Semantic Search Engines

There two new semantic search engines around: Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared (yet to be released)





Here's a hands on of google squared

Link Architecture

Taken from google webmaster blog, here is a brief but useful info about descriptive anchors in links:

To see all our basketball videos, click here for the entire listing.

However, instead of the generic "click here," you could rewrite the anchor text more descriptively as:

Feel free to browse all of our basketball videos.

So, I think we should avoid those "more info...", "view more..." links.

Google Chrome

It seems there is a new era for web browsers, since there are project underway trying to take the most from the web, take webkit and aurora as an example.

Now we have google chrome, which is browser developed for applications.

More on google chrome.

My choice for best web applications

1. Photsynth: It needs an active x pluggin for Internet Explorer, but it's like using something from the future now. The way the navigation goes through the 3d environment is great and the way I order photos in a 2d model is superb.
   
2. Google Maps - Live Maps: the entire map can be seen as a gigapixel image, street view is truly useful and the directions tools that both sites offer are a great way to show how web 2.0 apps are afecting nowadays rutine.
   
3. Google Reader: the best way to keep you updated, it has a high performance and forget about having to check manually every feed either in your browser or surfing page by page. In 5 minutes I can overview more than 80 feeds. Apart from the mail web systems, I thinks this is the most useful web software available for professionals.
   
4. Yahoo: the ultimate usability portal, well studied components which give the user a lot of information in one page.
   
5. Flickr: great community where people can actually know the whole world with high quality photos taken from great photographers. It has great sense of usability (yahoo trademark), and you can spend a whole afternoon using it in conjunction with the apps described at point 2.
   
6. Microsoft's Hotmail: It's fast to manage, I can do a lot of things faster than If I were using gmail or yahoo mail, it's very intuitive with the "right click" options.
   
7. iGoogle: the extensions and the widgets offered are great, you can actually set your internet "dashboard" here.
   
8. Youtube: the ultimate web 2.0 site. Huge community, huge traffic, and very entertaining site.
   

Google Trifecta

Here there is a presentation about how Google Trifecta tools (optimizer, webmaster and analytics) can improve your web exposure and management.

From youtubes description:

Recording of the Google Trifecta webinar held on July 8, 2008. Speakers provide introductions to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer and answer common questions. Individually, each tool offers valuable and actionable information about specific aspects of your site; combined, you get a comprehensive understanding of both your visitors and your pages.

Web 2.0

Recently, I've been asked: "what's web 2.0"?

Long story short, Web 2.0 isn't some kind of techonology or standard, you don't need a new web browser to view web 2.0 "compatible" web sites nor there is some validation process for it such as w3cmarkup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.

It's a way to develop web sites where you can take the current web technology (service oriented applications), apply some best pratices in design (for instance ,content & structure separation through CSS on HTML) so you can provide services which are used by community members to share information and/or collaborate.

How collaboration does happen? well, it's about when you share some video at youtube, or a document at google docs, when you add some friend at my space and then write some comment about one of her/his photos and so on.

There isn't a formal method which you can evaluate if a web site is web 2.0 compliant and you don't need to, but if you want to distinguish between what is 2.0 or not you can check:

• Is there a community?
• How can they collaborate?
• What services does the site provide or what the community does there?

People can build the best css & html site ever and still might not be web 2.0...and it could be true that it doesn't even need to. If you want some informative web for a company, is a community needed?.

Finally, Web 2.0 does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all, but It does can change the view of how projects can be accomplished and the goals of new businesses.

Plus, and additional source which I consider provide further information about the benefits of this new trend.

What's new in google gears

More on google gears, here's a little talk about what's new.

Google Gears API

Google Gears lets you run web applications offline, using a local cache provided by a local "lite" server.

There is an API for using this features which empowers IT or special projects which there is an offline environment for security, economic or even geographic reasons (internet connection not available for a specific region).

http://code.google.com/apis/gears/

Google's Design Guidelines

I read here about the google design guidelines, the "beautiful" concept caught my attention the most: "delight the eye without distracting the mind". Other guidelines:

1. Useful: focus on people - their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Fast: every millisecond counts.
3. Simple: simplicity is powerful.
4. Engaging: engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Innovative: dare to be innovative.
6. Universal: design for the world.
7. Profitable: plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Beautiful: delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Trustworthy: be worthy of people's trust.
10. Personable: add a human touch.

Source: Google System.

Webmaster links

Here some important links for anyone who manages site content and positioning.

• Very usable and nice webmaster tool by yahoo.
• Microsoft's counter part, seems kind of old but there is new beta on the way.
• The almighty google webmaster tool which provides basic manage task and some useful data andstats about the site.

Plus the google analytics offers reports and nice stats, most of the webhosting companies offers this in their plans, but still google provides some benefits such as "benchmarking".

Two important tasks is to provide a sitemap and to define the robots file:

1. From sitemaps.org:

   Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling

   Sitemaps have wide adoption since google, microsoft and yahoo are using it as defined in sitemap protocol.
2. Robots file: it is used to exclude some files from crawling. this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Hope this is useful for you.