Web Dev News

Friday, October 22, 2004

Google Catalogs Search in Beta

Check it out - another truly innovative search tool from Google. Just try searching for 'PC coupon'...

It's amazing what this company is indexing these days!

http://catalogs.google.com/

Friday, October 15, 2004

AirLok Network Security Routers and Products

I just read an excellent review and a press release of a small company in Vero Beach, FL with a product called AirLok.

Very convincing stuff: some guy has decided to incorporate the functionality of a Cisco Router, Content Cache from Network Appliance, Performance Monitor from HP and other devices in one totally secure box (Press Release) built on the OpenBSD secure OS with a couple AMD processors to manage it all in a single device! Nice!

As quoted from the article:
"The firm's Airlokdevice handles most of the core chores of running a network, signing up new users, checking passwords, routing traffic and, most important of all in this leaky, insecure age, protecting networks from hackers and viruses."

Check out the Website here and the Yahoo Article here.

Could this be the future of internet security?

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Code Project Article - Writing Effective Link Text

Every good web developer should know these 6 useful tips, but an occasional refresher never hurts!

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Yahoo! Article - Click Fraud Rises with Online Ad Spending

Nice article that is very interesting to those of us in the adwords world.

I heard a statistic the other day that online ad spending is now up to the same expenditure (and soon to be exceeding) the amount it was before the dot-com bubble burst.

I guess that naturally with the increased rise in online ad spending comes increased fraudulent representation of ad effectiveness. Have faith though, it shouldn't be too long before someone comes up with a technology that identifies fraudulent ad clicks.

In fact, the article even mentions a few emerging technologies although it sounds like they're not quite there yet.

Vivisimo - New clustering style search engine - to rival Google?

Nice new Search Engine site that I found: http://vivisimo.com/.

Search results are organized by "clusters" on the left-hand side of your screen. I was surprised, but this technique is actually a fantastic idea. The immediate benefit is that searches for ambigous terms can be separated by their different concepts.

For example, a search for the phrase: "physics wave" yields clusters for "gravitational wave", "quantum", "mathematical", "wave motion" etc. It immediately asks me the questions, what type of specific physics wave are you looking for? Then by clicking on the appropriate cluster I'm already narrowing my search again to find more appropriate results.

Great concept and Go Vivisimo!

Only problem is that the search engine is so hard to spell! :) ...

Google Print Launched

"Google Print" has just launched today. I think the idea is to include links to relevant books on Google search results pages. Interesting concept and Google is offering the service free to book authors and publishers (only a portion of the entire book can be viewed online via Google).

That begs the question: if only a portion of the book is viewed online, how much of the book is indexed for Google searching? If you do appropriate searching for the right keywords, could you come up with different snippets of the same book? Could you effectively download an entire book this way?

Google says to publishers that if they simply signup and send Google the book, they will SCAN in the book and index it for free with their search results. The benefit to Google is the increased power of their search results and the fact that no other search engine is indexing book CONTENTS. Nice idea!

I would hate to be the one scanning in the masses of books at Google though! Good luck!

Heres the link: Google Print

Update: I've just checked and Google Print will display up to 2 pages before and after the page of the book that appears in the Search Results. That's effectively 5 pages of the book. For a book of 200 pages you would need to do 40 specifically tailored searches to view all the pages of the book.

This actually isn't that hard though if you just want to read the entire book online:
Step 1: Perform a specific search that returns page 1 of the book.
Step 2: Read for 2 pages (until page 3).
Step 3: Pick a unique keyphrase on page 3 and do another Google Print search for that keyphrase. This should return page 3 of the book in the Google Print search results.
Step 4: Start reading where you left off for another 2 pages, then repeat step 3 indefinitely.

You could very well read an entire book online this way, especially since most people only read a small chunks of a book at once anyway. You could read a couple pages, then "bookmark" (no pun intended) the last Google Print Search you did and carry on reading the book later.

I'm sure people will figure this out, but I wonder if it will matter?

Comments welcome!