2006 should hold a lot of ad

The Google Base blog announced layout changes to test user surfing behaviors. From the blog:

This change allows us to experiment with how you browse and search on Google Base and see related items. The item details page enables you to see all the attributes and labels attached to the item and provides links to items with similar labels. We want to measure how this navigation changes the number of searches and other ways people will use it. In the future we plan to test a number of other navigation changes in order to optimize the Google Base experience. By the way, search results that display Google Base items on Froogle, Google Local and Google will continue to point directly to item URL.

Persistent has released two new GreaseMonkey scripts - Gmail Macros and Gmail Label Colors. These two scripts greatly increase the functionality of Gmail by altering the CSS used for the page.

I'll be using both of these scripts with my FireFox 1.5 install. Hopefully, Google will take notice of these scripts and add this functionality into Gmail by default to alleviate the need for these extensions.

The Mini-Microsoft Blog talks about a poster comment who recently left Microsoft and joined the Google team (the value of the Mini-Microsoft blog really is the comments and not the actual posts themselves). The conclusion of the article can really be summed in the following quote:

This is the kind of energy that I think is missing from Microsoft. It was definitely there in the old days.

I don't buy for a minute that the empty offices and empty parking lots are because people are working from home. Instead, I think that the fat cat partners are in meetings while they wait for their stock to vest (== empty offices). And the guys in the trenches have no incentive to work extra hours.