Author Archives: Nadir Garouche

MySpace to Create Digg Clone

Myspace just announced that it will add a Digg-like news service on its site. Rupert Murdoch must think this area isn’t saturated enough. But heck, with over 100 million unique visitors, they’ll for sure generate more revenue with this service.
This is what the news service will consist of:

“The service, called MySpace News, resembles a mix of Google Inc.’s Google News, which collects stories and arranges them based on thematic similarities and Digg.com, which displays stories suggested by its readers and displays them according to their popularity ranking, executives said.

[…]

The news service, long rumored, will have 25 main topics and about 300 sub-categories ranging from celebrities and gossip to autos and fashion. “

Yahoo! Needs More Mobile Sites: Now Accepting Mobile Feeds

In its attempt to increase the size of its mobile web index, Yahoo! just announced that it’s now possible to submit more information about your mobile sites.

With Yahoo! Webmaster Central, errr, I mean Yahoo! Site Explorer, webmasters will now be able to submit the url of their website and wait for their mobile robot to crawl the site, or they can submit an entire site feed in one of the following formats:

You can provide us a feed in the following supported formats. We do recognize files with a .gz extension as compressed files and will decompress them before parsing.

So far, it was possible to submit a sitemap of your mobile site only with Google Webmaster Central, good move from Yahoo!.

No more nofollow links

I’ve just installed the dofollow plugin that has disabled the “nofollow” attributes on the comments made on this blog. I’m pretty happy with Akismet, so I’m not worried about getting spam comments. So from now, all people who will comment on this blog will get some link love 🙂

Google Adsense Ads Get a New Look

Today, the Official Google Adsense blog announced a new format for their ads.

“You may have noticed that some of your ad units have started to look a little different lately — we’re happy to announce that, just in time for spring, we’ve given our standard ad units a fresh makeover. After extensive testing and research, we’ve found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers.”

With this new format, Google hopes that publishers, advertisers, and Google itself will make more money…

The defaul ads’ format now doesn’t have any border, and the “Ads by Goooooooogle” text link has been replaced by an image. The “Advertise on this site” link has also been removed.

Mobile SEO: Google Has Killed the Mobile Web

Google launched its new mobile search engine a few days ago.I’ve blogged about it on this post and highlighted the main features.While I think the new user Interface is better than the last one, I’m really saddened (and annoyed) by the fact that Google doesn’t allow users to search inside their mobile web index.

Instead, it has chosen to mix mobile web results with the regular web results depending on the users query. Google must think that because they transcode all pages, users will be happy with what will be displayed on their phones.

Google has probably analyzed the search behavior of mobile users, and depending on where they clicked (web or mobile results), they’ve now decided what to show to the user, without the need for them to select what kind of results they wanted to see.

So, that would mean that this new mobile search engine uses some sort of semantic technology…Yeah, right, the desktop engine is not a fully-fledged semantic search engine and Google wants us to believe that this is the case with the new mobile search engine.

So let’s see how good this new version is. Let’s say that I want to use Google on my phone to search for “ringtones”. With the new version of Google, we have these 6 results on the first page (I did this test with a SonyEricsson W600i):

1. http://www.ringophone.com: transcoded web page : Even if the page was taking so much time to load, I tried to make a purchase and on the next page, my phone displayed an error message saying that the “page was too large to load”

2. http://www.mtv.com/mobile/ringtones/: transcoded web page: Flash Site, unable to buy a ringtone (I got the “page too large to load” message)

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringtones: transcoded web page, Wikipedia page

4. http://department.monm.edu/uptildawn/forum/00000b93.htm?ringtones: spam page

5. http://www.ringtonejukebox.com: transcoded web page, again, I’m unable to browse properly and to purchase a ringtone.

6. www.umes.edu/accsupport/ossd/ossdchat/0000008d.htm?ringtones: spam page linking to a page full of ads (not displayed on my phone)

If you click on the next pages, you’ll only get regular web pages and the user experience will be the same.

If users still had the ability to see only mobile pages, their experience would be better (not excellent though). These are the results you would get if you selected “Mobile Web” on the previous version of Google Mobile. You’ll find mobile sites that will display properly on your browser an that have a mobile specific payment solution, for example this site.

So, did Google just go out of its mind?Why did they abandon the mobile web as a source of results? Transcoding pages is not the best solution to ensure a good user experience. There are more and more mobile websites that are user friendly and Google’s just decided to burry them.

I’ve sent a feedback to Google and I hope they will bring back the “mobile web” soon, as I’m sure a lot of people are going to loose a lot of traffic because of that, and users won’t be satisfied either.

[UPDATE]If you are involved in the mobile web and don’t want to lose traffic, please consider leaving a feeback with the comment form on Google Mobile to bring back the mobile web as a separate source of results. Also, please read Dennis’ post on Wap Review  who also complains about this issue.

Microsoft Launch New Mobile Browser (beta)

Microsoft Live Labs just announced that their new mobile browser was now available as a beta version. The browser is called Deepfish (the blue fish is really cool!), and is basically capable of displaying any desktop website.

“The Deepfish Technology Preview enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. Our zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are. ”

The browser allows you to zoom in and out, which seems like a pretty nice feature. I’ve seen that kind of feature on a Nokia e50 as well.

I’ve tried to download it but I guess they already ran out of invites…

Via Opera Watch and Cre8asiteforums.

LG To Install Google on Millions of Phones

Google just reached a deal with mobile manufacturer LG to pre-install its search engine and other services on millions of mobile phones.

“Selected LG handsets, pre-installed with Google products and services, will be shipped globally in the second quarter. They will offer one-click access to Google’s search engine as well as Google maps, Gmail and Blogger Mobile.”

This deal is similar to the one Google signed with Samsung in January.

With that kind of pact, Google’s market share in the mobile search arena is just going to increase even more.

Google Launches New Mobile Search Engine!

Google just launched its new mobile search engine in reply to Yahoo!’s OneSearch. If you go to the mobile version of Google, you’ll see this message:

This is what the new homepage looks like :

It’s just one search box. Users need to type in their query, and Google will automatically categorize them in “Web results”, “Images”, “News”, “Local results” etc.

For example, if I search for “britney”, Google will show images of the pop star first:

If the user searches information about a company and searches for a ticker, it will display this:

In this new version of Google, web results and mobile results are not separated, but mixed together. Google seems to be choosing which result (from their web index or their mobile index) to show depending on the search query.

This is what they say about this on their help page:

Google mobile web search can display different types of web sites:
– Webpages specifically designed for mobile devices will be displayed as is, and are identified by a phone icon.
– Webpages not specifically designed for mobile devices will be formatted by Google so that the pages will display on your mobile device. During this process, Google analyzes the original HTML code to get a sense for the page layout. In order to ensure that the highest quality and most useful web page is displayed on your mobile device, Google may alter images, text formatting and/or certain aspects of web page functionality to make it suitable for viewing on your device.

Users also have the ability to build their own mobile homepage, in order to add news, weather, Slashdot feeds etc:

It only took a few days for Google to reply to Yahoo! in the mobile search battle. We yet have to hear an announcement from Google to see if this is a beta version or not. I guess it’s now Google’s turn to compare itself against Yahoo! 🙂

UPDATE: A post has just been posted on the Official Google Blog to announce the new mobile search engine.