facesærch blog

finally found a great use for my first generation netbook

used

• eeepc 700
• gOS (based on ubuntu)
• http://eee.ricey.co.uk/
• twitter with my twitter account

oh yeah, and enjoy the twitter blog feedflow

Last Thursday Google launched a new feature called SearchWiki and well, it sucked. in my opinion. They turned a perfect clear-purpose product into a noisy icon-dessert which you can’t easily opt out .

I look at Google like 10.000 times a day, i don’t have time for noise, on the other hand, as an SEO manager I’m part of the GoogleEconomy, so i can’t just logout of the Google products or disable this feature completely.

So basically i coded a tiny

firefox greasemonkey enhancement called
“searchwiki on/off“

which lets you turn Google SearchWiki on if you need it (with this enhancement searchwiki is opt-in, means searchwiki is disabled by default.)

If you ever need the Google SearchWiki feature, i can just turn searchwiki on.

But if you have enough, the just turn SearchWiki off again.

And yes, the on/off status is remembered. So basically now you have a choice. This is how a user centric product is supposed to be from the beginning.

Installation SearchWiki on/off:

1. First you need the great Greasemonkey Firefox add-on.

2. Then just install the Search Wiki On/Off User Script with one-click.

3. Test it

Note: Googles SearchWiki behaviour is currently …. strange, al least here in austria it shows up on .com for some queries sometimes, then it is gone again. The “Wiki” on/off link that comes with this extension shows up all the time at google.com and google.co.uk.

WTF? While messing around with URLs for the Google Profile Search Start page i came across http://www.google.com/s2/status and well

what strikes is of course the logo and the small changes

1. finally the “i’m feeling lucky” button is put to good use (did somebody use it, anyway)

2. Google Profiles got pushed into the main Nav.

Well, trying it out it lead to

well, it lead to a standard 404! now all is back to 404 as it never existed. so well, either it was a trick or else or is this another journey of Google into the social - asynchronous communication - twitter space? Update: Is it real? No, not really - but not so far of.

Google Profile - Googles effort to become not only part but center of the whole social profile frenzy out there - are now searchable, all that is missing is a suitable start page. A fact that i changes, facesaerch is proud to present the

unofficial Google Profile Search beta.

have fun.

ok, currently lot of my time is invested to search engine optimize a social travel guide. basically imagine a few hundred thousand pages of unique travel content by professionals with lots’n'lots incoming content of community members on a complete new -fresh & not used before- domain.

the first challenge is indexing, which means

• sitemap.xml (does not perform)
• human readable sitemap (performs much better form my experience),
• navigation optimization (URLs and unique linktext) and
• page weight reduction (less KB, gzip, …).

but also for indexing

• linkbuilding

Google just stops after a while if it has enough pages but can’t estimate how important the site is and if it is worth indexing. Basically after getting a few (50+) links out there in the blogosphere the indexing kick starts again.

checking my xing contact, realizing that i don’t have a premium account anymore. but i liked the search feature, everything else is crap anyway. so here it is, the absolute free xing search, inoffical edition. trashy, but it works. hope you like it / find it useful.

i just love sunday morning coding

looks nice

http://www.search-cube.com/