Webstractions - Web Development & Design News

Scott Kingery writes about GDSPlus, which allows you to specify what extensions the Google Desktop Search (GDS) tool will index. This includes the ability to add new text extensions not yet supported by Google, such as:

• .XML
  
• .log (mIRC and Trillian)
  
• .cs, .vb (Visual Studio .NET source code files)
  
• .frm, .bas, .cls (Visual Basic 6 source code files)

Basically, any ASCII text document can be now be indexed by allowing you to specify the file extensions of those documents. This does not add additional support for other filetype like Adobe PDF documents in other words. Additionally, you can also remove support for any of the extensions that Google included and you do not want indexed.

GDSPlus can be downloaded for free at http://www.trivex.net/

This software does not come with an installer, so it is important that you follow instructions in the readme.txt file. The installation process calls for clearing your current Google Desktop data, editing a Windows Registry entry and then reindexing your hard drive.

Be forewarned, GDSPlus is a replacement for your GoogleDesktopCrawl.exe and GoogleDesktopIndex.exe files from Google. The current version of GDS is v.100504 and should be the only version of Google Desktop Search Beta available right now.

If Google updates GDS in the future, then you will more than probably have to get your update from GDSPlus instead of Google if you want to continue to have the extra filetype support. It may come to pass that Google will add this functionality into GDS in the future though.

While GDSPlus only supports text filetypes and does not add other types (Google will have to do that), Scott has noticed that you can still index the filenames of other filetypes such as .wav, .rar, .png, etc. It does not index the contents of the files, just the filenames themselves.

'nuf said, here is the official Gmail Known Bugs list.

VIA: Aimless Words

Some of you may remember this classic line uttered by Dan Aykroyd in a Saturday Night live skit many years ago. It seems that every twenty years or so that classics tend to re-emerge, and none could be so closer to this again as this classic blog post from one of the most ignorant sluts on the Internet today.

Janeth, you ignorant slut. You have bashed me in public long enough with hundreds of petty arguments and fabrications that are so far-fetched that even Jon Lovitz would be envious. You might remember Jon on SNL in his "lieing guy" character.

It seems that I and a friend of mine are the number one topics of conversation on two fora, Janeth's Freaks on Mushrooms and Phil de Crepid's SEO Front Shop, full of puppets-on-strings-like members who seem to believe everything that they are told. If it were not for us, they would not have any entertainment for their troops and the post count would be considerably lower. It is quite humorous reading, and I encourage you all to have a look see here and here.

Actually I feel kind of privileged to be getting more net-time from these two than Jill Whalen, one of my favorite all-time SEO Bitches. I should be thanking them for all this free publicity. Thanks, you anal retentive shitheads.

Keep it coming guys, I need a good laugh every now and then. God knows you ain't got anything else going for you right now. Phil has milked that fucking PR paper of his long enough and needs new material. Janeth, the "Queen of I agree posts", does not have a single original thought in that pea-brain of hers. And Fathom, what is up with this guy? I used to have a lot of respect for him. Now he is reduced to the same child-like behavior of the other two and rumor has it that he is covertly going back into WebProWorld and deleting his past posts.

Robin Good Marjolein Hoekstra, an independent writer who contributes to the Robin Good network says she prefers a new paid-for browser, iRider, over Firefox and its extensions. For a nominal fee of $29 USD, she considers it to be money well spent.

This is not the first time that I have heard this. Andilinks, a member of the Band of Gonzos forum, has tried iRider out already and came to the same conclusion. That conclusion is that it beats Firefox hands down in many departments.

The one feature that both Andi and Marjolein highly acclaimed was the sidebar navigation. Much akin to tabbed-browsing, this has more advanced features that tabbed browsing cannot provide. The sidebar is visually appealing by showing you thumbnail shots of the websites you are visiting. The navigation panel will let you instantly know whether a page is done downloading, whether you have visited a page or not, allows you to "pin" a page for future use (pinned pages are retained from one iRider session onto the next) and at which level the link was opened.

iRider is an Internet Explorer based product. iRider claims that they have plugged several security holes in their browser that currently plague other versions of IE. They also offer highly detailed technical support to secure your browser even further.

With security issues aside however, being an IE-based browser, iRider will accept any IE plugins that you may have grown attached to or just cannot do without. One such plugin, Pluck, which turns your IE into a full fledged newsreader has no comparative extension available in Firefox (Sage does not even come close).

UPDATE: I erroneously reported that Robin Good recommended iRider. The article actually was written by Marjolein Hoekstra, an independent writer who contributes to the Robin Good network.

"While I wholeheartedly respect Marjolein in-depth reporting and viewpoint, I have personally never stated that I would toss USD $29 to have iRider replace my FireFox.

I am a strong supporter of moving away from the IE platform, so while I must bow to iRider useful innovations, I look forward to having those same features without having to depend on IE."

My apologies Robin.

ICANN has announced that it has entered final negotiations for implementing two new top-level domains, .travel and .post. This final process can still take months.

In addition to .travel and .post, proposals for new TLDs include .xxx, .jobs, .asia and .eu. The status of the other applicants is still pending however.

Yahoo! has an eye on the "big eye" of CBS MarketWatch. Yahoo! currently provides financial news and information through its Yahoo! Finance channel. This move could gain several subscription-based products if they could buy MarketWatch, it also would turn them into a content provider. To date, Yahoo! has merely been disseminating information from other content providers.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says that Google has plans to release a version of its desktop search tool for computers running on the Mac operating system. He did not set a timetable for a Mac version of Google Desktop, saying it had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the fundamental differences between the Mac OS and Windows.

So far Google has not targeted any other operating system other than Windows. This will be the first time Google will move away from that trend.

UPDATE: Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle dug a little deeper on this story, and it is basically a non-story. The report from Reuters (et. al.) was taken out of context and highly exaggerated.

What Schmidt actually said was "yes and no", that a Mac version would require a new project from the ground up, and that while Google would like to, it wasn't planning anything.

When the news hit that a vulnerability in the Gmail login that could allow attackers to hijack their accounts, it was all over the Internet. Just as quickly as the news was getting around, Google has fixed the security flaw.

"Google was recently alerted to a potential security vulnerability affecting the Gmail service. We have since fixed this vulnerability, and all current and future Gmail users are protected," Google spokesman Nathan Tyler said.

An investigation by Google found that only a handful of Gmail users were victimized, the source close to the Mountain View, California-based company said.

People love to hand out Gmail invites like candy. Screw that. That is too easy. Lets have some fun with these invites!

First person that can tell me what this is (that is the easy part) and what it is actually "pointing at" will get a Gmail invite.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Placemark>
  <name>Here is a kml file for you</name>
  <View>
    <longitude>-122.0836513298948</longitude>
    <latitude>37.42228634135405</latitude>
    <range>637.0999999999299</range>
    <tilt>-3.180872743978974e-011</tilt>
    <heading>-0.0007160463744580959</heading>
  </View>
  <visibility>1</visibility>
  <styleUrl>root://styles#default</styleUrl>
</Placemark>


America Online, Microsoft, EarthLink and Yahoo are teaming again to turn up the heat on spammers.

The companies, which make up the Anti-Spam Alliance, announced that they've each filed new lawsuits in U.S. Federal Court against senders of unwanted computer messages. The companies filed suits in the states of Washington, Georgia and California accusing defendants of violating the federal Can-Spam Act, along with other state and federal laws.

Ever notice that freshdate tag in the Google SERPS is sometimes one day earlier than the actual date in the cached version of that page? This is because the timestamp of the cached version is simply Greenwich Mean Time (GMT -0 hours). The freshdate tag is based on Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8 hours). There will be an 8 hour window where the date will not overlap.

VIA: Zorgloob

Labels: repub

A mozillaZine member, wig_out_on_me, offers up a Windows Registry file that will create a Desktop namespace for Firefox similar to the way Internet Explorer, My Computer and the Recycle Bin shortcuts are set up. This namespace provides for a context menu with Profile Manager, Safe Mode, etc. included on it. Any shortcuts created from this namespace will retain the added context menu items which is handy for the Quick Launch toolbar.


VIA: Gemal's Psyched Blog

Labels: Firefox, repub

America Online says it will start bundling McAfee antivirus software for free into its proprietary service and no longer charge a subscription for it.

AOL is not alone in offering antivirus software, Yahoo and MSN both offer antivirus and anti-spyware features in their premium service packages.

Of course, AOL will probably need the antivirus software for their new AOL Browser which is based on Internet Explorer.

From MozillaZine Talkback:

"'Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. You can get these test builds from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the 'feature complete' preview) and you're not really interested in testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.

The release candidates include about 250 bug fixes since Firefox 1.0 PR and we'd appreciate any feedback around any of those areas. With this release, we're also featuring Mozilla Foundation builds for up to two dozen locales (slowly trickling in. if you don't see your language, try back in a bit.) If you do find regressions from the Preview Release, please file bugs in Bugzilla and nominate them as Firefox 1.0 blockers using the 'blocking-aviary1.0?' flag on the bug. Thanks for your help in testing Firefox!'"

The Release Candidate is about one week behind schedule, as mentioned in the Firefox Roadmap, but they have accomplished one of their goals in reducing The List. There are just a handful that remain and those are newly discovered bugs in the software.

They are not too much in want for testers either. Last glance at the tally, there have been over 6.5 million downloads of Firefox Preview to date.

Labels: Firefox

While probably not a totally exhaustive document on Google Desktop Search, Scott Kingery's GDS Tips is pretty darn close. It covers the basics thru some of the more obscure features of GDS.

Scott has gleaned information from various sources, such as the Google Desktop Search Group, and compiled all of that into one handy page.

In the DHTML Lab section of WebReference, they introduce their first maintenance release of Popup Calendar. They have added better navigation bar styling and the ability to clear read-only input fields. Also included, new functionality that enables you to separate form elements to display any combination of a user-selected date, month and year.

This is a stunning piece of code that you will just have to see for yourself.
(Click on the to access the calendar features)

Labels: repub

Svein Høier and Jon Hoem have put together an excellent tutorial on video blogging with Blogger. The tutorial includes template code changes and php/javascript code to launch a dynamic pop-up window for your video, as well as, general tips about video compression.

Once your template changes are made, posting the video is a snap. Enter the path to the video in your URL Link text box (this can be activated in your Blogger Settings), then upload your video via an attachment.

It dawned on me that you could also use this as a method for doing simple image blogging as well. By using this technique, you could just as easily have pop-up windows for your images.

VIA: Weblog Tools Collection

Labels: blogging

Just browsing around the net and came up with these interesting sites dealing with Photoshop. Tutorials, tip, tricks ranging from beginning to advanced. A little bit for everybody. Enjoy!

• Janee's Photoshop Tutorials, Courses in Photoshop
  
• Tutorial Outpost
  
• Good-Tutorials.com
  
• PhotoshopCAFE
  
• Photoshop Tips & Tricks
  
• Photoshop Tutorials
  
• PurePhotoshop Tutorials & Articles
  
• Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• 80Four Adobe Photoshop Tutorials, Video Tutorials
  
• CreativePro Photoshop Articles
  
• Photoshop for Photographers
  

If you have any to share, just drop them in a comment or two or three.

UPDATE: Oct 20, 2004

• Studio-X Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Axialis Tutorials
  
• HeathRowe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photosjop Tips & Learning
  
• TeamPhotoshop Tutorials & Tips
  
• DesignsByMark PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Grafika PS Tutorials (Czech)
  
• BioRust PS Tutorials
  
• CBT Cafe PS Tutorials & Articles
  
• Photoshop Lover

UPDATE: Oct 23, 2004

• Creative Bits: PS Tips Blog
  
• 3 Simple Improvements (Greg Roberts)
  
• Planet Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Computer Darkroom (Misc Tutorials)
  
• DevCo Photo Tutorials
  
• Nebulus Designs PS Tutorials
  
• Phong PS Tutorials
  
• Eyewire PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Think Dan PS Tutorials (Index listing)
  
• Magic Pixel PS Workshop

UPDATE: Oct 27, 2004

• Digital Photography Tutorials
  
• Informit Photoshop Articles
  
• The Makeshift Miracle Tutorials
  
• The Slimarillion
  
• Shanzcan Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photoshop Brushes Tutorials
  
• GrafX Design PS Tutorials
  
• Pegaweb Web Design & PS Tutorials
  
• RetouchPRO Tutorials
  
• Carl Volk's Photoshop Tips

Labels: repub

A Google press release announces that they have just purchased Keyhole Corp.

With the Keyhole software and an Internet connection a user can enter an address or other location information which accesses the database and takes them to a digital image of that location on their computer screen. The interactive software then give users many options, including the ability to zoom in from space-level to street-level, tilt and rotate the view or search for other information such as hotels, parks, ATMs or subways. Unlike traditional mapping technologies, Keyhole creates a dynamic 3D interface for geographic information.

Keyhole is probably most famous on CNN when they do the "fly-by shots" that are composed of animated images from satellites and airplanes.

"With Keyhole, you can fly like a superhero from your computer at home to a street corner somewhere else in the world - or find a local hospital, map a road trip or measure the distance between two points," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president, Product Management. "This acquisition gives Google users a powerful new search tool, enabling users to view 3D images of any place on earth as well as tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest. Keyhole is a valuable addition to Google's efforts to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

There is a price reduction in the Keyhole 2LT, effective immediately, from $69.95 to $29.95.

Adam Kalsey has a handy online tool to create those little buttons that everyone is so fond of. The tool uses Bill Zeller's button maker script which is written in PHP, so you could host this application yourself with without much trouble.

UPDATE: It does not appear that the script is available on Bill's site.

VIA: Band of Gonzo Forums

Labels: blogging, css, repub

As the Google Blog entry says, "It's not that all you know about Google is wrong; it's just that, most likely, all you know isn't all there is to know."

I guess this is true. For instance, they have a neat little "cheat sheet" and this is the first time that I laid eyes on Google Catalogs. Man, how did I miss that one.

Microsoft is planning to release in December new software designed to secure instant messaging and other communications within big companies.

What all is Microsoft debuting that month now? New Search Engine and Desktop Search, now Instant Messaging on a corporate scale.

In a not so related article, Microsoft released on Tuesday a preview version of new tools intended to make it easier for companies to create custom Web applications.

Microsoft released a "community technology preview" version of modeling tools, formerly code-named Whitehorse, to be included in Visual Studio 2005 Team System, an upcoming addition to Microsoft's line of developer packages that focuses on enterprise developers.

While the phpBB folk will probably snicker at this a little, it is no laughing matter. Hackers have compromised the download server for the open source PostNuke content management system, redirecting users to malicious code in place of the .zip download of the PostNuke program. The hacked code was distributed for more than 32 hours before PostNuke site maintainers addressed the security breach.

PostNuke users who installed a zip archive downloaded between 11:50 pm Sunday night and 8:30 a.m. today face a serious threat. All data submitted during the installation - including the server name, database credentials, admin name and password - were likely sent to the hackers. In addition, "in one file there was code allowing a malicious user to execute any shell command on the web server."

The PostNuke team is advising users who may have installed the compromised files to reinstall the code, and immediately change their database details, including username, password and the name of the database if possible.

VIA: Netcraft

Yep, apparantly it is true, the Bush Campaign Website, GeorgeWBush.com, is rejecting web requests from outside of the United States. It is a wonder that Russell Beattie is not all over this yet.

Jacob Rosenberg blogs an entry into today's Yahoo!Search blog to expose some of the more useful (and lesser known) features of Yahoo! News.

He gives examples of advanced search queries to over 7,000 Yahoo! News sources. You can filter your content based on Location, News Source, Category, Language, and News Type. You can even compose your own advanced search by using the above search commands or use their advanced news search page.

There is also a new xml button on the News Search result page, in which you can now turn any search into a fresh full-blown RSS 2.0 feed.

"For example hurricane location:florida gets you your own ongoing feed of hurricane news from Florida. The only restriction is that the source parameter doesn't work in RSS mode, and some providers may choose to opt out of RSS results."

This is probably the best new feature of all. You can roll your own news feed.

Labels: repub

SEbasic has some great suggestions for simple Blogger template changes you can make to optimize them for better rankings. He has complete sample code all laid out for you to paste into your templates. Worth a peak!

Labels: repub

One of the interesting technical challenges that every search engine comes up against is identifying duplicate content. Super-geek, Greg Linden, learns of a whitepaper from his friend Jeff Dean who co-authored (along with Krishna Bharat, Andrei Z. Broder and Monika Rauch Henzinger) a paper (PDF) on this very topic.

"The paper analyzes the performance of several techniques for detecting mirrors, from simple approaches like the similar IP address or hostname to more complicated and quite clever analysis of the link structure of sites. The paper concludes that a content-based approach (called 'shingles' in the paper) works well but that a combination of several approaches works best."

Labels: repub

An excellent find from Gary Price that may give us a glimpse of what the new MSN Search will look like. The interface is chock full of little goodies, of which, the most impressive is a set of slider switches that you can use to manipulate certain "ranking weights".

Gary discovered this interface when he noticed a new URL in the cache link at the Tech Preview site. The URL pointed to http://cc.msnscache.com/.

To access the sliders, click on the label +Search Builder. which will drop-down a tabbed interface. Next, click on Results ranking and you will see the sliders.

Unfortunately, the sliders do not work in Firefox. These may be ActiveX components and will probably only work in Internet Explorer.

I am wondereing what the "cc" sub-domain stands for. Perhaps "carbon copy" or "cache copy"?

A new Google Desktop "phishing" exploit is being reported by Netcraft.

Salvatore Aranzulla, an Italian journalist who discovered the exploit, says "The flaw allows attackers to target users of the Google Desktop application and modify the contents of search pages by injecting scripts located on external servers. Such cross site scripting attacks provide attackers with a means of obtaining information under the guise of a reputable domain."

Aranzulla has published details about the new vulnerability on his web site, where he includes some example exploits (Italian). Inexperienced users may be susceptible to phishing attacks like this one. Experienced users may become suspicious of it however.

This exploit is similar but seperate to the exploits discovered earlier in which one Google had known about for two years. That exploit was not severe enough until the release of Google Desktop prompted them to look at it again.

What I can ascertain from Aranzulla's example (it is in Italian), is that this exploit will probably need an update in the software itself. The previous exploits could be fixed at the Google Website. Aranzulla is recommending removal of the software.

So far there has been no response from Google.

RustyBrick finds a WMW post where a member had conducted a normal search at Google, at the top of the page, you would find a line of text that read IMAGE RESULTS FOR 'KEYWORD PHRASE'. When you click on that link, it would take you to where you would go if you would click on the 'image' tab.

GoogleGuy Says "You know us; we're always testing out different little UI changes.."

Meanwhile, over at Zorgloob, they reveal that a search for flower will show Froogle results at the top of the page.

This seems to be permanent feature in the Google results now.

There is a rumor floating around that Nathan will be Brad Fallons guest on Search Engine Radio tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at noon, EST (9 am PST). The show will run for one hour.

"This should prove to be fun and stressful", Nathan says, "I'll, of course, be talking about Google, but the field is wide open ... I've done radio before, but never a guest, always a host, so I think I might enjoy this. That, or make a complete fool of myself."

If you want to ask Nathan a question, you can call in at 1-888-327-0061 at the time of the show. Good luck Nathan!

UPDATE: Nathan's interview has been postponed for at least two weeks.

I tell ya, if it t'aint one thing, 'tis another. You would think that some people have better things to do with their time.

Not too long ago, GoogleGuy broke his silence over at Webmaster World and made mention of a new document.

"... if you didn't notice, Rob Pike is answering questions over at Slashdot:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/

Rob only joined Google a year or so ago, but I'm really glad we have him--I read his book a long time back. For the folks that like to read papers from Google, here's a systems one that Rob mentions:

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

I think it's pretty cool that Google keeps writing stuff like the GFS paper and the MapReduce paper; not too many other search engines are talking about their systems."

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.

In that newly released paper there is evidence of Google using this process on its production index in August of 2003. The next major update in that index appeared in November of 2003, the Florida Update.

"One of the most significant uses of MapReduce to date has been a complete rewrite of the production indexing system that produces the data structures used for the Google web search service. The indexing system takes as input a large set of documents that have been retrieved by our crawling system, stored as a set of GFS files. The raw contents for these documents are more than 20 terabytes of data."

Eric Baillargeon who discovered this passage is wondering if this is all coincidence.

One graph in the document shows the significant growth in the number of separate MapReduce programs checked into their primary source code management system over time, from 0 in early 2003 to almost 900 separate instances as of late September 2004.

"MapReduce has been so successful because it makes it possible to write a simple program and run it efficiently on a thousand machines in the course of half an hour, greatly speeding up the development and prototyping cycle. Furthermore, it allows programmers who have no experience with distributed and/or parallel systems to exploit large amounts of resources easily."

It is very evident in the graph that Google has sharply increased its usage of MapReduce since February of 2004, which coincided with another update at that time, Brandy.

Also, from this point in time, numerous backlink updates have taken place. I am assuming that MapReduce may have had something to do with new instances of it being introduced into parts of the source code that addresses this.

I don't think it is a matter of coincidence, as Eric mentioned, it is now a matter of record. MapReduce is now part of Google and understanding the mechanics of it will soon be discussed in many a forum from this time forward.

The Associated Press announced (via USA Today) that Yahoo and Adobe Systems have joined forces to tap each others' customers and put Web search features into Adobe's Acrobat Reader software. This is Yahoo's latest maneuver against Google and Microsoft in the fight to put its own search service and Web access on as many desktops as possible.

Initially, the toolbar will feature links to Yahoo products and services as well as to Adobe's Web-based subscription service, which converts documents into the Adobe P.D.F. (for Portable Document Format) file format.

Later, the companies said, the toolbar will add features like the ability to quickly convert Web-based content into Adobe P.D.F. files. Yahoo search will also be built into a future version of the Acrobat Reader, permitting users to search for more information from within the document without going through the extra step of launching a Web browser.

Through the magic of the Internet Archive via their Wayback Machine, we can look back at Google and "what a wild strange trip its been".

From the very simplistic design on 11-11-1998 you will see that they had a mere 25 million pages (soon to be much bigger) in the Google Search Engine Prototype. Then there is the "might work some of the time" Alpha Google (1-25-1999). Uck ... gag me! Glad this design went into the waste basket.

Fast forward to 04-23-1999 and they are wanting to know if you feel lucky! Well, do ya? Special Stanford and Linux searches are part of more Google...

Lets move way ahead to 05-11-2000 and see that Google was voted Best Search Engine by Yahoo Internet Life. Secretly they are still saying that, I'll bet.

At or around this time, you can get Google Buttons, three Google Web Search Plans including the Gold Plan for $2000 a year, they are hiring, and Google goes wireless.

Advancing on to 09-19-2000, you will see the hallmark Google as we know it today (with minor changes). Not much change in the layout over the last four years. They have added more tools, yes. But Google seemed to settle on what was going to be at this point in time.

Thanks to SEbasic for inspiration on this article.

UPDATE: Gary Price stopped by in the comments to let us know that he has a page of Google Milestone Pages which include Backrub (1997), Google's First Press Release (1999) and links to key documents and patents.

Google Desktop Proxy (GDP) is a java program that provides access to your Google Desktop search service from remote machines. The software is provided by Project Computing in a precompiled Java JAR file. The Java source code is also being made available.

Google Desktop was designed with a built-in web server which binds to your PC's TCP/IP loopback interface and can only be accessed by requests originating from your PC. No other machines can send search requests to your Google Desktop search engine. Google Desktop Proxy allows you that access however.

This program is a very simple proxy. A browser or other program on another computer can open a connection to this program which passes the request through to the Google Desktop web server on the same machine as the proxy. Because it is on the same machine, the Google Desktop web server processes the request and passes the result back to the proxy which in turn sends it back to the originating requestor.

There are some bugs with this software that still need to be ironed out. Also, it has no authorization support, so use at your own risk.

Thanks to John for pointing to this.

A passage in a New York Times article (or via Washington Post) that sums up Google's strategic plan pretty well.

"Several financial analysts said on Thursday that they were still trying to understand what the company's business would be over a longer period because the company has kept much of its strategy closely held, even after going public.

'We can't adequately answer the question of whether the company's stock is overvalued until we can tell what the company is,' said David M. Garrity, a financial analyst with Caris & Company, an investment firm in New York.

However, he added that the broader underlying outline is that the company intends to use software technology made available freely to its customers to drive traffic and that could be a model that would be difficult for rivals like Microsoft to compete against.

'Google is making a mockery of existing technology solutions, to wit, Microsoft,' he said."

We don't know what Google is going to do, but we know how they are going to do it.

Thanks to Bill Holmes for the tip.

CNET News.com is reporting that Microsoft has set a firmer date for the release of its desktop search software.

During its earnings call with financial analysts, Microsoft said an MSN-branded tool would be made available before the end of 2004. The tool and an algorithmic Web searching engine will be in beta testing by year's end, a representative said.

Microsoft first demonstrated the technology for its own desktop search tool at a financial analysts' conference in July. At the time, MSN executive Yusuf Mehdi would say only that it would be out before the release of Longhorn, the next version of Windows.

The PC search technology that Mehdi showed allowed a computer user to search within Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client as well as within Windows folders such as "My Documents." It was just two weeks prior to the demonstration that Microsoft acquired Lookout Software, a small company with technology for searching e-mail, which may have allowed Microsoft to make progress on the local hard-drive search technology.

If you are using both Google Deskbar and Desktop, then here is a tip for customizing your Deskbar search for use with Google Desktop. The tip also includes suggestions on setting up "sticky searches" to filter for email, files, web history, etc.

Firefox advocates' call for donations to pay for an advertisement in The New York Times has more than reached its target , and only three days into the campaign.

The campaign, run by Spread Firefox volunteers, started Tuesday to raise money to place a full-page ad for the launch of the open-source browser in The New York Times. The goal was to get 2,500 people to donate $30 or more to the marketing fund within 10 days, or before the official release of Firefox 1.0 on Nov. 9.

The Firefox Release 1.0 is a landmark moment in the browser wars. "This is Mozilla’s most important release ever," says Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox. "We have an opportunity to take market share from Microsoft. This is as good a chance as ever existed." And the fact that its fans are paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times calling attention to the product will likely result in a few more stories such as this.

Labels: Firefox

A working group of search engine marketing professionals in the UK has come together to plan the formulation of a UK based trade association for Search Engine Marketers. The proposed Search Marketing Association UK (SMA-UK) will provide a platform to inform and educate the marketplace of the benefits of search marketing in the overall marketing mix, as well is giving its members an industry voice.

The new Association is being headed by Barry Lloyd (acting Chairman) of the search marketing firm MakeMeTop. Andy Atkins-Kruger of search marketing firm Web Certain is the acting Deputy. Other current members of the working group include Paddy Bolger , Richard Gregory, Edward Cowell, Colin Irwin, Simon Collingridge, Jason Cartwright, Ammon Johns and Mike Grehan.

The Group cited that SEMPO (an existing US-based organization) was not seen to be appropriate in its operations for the UK market. Barry Lloyd, commenting on the reason for a new UK based association said:

"The UK search engine market is currently the second largest in the World outside the United States. After looking at the way trade associations are being developed internationally it has became apparent that the UK should have its own association for this growing sector, set up in a manner to reflect the specific way that both businesses and trade associations operate in the UK and other parts of Europe."

VIA: SEO Book

Yahoo has purchased e-mail software company Stata Labs, in what could be an investment in a coming PC search tool to rival Google and Microsoft. Stata Labs sells (actually sold) an e-mail application called Bloomba that lets people search message text and attachments.

The Stata Lab's Web site notified its users of the buyout with this message:

We are pleased to announce that Stata Labs has been acquired by Yahoo!. We are thrilled to join Yahoo!’s industry-leading team of technical experts. This acquisition will provide Yahoo! with exceptional technological expertise and strategic assets.

We appreciate the ongoing support we’ve received from our customers and partners. We intend to continue supporting Stata Labs’ existing customers for one year from date of product purchase. Again, we thank you for your support and encourage you to review the Frequently Asked Questions.

Bloomba was billed as the world's first search-based email. You can instantly find any email message, attachment or contact whether or not you use folders. Bloomba came with an integrated personal information manager that includes a searchable calendar and contacts.

Elizabeth Millard of ComputerUser interviewed Stata Labs Co-founder and CTO, Raymie Stata, earlier this year and asked him what he thought are the largest challenges that you see in providing your products?

"Our biggest challenge is the perception that, to survive as a software company, you need to out-box Microsoft. The fact is, fragmentation of the e-mail and PIM markets is inevitable, with players like us building products for heavy users. These users feel more pain at the hands of old-fashioned products like Outlook and need something new and better. Our company can not only survive, but thrive on this smaller segment, and in this role paint a brighter future for all users."

Stata described their product as a "Personal Content Database," a database that's optimized for the type of semi-structured data typical of personal data and the configurations of personal platforms. At the database level, our focus is on fast, scalable search, and on replication. At the same time, we're building applications that leverage this underlying database technology. We've started with e-mail--where the management problems have become the most acute--and we'll be slowly expanding the footprint.

It seems that the "footprint" will be expanding much faster than he had imagined at that time. Welcome to Yahoo Raymie!

There is a security patch release (0.7-rc1) as well as the last release candidate for Serendipity 0.7. It is advised to upgrade to this version.

This release contains a bugfix to the a possibly exploitable HTTP Response Splitting, which may allow intermediate caching/proxy servers to perform man-in-the-middle-attacks.

Per a OSVDB report, Bjarke Viksoe's Gmail Drive 1.2 contains a flaw that may lead to an unauthorized information disclosure. The issue is due to the program naming the drive based on the Gmail account login name, resulting in a loss of confidentiality.

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

Currently, there are no known upgrades, patches, or workarounds available to correct this issue.

Wowsers! AOL launched a promotion that lets subscribers of its broadband service download full-feature films for free through Movielink. This almost is a temptation to get me to sign up, but unfortunately I do not have a local number for AOL and the telephone company would tack on a surcharge to my bill for access.

Stll the promotion sounds pretty good. Under the program, the companies will make 10 'classic titles,' including 'Steel Magnolias' and 'Against All Odds,' available for free in the first month. In subsequent months, five movies will be offered. Once downloading is complete, customers have 30 days to watch the film and 24 hours to complete it, once viewing begins.

The words, 'classic titles', does give me pause however. I interpret it to mean 'only from a limited list of our choosing and you have no other choices'.

SOURCE: CNET News.com

As I reported earlier, Jim Ley posted the warning about Google's script-insertion flaw. As it turns out, this cross-site exploit has affected Google's main site for as long as two years. Now with the addition of Google Desktop, it has become more serious because it places the results of a desktop search into the output of a regular Google search.

It appears that Google has fixed this security flaw in its Web search service that could have allowed malicious hackers to modify its pages. But, according to Ley, the fix doesn't seem to be complete to him. In special cases, strings used in javascript and vbscript can still put things other than http urls into img elements. This may mean there are remaining vectors to attack, either with different script methods, or by playing with charsets that bypass the filtering.

"I seem to be getting what appears to be successful google exploits coming in again, I don’t know if this is because of proxy caches, or some google boxes haven’t been patched, or just because the logs are making other requests look like google ones. But a reasonably steady request for the javascript files with google referrers. and then subsequent hits to the steal uri just like the pattern when it was working for me are coming in."

"Still appears patched for me though - Netcraft however says they’ve found another though, not surprising, but lets hope google are little faster at fixing it this time - Turns out my 2 years was actually an undersestimate, in May 2002 I posted it to usenet, and that was months after I’d let google know."

"Google was recently alerted to a potential security vulnerability affecting users of our Web site," a Google representative said. "We have since fixed this vulnerability, and all current and future Google.com users are protected."

This is in direct contradiction to Ley's statement of them being informed over two years ago and leaves you to wonder just how safe the Desktop product is.

UPDATE: Netcraft reported that Google has fixed the second phishing vulnerability that was discovered on Wednesday. Google notified Netcraft that they had closed the vulnerability, making this less-than-two-days response much faster than the two years reported by Jim Ley when he discovered a separate but similar bug.

You can see the latest list of Search Engine IP Addresses and hostnames here. Included on the list (last updated in September) are:

• Fast/AllTheWeb
  
• Alta Vista
  
• Lycos
  
• Inktomi
  
• WiseNut
  
• Google
  
• Ask Jeeves/Teoma
  
• Misc Search Engines
  
• Non Spiders

Labels: repub

An online utility that will validate your robots.txt file.

VIA: Band of Gonzos Forums

Labels: repub

In a Secunia Advisory they have discovered two vulnerabilities in Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and Camino, which can be exploited by malicious web sites to obtain sensitive information and spoof dialog boxes.

1) Inactive tabs can launch dialog boxes so they appear to be displayed by a web site in another tab. This can be exploited by a malicious web site to show a dialog box, which seems to originate from a trusted web site.

2) Inactive tabs can gain focus from form fields on web sites in another tab. This can potentially be exploited to collect sensitive data entered in form fields on other web sites.

Secunia's solution is don't visit trusted web sites while visiting untrusted web sites or disable JavaScript.

Mozilla apparantly have been aware of this vulnerability since October 4th. It has now just been made public.

The form focus tab flaw (the second issue) was fixed on the Aviary branch (1.0 releases of Firefox and Thunderbird) and the 1.7 branch on October 6th. The fix is more of a workaround than a proper solution. The first issue is still open.

You can test for vulnerablities by visiting the Secunia Advisory page.

Labels: Firefox

It is so long that...
* Some webforms are unable to read it
* Some software cannot be configured
* People have a hard time typing it in
* Companies think that it is a fake
* It is the longest one on earth

What is it?




It is The World's Longest Alphabetical Email Address of course.

And it is free.

I am thinking about dropping one of these onto the site for the email harvesters to choke on.

Thanks to Itchy Hands

Netcraft is reporting that a cross-site scripting vulnerabilty has just been plugged, but another one still exists.

"A British computer scientist has demonstrated that opportunities exist for fraudsters to launch phishing attacks using cross site scripting bugs on the very widely used Google sites. Using these conduits, fraudsters would be able to inject their own content onto the site in order to collect credit card details and other sensitive information.

Jim Ley's demonstrations include a well crafted credit card submission form which explained that Google was soon to become a subscription-only service at $5 per month, but that users could take advantage of an earlybird special offer to obtain lifetime free searches for just $10.

See screenshot.

Google's introduction of the Google Desktop has exacerbated the situation, as Google search results can now include the content of local files. The vulnerability uncovered in the Google Desktop allowed an attacker to search a user's local machine for passwords and report the results directly back to the attacker's own web site.

Ley notes that both of these problems were fixed earlier this morning. However, while investigating his report, Netcraft noticed at least one more serious phishing vulnerability which would allow an attacker to inject their own content using the Google web site. Such links are easily hidden in web forms or disguised as links in phishing mails. Netcraft has notified Google of the vulnerability and will explain the issue when they receive a response from Google."

An interesting observation by Evan Williams for the search term "powered by" (with quotes) in Google. The search will pull up results that mostly contain the term in the anchor text of links pointing to the sites (view the cache version of the pages to see this).

Anchor text is one of the most powerful ranking factors at Google. The results are a pretty good gauge of how many pages are powered by certain software or services. Of course, pages with higher PageRank could influence the list and not just the brute strength method.

The top ten, at the time of this post, are:

1. Apache.org
   
2. MySQL.com
   
3. PHP.net
   
4. Blogger.com
   
5. Bravenet.com
   
6. FreeBSD.org
   
7. ListBot.com
   
8. RedHat.com
   
9. RingSurf.com
   
10. Linux.org
    

Surprisingly, Google.com did not make the cut. It came in at #14.

Your results may vary, depending on your location. Evan actually had Apache, Blogger and MySQL in the top three.

Labels: repub

Available only in the US for the last two years, Google has now rolled out Corporate Search into the global market. This technology enables firms to "google" their own networks easily.

This Google appliance comes in a yellow box which can be rack mounted into the Company Server. The box contains a Google search engine with "tweaks" and runs on a version of Linux.

Google's new solution carries its own hazards though. It makes all documents on an intranet visible to all, unless security steps are taken.

VIA: The Unofficial Google Weblog

Digital Media Europe is reporting that Lycos UK has launched today a 10GB webmail service - Lycos Personal Mail 10GB.

Storage on the Lycos UK Freemail service rises to 300MB as part of the upgrade.

The expanded LYCOS UK Personal Mail 10GB account is now the largest fee-for-service e-mail service available.

All the revamped e-mail services include access to Lycos UK's new Online File Storage Drive (Online drive). The service enables Lycos UK customers to drag and drop files from windows directly into an online storage drive.


VIA: ResearchBuzz

A frank and very open discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums regarding cloaking techniques ... and the pitfalls.

The thread has liberal amounts of thoughts from their resident "industrial strength cloaker", Fantomaster. You will learn such things as IP Delivery, Shadow Domains, and a host of other tricks of the cloaking trade.

Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey are in Japan on their promotional tour. They had this to say:

"The company is also working hard to stop search engine optimizers (SEO) from distorting search results...There are many SEOs that are trying to manipulate Google. Our biggest message is that through our products, we always want to promote a better and healthier service."

No that was not in response to the thread at SEW, it is just Peter's quirky sense of humor in his blog post today.

Labels: repub

Philip, of Blogoscoped, has just discovered that Google Desktop will cache files that have been purged from your Recycle Bin.

"I tested this by creating a text file with a unique string in it. I then threw the file in the Windows trash can, which I emptied afterwards. And guess what, the file can now still be found, and Google Desktop offers me its full-text cache of the file even though it had been removed."

This is something I think all people should be aware of. It could be a good thing, then again, it could be a bad thing.

You can instruct Google Desktop to exclude the Recycle Bin from being indexed of course, but I think this is a bass-ackwards approach myself. I think it would be more convenient to actually be able to select what you want to include in the first place. I am hoping that Google will take this approach in the future. It will be far more simpler, and then they do not have to worry about people wondering why their private documents are showing up in searches. They would only have themselves to blame.

It seems that some people within Mozilla are digging up certain inconsistencies and covert goings-on which add to the speculation of a new Google browser may still be in the works.

"As I stated, Mozilla.org and Mozilla developers have been very quiet on all of this. But with such an open organization, it's hard to hide all secrets. There have been a lot of hidden bugs in Bugzilla related to searching, bugs that even members of the Security group can't access. Recently, there was a bug duplicated to a confidential bug with the following comment by the triager: 'This is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one.' That bug also now closed, but it was open long enough for people to notice it.

There's also a lot of 'covert' code going into the tree without individual bug references. And none of these patches are being checked in by Google staff, but by other Mozilla developers, ostensibly checking in code for Google employees to keep a low profile. None of this is Google-exclusive, per se, as much as it is code that one could easily see as making life easier for a third party developer making heavy integration changes. The checking commends are usually very technically described, possibly to obfuscate their use to the majority of watchers to maintain the secret. Example"

The bug mentioned above, is one that I reported on earlier, in which Blogzilla's Pindar reported that Bug 226572 - Google branded Mozilla browser was suddenly marked as Private. Now a duplicate bug appears, and disappears from sight. This time the reason for marking it Private is because of "working with Google". It is still unclear what the bug actually is, but it does show that there is activity going on around this non-existant Google browser.

There are also recent acknowledgements from the Google camp which fan the flames even higher. Google, being Google, are pretty good at secrets though. This is one that they are seemingly playing very close to the vest.

Slashdot has a post from timothy where he came across a BugTraq entry on web browser security. Basically, the story is that Michal Zalewski started feeding randomly malformed HTML into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links and watching what happened. The bottom line?

"All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse."

If you want to try this at home, he's also provided the tools he used in the BugTraq entry.

The French version of the Overture keyword suggestion tool has an additional note attached. The note briefly states:

Note 2: You can check whether a word corresponds to a registered trademark by visiting the INPI website <http://www.icimarques.com>

This seems to suggest that Overture is putting the burden on the user to validate whether a Trademark has been registered or not. At least, that is the way I look at it.

VIA: SEO & Web Marketing News -> North

Ping-o-matic hit it's 20 millionth ping sometime today.

Them's a lot of pings, but I am sure it is just the beginning of a lot more to come. Congrats guys!

Labels: blogging

That is right. A new book simply titled The Gmail Book: Your Definitive Guide can be ordered in advance at Amazon.com for $21.99 $15.39. Hey, it is already being discounted! There is even free shipping on orders over $25. Kewl, I think I will take two then.

Don't bother rushing in to pre-order the book. You have plenty of time to do so, it is not due out until April 8th of 2005. I am sure Prentice Hall will be going thru quite a few rewrites before then.

What gets me is that there are 304 pages in this book. Come on! Why would it take 304 pages to explain how to use Gmail?

Thanks to geraldine in the Gmail-Users Group.

Drupal has just announced the final release of Drupal 4.5.0.

Some of the key changes since Drupal 4.4.2 include:

• Tab based user interface
  
• Configurable menus
  
• Multiple roles per user
  
• Document/image uploads
  
• Node-level permissions
  
• Improved locale support
  
• Anonymous comments
  
• Theme system improvements
  
• Customizable user profiles
  
• Usability improvements
  
• Configurable input formats
  
• Performance improvements

For a complete list of the major changes, please consult the Drupal Changelog.

Coming with the new release, Drupal is also sporting a new look.

"For Drupal 4.5 one of our action points was improving the Drupal.org site itself. As well as making information easier to find for users, we wanted to make the site friendlier for people who are new to Drupal. As part of this, a new look was designed for Drupal.org. The style, called Bluebeach, was inspired by the Bluemarine Xtemplate and was designed by me, Steven Wittens."

Looks very nice!

Dennis O'Reilly has penned a new article that will appear in the November issue of PC World Magazine which has an accounting of ten desktop search tools for your hard drive and inbox. Some of the software is well known, and not so well known.

While this is a more interesting read than the Open Sourcery's list and Amit's detailed comparison, it only accentuates the fact that everyone's view of what Desktop Search should be and how it should function are widely varied. All three had different choices for top dog in desktop search. (Btw, Amit mentions Filehand Search which was not on either of the other two lists.)

The only thing they could agree on is that Windows Search sucks and Google Desktop is an interesting novelty, albeit a hot topic garnering a lot of buzz.

Commonalities in Desktop Search
All of the software have something in common though, they do not support too many non-Window file types. If they do, it is made to order.

The fact is some of these programs leverage a portion of the Windows operating system known as the Catalog Index Server which drops a file called index.dat onto your hard-drive. The aforementioned Filehand Search states that the program will not function properly if you turn the Index Server off.

Carlos Perez says that Google Desktop uses the index.dat file to locate URLs you visit, the email you receive and send, AIM chats, your cookies and apparently everything you open with the file manager. He also has a stark warning about spyware that already exploit this file:

"Google Desktop could make it even easier to exploit, allowing for easier discovery of confidential data on your computers! Now you have to make a call. Do you trade convenience for a potentially massive privacy hole? The problem is compounded when you have no option but to use Internet Explorer, the primary entry point of most Spyware programs."

I do not hold a PHD in Computer Science, so I will take this statement with a grain of salt. I will concede however that with all the choices that we now have out there ... are any of them really that safe to use?

Faster Search using Windows Index Server
So why is it that Windows Search does not utilize this Index Server as efficiently as these programs can? Good question, of which I do not have an answer for.

But Windows does have another file search available to the user, if you look in the right place. This search is lightening quick and searches a lot more than just email and html pages.

Located in the Control Panel's Administrative Tools is the Computer Management snap-in. This snap-in allows you to configure and create custom catalogs that can be queried within the snap-in itself.

The catalog that you will want to query is located in the Computer Management snap-in under Services and Applications > Indexing Service > System. You will see the "Query the Catalog" link, which will open up your search form. I tried a couple of searches and the results were instantaneous.

Another feature is that you can create custom snap-ins that will hold your searchable catalogs. This allows an easy one-click access to your custom catalogs -- all of which you choose what gets searched and what directories will be included to be indexed.

Here is a complete guide on Creating/Configuring a Catalog for Indexing at Microsoft Support.

I am exploring this more in detail. It is not as pretty as the other alternatives, but it is just as effective. This method does give you far more control than any of the other alternatives, namely you are in control without the use of a third-party software and therefore no security issues.

Creative Commons has provided a tool, ccLookup, which allows you to drop an MP3 file onto the program icon (or a running window) in order to verify an embedded CC claim, if any. The free download is available for both Mac OS X and Windows.

Creative Commons has had a long-standing specification for embedding licenses in MP3 audio files which requires two pieces of information: a license claim embeddded in the audio file, and verification metadata hosted on a web page. While command-line tools for looking up the verification metadata have been available for a while, the ccLookup tool provides for an easier drag and drop solution for examining an embedded claim.

VIA: Creative Commons

According to a post at IETF's MAIL-SIG list, Google has begun to sign outgoing email from Gmail with Yahoo's DomainKeys signatures. This is the first large provider of email that is actually doing so (not even Yahoo has started that yet).

VIA: Slashdot

Nino Marchetti blogs that there has been a huge drop in postings recently.

Why, do you ask? Not enough time. I have too much on my plate these days to be able to keep at this like it requires.

Nino and Jason are looking for a new person to take over at the Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog.

Interested? Drop them a line and you might find yourself the next Unofficial Y! Weblog blogger.

Not only does MSNBC follow Yahoo!News' lead in providing a recently added News feed of their own, but it appears that they have snagged a copy of Yahoo's TOS as well.

See Jeff Boulter's side by side comparison of the TOS.

"Jeff is an engineering manager for Yahoo News and one of the driving forces behind Y! News RSS", says Jeremy Zawodny and adds, "Apparently the lawyers at MSNBC would rather copy Yahoo's "terms of use" for RSS than start from scratch."

This isn't the first time that MS has "borrowed" something, but it is the first time that I have seen this much blatancy while doing it.

Per a member post in the Gmail-Users Google Group, he found that the label "unread" gets a system error and thinks there may be another feature on the way.

Creating a label entitled "unread" gets the following error message:

  System specific label names are not allowed. Please try another name.  

I don't think there are any new features on the way, for you get the same response for the labels entitled "draft", "starred", "trash", etc. But it is an interesting piece of information to file away.

The McDonald brothers have updated the Google portion of the Firefox Toolbar to include Google Desktop. Grab your update now.

While the Google Firefox Toolbar does work on Macintosh, Google Desktop does not, so this update will not be of any use.

VIA: Blogoscoped

I just learned that there is another Google backlink in progress. Sure enough.

Checked a few sites out, the links are pretty funky. I am picking up backlinks from redirection scripts (FURL) and from comments that I made in a few blogs. In the case of the later, those are also scripted and the pages do not have any PR. Basically, I picked up a whole slew of crappy links.

UPDATE: Forum coverage list. More to come.

• Band of Gonzos
  
• DigitalPoint
  
• HighRankings
  
• JimWorld
  
• SearchEngineWatch
  
• SEO Chat - Slower than a slug.
  
• WebProWorld
  
• V7N Forums
  
• Webmaster-Talk - Technical problems
  
• WebmasterWorld
  

A simple php & curl script to turn Google News queries into an RSS feed. Please be warned though, this is a scraping script. 'nuf said.

I tested the script out in my Sage reader for Firefox, and it is works very well. No reason why it would not work in most readers.

Since you can not use the Google API to query the Google News area, this is about the only way to get a feed from them. It would be nice if Google would start providing feeds for their News Search though.

Labels: repub

Here is a great hack for Firefox. If you are a person with numerous tabs that are open and want to jump to a particular tab, then this is the thing for you.

This hack will modify your userChrome.css file to overlay the number of the tab onto it. You can visually see the number of the tab to use for the correct CTRL-number keystroke to access it quickly and easily.

Apparantly the new beta upgrade of My! Yahoo is not available to SBC/DSL customers a paid Internet Service of Yahoo. Maybe this has been posted somewhere, but it is news to me.

Yahoo's response:

"... we hear your frustrations, however, it is important to note that the service is a beta, which means that we are continuing to work out the kinks.

We are planning on rolling out the My Yahoo! enhancements to our SBC Yahoo! members before the end of the year. This is consistent with how we always looks to extend service improvements to our SBC Yahoo! members. This allows both Yahoo! and SBC to make sure the service works well and is virtually bug free."

Oh yeah, almost forgot. There are slides (Powerpoint) and audio (40 min. stream) of their presentation of My! Yahoo RSS at Gnomedex.

Since Playboy will not publish a Letter to the Editor from Daniel Brandt, I guess he has to throw it up on his site (excuse my pun ... but gag me!).

Daniel includes an note stating that he has given Playboy enough lead time on his letter which was in response to the Page/Brin Interview, and he is going ahead and publishing it in its entirety.

Google Watch editor's note: The letters editor at Playboy asked Google Watch if we'd submit a letter about the above interview. The following was submitted a week later, and Playboy acknowledged receipt. Now it is October 16, and the November issue is out. We have no idea if any portion of this letter was published, or will be published in the future. We didn't post the letter until today because we wanted to give Playboy some lead time.

The letter is just more of the same blah-blah-blah from Daniel ... cookies, security, Google is Evil, etc. Nothing new here that he has not already blogged, published or posted in the forums.

Maybe next time, Daniel, you should also send in some photos too. Actually, have you tried Playgirl yet?

According to a CNET News article, Richard Smith, a well-known security consultant, said he examined the code in the desktop application and found included in the program files a new protocol: google_im://. "This is a good sign there's an IM client," he said.

A Google representative said the protocol flagged by Smith does not hint at a pending Google IM product; rather, it is merely a component used to capture IM data from America Online Instant Messenger and make it searchable on the desktop.

Another non-story.

Smith did unearth some of the history behind the desktop search application, before it was named Google Desktop Search, the software was code-named Total Recall. Google confirmed the handle and said the project had also previously taken the code name Fluffy Bunny.

Ping-o-matic is having problems with pings to My Yahoo. Yahoo is not intentionally blocking them. They've been in contact with techs at Yahoo, and they are supposed to be looking into it. No timeline on when it should be fixed.

In the meantime, however, My Yahoo picks up pings from blo.gs and weblogs.com, so as long as you continue to ping those, Yahoo will see when you’ve updated.

Google announced today that Sergio Sancho, a computer science student at the University of Buenos Aires won the Google Code Jam, Google's annual computer programming competition, which comes with a $10,000 first prize. Sancho competed against a total of 7,500 top programmers from around the world for first place.

A second place prize of $7,000 went to Po-Ru Loh, a mathematics student at Caltech.

Third prize of $5,000 was awarded to Reid Barton, a math major at MIT, and fourth place and $3,000 went to Tomasz Czajka, who is studying for a doctorate in computer science at Purdue University.

Additional cash prizes went to the other top 50 finalists, who are working or studying in the United States and in 16 other countries, from Scandinavia to central Europe to Hong Kong, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Google flew all finalists to its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters this week to compete in the championship round.

In 2003, Jimmy Mardell of Stockholm, Sweden, took home the grand prize.

InsideGoogle has a very revealing expose of what is underneath the hood of Google Desktop. Nathan caught up with Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products, at Digital Life today and got an earful of interesting tidbits.

Here are some interesting parts of the article:

• Gmail users will have a bit of good news. Gmail users should be able to search Gmail in the next few weeks.
  
• While PageRank is not used in determining relevancy on desktop searches, Desktop does make use of nearly every other method of determining keyword relevance Google uses, from titles to bold text. 'The way queries are parsed is the same' Marissa said.
  
• The Google Desktop Index maxes out at two gigabytes. The data can't go above that ceiling, so don't worry about it taking over your hard drive.
  
• For now Desktop is only for one user on the computer. First come first serve, the others are plum out of luck. They are working on fixing this as soon as possible.
  
• It's likely Google will do a software bundle in the future, so users can download all Google products in a single installer.
  
• The reason that Hello is getting such low press coverage is that the Piccassa team doesn't think its ready for prime time.
  
• The codename 'Puffin' was the designation for the Deskbar, and that's been out for a while. Marissa wouldn't say what Desktop's code name was, but it sure wasn't 'Puffin'. (oops)

Source: InsideGoogle

Here is a Mycroft plugin for the Google Desktop Search tool. It requires slightly more work to install than the standard Mycroft plugin (three short steps instead of one), so it has not been submitted to the official Mycroft website.

This plugin allows you to search your computer’s hard drive using the new Google Desktop Search tool by typing your search query into the search box in Firefox. It also displays 100 results by default, as opposed to the 10 that the standard GDS shows.

According to members of the gTray Google Group, Gmail invites have come to a stop. Personally I have a few left to hand out and have not noticed.

It was a few months ago that this had happened and then the invites resumed with an actual increase in the number of those invites. This could be a signal for a repeat of that type of action from Google, or is it something else?

On that note, first person to leave a comment here will get one of my invites. Leave the email address you want me to send it to (I will edit it out later and not leave it up for very long). Please be advised that Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts may toss this invite into the bulk bin or worse, so be on the lookout for it.

A CNET News.com report states that America Online has confirmed that it is testing a new search engine that scans for files on a PC's hard drive, mirroring Google's Desktop Search. The AOL desktop search is being developed by a third-party's technology, and it is not Google.

The desktop search tool is currently being offered as a feature within a test version of a standalone Web browser that AOL is developing. As reported earlier, AOL is readying a stand-alone browser that is being based on the Internet Explorer engine.

It was also reported that the new desktop search tool will match many features offered in Google's similar application. Both products can search for Microsoft Office files such as Word and Excel, photos, music, chat logs from AOL Instant Messenger and previously viewed IE pages.

This might explain why AIM files were included in the launch of Google's desktop search. Both products, however, cater only to Internet Explorer web page history and leave other browser technology out of the mix. As I just reported though, it is possible to hack Firefox to allow any tool to index visited web pages. It does leave you to wonder why both Companies are ignoring the other browsers.

VIA: InsideGoogle

One of the biggest buzzes right now is Google's Desktop Search. Unfortunately if you are using Firefox as your main browser, then you are SOL when it comes to searching your browser history. Google Desktop Search only supports Internet Explorer history.

There is hope however. Jon Udell mentions that Ken Schutte's Slogger is a Firefox extension that saves your viewed pages. Once the pages are saved, then any indexer can be used -- including Google Desktop Search.

I couldn't wait to try this out. I installed version 0.2.2 from the main Slogger site, because there does not seem to be an update posted over at Mozilla. I have to say that it does work, but according to ClassyDee it will not give you the browsing history metadata.

There is a toolbar button which I suggest that you add in a convenient place. This button has some options that will come in handy, such as auto-logging the web pages that you visit. Alternatively, you can set this up as a one-shot save option that you can use on a page by page basis which would be useful if you are either low on disk space or really do not want to log your complete browsing history. In the case of the later, this might be a wiser choice, especially if you have a tech savvy significant other.

Don't let this name fool you, but the FCKeditor is a full fledged text editor for Internet. This HTML text editor brings to the web many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors like Word. It's really lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation in the client computer for it is all TTW (or Through The Web).

It is also Open Source and jam packed with features, including Internet Explorer 5.5+ and Gecko browser (Mozilla / Netscape) compatibility, skinnable, link creation and anchor support, table creation and cell editing, form fields, right click context menus support, spell checker, CSS support, automatic browser detection, multi-language support, integration with many scripting languages (ie: PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, etc.) and image / file uploading.

You can demo it here.

Labels: repub

What Microsoft is revealing in their Tech Preview and what is going on behind the scenes are two different things, says Robin Good. Robin, one of the MSN Search Champs, was shown some of the key facilities and ideas that are going to power the new MSN Search engine during the whirlwind tour at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond just recently.

"None of the innovative ideas, interface solutions and other new solutions showcased to us during the 2-day event has yet made it to this Preview release, though stable and fully functional features will be gradually rolled out to it as soon as they will become available."

Robin is bound by his non-disclosure agreement and does not mention much more than that. But he does confirm that the MSN Search Team are seriously committed to rolling out the new Search Engine before year's end, although there was no specific date given.

"This does not mean that the new MSN Search will contain the full spectrum of features and facilities that are being developed right now, but that upon launch the new search engine will be able to stand up on its own when compared to its closest competitors (Google, Yahoo)."

Robin has a great article on his visit to Seattle, very good reading.

An Associated Press article is reporting that the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, want to tap the Indian market by recruiting 'extraordinary talented entrepreneurial people who want to make a big change in the world'. Brin admits however that they may have come to this realization a little late in the game.

Researchers in Bangalore will work with their counterparts in Google's U.S. offices to conceptualize new services and develop software, they said.

"This includes developing search engines that will present results based on speech input or drawings, ones that will work in more languages than at present, personalizing search results to suit individual preferences, and new features for Google's new e-mail service."

VIA: Raghu's NetLog

If you are a Firefox user you can "hide" the text ads in Gmail. The hack is accomplished by using CSS and the Firefox configuration file named userContent.css.

This hack only hides the text ads, they are actually still there. This means that Google still scans your email messages to provide you with "contextual ads" that are based on your email text. This hack will not negate that process.

A DISCLAIMER: as mentioned at Blogoscoped, this hack may violate the Google TOS for Gmail. Use at your own risk.

The Hack

The userContent.css file is not available to edit without first installing an extension named ChromeEdit (at least it wasn't in my installation of Firefox). This extension will add the file and also simplify the process of modifying other Firefox configuration files. After installing this extension, you will need to restart your browser before preceding to the next step.

After restarting your browser -- click the Firefox Tools menu, then the menu item Edit User Files....

A new dialog window will appear with five tabs, click on the tab labeled userContent.css.

Copy and paste the following CSS code into the userContent.css file, then click the Save button.

#rh table[class=”metatable”]{display: none !important;}
#rh div[class=”c”] {display: none !important;}

It is important to note that this is based on the current styling rules in Gmail. This hack may need to be changed in the future if Google changes the Gmail interface which will break the code.

Very special thanks to Digital Media Minute for this hack.

UPDATE: Raghu pointed out to me that ChromeEdit is not really needed to effect the changes necessary to the userContent.css file. This file can be created and saved to your profile folder.

The userContent.css file is not available by default (which I have found out), but if you have customized the appearance of web pages in Firefox, then it should be there in your profile folder already.

More information at http://texturizer.net/firefox/edit.html.

Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle is reporting live from Digital Life and has already payed a visit to the Google booth there. Lots of interesting stuff in his post including a test drive of the just unveiled Google Desktop Search.

Outside of some brief conversations with Biz Stone (Blogger) and Orkut Buyukkoten (the namesake of Orkut) something else caught my eye.

The Picasa team let Nathan in on a little known secret, Google actually has an Instant Messenger. It's in Hello, a part of Picasa, and it's pretty powerful, as well as, in their words, 'more secure than AOL's'.

"I'll be checking out that more in the future. They also showed me how Hello integrates with Blogger, and told me why Google bought them."

Come on Nathan, don't leave us hanging like that! ;-)

UPDATE: Nathan has a great follow-up on Picassa & Hello and how they integrate with Blogger, plus the Instant Messaging portion of Hello.

ZDnet is reporting that Google (on Thursday) unveiled its first-generation desktop application for searching through personal files and Web history stored locally on a PC, a move that could shake up the landscape of Internet search and raise privacy hackles.

Google's Desktop Search is a thin-client application (about 400k) that, upon initial installation, scans the hard drive in the background to index the full text of Word, Outlook e-mail, Excel files, text files, AOL chat logs, and saved Web pages from Internet Explorer--a process that typically takes between five and six hours. Then as the application runs, it indexes new documents and visited Web pages in real time.

(People using Firefox and other browsers will not be able to record their Web history using the application.)

"It's like photographic memory for your computer--if you've seen it before, you should be able to find it,' said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products at Google."

I am sure that there will be a lot of talk about this in all the forums. I will be posting a list of the threads here shortly, stay tuned. Currently a topic is running in the Search Engine News forum at Band of Gonzos Forums. Drop on by and let us know what you are thinking.

Screenshots and Overview of Google Desktop Search.

ListGarden is an Open Source RSS feed generator
from Software Garden Products.

Features:

• Creates and maintains RSS feeds
  
• Produces both XML and optional human-readable companion HTML
  
• Runs either on your PC or on a web server (perl)
  
• Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
  
• Open source
  
• Requires no knowledge of XML or the RSS data format
  
• Tuned for quick manual additions of new items and simple editing

Lee Underwood has a very nice review of ListGarden at WebReference.com.

Labels: repub

The Toolbar Browser is a complete Toolbar Authoring and Management tool. You can use it to manage dozens of toolbars in a simple tabbed control to save valuable browser space. It also includes all the standard features for search, navigation, popup blocking, etc., so you will never need another toolbar.

Toolbar Authoring & Custom Toolbars
You can take the best features from all your favorite toolbars and combine them into your own super toolbar. Because the Toolbar Browser is also a complete authoring tool, that is exactly what you can do. Designing a new toolbar is as simple as creating an HTML page. Toolbars can be written in XML, HTML, Java or even Flash.

FreeWare
The Toolbar Browser is a freeware application. There is nothing you need to purchase, no royalties or fees, so you can create and distribute a great toolbar for your website, service or business.

Distributing your own toolbar builds customer loyalty and brand awareness. Toolbar Distribution is also very simple. Just insert the toolbar code into any web page.

VIA: SEO Book

Labels: repub

In a mozillaZine post, Netscape has abruptly shut down shut down their web developer resource, devedge.netscape.com, without warning. There was a great deal of content available on the site.

Mitchell Baker says that mozilla.org is going to try and recover the lost content:

It appears that Netscape DevEdge is gone. I am working to see if the Mozilla Foundation can get a license to important DevEdge content so that it remains available to the community. I suspect that the end of Netscape DevEdge before the Mozilla Foundation is authorized and set up to take over this function is a miscommunication somewhere along the line.

We do not currently have copies of the DevEdge material, nor do we yet have the right to display and maintain them. I am hopeful this will happen, and that we can get something in place quickly.

For those who are looking for some specific content on the site, much of it has been archived on Google. The better place to find content would be the Wayback Machine.

JustBlogIt is a Mozilla / Firefox extension to allow easy right-click posting to a weblog from any website. JustBlogIt supports posting to a variety of weblog system types and is not specific to just one. There is also a Custom setting to add any weblog type you want.

More importantly, JustBlogIt supports seamless posting from within many web-based News Readers. JustBlogIt checks to see if you are trying to post from a News Reader and adapts the blogging data accordingly.

What weblog types are supported by JustBlogIt? Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Radio Userland, TextPattern, TypePad and WordPress. Plus you can add any weblog type you want through the Custom setting.

Which News Readers does JustBlogIt recognize? Bloglines, Rojo, Radio Userland and Amphetadesk.


VIA: Weblog Tools Collection

New Job (Again) says Jeremy Zawodny. He is to move back to Yahoo! Search, but in a different role.

Instead of hacking away on software bits, I'm going to be working to:

* make sure our products kick the necessary amount of ass
* better communicate what we're thinking about and building
* incorporate outside feedback and ideas into what we're doing
* recruit more smart people

And other stuff as it comes up, I'm sure.

This change is one that I thought about for quite a while. And, quite honestly, it's the first time I've accepted a new role without a very solid idea of what I was getting myself into. It'll be very interesting to see how this evovles. I know that I have a lot to learn and hopefully a lot to teach as well. In some ways, this new role is experimental. I'm expecting it to morph a bit over time and so are the folks I'll be working with.

Maybe we will be seeing some of Jeremy out in the forums (item number two on his list). That would be nice to see.

Good luck in the old new job Jeremy! Wish you the best of luck. Hope to see you soon! ;-)

UPDATE: Interesting response from Andrew Goodman about Jeremy's news and the style in which it was written.

RSSAds is signing up RSS publishers, with buyers being able to buy ads soon. RSSAds provides an economic model that allows content publishers to offer full feeds of their content via RSS.

Per the RSSAds Web site:

Ad Buyers: Place your ad in RSS feeds throughout the web. Reach users who read content in RSS aggregators.
- Coming soon!

Publishers: Monetize your RSS feed. Maintain total control over the ads placed in your feed. Expose all of your content via premium RSS feeds.

In the RSSAds FAQ, there are no setup fees for publishers or advertisers. A 25% gross revenue fee will be charged to sell an RSS ad (hosting, billing, integration included).

VIA: Blogoscoped

If you use the stock searchbox that comes with Firefox, the query that gets sent to Google will include a client parameter set to firefox-a. The results that are returned are far less than if the same query was made from Google's main page.

The word "the" for example, Google's main page returns approximately 5.9 million results while the Firefox Searchbox feature will only return 2.5 million.

Further investigation of this phenomenon in a SearchEngineWatch thread reveals that the client parameter does not mean browser client -- client equates to search client or partner.

Using an AdSense search client (WebSearch) on a site that participates in that program will return less results also. The same holds true for sites that utilize the Google API search appliance. Other possible search clients include A9, of which a subset of the total Google Index is returned.

Barry Schwartz, in the same thread, opines that this might be a misuse of the client parameter.

So was this a gaffe on Mozilla's part to insert a client parameter in the search box? I don't think so because how would they know what to set that parameter to in the first place. They would had to have something they used before that included this parameter. The parameter setting alone, firefox-a, is unusual in itself. Why the "-a" on the end of it? Why not use plain old "firefox" as the client?

Interesting subject none-the-less.

VIA: Danny Sullivan

UPDATE: The folks over at mozillaZine Forums found this blog entry and were put a little back by it. But in short course, they came up with a workaround to prevent the client parameter from being injected into the URL on your searches.

Locate the file google.src which is in the searchplugins directory inside of the application directory. Open the file up and remove (or comment out) the following line:

<input name="sourceid" value="mozilla-search">

It was said that the google.src file was written (or provided) by someone at Google (according to the poster).

In a Jeremy Zawodny blog entry, Yahoo has been upgrading the backend of its RSS feeds to 2.0. Now you can add Yahoo to the list of search engine feed providers in NetNewsWire and possibly more.

"In case any other aggregator developers want to add Yahoo support to their aggregators, feel free! (I wonder if we shouldn't be doing some sort of promotion or list somewhere on the Yahoo RSS site for stuff like this?)

It's also worth pointing out that the move to RSS 2.0 is something you should see reflected in most, if not all, of the Yahoo RSS feeds. We've hashed out some standards internally, so that'll mean more consistency among the thousands of feeds we're publishing."

A scheduled meeting betweem Serjey Brin and Larry Page with the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was called off today, said a Government spokesperson. He did not give a reason why.

When contacted, Google's head of Bangalore R&D centre, Krishna Bharat refused to take any query and answer as to why the two founders were meeting the PM and whether their visit to India has been called off.

VIA: InsideGoogle

In the Google Investor Relations Code of Conduct, Google is a "dog company". They even have a Dog Policy for their campus.

e. Our Dog Policy

Google's respect and affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. If you're interested, here's our official Dog Policy.

We have nothing against cats, per se, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our campus would be fairly stressed out.

VIA: SEO & Marketing News

Here is a great tutorial and commentary on how to style the Sage RSS Reader extension for Firefox. Originally designed for Mac OS X, this tweak also applies to other platforms as well.

Daum Communications has completed the acquisition of Lycos. The transaction includes the Lycos.com site as well as Lycos' popular specialty sites, wired.com, tripod.com, angelfire.com, matchmaker.com, quote.com, and hotbot.com.

The sale also includes ownership of the Lycos brand globally excluding Europe. Lycos will continue to operate as a stand alone business entity with its U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Daum is the number one Internet site in Korea, and a leader throughout the Asian markets, focusing on community, e-commerce and on-line transaction. Daum brings to the union expertise and successes from its Korean business. With 75% broadband penetration, Korea tops the list of broadband and wireless markets. The new combination will focus on the areas of greatest strengths of the two companies: search, community and web publishing.

Read the full article at WebProNews.

Peer2Mail lets you store and share files on your web-mail account. If you have a web mail account with large storage space, you can use P2M to store files on it. Web-mail providers such as Gmail (Google Mail), Walla!, Yahoo and more, provide storage space that ranges from 100MB to 2GB.

P2M splits the file you want to share/store zips and optionally encrypts it. P2M then sends the file segments one by one to your account. Once P2M uploaded all file segments, you can download them and use P2M to merge the segments back to the original file.

Labels: repub

Simple little icon generator for your Gmail account.



... or your Yahoo! Mail account.



... or your Hotmail account.

Labels: repub

Ben Goodger, chief developer of Firefox, tells us that he has updated the Firefox Roadmap again - outlining what are roughly the release dates. They are 10/18 for RC1, 10/25 for an optional RC2 if needed, and 11/9 for final.

"We would like not to slip off 11/9 if at all possible... (we had initially wanted 11/2, but the odds of getting decent press coverage during the US Presidential Election seemed slim)."

The crew behind Firefox are on an aggressive schedule to get something released by the end of the year. Some of the bugs encountered in PR1 and prior have been dropped from The List as it is called in order to meet the roadmap dates.

"I understand that some among you may be upset that bug(s) you consider important are not on this list. All I can tell you is - bugs I would have liked to have fixed are not on this list either. We need to try and ship something this year. This really is 'alternative browsers'' day in the sun - and we intend to make the most of it."

SpellBound is a port of the spell checker user interface from Mozilla's Composer that enables spell checking in web forms (e.g. html textarea and html input elements - html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound - wysiwyg rich text forms). This allows you to spell check forms (e.g. message board post, blog, etc.) before submitting them when using Firefox. There are no special system requirements beyond those to run Firefox 0.9 or above and it has been verified to work with Windows, Linux, and MacOS X.

Since the vast majority of the code is the same as the Mozilla spell checker it by nature has all of the same spell checking goodness and is also able to utilize the same language files which has made it possible for SpellBound to be available in 43 languages.

SpellBound has also been developed with other extension developers in mind so they are able to easily add spell checking to their own extensions. The original intention behind the creation of SpellBound was to provide a spell checker for the Deepest Sender extension as a separate extension. It was designed for not only users, but extension developers can also easily utilize it.

DynAdvance's Mail Notifier is a tool that notifies users when they have new e-mail on several types of account types. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and POP3 accounts are currently supported.

Some of the features include:

- Full Unicode support ( Asian characters, etc. )
- Message Preview
- POP3 support
- Hotmail Support
- Yahoo! Mail support (without auto-login)
- International Yahoo! Mail flavors support ( French, Spanish, etc. )
- Gmail accounts auto-login for Internet Explorer users
- Gmail multiple account support
- Setting for check intervals
- Wave sounds played when new e-mails arrive
- Balloon notifications

Practical PHP Programming is an online book for PHP that delves into the basics of this scripting language. Quickly glancing through this resource, it appears to be comprehensive and is written in an easy to follow style. Good for the newcomer to intermediate programmer.

Labels: repub

MySQL claims to be the world's most popular open source database and with good reason. It is free, runs on a wide variety of platforms, is relatively simple, easy to configure and performs well even under significant load. By comparison to some other popular database management systems, configuring it is quite simple, but there are still a sufficiently wide variety of security-relevant configuration issues to make securing it a challenge.

NGS Research has a brief whitepaper (PDF file) of common attacks on MySQL and the steps that a MySQL administrator can take to defend against them.

Topics covered in the whitepaper include:

• MySQL versions and patching
  
• MySQL in a network environment
  
• Bugs In The Authentication Protocol
  
• Historical Bugs
  
• MySQL as a web back-end
  
• SQL injection in MySQL (via UNION, SELECT, LOAD_FILE and more)
  
• Local Attacks
  
• Other MySQL features to be wary of

A MySQL Lockdown Checklist is also included.

Further MySQL security resources:

• MySQL Security Guidelines
  
• Securing MySQL: step-by-step
  
• Secure MySQL Database Design
  
• Securing Your MySQL Installation
  

Labels: repub

Comprehensive whitepaper entitled Understanding & Preventing Phishing Attacks (PDF file) that covers the technologies and security flaws Phishers exploit to conduct their attacks, and provides detailed vendor-neutral advice on what organizations can do to prevent future attacks. Security professionals and customers can use this comprehensive analysis to arm themselves against the next phishing scam to reach their inbox.

The whitepaper is provided by Next Generation Security, a UK company, which also have what appears to be an excellent set of white papers about different security topics.

VIA: ReachCustomersOnline

If you are not seeing the Atom feed button in your Gmail account yet or it has disappeared, you will still be happy to know that the feed is still there. You just need to know where to find it.

The feed can be found at:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

You may also be able to use HTTP authorization, which means you can use the username@password construct in some feed readers. Add this to your feed reader:

http://gmailusername:password@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/

If you are using Live Bookmarks or Sage and GMail is always logged in, you don’t need to do this, but its probably better to do so.

Thanks to Cow

Labels: repub

From a post in Biz Stone's blog, there is new hack for Blogger that will allow you to insert a Create New Post link into your blog that only you can see, and nobody else.

Follow the instructions in the Blogger Hacks section for Conditional "new post" links which is pretty straight forward. One pre-requisite however is that you are already using the Quick Edit Links feature which you can turn on in your Basic Setup in the blog settings panel.

Netcraft reports, that eNom moved to register the .info equivalents of nearly one million .com domains owned by its customers between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4. The domains were registered through Sipence, which has the same address as eNom.

While the domains were reportedly registered with the name and contact details of the owner of the .com domain, there is conflicting information on their intent. Some customers are being informed via email that the .info domains would be available for a fee. Other customers say they've been told there will be no charge for the domains.

Some eNom customers are asserting that Sipence/eNom has effectively acted as a cybersquatter, registering domains associated with their brands. But the scenario is somewhat different from traditional cybersquatting, since the .com owner is the listed registrant.

If you want to follow what people are saying about the recent toolbar PR update here is a list of the forums that are covering it. I am sure there will be a mix of good and bad reviews.

Band of Gonzos
Cre8asite Forums
Digitalpoint Forums
Highrankings
Jim World
SEOchat
SEOpark
SEW Forums
V7N Forums
Webmaster-Talk
Webmasterworld
WebProWorld

A good portion of this list is from Phoenix at SE Roundtable who is sitting in for RustyBrick while he is away. I added a few others into the mix that had some decent conversations going on.

The common theme running thru most of the fora is that there were a lot of reductions of PR on the home pages, this site included. Even though there were substantially more backlinks attained during this 3 month plus stretch, PR still dropped.

The theory is that there are more pages in the Google Index and Google had to raise the bar accordingly. In fact, this seems to be the case according to a Netcraft survey released this month. The survey reported close to one million sites that went online in just one month alone. There has been a boom in upstart Web sites and with a new googlebot digging even deeper, the index has surely grown considerably.

With the onslaught of new pages, adjustments to the PageRank logarithmical scalation may have taken place. This is likely a manual scalation which follows a logarithmical scheme, so that Google has control over the number of pages within the single Toolbar PageRank ranges. The logarithmical basis for this scheme is assumed to be between 6 and 7.

But of all the bad stories in the fora, there is one notable success story. And, that is of the new SEOpark Forums. The owner of the forum has done an outstanding job in modding the phpBB-based forum into a very spider friendly site. The site garnered a PR6, with PR spreading quite nicely down into the deeper topic pages. Excellent work!

Just as the noise surrounding Gbrowser takes off, now it is reported that AOL is readying a stand-alone browser of its own.

In a surprising departure, the AOL Browser will be based on Internet Explorer and not the Netscape browser engine. The IE-based browser will have features not currently offered such as tabbed browsing and "tear-off" tabs where a tabbed window can be torn off into a new window. A pop-up blocker will also be included (not so much a surprise).

I think the biggest story behind this is that this new browser is the result of an antitrust settlement between America Online and Microsoft, AOL has the option to use Internet Explorer technology royalty-free for six more years.

Now the question is just begging to be asked. What happens to a browser in a browserless system such as Longhorn? Anybody want some 5-1/4" floppy disks?

Netcraft reports that there is security flaw in Microsoft's ASP.NET technology could allow intruders to enter password-protected areas of a web site by altering a URL. A fix is not yet available, but Microsoft is offfering guidelines to help ASP.NET users secure their sites against intrusion attempts. The flaw exists only in ASP.NET, not ASP (Active Server Pages).

Adam M. Smith, Google Print product manager, has just announced that Google is expanding the program and they're now inviting publishers to send us books that they'll scan and put online for free.

"There are many, many books out there, and the process of scanning takes time, but depending on your areas of interest, it's likely you'll soon be seeing more Google Print results when you use Google."

Nathan at InsideGoogle beat me to another scoop and it appears that I will be his Guest Blogger for the next 72 hours (and change, as he puts it.)

I am thrilled and honored to take on his duties over there and hope that I can rise to the challenge. I have already ran down to the 24-hour Quick-Mart and cleaned their shelves of No-Doze and Mountain Dew (lotsa caffeine in that).

Netcraft is reporting that Worldpay, on online payment processor, is the latest provider to have its operations disrupted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The attack on Worldpay follows similar attacks on Authorize.net and several smaller payment processing services. In each of those cases, the attack was preceded by a demand for payment.

Persistent.info describes how you can skin your Gmail interface with the URLid extension for Mozilla/Firefox.

Also included is a CSS file (link to a screenshot).

VIA: Blogoscoped

Labels: repub

The Austin Business Journal reported that Pluck has raised $8.5 million dollars in venture capital. The new capital will be used by Pluck to expand marketing and development activities.

I have noticed several subscribers that use Pluck (via my Feedburner stats). Pluck is an excellent plug-in for Internet Explorer that functions as a news reader and a lot more.

InsideGoogle: is wondering if this is new or just noticing it for the first time, but when a Google search returns a corporate website, apparently it includes a link to see that companies stock quote.

I do think it is new. The link jumps to a "framed" menu bar, which is a first for Google too.

Inside the target frame (selectable from the menu) are Yahoo Finance, Fool.com, MSN MoneyCentral and ClearStation stock quotes.

What is funky about this is that some of these sites require you to register or download controls in order for them to function properly. This is all too strange for Google, not their style. What are they up too?

Finally! It is about time that the Tech Preview site was made available. It might be possible that this preview will last about as long as the Search Champs meeting is being held -- just a prediction.

SEbasic's blog notices that the site is sluggish. The little rainbow icons for feedback are now gone.

SEbasic also notices the same thing I did, the preview sometimes will only show you seven or eight results out of millions -- as if the result set is being "throttled back". They will not allow you to view additional pages via the next>> button (it is not there). The result set is not even a full page of ten items either. This appears to not happen all the time, just some of the time.

They are showing how many results they have for the individual queries. This was not there before. What is weird however, is that if you advance to the 3rd or 4th page of the result set -- the totals will change. I kept an eye on this, and saw the number change many times.

SEbasic likes the results for his pet searches. I have to agree, so do I. After all I am number one for Web Development News out of 16 million plus. The BoG Forums are in the top ten for some key "xxxxx forum" key terms.

I can only attribute these successes at MSN Search to strong anchor text and page titles. All of the terms were targeted and the onpage factors were there to support them as well. Basic SEO skills work at MSN Search.

Results this time around seemed less spammy and multiple pages for a site were consolidated into one, sometimes a site would have the indented supplementary result with it. They managed to work this out pretty well. All in all -- the results were pretty darn good with the checking I did.

InsideGoogle is a little disgruntled that his blog is not even in the MSN Search Index. I would be too. MSNbot has been busy as a bee, and it misses his site entirely? Something wrong there.

Nathan notices, as did I, that there is Message Board set up for the Search Tech Preview. I visited the board, not much shaking, just an announcement that the Tech Preview site was open again. Like duh!

He also says, the interface is very simplistic. The large font turns him off and he would want a smaller, tighter interface. I summize that he is using Internet Explorer, because I remember the fonts being rather large and they must not have changed in that regard. I was using Firefox PR1 to view the site with and found the font actually very tiny and had to increase the font size to actually read the green URL text. I would assume that this is just a temporary interface though, and they will be sticking with their new layout that they unveiled a couple of months ago.

I left a comment in his blog about the number of pages the sites were returning. I noticed that they were right on top of things, and the result counts (if you can trust them) were right in line with Google counts but running a little less. A hell of lot better than Yahoo! Search anyway -- time for them to get on the ball over there.

They are also digging up some stuff I have not come across yet. Found some references that you would never probably see in Google, such as .cgi comments from MovableType blogs and numerous pages with SID numbers in them (many forum references are showing SID's). The later is something they will probably have to work on in the future.

MSN uses the domain: command, although the site: command works too -- but domain: returns more results. It does not return all of the pages though. You have to use a word that is on most of your pages in order to get the results to show all of your pages. In the case of this site, I used domain:www.webstractions.com webstractions to reveal all of the pages. Bug? Or is this intentional?

Also, to repeat what Nacho said at SearchEngineWatch forums:

1. Keyword-in-domain continues being strong, but not as much as Round 1.
   
2. Cache is as fresh as your grocery store around the corner.
   
3. Improved navigation and nicer looks.
   
4. The index seems to have been growing nicely.
   
5. link:www.domain.com is working well too.
   
6. Big authority websites carry weight in ranking. Seems like mom & pop will continue to struggle.
   
7. On page factors and content weigh in heavily.
   
8. Results for other languages are not coming up well (I tried Spanish).

And my response:

1. This could be true. I think the answer is as previously noted about anchor text and titles.
   
2. Damn ... I knew I forgot to look at that! That wasn't there in the first preview.
   
3. My feeling is that this is a temporary shell. They will stick with the current MSN Search layout (or another one that we have not even seen).
   
4. Oh hell yes! It has grown very well. They are on a tear.
   
5. I found the link: showed less than domain:, plus you had to add a qualifying word to trick the query into revealing your pages.
   
6. I am not so sure about that. I can see a good mix here. In some cases, mom and pop or startup sites are doing quite well. But this could be subjective too. Everyone will have a different interpretation of that.
   
7. Umm ... I think it is anchor text and titles. But that is a debate, I hate to debate. Let's just say you are correct! ;-)
   
8. Tomaré su palabra en eso.

There is a Wiki for Gmail. I think I came across this once before, but Mark reminded me of it once more.

The wiki is set up into sections for Tools & Utilities, FAQ, Links & Resources, Tips & Tricks, In the News, Reviews and Wanted Features.

Pretty sparse right now, but everyone is encouraged to add new material and links.

What's good for the Google, is good for the Gander. The geese at Yahoo have just launched Yahoo! Next.

Yahoo! Next is a Google Labs-type area in which they will showcase some of the ideas and products that they are working on. As of now there is only one product, My Yahoo! Search Beta, a knock-off of MyJeeves.

It seems that they are following Google's lead on labeling their products as not-for-primetime, but rather as Beta versions thereby flying under the major scrutiny factor.

Yahoo! has also launched a new message board, My Yahoo! Search Community to field the questions and gauge responses for the new personal search beta product.

VIA: Blogoscoped

A new Bloglines Forum was created for users to discuss Bloglines, and for developers to discuss the new Bloglines Web Services that were just recently added.

Robin Good posted the members of the MSN Search Champs advisory group.

They are, in no particular order:

Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Paul Aelen, Ian Grayson, Chris Pirillo, Matt Paines, Kris Abel, Peter Stewart, Steven Bink, Don Park, Jason Dunn, Matt Miller, Andrea di Stefano, Aurelio Minerbo, Marc Mitrani, Buzz Bruggeman, Greg Boser, Maurizio Bergami, David Weinberger, Phil Bradley, Peter Da Vanzo, Loren Heiny, Brad Turcotte, Doug Seven, Alan Reiter, Gérald Claessens, Luca De Biase, Dave Winer, Marc Orchant, Marjolein Hoekstra and of course Robin Good.

It is a pretty diverse group from around the world including Denmark, France, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom as well as the United States.

New beta program at Alexa: Alexa Web Information Service

The Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS) provides developers with programmatic access to the information Alexa Internet (www.alexa.com) collects from its Web Crawl, which currently encompasses more than 100 terabytes of data from over 4 billion Web pages. Developers and Web site owners can use AWIS as a platform for finding answers to difficult and interesting problems on the Web, and incorporating them into their Web applications.

Developers have free access to the Alexa Web Information Service during the Beta, but usage is restricted to 10,000 requests per day per developer.

VIA: Geeking With Greg

Commenters at MicroPersuasion, including Steve Rubel, are reporting that the Atom Link in their Gmail accounts are now disappearing. The plot is thickening!

WebReference was granted the rights to republish excerpts from the book "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web" by permission of Manning Publications. A very detailed synopsis of what the Symantec Web means and how it may be achieved.

"For the Semantic Web, semantic indicates that the meaning of data on the Web can be discovered—not just by people, but also by computers. In contrast, most meaning on the Web today is inferred by people who read web pages and the labels of hyperlinks, and by other people who write specialized software to work with the data. The phrase the Semantic Web stands for a vision in which computers—software—as well as people can find, read, understand, and use data over the World Wide Web to accomplish useful goals for users."

Labels: repub

InsideGoogle reports of seeing new Gmail Features, but I am not yet. Nathan has observed the addition of Atom Feeds and Drafts and the Contacts List being moved into the main navigation on the left side.

The most surprising new feature that Nathan mentions, however, is the ability to set up automatic forwarding of your Gmail to another email inbox. Now this I will have to see for myself. That will really rock if it is true.

I am seeing conflicting reports on what the Atom Feeds really do. Nathan says, "You can now receive your new mail notifications in your RSS reader". But Steve Rubel is saying the feeds include a summary of each new message in your Google email. The screen grabs from Steve show a label with the title "News Feeds(6)".

It appears that you can use Gmail as a newsreader now. The feeds will show up in your labels section. If that is the case, then Google will have to do something about labels now -- like maybe add folders! They probably should have folders anyway. Labels are fine and dandy for "tagging" your mail, but folders would be handier for "sorting" your mail. Throw in newsfeeds and that just compounds the mess.

Netcraft just released their Most Reliable Hosting Providers survey for the month of September.

And the survey says:

"The dominant operating system was Windows, with six of the top most reliable sites running on a Microsoft operating system, evenly split between Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000."

While Netcraft's Web Server Survey clearly shows Apache Server as the clear choice for web server software and Microsoft trailing as a distant second, it appears that the Windows machines are more reliable to run that software on.

They did have to tweak the results this month due to the weather in Florida. Outages caused by hurricanes and floods are absent from the list, however Alabanza experienced a major outage due to an underground fire near its datacenter. The Alabanza fire disrupted service of 188,000+ hosts for about 2 days.

The Netcraft Server Survey is out for October 2004. Their survey has topped 55.4 million sites, which is a gain of 981K from the September survey. The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found 18,957 hosts.

Web server market share remained static though and has been that way since November of 2003. In the ensuing months since November 2003, Apache has added 7.3 million sites and Microsoft servers have gained 2.2 million sites without disturbing the prevailing market dynamics. Apache currently holds 67.85% of the market and Microsoft at a distant 21.14%. Sun and Zeus brings up the rear with less than 5% combined.

Tabbed browsing in Firefox PR1 is pretty much, well, not there for the most part. Being an old IE user and hearing people tout previous versions of this Mozilla-based browser and it's tabbed browsing, I had to give it a try. What a let down, everything opened up in a new window and I just did not get it.

Firefox is basically a build-it-your-own-way browser. Whatever functionality you want to add to it, just go find it and add it on. The problem is that there is a myriad of extensions to sift thru. Some good, some horrendously bad. But that was kewl, I am used to building and adding on to phpBB, so no problem there.

Single Window 1.4
Then tabbed browsing got better when I stumbled onto Single Window. This kind of half-assed worked. External programs, such as Outlook, would open another instance of Firefox though. When it did, there was this flashing jerkiness to my screen when the last instance appeared and the new one opened on top of it. What a FUed mess.

Tabbrowser Preferences (TBP)
Then I stumble onto an entry in Chu Yeow's Redemption in a Blog where he mentions Tabbrowser Preferences and wow! This is what the doctor ordered.

TBP allows links from external applications to open in a new tab. Other options for you middle button (or scroll wheel) to open clicked links in a new tab. The Search bar and Address bar can be set to open in a new tab too. Sub-options to open the new tabs in the foreground and background, plus some other little tweaks.

Can it get better? Yes!
Chu mentions that there is new daily build for Firefox that includes a Tabbed Browsing preferences section in Firefox options now. See Chu's post for the rest of details and a screenshot of the new options. He also has tips on how to set them.

Note that this is currently for Windows only. There are patches for Linux and Mac attached and waiting for review, so there’s hope they’ll be fixed pre-1.0 as well.

Glancing thru the blogs I noticed that Peter Da Vanzo has just reported in from Seattle. Although he says he probably has said enough already, for you see, Peter is one of the invitees to the MSN Search Champ Camp.

Thinking about what might be going on there reminded me of a similar experience I had years ago when I subjected myself to some Microsoft testing. Kind of a strange experience.

I wound up being sent to a room with a computer sitting on a table and they shut the door behind me. Then the voice over the speaker instructed me what to do. Lo and behold I was looking at Windows 95 for the very first time.

Most of the time the voice would say "Will you please tell us what you are doing?". They wanted me to think out loud. I think I was instructed to think out loud on more than one occasion -- possibly several times. Okay maybe over twenty times.

I was like a kid in a candy shop. Back then, Windows 95 was absolutely an amazing thing to see -- compared to Win 3.11 for Workgroups. I wasn't really expecting to see something like this. I only came here for the free software they promised me.

I distinctly remember forgetting about the free software and not wanting to leave. Then the voice came again, "Thank you, you can go now". I think it was about the third time that the voice said that I could leave ... maybe the fourth ... when I finally had to leave.

So I wonder what kind of room they will stick the Search Champs in? Will they be asked to leave too? Do they get little chocolate mints on their mousepads?

Back to reality now. This second MSN Tech Preview going on and off lately -- could this be the Search Champs sitting in one of those little rooms? Possibly. "Will you please tell us what you are searching for Mr. Da Vanzo"?

The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools could provide some direction for improving news websites.

In Eyetrack III, they observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. The article provides an overview of what they observed.

Included in this article are hot spot images that show the eye patterns -- where they first landed on the page, what direction they moved, time spent at a particular spot on the page (pause), etc.

Quite a fascinating study that is worth looking at.

This is wild, Soople a tool to make searching Google easier than ever. The designer initially made this site for his mother, who, though computer-savvy, still didn't know about all the possibilities Google offers. This site is therefore meant for all those who are not yet familiar with all the functions and required syntaxes -- it is all there in one convenient user interface.

Soople has most of the advanced search methods and tools rolled into one. For instance, one can specify a search by one particular site or filetype ( word, excel, powerpoint and pdf) or an image search by size and type. As well as the useful tools Google offers; search in the latest news, look up definitions or use Google as a phonebook.

Then there is the Calculator. This tool lets you do all kinds of (very advanced) calculations. Soople has added the unit-converter, which is based on this calculator, for the conversion of all the common units/measures (meters<--->yards).

The main page is comprised of the following functions:

1. Standard Google searchbox, with option to search by a specific country
   
2. Search multiple sites at once
   
3. Filter by file type (MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, .PDF, etc.)
   
4. Find definitions of particular words (e.g. define:RSS)
   
5. Search in a specific language, or sites from a particular country
   
6. Search for sites that relate to a particular site
   
7. Search for stocks in 5 finance sites
   
8. Search within one site, or domain
   
9. Specific image search
   
10. Search in latest news (Google News)
    
11. Search by number (e.g. UPS or Fedex tracking, patent, airplane)
    
12. Search for movie reviews
    
13. Find who is linking to a site

Advanced features are available via a tabbed menu for Calculator, Translate, Phone & Location and a Super-Filter. Excellent help sections are also available for most of the more complicated features.

VIA: Robin Good

Not too long ago RustyBrick warned us of a phishing expedition that tried to obtain your Gmail login information. Additionally it was found out that your Gmail account name and password not only secures your Gmail account, it also secures your API account, AdSense and other possible Google programs. This will not be problem if you use different login names and passwords though.

Now InsideGoogle reports that Google has taken steps in identifying potential phishing hooks and will display a warning when a phishing rod is trying to bait you with this message:

Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information. Learn more

Nathan, of InsideGoogle, received one of these warnings -- but apparently it was a false-positive:

"While this is a great idea, and one more companies should try, it is also incredibly stupid if it doesn't work, and this case is one where it didn't. The email was a Google Alert, and one from National Public Radio, no less. The reason Gmail thought it was a problem, as far as I can tell, is because it links to an audio file, not a web page. Good idea, poor execution, definitely needs some work."

Too funny -- a Google Alert! =)

Important Security Update for Firefox Available
October 1, 2004

The Mozilla Foundation releases an important security update for Firefox. All users should upgrade to the latest version of the Firefox Preview Release. A patch is available for current Preview Release users.

How does this security vulnerability expose the user?

A malicious hacker who could trick a user into saving a file could delete files from a user's download directory.

How serious is this vulnerability?

While this is a potentially severe security vulnerability, user interaction is required to trigger potential harm. This security update is also another example of the Mozilla Foundation identifying and fixing security vulnerabilities before they are exploited by malicious hackers. This type of security vulnerability is very different from cases where a hacker could take advantage of a vulnerability to obtain valuable information from a user's computer.

Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has announced that there will be a book available soon, The Zen of CSS Design. It is due out early 2005, published by New Riders, co-written by Molly E. Holzschlag. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com if you look hard enough.

(hint, hover over the book cover at left)

Labels: css, repub

In a CNET News.com article, Bill Gates mentions:

'This malware thing is so bad,' he said in a speech at the Computer History Museum here. 'Now that's the one that has us really needing to jump in.'

It's also a problem that has affected Gates personally. He said his home PCs have had malware, although he has personally never been affected by a virus.

'I have had malware, (adware), that crap' on some home machines, he said.

Gates also said Microsoft will offer software to detect malicious applications and that the company will keep it up-to-date on an ongoing basis. He did not say when the software would be available or whether Microsoft would charge for it.

Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. At the date of this post there were 884 designs total.

Some of the designs are actually very good -- but with the good there also comes the bad. All in all it is an excellent resource for designers to have a look at.

VIA: ReachCustomersOnline

Labels: repub

Interesting find here JR's Pages which is a modest human edited RSS feed directory. Currently there are 1064 feeds available (137 webfeeds and 927 RSS feeds from 347 sources) of which are categorized quite nicely.

You will find some of the perennial favorites here such as Gnomelocker, Mezzoblue, AListApart and others but there are several others that may have escaped your eye also.

What is interesting about this site is the way it was put together. The owner, John Rudge, saw another site and just said "Hey, I can do that". What's more is that it is put together on the personal webspace offered by his ISP.

It will be interesting to see what the directory will look like a year from now.

Labels: repub

SEbasic has compiled a list of Google Patents that will surely keep you busy reading for hours.

The Search Engine Watch blog reported that a second MSN Search Tech Preview was online briefly today, and now it is gone. I tried the link to MSN Tech Preview and got a "connection was refused" error in my browser.

Gary Price noted (in the blog entry) not too many changes except that the number of pages jumped over the last time. Since he did not list how many and the site is back down again, not clear on how many that might be -- should be a ton of 'em you would think.

Gary also said, "Still no advanced interface to try on the US side. A UK version of the service provided a number of interesting refinement tools, such as filtering by filetype, date, a numeric range feature and even some relevancy sliders or equalizers."

Clustering of same-domain results was seen with a green button next to them reading "see more results from ...". That is a good sign to see.

Nacho, a moderator at Search Engine Forums had these observations:

* Keyword-in-domain continues being strong, but not as much as Round 1.
* Cache is as fresh as your grocery store around the corner.
* Improved navigation and nicer looks.
* The index seems to have been growing nicely.
* link:www.domain.com is working well too.
* Big authority websites carry weight in ranking. Seems like mom & pop will continue to struggle.
* On page factors and content weigh in heavily.
* Results for other languages are not coming up well (I tried Spanish).