Search Engine for Comics

A relevant comic strip introduced into an article or presentation can make a topic more appealing & livelier (assuming you have permission to use if it's not your own). Finding the image of a strip on the web that you remember reading in a Sunday newspaper may not be easy. Don't you wish there was a comics search engine that could get you cartoons for a keyword you submit?

Here are a few that I found -

• Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine by Michael "Bing" Yingling


• Dilbert Strip Finder by BF Martin


• XKCD - use this search filter on Google: [keyword -site:*.xkcd.com site:xkcd.com]. The first filter is to exclude searches within subdomains of xkcd.com. The content is indexed by Google because each strip has hidden text. 

Related:

Software industry related comics

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DuckDuckGo shows why Google may not be good for you

To show that DuckDuckGo, a search engine site winning rave reviews, doesn't "filter bubble" or track you, they have illustrated guides to demonstrate how Google may not be as saintly or good as it may appear. The facts they present are something to ponder on.

On a different note, DuckDuckGo provides a great API alongwith other goodies like the easily configurable Karma Widget that displays your online karma (e.g. twitter follower count, facebook fans, etc.), for your blog, profiles or other Web sites.

Here's how a sample Karma Widget looks -

Related:
Say Goodbye to Privacy

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Competition drives Search Engine innovation

The hot pursuit to get the most relevant results faster & in an appealing way is evident from the way competing search engines are building on each other's strong points.

Before I buy a book, I like looking up Amazon to see not just how many stars it has got but how many people rated it (popular books have a large number of reviews) and also what some of the folks who gave it the highest & lowest rating have to say about it. This kind of opinion aggregation has also been the topic of several academic dissertations.

I was happy to see that both Bing & Google show the user ratings & total reviews that a book has received on Amazon in the search result itself.

Bing introduced the preview search result feature ...

.. and now Google has improved upon that to show visual search results called “Instant Previews” which may include text call outs in orange to highlight search terms in the image-based snapshots

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Adding new Search Provider easiest with Opera

If you search for items frequently on popular sites (like Amazon), it may be easier to use that site's native search right from the browser. All popular browsers allow adding new Search Providers to the search box but it is fastest to do this in Opera, followed by Chrome.

IE8 & Firefox require an add-on to be installed for each search provider which internally uses a standard XML-based OpenSearch Description File. In contrast, Opera lets you quickly configure a search provider yourself for any any site that provides it. Let's see how to search StackOverflow, the programming Q & A site, right from the Opera browser.

1. Go to Tools > Preferences & select the Search tab in the dialog box that opens up. It contains a list of search providers like Google that are already added by default.

2. Click on the Add button & fill in these values -
Name: Stack Overflow
Keyword: so
Address: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%s

3. Click on the OK button to save these settings & after that you will notice Stack Overflow as a search engine option for the search box.

Instead of using the search box, you can also search from the address bar by typing the keyword so followed by your search query to look up StackOverlow specifically. Example  - so jquery

If you wish to exclude certain sites from being included in the results displayed by popular search engines like Bing & Google, you can edit search settings to restrict sites using the site: operator. For example, to exclude results from the domain example.com when you search Google from the Opera search box, edit the address in the Search preference for this search engine to look something this  -
 http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site:example.com

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Bing + Wolfram|Alpha = Cool

Google may have been the first to do maths calculations, currency conversions & the like which are impressive but what Bing & Wolfram Alpha are doing is astounding! You get more precise answers quickly. Sample the results for these search queries -

• What is the population of India compared to China? 

• What is the area of India compared to China? 

Also see:
Search Engine Wars
.

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Wolfram Alpha can probably finish your homework

Does it take you more than a few minutes to precisely calculate your age exactly to the month & day?

There are a number of online tools to find your precise age to the nearest day but Wolfram Alpha the “computational knowledge engine” not only calculates this when you just enter the date but also presents fun facts about that date. Try it out.

Wolfram Alpha is also an excellent research tool for students of all ages. For school kids, it may even finish their homework.

Also see:
View math calculation results directly in Firefox Search bar

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HOW TO prevent Google from indexing or caching a specific page

Did you know, you can prevent Google from indexing & caching specific pages of your website by just adding a META tag to those pages?

As explained on the Google blog.....

In addition to the robots.txt file -- which allows you to concisely specify instructions for a large number of files on your web site -- you can use the robots META tag for fine-grain control over individual pages on your site. To implement this, simply add specific META tags to HTML pages to control how each individual page is indexed. Together, robots.txt and META tags give you the flexibility to express complex access policies relatively easily.

To prevent a webpage from showing up in the search results, you can insert this line within HEAD tags:
<meta content="NOINDEX" name="GOOGLEBOT">

Add the NOARCHIVE tag to a web page and Google won't cache copy of a web page in search results :
<meta content="NOARCHIVE" name="GOOGLEBOT">
As a result of the above line, that web-page will appear in a search result but the Cached link that typically appears in a search result will not be shown.

Also see:
HOW TO find "dofollow" blogs/websites
rel="nofollow" - one non-standard HTML attribute value that the Big 3 search engines support

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HOW TO find why your competitor has better search engine rankings

This question appeared on Webmasters.StackExchange.com, a new Q&A Forum (currently in beta) for pro webmasters from the makers of Stack Overflow.

One suggested answer was to study the competitor's backlinks using SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer, a link popularity checker & back-link analysis tool.

The comparision chart below (click to enlarge) shows how two of India's popular websites Rediff & IndiaTimes fare against each other.

Related:
Tools to monitor your website

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Best of Google Webmaster Help videos

Over at SEOmozBlog, Dr. Pete informs that there are 200+ Webmaster Help videos on YouTube featuring  Matt Cutts, Google's most visible anti-spam engineer. Occasionally, some Google secrets slip out during these videos. He watched 70 of the videos posted in 2010 & gathered some unusual facts.  Excerpts -

• Google does not use the keywords meta tag for ranking. Meta description still has value for other reasons
• Cross-linking 3 sites probably isn't a big deal, but 30 or 300 could likely get you into trouble.
• ...footer cross-links are often low-value
• Google does not guarantee that pages in your XML sitemap will be indexed.
• Indexation has a lot to do with your authority and trust – an authoritative site will get more love from the crawlers, plain and simple
• Matt (Cutts) says: "Most people can switch their IP address and never have any issue whatsoever."
• As long as your domain name and hosting country stay the same, switching from one reliable host to another should have no SEO impact.
• page speed...would be one of over 200 ranking factors.
• Google makes a change to the algorithm on the order of ONCE PER DAY.
• These changes may be batched and rolled out in chunks, but another video confirmed a number of roughly 400 algorithm changes in 2009.

Related:
What's in Google's secret PageRank sauce?

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Google Search Operators

Google gets you results fast but if you are searching for something complex, how do you frame your input to Google so that you can relevant results immediately?

If you haven't already tried, you should read up on search operators & take advantage of it.

Google supports several advanced operators, which are query words that have special meaning to Google. Typically these operators modify the search in some way, or even tell Google to do a totally different type of search. For instance, "link:" is a special operator, and the query [link:www.google.com] doesn't do a normal search but instead finds all web pages that have links to www.google.com.

There are also some undocumented operators listed in the Google Guide. Some of these operators may work in other search engines as well.

Search operators for GMail are also available.


Also see:
Search Engines in the pre-Google era
Search Engine Wars

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Google Guide

The freely download-able Google Guide (pdf) had been lying in my ebook collection for a long time and I finally got to browse through it this weekend. Considering the guide was compiled in around 2005, it had some stale info but it is still useful and I would recommend Google Guide to newbies getting started with search engines.

I learnt some interesting facts & tips from it -
* You can prefix a "-" sign infront of a search operator to negate it's effect"
Google Buzz" -site:google.com

* You can find synonyms by preceding the term with a "~" tilde. This takes you beyond the automatic stemming that Google already performs

* You can specify that results contain numbers in a range by specifying two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces.
recumbent bicycle $250..$1000

* Since Google's servers are typically faster than many web servers, you can often access a page's cached version faster than the page itself. This is helpful especially if you browsing using a slow connection.

In the search results page, there are some small details like the page size of a relevant link & the "Search within results" link at the bottom. Google Guide explains their usefulness -

Large web pages are far less likely to be relevant to your query than smaller pages. For the sake of efficiency, Google searches only the first 101 kilobytes (approximately 17,000 words) of a web page and the first 120 kilobytes of a pdf file. Assuming 15 words per line and 50 lines per page, Google searches the first 22 pages of a web page and the first 26 pages of a pdf file. If a page is larger, Google will list the page as being 101 kilobytes or 120 kilobytes for a pdf file. This means that Google's results won't reference any part of a web page beyond its first 101 kilobytes or any part of a pdf file beyond the first 120 kilobytes.

Scroll to the search box at the bottom of your results page and click on the link "Search within results." This causes Google to run a new search using your newly specified terms (those in the search box) only on the pages it found from your initial query, rather than a search over the entire web.

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HOW TO perform a HTTP 301 & 302 redirect using IIS

Google ran a SEO quiz using Google Docs a few weeks back and the answers are now online. Developers building a public-facing website can benefit from learning tricks of the SEO trade as it can significantly boost traffic to their site. This area also needs continual learning as new things emerge frequently.

One of the question there was about how to move a site to a new domain name while retaining it's original search engine ratings.  The preferred way is to permanently redirect traffic using a HTTP 301 (permanent) redirect as this will inform search engines to update their index with the resource’s new location. If the change is going to be short term such as a special page that is seasonal, a 302 (temporary) redirect would be a better choice.

I never had a chance to try this out but implementing this in IIS 7 or older versions is pretty easy. This can also be done programmatically -

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-domain.com");
}

Related -
Tips on ASP.NET Hosting & Deployment

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SEO Learning Resources

I came across several interesting beginnner level articles on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) last week & thought of compiling them all here for easy reference -
Google SEO resources for beginners
Learn SEO in 30 Minutes a Day
Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Rewriting the Beginner's Guide - The Outline
The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO
The 12 Skills That Have Served Me Best in My SEO Career

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Search Engine Wars

Mike Markson, VP of Marketing for Blekko, cites instances of Google stealing the thunder off search engine players.....

* This past Tuesday, Wolfram Alpha announces its structured data search product. On the same day, Google announced its new structured data product.

* July 28, 2008, so called Google killer Cuil launched its search engine. It claimed that their index of 120B documents was 3x that of any search engine. Three days before though, Google announced it knew of 1 trillion URL's.

* June 3, 2008, Wikia Search launched a feature that allows users to add and delete URL's to search results. July 16, 2008, Google announced that it is bucket testing similar features. The features went live a few months later.

* February 25, 2009, Cuil announced it is integrating longer snippets into its results. March 24, 2009, Google announced...you guessed it....longer snippets.

and finally closes his argument with ....

I guess the fact that there are zero switching costs for search engines makes their paranoia run a bit higher than most.....

...provoking Matt Cutts to react with the "facts".

Once instance where I have seen Google drawing from others ideas is with Live Search's "Show Similar Images" feature.

Also see:
Search Engines in the post-Google era
Google Search - Then & Now

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Search Engines in the pre-Google era

James Svoboda who has completed 10 years working on SEO related activities recounts his experiences with Search Engines in the pre-Google era and it makes for interesting reading. He talks about Meta Search, Web Directories, Pay Per Click, Affiliate Programs and catastrophic SEO events like AltaVista’s Black Monday, Google's "Florida" Update (both events are the SEO equivalent of a stock market crash due to a change in the Ranking algorithms)

As far as I can remember, none of the search engines then were even as closely minimalistic as Google nor as fast. I used to frequent Ask.com and try out other search engines if I didn't get any results there. For searching code, I used to depend on the now defunct CodeHound. After Google got popular, I mashed-up a custom Javascript application to fetch results from my favorite code sites.

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MIX09 Presentations

If you could not make it to Las Vegas to attend MIX09, you can take comfort in the fact that you can still watch over 100 presentations online that are powered by Silverlight. They are also available for download in WMV, MP4, WMA, MP3 and some in PPTX formats.

I wish the listing also had the duration and a precise summary of contents. I watched Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Web Developers (13.45 minutes) to "learn SEO best practices and proven techniques". The description was a little far-fetched as it covered only URL Rewriting (with IIS 7) significantly. Ofcourse 13 minutes is too short a time.

I'm keen to watch "Building High Performance Web Applications and Sites" (59.23 mins.) and have it next on my list.

Which presentations did you like?

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HOW TO customize Search Engine results programmatically

All the popular search engines offer APIs to programmatically access results. The Live Search API 2.0 reportedly serves more than 3 billion queries/month.

Google offers specialized searches like Local Search and Blog Search that narrow down the scope of results. These specific category search results can also be fetched through code as this WebMonkey article explains.

Trivia: WebMonkey has a funny way of representing the skill level required for understanding the article -

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HOW TO execute a SELECT query Without Column Names

A developer posted an unusual T-SQL question on an online Message Board I frequent. He wanted to know how to find a column's value without specifying the column name. I guessed syscolumns would be part of the puzzle and rather than construct the query I searched & found a complete working snippet by Kalman Toth. It gets the third, fourth and sixth columns of the Contact table (in SQL Server 2005's AdventureWorks database) without explicitly specifying the column names in the SELECT query -

use AdventureWorks
go
declare @SchemaName as sysname, @TableName as sysname
declare @Col3 as sysname, @Col4 as sysname, @Col6 as sysname
declare @SQLstring as nvarchar(512)
set @SchemaName = 'Person'
set @TableName = 'Contact'
select @Col3 = sc.name
from sys.objects as so inner join sys.syscolumns as sc
on so.object_id = sc.id
where so.name = @TableName and sc.colid = 3
select @Col4 = sc.name
from sys.objects as so inner join sys.syscolumns as sc
on so.object_id = sc.id
where so.name = @TableName and sc.colid = 4
select @Col6 = sc.name
from sys.objects as so inner join sys.syscolumns as sc
on so.object_id = sc.id
where so.name = @TableName and sc.colid = 6
select @SQLstring = 'SELECT ' + @Col3 + ',' + @Col4 + ',' + @Col6
+ 'FROM ' + @SchemaName+'.'+@TableName

-- select @SQLstring
exec sp_executesql @SQLstring
go

This goes on to show how sharing discoveries by using the right keywords can help fellow developers. Choosing unambiguous names & titles helps search engines to rank relevant links higher.

On a related note, I remember in the early years of C#, Google misunderstanding the context (like spell-checkers do) would exclude the "#" part possibly as part of sanitizing input

Also see:
HOW TO merge two HTML tables with Javascript
Can VS 2008 editions be installed side-by-side?

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Search Innovations

Google's prime properties like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar are said to have been developed in the "20 percent time" or one workday a week Google gives it's developers to work on whatever projects fan their passions.

Among the other "20 percent time" projects that NY Times's tech columnist David Pogue highlights is a somewhat trivial but interesting Google Sets.

...type in several items in a series (like “cleveland browns” and “dallas cowboys”); Google fleshes out the list with others like it (all the other football teams). Great when something’s on the tip of your tongue (a kind of fruit, president, car, holiday, currency) but can remember only something like it.

These are nice conveniences on the Internet that let you find you what you want based on correlated things. You can now even search an image with a correlated image or identify a song by humming a few lines on your mobile.

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Google Search - Then & Now

Speaking at WSDM 2009, Google Fellow Jeff Dean in a keynote talk shared how Google has grown from 1999 to 2009. Various search engine enthusiasts have blogged about the facts presented in the talk from their own notes.

Excerpts:

• Google handles 1000 times more queries now with 1000 times more processing power (# machines * speed of the machines).
• It uses 1000 machines to handle a single query compared to just 12 previously.
• Query latency has improved from under 1000ms to normally under 200ms now.
• Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999.
• For many pages, search results now change within minutes of the page changing.
• Rolled out seven major rearchitecture efforts in ten years.
• In-house design from the ground up: rack design, pc class motherboards, linux, and in-house software (GFS, BigTable, etc...)
• Google's machine translation models use a million lookups in a multi-terabyte model just to translate one sentence.

Popularity comes at a price. Google is now accused of harming the environment with it's energy consumption (a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2) and for not practicing what it preaches.

Also see: How LARGE websites manage performance & scalability

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