Bally Chohan - News, Views & Reviews on Information System

Yahoo Search ResultsYahoo announced support of new tags for giving more flexibility to webmaster and web site owner ,that manage how pages and documents are crawled and indexed by Yahoo! Search. Yahoo now extending support of page level exclusion tags — NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, NOFOLLOW – that be beneficial to provide additional control for archiving and summarization of ANY file type. Before that , these page level tags could only be expressed within html pages through the META directive (for e.g. <META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>), But after getting the views and reports about that matter , Yahoo! Has extends the capability to enables these tags expressed through X-Robots-Tag directive in the http header, giving webmasters the flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types, including html files, and increasing their coverage through a simplified process. Additionally, webmasters no longer need access to html templates in order to express exclusions for html files. To take advantage of this feature, simply add the following page level tags to the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header. Here are a few examples:

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX — If you don’t want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

Note: We’ll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don’t wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE — If you don’t want to display cache link in the search results page.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET — If you don’t want to display summary in the search results page.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW — If you don’t want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

Besides that Yahoo has made some significant changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. The updates now will come into effects in the upcoming days .
Know more about ….http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000508.html

French Google blog Zorgloob has what they say are screenshots from a Google employee showing a certain “GG Score” value in action. Apparently, this value and others are displayed when a Google engineer internally looks at search results, perhaps through a certain special tool.

The full line below the snippet for www.ffp.asso.fr for instance reads (my line breaks and formatting):GG Score:
$11.68
Adv: Yes
Vertical: /Local/Regional Content
PVs: 11,088

Update:
Tom in the comments explains that he photoshopped the screenshot info lines (perhaps in order to protect each site’s privacy); in other words, e.g. the number “$11.68” isn’t really the one from www.ffp.asso.fr, but it was shown below another domain.

What exactly the GG Score in dollar is, the Zorgloob blog doesn’t know either, but they do add that the screenshot was sent by someone working in connection with the AdWords department. Other GG Scores shown include $30.73 and $34.33. Commenting on the meaning of the “Adv” value, Zorgloob’s TomHTML says “We did not find a correlation between this value and the presence or absence of AdWords advertising for these sites”* (during a brief scan I didn’t spot any AdSense on e.g. www.ffp.asso.fr either). “PVs” on the other hand, TomHTML ponders could be short for “page views.”

The screenshot Zorgloob presents also includes a navigation entry that reads “Moma” – the name of Google’s intranet.

By: Philipp Lenssen Source: http://blogoscoped.com/

 

Google is missing out to celebrate US patriotic holidays with their special logo doodles, some think, and created a Google Memorial Day Logo Design Contest earlier this year. You can find the collected creations that will now be suggested to Google. The latest “controversy”: Google put Sputnik into their logo… a (gasp) communist satellite*! “Google consistently has ignored patriotic American holidays such as Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day,” WorldNetDaily writes, continuing that now “it acknowledged an accomplishment of the communist

Soviet Union, which launched the Sputnik space satellite 50 years ago. … Besides overlooking Veterans Day and Memorial Day since the company’s inception in 1999, it also has ignored Christmas.”

The neat Google Alert service lets you subscribe to certain search queries to get updates emailed to you. For instance, you can subscribe to mentions of your website name in Google News. The newest member in the Alerts family is Video. I subscribed to the query “google” to give this a try, setting the alert schedule to “as it happens,” and found several videos thumbnails + links in my inbox this morning.
The alerted videos come from all kinds of sources, not just Google-owned properties; along with YouTube, there’s e.g. German Clipfish.de, or Metacafe.com. However, the link will always point to the Google Video frame wrapper for displaying the actual video. Google – framing the web for outgoing links so you’ll always bookmark their site? Let’s hope this doesn’t catch on with other services of theirs, like web search.

…more on blogoscoped

Yahoo just acquired Zimbra for 350 million bucks, TechCrunch reports and Yahoo confirms. In Zimbra’s own, slightly cryptic words…

Zimbra is open source server and client software for messaging and collaboration – email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. The Zimbra server is available for Linux, Mac OS X, appliances, and virtualization platforms. The Zimbra Web 2.0 Ajax client runs on Firefox, Safari, and IE, and features easy integration / mash-ups of web portals, business applications, and VoIP using web services.

Yahoo says:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us.

Yahoo in their blog remarks, “We see great opportunities to incorporate some of [Zimbra’s] best-of-breed* features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!’s industry-leading communications products.” Mike Arrington, who calls Zimbra an “online/offline office suite”, adds that he wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo picks up online office maker Zoho.com next. “That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.”

Source : blogoscoped

With the start of the Twenty20 world championship, cricket fever is upon legions of enthusiasts. To make it easier for you to indulge your interest in a game John Fowles characterized as “chess made flesh,” we’ve simplified your search for cricket scores. Just type [cricket] in a Google search box and you’ll see a brief score of all the current cricket matches. A single click will also give you access to a detailed cricket score card.

If you’re a diehard India fan, then type [cricket india] or [cricket score India England] to get results for Indian matches. Of course, feel free to replace India with the country of your choice for country-specific results.

Posted by: Sadeesh Duraisamy

Google Spreadsheets just got a bit more powerful. There are four new cell functions to automatically import external data: importXml, importData, importHtml and googleReader.

For instance, importXML has two parameters, URL and an XPath query. Entering =importXML(”http://waxy.org/links/”, “//a/@href”)into a Google Spreadsheets cell and hitting return will load all links from the Waxy.org link blog in the subsequent cells. (I’m not sure if this data is automatically updated or if it’s a one-time fill, though it seems to be auto-updating.) A similar feature had been around in online spreadsheets competitor EditGrid, and so far set EditGrid apart from Spreadsheets in that regard.

Another new feature in Spreadsheets is auto-filling of cells. Enter “Monday” and “Tuesday” in two cells, select them, and click the blue dot on the cell edge to drag it over subsequent cells. They will now read “Wednesday”, “Thursday” and so on. You might know this from other spreadsheet applications, but what’s more, if you hold down Ctrl when you perform this auto-fill, Google will poll data from Google Sets to automatically complete almost anything (at least that’s the theory).

I think auto-filling based on Google Sets is a really cool idea, though during my tests that feature was very unstable, didn’t show a load bar (so you won’t know if there’s something still being polled from Google Sets), and mostly didn’t work at all… or returned results much less relevant than what Google Sets returns, incidentally.

Full source: blogoscoped.com

Reporters Without Borders writes that China introduced a new “self-discipline pact” signed by 20 blog service providers in China. Two of these are Yahoo.cn and MSN.cn. According to the article, bloggers are now “encouraged” to register blogs under their real names, putting an end to anonymous blogging. Reporters Without Borders speculates that having Yahoo and others store this registration information gives the Chinese government ways to track down creators of subversive content. “A new wave of censorship and repression seems imminent,” the article says.

 Source :   blogoscoped

On January 7 2006 Google announced a video store service on top of Google Video. You were able to purchase videos such as NBA games, Charlie Rose interviews, or shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (in the US at least). You were also able to set a purchase price for videos you uploaded yourself. Today, Google started sending out mails like the following, announcing the end of this program:

As a valued Google user, we’re contacting you with some important information about the videos you’ve purchased or rented from Google Video. In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective August 15, 2007.

To fully account for the video purchases you made before July 18, 2007, we are providing you with a Google Checkout bonus for $2.00. Your bonus expires in 60 days, and you can use it at the stores listed here: http://www.google.com/checkout/signupwelcome.html. The minimum purchase amount must be equal to or greater than your bonus amount, before shipping and tax.

After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.

As this case shows, “download-to-own” is a lie when it comes to DRM content. Digital Rights Management is an euphemism for copy-protection services that (mostly) treat consumers like criminals, and deprive them of their fair use of acquired content; in this case, Google indicates you won’t own the movies you purchased after all. When a DRM-based service ceases to exist, so may your purchases.

Jennifer Feikin in May this year was reported to have resigned from her job as Google Video chief. Google by now is using YouTube for much of the officially released Google content, like videos posted in their blogs. An internal Google goal from 2006 ordered to count the “total number of Google products and reduce by 20%”. I wonder if the technically superior but less community-oriented YouTube alternative by YouTube-owner Google ended up on the 20% list – or at least parts of it?

Source : http://blogoscoped.com/

There’s nothing I like better than when Google AdWords decides to make our lives as search marketers just a bit easier. If you’re interested in working smarter and improving campaign results, be sure to check out two of the more recent reporting roll-outs – Google’s new Placement Performance Reports and Search Query Reports.

Google Placement Performance Reports — Finally… We now have visibility and CONTROL over where our ads display in the Content Network given Google AdWords’ relatively new Placement Performance Reports.

For the sake of providing some historical context, there definitely has been an evolution in terms of Google’s Content Network offerings. We were granted some control years back when Google decided to let us set separate bids for Content v. Search (and by the way, if you aren’t bidding separately for the Content and Search Networks, you really need to make this change – these really should be viewed and managed separately, as they are entirely different beasts).

The ability to bid separately for Content and Search was definitely a big step towards more control.

Then, another not-so-small victory came about when Google decided to let us exclude sites – nice feature, and another step towards more control. But given that most account managers don’t take the time to dive into their log files, this didn’t help much for those who were clueless as to the source of their traffic in the first place.

But now with Google’s new Placement Performance report, we’ve got quick and easy visibility coupled with control. These reports allow you to see exactly which Content sites are sending you traffic and conversions, and therefore make the right decisions to improve your campaign’s ROI from the Content Network (as opposed to throwing your hands up in the air in frustration and pausing the Content Network all together as many of us did in the past).

Full Source :http://blogoscoped.com/