Posts Tagged google
What Being Number One On Google Gets You
Posted by Howard Yeend in Startups, web on October 27, 2011
I’ve been collecting information on how much traffic Google send to me across my various domain names. I’ve found the results rather interesting and quite useful, and so I thought I’d share them. Note: This is based only on four data points. Skip to the ‘related work’ section at the bottom for some links to studies which are more involved, but which lack my deeply elegant wordsmithery and the soothing pixelated green header that puremango has become world famous for… (ahem)
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A Pointless Update?
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on May 10, 2011
This is a pointless update.
I haven’t updated this blog for over a month. Google likes it when I update frequently. So I’m doing a pointless update to see what Google does. Last year I started updating the blog every two weeks and have noticed a huge increase in search traffic since then (anecdotal evidence I know, but controlled experiments on SEO are difficult).
Now my updates are less frequent, my traffic has dipped a little again. So I’m hoping that this update will cause my traffic to increase again.
So it’s not really a pointless update, it’s part of an experiment to see how Google responds. And in fact, I’ve actually managed to turn this into a vaguely interesting post about search engines after all, so the experiment is probably hopeless flawed. But read on if you’re interested in some chatter about how search engines like Google actually work.
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What Bing Should Have Said To Google
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on February 3, 2011
So, Bing made their response to Google’s accusations of copying their results. I don’t think Bing were as clear in their response as they could have been.
Today I’m going to write the post that I think Bing should have written. To be clear – I have absolutely no relationship with either of these companies (beyond using gmail, analytics and adsense), I’m just putting this out here from my view of the situation. After this I’ll get back to blogging about cool web stuff, and stop ruining my chances of ever working for Google…
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What are Google thinking: Part 2
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on February 2, 2011
Original blog post here: >What are Google thinking<
I’d like to respond to some of the comments made on hackernews and puremango about my post yesterday, and about Binggate / copygate in general.
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What on earth are Google thinking? (re: Bing-gate)
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on February 1, 2011
By now you’ve no doubt smelled the shitstorm surrounding Google’s allegation that Bing are ‘cheating’ and copying Google’s search results. If not, in brief, Google spotted that Bing sometimes includes results that seemed to be copied from Google, so Google set up a honeypot – they made some made up words like [hiybbprqag or juegosdeben1ogrande] cause Google’s SERPs to link to random unrelated sites. A few weeks later, around 8% of those sites showed up on Bing for those queries.
In what is being dubbed by many as “BingGate”, Google then leaked a great story onto searchengineland.com who ran with the headline Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results. This on the very same day that the Farsight 2011 event was held – a discussion about the future of search between Matt Cutts (Head of Webspam at Google), Harry Shum (Bing Corporate Vice President) and Rich Skrenta (CEO of Blekko) – great timing Google. Classy.
When I read about the story on hackernews, I pretty much immediately saw what was going on – Bing are using click data from everywhere to improve their results. Now I’m no MS evangelist. I run OSX, had gmail when it was still 6 invites per user, yada yada. (heck I run adsense and analytics on my blog. I love Google, which is why I’m massively disappointed to see this kind of behaviour from them!)
WordPress Performance Tips
Posted by Howard Yeend in Wordpress on October 9, 2010
WordPress is an excellent piece of software. It helps over 27 million people publish their blogs, and people view pages on WP-hosted blogs over 2.1 billion times a month(source). I use wordpress on all my blogs. But there is growing evidence that page load times are a large contributing factor to bounce rate – those people who close your site before it’s even finished loading. As google have recently shown, the future is instant, and if your blog is taking 7 seconds to load, that could be 6.5 seconds too long for some visitors.
This blog post will teach you how to optimize wordpress performance and keep your visitors more engaged. I’ll be taking you through each step as we speed up wordpress. These tips are largely independent of the theme you’re using, and I’ll guide you through the process as simply as I can.
Setting Up – Profile Your Site.
Google Instant Launches
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on September 8, 2010
Kapow! And the web wakes up and scrambles over itself to play with google’s latest, pretty bold, innovation in search: search-as-you-type, or in Google-speak “Google Instant”.
The new feature combines autosuggest with realtime search. The video below demoes the functionality, and it’s live right now on the search giant’s homepage if you’re signed in to your google account.
Here are some quick and dirty first impressions:
Adaptive Web Sites
Posted by Howard Yeend in Adaptive Web Sites, web on June 14, 2009
(this is a slightly expanded transcript of a talk I gave at Oxford in June 2009 about my work there)
Hi! I’m Howard Yeend, my supervisor is Vasile Palade, and the title of my project is:
“Implementing Adaptive Web Sites using Machine Learning and Ajax“.
But before I talk about what all those buzzwords mean, I’d like to give a little background information about why this is an important research area, and why I feel it’s the right project for me.
When I was trying to think of a project title, I had a question in mind:
How can we improve the web?
And I think that’s a hugely important question for us to ask.
Google Images Link Improver WordPress Plugin
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP, Wordpress on May 1, 2009
Google Images Link Improver improves the way visitors find your site by redirecting hits from google images to more relevant content on your blog.
Here’s an example of how it works on an actual for “earthrise”. The user clicks the following images result:
… and here’s how the clickthrough page looks:
 Before Plugin Installation |
 After Plugin Installation |
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Save & Follow
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Promote JS
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