Author: Dinesh Dhiman
The erstwhile Internet search leader Yahoo has updated its search results, refreshing the way search results are displayed on the site and adopting a Google-like navigation bar in the process. Did somebody say ‘copying’? Ouch!!
Continue reading “Yahoo tweaks search results, adopts a Google-like navigation bar”
Author: Dinesh Dhiman
WordPress, the CMS that is powering 18 percent of the Internet is 10 years old! Having started its journey as a little known blogging platform, WordPress has developed into a force to reckon with, as web developers and novices are building sites from simple blogs to complex web portals.
Continue reading “Happy Birthday WordPress: The CMS Powering the Web is 10 Years Old”
Google says –
“Webpages with a higher PageRank are more likely to appear at the top of the Google Search results.”
Let’s start with the story that has surprised many…..
The recent PageRank update from Google has shocked many webmasters as no one expected it, this year. The entire SEO community and discussion forums are spreading the word that Google has updated the PageRank. It’s surprising, since Matt Cutts had said there were no plans for another PageRank update in 2013 due to technical issues. But, it’s all done. As you may remember, the last update was on February 4, almost 10 months ago. I guess, Google didn’t want to further delay the update and hence pushed out the update prior Christmas.
It’s all about the overall value of a website that it possesses in the virtual world in relation to all other players. The numerical formula doesn’t matter, what matters is the result that is derived from the sum of the value sent to your site, through different links. It doesn’t care what your targeted keywords are but ‘Relevance’ is the major thing. It’s the key to achieve top ranking.
What’s the Impact…..
As stated earlier, ‘Relevance’ and ‘Quality’ plays a major role, the thing to remember is that your site’s position in search results depends on the Keyword Phrase. Initially, the concept was set in pace to measure just the authority of a specific website. However, it has change dramatically to become a quiet complicated, yet still impacts the ranking. Your site’s Page Rank can be used to measure the value of your strategy. An exceptional website with quality content can naturally bring people to your site, no illegal tactics are required.
Nowadays, most of the search engines use Page Rank as a part of their optimization. Besides them, webmasters, SEO experts and other Inter marketers view it to determine a website’s value and worth. Simply speaking, PR is one of the important factors dictating the victory of your website on the World Wide Web. While it’s an important thing but still the stress is to develop a successful SEO strategy using latest techniques, both on-page and off-page.
A lot of webmasters use black hat SEO tactics to manipulate the results or to boost their authority in the virtual world. Thus, these sites were successful in getting good Page Rank, so Google continues to modify their strategy. The ever-changing criteria is to avoid illegal activities and make everything transparent. This is also a big reason why Google has chosen to bring updates quarterly. This makes it difficult for webmasters to judge the actual PageRank of their website.
Know More About PageRank…..
It’s an algorithm used by the Google to rank different websites in their search engine results. The word ‘PageRank’ came into existence after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. It’s a way that measures the importance of pages of a website. Googlebot, an automated web spider, counts links and congregate other information on web pages. It’s very important for sites and blogs and basically ranks a page on the basis of the quality of its back-links and their authority.
It’s not confirmed when the next PageRank update will happen, Google knows it well. The last update was late, on 6 December 2013.
A Treat to Shoppers from Google India!!!!!
Again a good news for you all – Google has extended their mega event – Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF). Huge response from shoppers made them to extend the fest till Saturday – good for shoppers.
It’s the second addition of GOSF, started Thursday, and now going to make people busy even on weekend. Regardless of the initial technical issues faced by the GOSF website, the excitement of the online shoppers hasn’t doused.
Nitin Bawankule, Google India Industry Director e-commerce, said, “GOSF is getting an overwhelming response from people, despite initial technical issues faced by the site. We are extending the fest by a day and it will now run till December 14.”
He added, the first addition witnessed over a million shoppers, but this time that figure has already been surpassed. He said, “The popularity of GOSF can be seen by the fact that Tata Value Homes sold 22 flats and 3 cars have also been sold.”
Google India tweeted yesterday, “We’re sorry for the delay in the #GOSF launch. The site will be up soon and you can shop through the deals being offered until 13th December.”
All online retailers are enjoying a phenomenal increase in traffic and sales, according to them the revenue growth is many a times, versus the preceding few days.
So, keep shopping!!!!
Every web browser has Bookmarking feature but a very few of us actually use it and that could be the reason that Google is trying to make it more interesting and useful.
The search giant is experimenting with a new Chrome feature that would allow you to save any piece of content such as a web page, an image or an email. Google named the new service as ‘Google Stars’ and it appears to be in its very early stage. The feature will let users bookmark and save different items on the web and add them to folders. Once saved to a folder, the users will be able to share and review their favorite content later.
The new feature was first discovered by Florian Kiersch – a German student who enjoys fishing Google code. Google’s new read-it-later feature may be similar to the bookmarking feature that’s available in the Chrome right now. The new feature is currently being given to Google employees only for testing. The service will include its own extension to let users save links and will also sort those links into lists and categories automatically.
Kiersch writes – Google Stars was originally named as Google Collections, and it looks more beautiful than bookmarks. Users can already star web pages and emails from Chrome but if this feature ever executed, they can even expect to see the star on YouTube videos, Google+ pages, image search results, and even personal contacts.
According to the current source code, the new feature will make all bookmarks fully searchable. The stars will remain private until made public by users to share them. The search giant will automatically organize your stars, detect spam as well as dead pages, and can categorize the content into filters by discovering the patterns. There will be a bookmark library that will allow users to make notes on their bookmarks.
Images, videos and web pages are specifically mentioned in the source code but it may include nearly all of the Google services. It looks like Google is planning to cover all things under the head ‘Stars’ and the feature is expected to launch in June during Google’s I/O developer conference.
Millions of websites, social networks and online stores were on stake when operating with a major security flaw, exposing user’s personal and financial info to hackers.
Monday afternoon, the entire IT world got a wakeup call, when an emergency security advisory from the OpenSSL warns about an open and dangerous bug ‘Heartbleed’. The security flaw could be used to grab a portion of working memory from any server. There was an emergency patch, but in the meanwhile, many servers were exposed.
A flaw known as ‘Heartbleed’ Bug could allow attackers to gain access to even highly sensitive and protected information, including usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other important data. Computer security researchers and web administrators on Tuesday crawled to fix a serious vulnerability in OpenSSL encryption.
In simple words cyber criminals or hackers can use the Bug to steal your private encryption keys from server running on OpenSSL protocols. According to reports, the servers of Flickr, Imgur and Yahoo have been affected. This is around two-year-old flaw and hence no one have any idea about how many servers have been compromised and how many people have exploited.
Heartbleed.com reads, “Operating system vendors and distribution, independent software and appliance vendors have to fix as well as notify their users. Service providers and users have to install the fix as it becomes available for software, networked appliances and operating systems they use.”
The problem was discovered by a team of researchers from Codenomicon and Google Security. Their research found Yahoo, Twitter, Steam, Tumblr, GitHub, PostFinance, HypoVereinsbank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Regents bank are all affected by the bug. Apple, Microsoft and Google seem to be unaffected.
The researchers said that your popular social site, commerce site, hobby site, company’s site might using vulnerable OpenSSL.
Google has rolled out certain changes to how it displays results on its search page – delicate but noticeable change.
When talking about the two big changes – first is the removal of lines from the search results and second is the introduction of a yellow label. This yellow label is called “Ad/Ads”, these modifications are to redesign the search pages and making them cleaner.
Have a look:
Design lead for Google – Jon Wiley wrote on Google+ on Wednesday that, “We’ve expanded the size of search result titles and removed the underlines as well as evened out the height of lines. The move aims at improving readability and creating a look that is clean. We’ve also introduced our latest ad labels from mobile, to make multi-device experience more exciting.”
Web users started noticing the changes in the last two days, but officially confirmed by Jon Wiley on Thursday via Google+. The lines you are used to were adopted in the 1990s, being a part of web designing ideology. But in the last few years many sites have moved away from underlining links, to make their pages look cleaner.
Along with these changes, Google has also removed that light pink background you must have noticed at the top of the search page. The search giant has increased the font size for titles and it clearly means less character appears. The new layout will feature a dark gray color, rather than black.
Some users welcome the modifications but some didn’t. According to some users – the changes will definitely improve readability while others say it’s too blurry. They say that the font size is too bigger and the search giant also failed to use the full width of the screen.
The changes also looked different on different browsers and seem to be effective on Chrome as compared to Firefox.
Hope, the changes will not make it difficult for web users to use Google….
The World Wide Web turned 25 yesterday and it’s a landmark anniversary for Tim Berners-Lee and he is like a proud father. He says, “I feel like inventor’s pride and my greatest pleasure has been the spirit of collaboration we’ve had for the last amazing 25 years.”
Berners-Lee has watched the web grow through a cheerful childhood and bitter adolescence, reaching to a more serious stage. He said that it’s time to make some crucial decisions for the fate of Internet especially when it’s under attack from different authorities who think they can easily control people through web.
He said during an interview, “Our rights are being violated more and more, and the worst side is that we get used to it. We need a Bill of Rights for Internet to make things more safe, secure and genuine.” He also added, “After 25 years of contribution, we need independence of the World Wide Web for democracy.”
The recent years were not at all good due to revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA as well as other agencies. The use and stock of illegal and immoral material has grown in bulk. The Bill of Rights he is talking about is to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and rights of users after revelations about government wiretap of online activity.
The World Wide Web Consortium – a global community and Berners-Lee united with a mission to lead the web to its full potential. They have launched a campaign called ‘the Web We Want’ in order to urge people to push ‘Bill of Rights’ for every country. The founder of web is clear that our ability to associate freely and speak is under threat.
Following are the principles an Internet Bill of Rights advances:-
• The protection of user’s personal information and the right to communicate in private
• Affordable access to a globally available platform of communication
• Decentralized, diversified and open infrastructure
• Neutral networks
• Freedom of expression online as well as offline
Berners-Lee said that unless we have an open, neutral web we cannot say anything about what’s happening at the back door. We can’t have good democracy, connected communities, good healthcare and open government until we have Bill of Rights.
JPEG, the decades-old format for images, shows literally no signs of disappearing and dominates a large portion of the web. That’s why Mozilla announced an interesting project on Wednesday to make the format compatible for 21st century.
Mozilla Firefox announced a project called “mozjpeg” that intents to compress JPEGs by shaving 10 percent of images. Smaller JPEG file size means Web pages load faster and users can enjoy an improved performance. This way home or office surfers can enjoy huge speed and bandwidth savings, especially to those with restricted mobile data connections.
As you probably be aware of the fact that that images, in particular JPEGs, make up the huge majority of a web page’s complete size. Text, scripts, style-sheets are the other elements but they usually account for just a small portion of the total page size. The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) file format gained popularity since 1992.
This particular compression algorithm is very popular with the web where the images play an important role apart from the text. But the fact is – it wasn’t originally designed and introduced for the wen, but due to its small file size and high quality it became so popular. In 1987 – GIFs were popular and in 1996 – PNGs were introduced as an alternative to GIFs. Despite of so many formats available for the web, JPEG’s popularity has never faded.
Version 1.0 of ‘mozjpeg’ – a fork of libjpeg-turbo with built-in Loren Merritt’s jpgcrush functionality. If users use mozjpeg to develop their images, they should be able to compress JPEG file size by a full 10% without affecting compatibility. A 10% reduction is huge especially when an average web page has near about 1MB of images on it and the figure is increasing by 2-3% every month.
This reduction could save hundreds of megabytes over a month to those who use their Smartphones for surfing websites. In order to make this concept a reality, image editors such as Gimp, Fireworks and Photoshop required to tool this new mozjpeg library. Implementing this new library will take time, but it’s much more effective and realistic than getting every web browser to support an alternate image standard like WebP.
We believe that JPEG will continue to gain popularity, but of course improvements are very much required at this stage of technology.
