A random muse ~ thoughts and observances from around the web.
Explore search engines and directories; discover which directories are worthwhile and which to avoid.
Remember when Google would proudly display the size of their index on the home page or publish a milestone when the index size increased?
It seems size no longer matters as they removed the statement from the home page back a short while back. Or maybe they realized that relevancy is what matters most.
The original concept of using rel=”nofollow” to combat blogspam or splogs was a good idea when originally proposed by Google.
This was to identify links that should not be counted as a vote or endorsement by the linking page. It’s interesting to note that it was originally designed to be utilized on pages where users or visitors could add links by themselves such as blog comments, guestbooks, visitors stats or referrer logs.
I’m seeing more and more comments on the expanding use of this attribute by some search engines, especially in relation to paid links or text ads placed on a site.
MSN made a grand move today allowing webmasters the option to have their Open Directory Project descriptions removed or not displayed in MSN’s search results.
MSN, like other search engines, uses data from the Open Directory Project, and in some instances they will display the site snippet from the DMOZ directory in their search results.
Ever browse the Google Directory? I enjoy how they have the listings ordered by PageRank as opposed to alphabetically, but I’ve always wondered about the PageRank bar in front of the listings.
They are different from the PageRank displayed on Google’s Toolbar and there are no values assigned, so you can’t mouseover the bar to see if it’s a PageRank 6 or 7, or whatever it may be.
Seems that there’s quite a bit of speculation regarding the current PageRank update and fluctuations displayed by the Google Toolbar that began earlier today.
New sites and pages are displaying PageRank values that appear to be inflated, while there’s little or no change of the values assigned to older pages.