blog.rightreading.com

Apparently Google has secretly been working on “the next generation of Google Search … an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine.” And you can be among the first to try it out, here:
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
It’s clearly faster. Are the results better? It seems they are different at least. My first impression is that they’re [...]

Graywolf — the search guy not the book publishing company — shows how to turn off personalized search by default in Google Chrome.
You can also get plugins for various browsers from Yoast.
Personalized search means that your search engine results will be skewed according to your browsing history.

Many years ago, as a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus in part on the linguistic model in literary criticism, I turned my attention to beyond-the-sentence topicality. Scholars have parsed the sentence since ancient time, but they have paid less attention to the way sentences connect to each [...]

The image at right is a selection from my inlinks tag in Google Reader. It shows websites that have been linking to mine (these are all via Google Blog Search). This is less than a single day’s sample. As you can see, all of a sudden many people are posting links on their blogs to [...]

Today’s guest post at ForeWord Magazine is about how book publishers can increase traffic to their websites.
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What would cause Google to label the San Francisco Ballet website as porn? Please see the post on this subject at FriscoVista.

A few months ago, scholars from the University of Graz in Austria released a 187-page pdf document, entitled Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google. (The file is large, so I recommend downloading and opening it from your hard disk rather than trying to access it through a browser.) The [...]

Publisher 010 Uitgeverij has made what I think is probably a smart decision to put their 2004 title Dutch Type by Jan Middendorp in Google Book Search. Of course we have seen public domain books in GBS for some time (by the way, it is absurd for Google to claim any proprietary rights at all [...]

There’s a nice selection of (mostly) postwar Polish posters at a Grayspace Poster Gallery.
I’ve set the background to white in the selections above, using the “remove background image” and “page color to white” bookmarklets (I realized afterwards that I should also have set the text to black, and I found the zap colors bookmarklet [...]

I like Matt McGee’s summary of the NYT article on Google search.

If you do an image search on Google and then append &imgtype=face to the end of the url, what do you get? You get only faces as results. The above images are all from this site. Interestingly, the tags under the images are not the filenames or the alt or title tags but text that [...]

I’ve been working on a bibliography for a book about Chinese jades. Many of the listings were incomplete, and I had to search a variety of sources to find the information I was looking for. I found that by searching through WorldCat I was able to locate a number of titles (including many books published [...]

Over at Google Blogoscoped they’ve been talking about Google results for the query “how to get a …” Seems the things people appear to want are a passport, a six pack, a girl (or guy), and a book published.
Well, I can’t help much with the six pack, the girl, or the passport. But “how to [...]

Are you in shape for following step 12 in the instructions shown in the screen capture?
Via Google Blogoscoped. While at GB, check out Raymond Chandler’s 1953 mention of Google.

Google Maps offers the following:

Click image for more info.

Wikipedia announced recently that it is going back to adding the “nofollow” attribute to its outbound links in an attempt to keep people from gaming the system to leach linkjuice off the the site for personal gain.
According to Google, “when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we [...]

In D-Lib magazine David Bearman provides an abstract of the argument Jean-Noël Jeanneney (President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) presents in his Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (University of Chicago Press, October 2006). Jeanneney argues:

Google’s selection skews “the world’s knowledge” toward English-language texts, especially those from the U.S. [...]

Speaking of SEO, here is a list of the SEO-related sites that have feeds I subscribe to. (I’m just an amateur who got into this when my website got penalized.) Maybe I’ll actually use this someday. Am I missing any important ones?

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim
Cartoon Barry Blog
Daggle: Danny sullivan’s Blog
Dan Zarrella
David Naylor
Gray Hat Search Engine [...]

It’s beginning to seem that way. As soon as anyone says anyone negative about search engine optimizing, the SEO community (or, to be fair, one faction of it) jumps all over that person and tries to inflict punishment by driving down the offender’s pages in the SERPs.
First there was the unfortunate Kimberly Williams — a [...]

I found this in one of my gmail spam folders.