Alex Dumitru / Sandossu

Bing Fail

The URL shortening craze started once Twitter began using TinyUrl.com to shorten all the url in tweets. When people noticed there’s going to be a lot of traffic headed to the URL shorteners, everybody made one, because it’s extremely simple. Like always, the ones who provided better services, advertised better and had more connections earned a bigger piece of the market share, and Bit.ly even took TinyUrl.com’s place and became Twitter’s default URL shortener.

Lately, some of the biggest websites out there set up URL shortening services for their own websites, like StumbleUpon ( su.pr ), Google ( goo.gl ), Youtube ( youtu.be ), and many more. Of course Microsoft couldn’t stay out of it and, of course, they failed at it. A few days ago they announced their own URL shortening for Bing, which is actually 1 character LONGER than Bing.com. Their new “URL shortener” is Binged.it and it might do a great job at making their URLs longer.

I’ve been thinking for the last few years how can Microsoft fail so many times, considering it’s one of the biggest corporations in the world and theoretically it has hundreds or even thousands of professionals in its domain of activity. I sincerely can’t find a reasonable answer to my question. All I can think of is they really don’t care about the company they work for and they do their job only to be done and for the salary.

Of course this is not one big mistake, but it’s a really funny one.

What do you think about it ?

image credit: Dynamoo

Probably the biggest question after Twitter got some exposure was how would it monetize without disturbing its users. After this questions, lots of answers came, though none of them was even close to the real answer, at least none I’m aware of. Bloomberg just announced that Twitter did make profit this year from its partnership with Google and Microsoft, cashing in about $25 million. What did Twitter have to do for the $25 million ? Nothing that could really disturb its users. According to me, Twitter made one of the best deals I’ve ever heard of. They allowed Bing and Google include Twitter’s updates in their search results, which can only mean more traffic and exposure.

Twitter money

I’m an entrepreneur, webmaster and internet marketer, all at the same time and if someone would pay me to allow him bring me exposure, I wouldn’t be able to refuse him. And that’s exactly what Twitter did. In my opinion, I don’t think this will be Twitter’s biggest income stream, because from this deal, at least, it didn’t make a huge amount, but it’s been an excellent deal.

I’ve always admired Twitter’s founders for what they did and for making an application that looked stupid to be used by so many people. They managed to get people’s trust even if thousands of people were pointing at their application as being stupid and totally useless.

image credit: Halfway Nerdy

Google launched Image Search back in 2001 and since then it has been much easier for people to find all images that interest them. Now, Google has just launched the all-new Image Swirl, which is practically a Wonder Wheel for images.

Image Swirl Romania

Thanks to the new feature, you can search an image that interests you and see 12 thumbs related to your search so you can find exactly what interests you much easier.

Currently, Image Swirl only works for around 200,000 queries, but many more will be soon included. Fortunately, an auto-complete is also available, just like Google Suggest, which will make it even more easier for you to search images, based on what people search the most.

Google has first unveiled Caffeine, the search engine’s new version, back in August, and now they are preparing to release it. Until now it has been available to test at a special page that it’s no longer available, as Google will start using the improved algorithms widely, starting with one datacenter.

Google Caffeine

Caffeine doesn’t bring huge changes to the algorithm, though it will index pages faster and treat spam more severely.

Unfortunately, the exact release date wasn’t disclosed and neither the datacenter it will go live on, though it shouldn’t be too hard to figure it out. Stay put and I’ll let you know as soon as I find out !

Google has just added search suggestions to Image Search and it doesn’t seem to be the same as for the web version. They are trying to make suggestions relevant, but there are always issues, unfortunately, especially that they are based on users behavior. You might find adult or irrelevant suggestions, but if you want to get rid of them at all, go to preferences and check “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box.”

Google changed the Favicon again, after they already changed it in June, last year. The new favicon is very colorful and I really don’t like it.

What do you think about it ?

Google Favicon

I am a relatively active Twitter user and my native language is Romanian, because I live in Romania, but I also have a lot of foreing followers. The problem is that I talk to my romanian followers in Romanian and with the other in English. I’m not sure if the Romanian ones are very disturbed, because most of them can speak English, but I’m sure the others are when I’m Twitting in Romanian.

So the idea is Twitter should allow me to group my followers, so I can Twit in english to a public group, that everyone can see and in Romanian for my followers from Romanian.

I’m sure this would be useful for a lot of users and not only for language, but for example a singer would like to Twit his fans about his upcoming concerts and his friends about the club or party he’s going to go tonight. There can be a lot of examples, just use your imagination.

I would really love this feature to be added. What do you think ?

Google has just made public it’s voting-based SearchWiki so now you can upvote, comment,  or remove any result from the SERP. For the moment it only seems to affect the voting user’s rankings and not the whole SERP, so you don’t have to worry.

In the future there are many chances Google will use this voting system in it’s algorithm to rank websites, but it surely won’t base on this too much, because it’s much easier to game than using older techniques.

We shall see in the future what they have in mind, it might be a totally mess and take it out, but nothing’s sure.

Here’s a snapshot:

Technology News

Today me and almost everyone I asked noticed changes in SERPs on a lot of keywords and the strange thing is that the positions have changed for almost all websites in the query and the quality, trusted ones went down with up to hundreds of positions, while new websites, with no inbound links jumped to the first positions.

I talked a lot about this today with a lot of people and we didn’t manage to get to a conclusion, because if the SERP remains like this, Google’s relevancy ends today. There are many querys where all quality websites went down and new, spam, and irrelevant websites took their place.

Considering the conditions and ways Google updated it’s SERPs today, I will have to call this the “Google Shaker”, because it seems like Google introduced the SERP in a shaker and shaked it.

“Google Shaker” seems to happen much more in local searches more than on Google.com. Until now I have seen many people complaining that Google.ro, Google.ru, and Google.co.uk is totally screwed up.

I thought all day at this and researched especially on Google.ro, being the country I live in and it might be a mistake, a Halloween joke or a test, because the SERPs definitely can’t remain this way. Other way, Google’s relevancy is gone, at least in those countries and a lot of CEOs will run mad, along with us, the SEOs, because our clients will be more than angry.

I would love to get your feedback on this and maybe we can find an explanation and a solution. Did Google really changed the algorithm in such a drastic way ?

A new version of wordpress, the script this blog is running on, is preparing to be released. The 2.7 Wireframes version comes with a lot of new features, that allow you to change your admin interface structure, fixes some bugs, but I’m sure that like any new version that comes out, it has many other new bugs.

I will not install it yet, but wait for 2.7.1 or so, that should be more bugg-free.

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