Google has released Buzz recently and, like everything that gets out of Google’s labs, it got a lot of, exactly, buzz. In my opinion they’ve screwed it big time with it, being a service that has absolutely no usability and it seems like it got a lot of people mad by integrating it with Gmail. Google Buzz has almost to no features, except you can “like” and comment to the links shared by the ones you follow, but it’s hard to track and also really cluttered. Of course it can’t [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. 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 [...]

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. 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 [...]

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 ?

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]