Alex Dumitru / Sandossu » Online

Microsoft tried to join the URL shortening boat, but fell into the water…again

Alex Dumitru — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:30:39 +0000

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

Google Labs launches Image Swirl

Alex Dumitru — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:23:34 +0000

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 Adding Search Suggestions to Image Search

Alex Dumitru — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:15:26 +0000

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 Testing Ads In Image Search

Alex Dumitru — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:02:14 +0000

Google has just started testing ads in the Image Search, but this was an expected movement, because the image search is very expensive to upkeep, for sure. Currently, it must be in a beta phase, because the ads rarely appear and I don’t see a menu in my Adwords that allows me to place that ads.

I’m sure affiliate marketers can’t wait to try them, even if the image ads conversion is lower than the text ads. Though, the advantage is that the ad also includes text, below an image. Fortunately, the image has an yellow background and above it is the text “sponsored image” so the users won’t click them by mistake. But I’m not that sure they won’t, especially they didn’t expect them to be there.

Once launched, we shall see the advertisers experiences on conversions, but I’m confident they won’t be combarable with the text ads in search.

Take a look at the ads

Ex Google Employees Released Cuil Search Engine – Fail

Alex Dumitru — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:31:46 +0000

Two ex Google engineers, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, along with a third person, Russel Power, have released a new search engine. Cuil started with 120 billion indexed pages and they stated that their new search engine has the biggest index of them all. Probably they haven’t read Google’s last post, where they say to have indexed more than 1 trillion pages, which is almost 8 times more than that.
From the tests I was able to make until it got down, it doesn’t seem very relevant and there are a lot of searches it returns no results, while other search engines do.
Cuil is a wannabe semantic search engine, understanding the meaning of words, but it’s not very good at it. Until now, I didn’t find anything I could like at it, better than Google. What I am satisfied of is the simple design.

Google Adsense Introduced Third Party Ads

Alex Dumitru — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:46:23 +0000

Google made an announcement that they opened the Adsense network to other third-party advertisers. This is good news for both publishers and third-party advertising network. Publishers have more monetization possibilities and advertising networks deliver more traffic to their advertisers.

Currently, this only works for image ads, so you will see no change if you are opted out. If you are currently using or going to use image ads, then you have to update your privacy policy to let your visitors know about the third-party ads you’re serving.

We’re happy to announce that the Google content network now accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors. During this initial release, only ads in English are eligible, although we look forward to offering more options in the future.

By accepting third-party ads, we can attract a greater variety of advertising on the Google content network, which we believe will result over time in increased revenue for publishers and more relevant advertising for end users.

WordPress 2.5.1 Released

Alex Dumitru — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:39:14 +0000

WordPress 2.5.1 was just released and includes over 70 security fixes. Visit the download page to get it, because it improves security and it’s very important for your blog.

Here is some of what they improved:

Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.

Better performance for those who have many categories

Media Uploader fixes

An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7

Widget Administration fixes

Various usability improvements

Layout fixes for IE

Show-Off Bloggers Are Making A Lot Of Buzz

Alex Dumitru — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:25:31 +0000

There are a lot of blogger good at marketing that only tell their readers what they want to read and make profit of their naivety. Unfortunately, this is far away from quality blogging, because almost all blogs of this kind that I’ve seen offer almost no useful information and only general facts that can be found everywhere.

Readers are subscribing when seeing that blogger earns a lot of money in the hope they will find out how to do it. But rarely this will happen because nobody is that fool to tell their secret and worse than that, a lot are lying just to get a strong readership and profit.

Those blogs mean time loss and a good blogger has to manage his time very good to increase productivity, so only subscribe and read the blogs that can really help you, don’t just get fooled by everyone.

Of course nobody will tell big secrets, but by reading a lot of useful information you can make an idea of what you have to do and test, until you get somewhere good.

What do you think of those bloggers ?

Alexa Announced New Ranking System

Alex Dumitru — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:15:04 +0000

Once with Alexa’s new ranking system announcement, a lot of blogs have lost their rank. The reason is that Alexa is now based on more informations, not only the surfers that have Alexa toolbar installed. Now websites and blogs that had a tech savvy audience have lost rank, Alexa becoming more accurate and not advantaging them anymore.

A lot of popular websites and blogs have met a drastically decrease in rankings, like Problogger ( 3xxx -> 12xxx ), Digitalpoint ( 3xx -> 9xx ), Shoemoney ( 2xxx -> 19xxx ). I have also seen some not-so-major changes in my websites rankings, most of them going down a bit.

I see this changes as an improvement and hopefully Alexa will continue to become more and more accurate, because a lot of people and mostly advertisers are basing on this stats that, at least until now, weren’t relevant at all.

Find more rank changes on some blogs at Amit’s blog or you can read Alexa’s announcement.

WordPress 2.5 RC2 & SCreencast Released 2 Hours Ago

Alex Dumitru — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:11:43 +0000

WordPress has just released a new great version, with improved dashboard, uploader and it comes with gravatars, internal gallery and more.
You can watch the screencast for a better view of what i am talking about.
Get it now.