There is no practical definition of the term. Two juries will come to completely different conclusions when presented with the exact same evidence.
How lucky would you feel if someone pulled a drive-by threat to a public official? At minimum, all of your computer equipment would be seized.
I use WEP + individual MAC Address access. Perfect and uncrackable? No. But certainly the least attractice option when my three of my neighbors are running wide-open.
You seem to have an odd tendency to describe spammers as "pleasing" or "catering to" google--as if they're doing google a favor, and google appreciates their actions
It's Google's algorithm. No? Catering to the Googlebot gets you listed higher. No? Ergo, the definition fits. The Googlebot determines "quality" or at least "relevance", and pleasing it lists you higher.
But of course what they're actually attempting to do is "scam" or "trick" google.
Right. And they are not only attempting, but more often than not, they are succeeding. They do it by pleasing the antiquated bot.
What google wants to find and serve are valid, relevant, unique, contentful, non-spam pages; spammers attempt to thwart that by impersonating those traits however they can.
Right. And the spammers are gaming Google quite effectively, since "the formula" is no longer very secret.
Believe me, there is no one in the world who wants "optimizing your site for google" to become passe more than google does.
Really? Google is in the sole position to change it. I would have taken some of that $100 Billion, and tricked out a new algorithm before someone else such as Yahoo or Microsoft did so.
If those business can't be bothered to create civilized websites, then I'll happily take my custom to another company that can.
Please do. Perhaps room prices will come down and vacancies will open up.
Sorry to hear about your luck. Allow me to recommend that you try out w3m; it's my primary browser, and makes me quite happy.
I actually use Firefox, and like it quite a bit.
I'm a little confused by this. Because writing standards-compliant pages makes them more accessible (to everything, including google's crawler), and some spammers therefore write standards-compliant pages, you're holding standards to blame for spammers' actions? That... seems a little wacky.
If google also ranked pages more highly for having correct capitalization and punctuation, would you at this moment be railing against the evils of capitalizing the first words of sentences?
I don't find Google's search results nearly as relevant as I found them 5 years ago.
I don't agree with some of their algorithms... such as their lack of depth on dynamic content and the linking thing (buy more ads, you get more links whether your site is garbage or great).
In my opinion, content is king. Content is ALL I care about. Does that medical site have correct header tags whereas the one I viewed before didn't? If I find the information I need on the one that does not, then that page is more relevant to me.
It's really just that simple. I welcome any engine that will help me find the information I am seeking more efficiently. When searching, I don't give two and a half craps about standards as long as Firefox renders it so that I can view it.
We can argue all day over it, but I'll just agree to disagree with you on this one.
Its not a question of dynamic content per se - the indexers have no problem with that - they have a problem with dynamic content that includes passed parameters. What value do you give them? For example, how would you index a site like google, which requires parameterized queries? What parameters are valid, and how do you avoid getting stuck in an endlessly growing tree, where every dynamic query generates links for 20 other possible queries?
With $100 Billion in market capitalization, I would figure it out.
I don't think the problem is not optimizing for google. It's not following the guidlines recommended by the W3C. As said before, use semantic markup and you will see a significant rise on _all_ search engines. You could have the greatest content in the world, but if you make it inaccessable not only to robots, but to the handicapped, then you are wasting your time.
Well, not to sound callouse, but just saying what is the brutal honest truth.... I've been in this business for awhile, and client requests to "make pages accessible to the handicapped" are almost NEVER brought up. It's just not even on the radar. Some clients are perfectly willing to throw away the 10% or so of Firefox users and force IE down people's throats. The sad fact is that they don't give a second thought to the few percent of handicapped people that may or may not visit the site. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. It just is what it is.
And to disagree on one more point, it SHOULD be about having the greatest content in the world. That's all is should be about. A great search engine should be able to efficiently find the greatest content in the world, and place it at the top of the list. Creators of the content shouldn't be trying to convince the search engine of this. The $100 Billion engine should be able to figure it out.
Creators of the greatest content in the world likely won't spend too much of their time trying to game the Google algorithm.
But, everyone else will.
I welcome a better mousetrap, and a better search engine. I am sure there is one out there on the horizon.
I frankly look forward to finding more relevant search results.
Given that Flash does nothing but obfuscate content, and I'm grateful to any search engine that will filter it out for me. About the first thing I'd do if I happened upon a Flash-only site is leave and find a civilized site anyway, so I'm happy to have that step skipped for me.
Hey look, that's all well and good. But if you are going to book a room at the Wynn, MGM, or Palms hotel, you better pick up the phone and call, because you won't be able to browse the rates at your leisure from their site. As a matter of fact, all of the information will be obfuscated. Google won't help you, other than driving you to a third party site advertising LOW LOW rates for these hotels.
Like I said, they had to pull me kicking and screaming away from Lynx and on to Netscape, but hey, the times they change whether we like it or not.
The obnoxious flash crap and dynamic content is the wave of the future unfortunately, and the only people who will be obsessively putting up "W3C Approved" pages will be those trying their best kiss Google's royal behind so that they may throw a click their way.
As a matter of fact, that is more or less what a Google search seems like now.
The drug company's non-compliant White Paper looked fine in Firefox to me. As a matter of fact, it looked much better than all those animated gif, standards compliant pages offering to sell me the drug without a prescription.
Okay. First, PHP is *not* an issue at all. PHP is handled by the server before googlebot sees anything. PHP doesn't exist to crawlers at all.
Then why do I have hundreds of PHP pages catalogued in MSN and Yahoo?
It's also a matter of how many parameters an engine will take. Google seems to quit at the first number after the '?', while MSN and Yahoo will go past the second comma to retrieve content.
As for Flash, maybe you've got a point, but here's a question: How do you propose a robot deal with Flash? How does it tell the diference between a flash ad and actual content? Besides (and this is my own personal evangelism at work), Flash is inherently inaccessible (to people with disabilities, mobile/pda displays, etc.), and as far as I'm concerned, shouldn't be indexed by search engiens anyway, since they should help people find content that is usable to everyone.
Well, that's your opinion and you are certainly entitled to it. But information is information, and if I can find better information in some web application than I can on a small static page, then it is relevant to me.
Heck, I didn't stop using Lynx until very late in the game. I figured text was all that anyone would ever need.
Times change. A $100 Billion+ Market Cap company who sells search should change with times.
And FWIW, Flash and PHP aren't the main issues. There are many kooky link exchanges and title and keyword manipulation schemes that will place a SPAM pages well ahead of perfectly legit pages.
A recent example was my research on a new drug. Before I found the official prescribing instructions and manufacuteresheet for the drug itself, I found about 20 pages where I could BUY THE DRUG CHEAP WITH OVERNIGHT SHIPPING WITHOUT A PRESCRIPTION!!!!!
I believe I found the white page for the actual drug (what most people would consider relevant) on page three or four.
They just didn't "optimize that site for Google".
Did I find it anyway? Sure.
But you would be suprised at the number of soccermom's and AOL'ers that think everything that is fit to print is on page 1 or 2 of Google.
I did mention that it would also improve accessibility for people who have problems, such as those who use screen readers.
Agreed. This is a noble goal and I will add that to the list of things to do.
Its not just google - all search engines are wary of pages that are generated by passed parameters.
They shouldn't be. At least not in 2006. More and more relvant content can be found in dynamic and parameter pages than ever before.
And web developers should be free to use whatever scheme they wish to accomplish that goal, whether it is a script that parses dynamic content to static.html pages, or people who are content with page.html?8,55 - information is information. And if you want to catalog it, you must be flexible and ever evolving.
If Google wants to capture the world's information, then they have to be as flexible as the web is, was, and always will be.
Search engines should figure out how to capture information, not the other way around, IMHO.
It seems like Google, through sheer market domination, has convinced the web community to make it's [Google's] job easier... or to suffer the consequences.
I'm not a big fan of that model. And I hope some good, stiff competition will change it.
bollocks. well written original content, marked up semantically, and such that content is seperate from presentation, will *allways* rank reasonably well. hands down. aditionally, the #1 main indicator for google page rank is other sites that link to yours. if your content is good, people will link to it, and it will do well on google.
Disagree 100%. Spammer (and just plain agreeement between sites, and even sites by the same owner) interlinking is extremely common because of this very well known part of the algorithm.
Daily, I encounter original written content, that is ranked in double digit pages.
As a matter of fact, I rarely find the most relevant pages of a topic in the first page of Google.
Does it happen sometimes? Sure. If there are only 10 pages about a certain topic.
But when there are 1000+ pages dedicated to a certain subject, the optimized pages come up well before the non-optimized pages. Regardless of quality of content.
I will sometimes look up a specific property, and instead of finding that property's homepage, I see travel sites, trip reports, about.com blurbs, etc... well before the official homepage of the property comes up. Sometimes the official site has Flash, PHP, or other things that apear to throw googlebot off. It seems antiquated. They still catalogue pages like it is 1998.
I welcome other, hopefully superior ranking algorithms. Especially ones that deal with more modern dynamic page concepts.
You know that you can make an alternate set of pages just for googlebot and the other crawlers that have problems crawling dynamic content... (snip)
This is true. But I shouldn't have to, IMHO.
I spend what spare time I have providing valuable (or so I have been told) content. Luckily, I get lots of hits from other links and through word of mouth and don't worry that much about it, but Google does list 50 spam sites ahead of mine. And many of them have nothing to do with the subject. They just have titles and meta tags and link exhanges that increase their placement.
Web pages now have "Credit Scores" and Google is the de facto credit reporting agency. I think Google has been given too much power. When people start creating alternate pages to please a particular search engine, it's gone too far. You are working for free, or for Google, however you want to look at it.
The Internet community is just not being served optimally by search. They are being shown pages by people who obessively "optimize for Google". I have noticed that the pages that spend that largest amount of time "optimizing" often do so to compensate for otherwise lackluster content.
Therefore, Google has become a showcase for header tag manipulators, and people who spend days on end trying to crack the Google algorithm, and succeed more often than not.
I am no M$ fan at all, but said PHP pages come up much higher in MSN search than they come up in Google, and from looking at the web logs, MSNbot handles dynamic content much better than Googlebot. It also visits 4 times as often, and the dynamic pages are updated frequently. Even Yahoo is a little better at handling rapid changes. Google has a 4 month old cache of one of my main sites. Search engines other than Google are now returning more relevant content, because they are archiving more pages NOT optimized for Google... and those pages often contain the relevant information I am looking for. "Optimized for Google" is almost becoming synonymous with "Spam Site".
The whole "search engine optimization" thing is using up too many developer resources, IMHO, it is NOT helping web searchers find what they need efficiently, and I can't help but think that more competition will help.
The current state of search is simply a competition as to who can most effectively please Google's searchbot.
I'll be happy if web developers can quit wringing their hands over how to "optimize their site for Google".
Too many people are skimping on quality content, and spending more and more time trying to "please Google". It has just gotten to the point of silliness.
It's gotten to be a real problem. You can have crap content but come in first or second if you obsess over optimization, but if you simply concentrate on content, and not Google, you may not come up in a search.
I'll would like to see an engine that can better evaluate content, and free people up from trying to cater to one particular engine.
I use frames and PHP on some client sites that are widely regarded as the best of the informative source of information in their respective fields, but they come up on page 5 of Google, wheras some meta tag hogs with flashing banner ads and one line of text related to the topic comes in number 1 or 2.
I would like to see "Optimizing your site for Google" to become obsolete.
My first google search found the same business, but my subsequent searches turned up nothing. Any ideas why google returned nothing?
I have actually found the quality of Google's search to be declining over the past year.
I hate to say it, but the relevancy of search results of Yahoo and even (barf) MSN, usually turn up more useful information nowadays.
The whole "how to optimize your page for Google" nonesense has gotten so out of hand, that those who obsess over it usually land on the first two pages, while those that don't worry about it and simply put up the actual content I am seeking are usually in page 10+.
I have several bookmarked sites that I consider the authority on their respective subjects (even though they are somewhat obscure subjects) that appear in the first 10 placements on Yahoo and MSN, yet cannot be found in Google unless I wade through the double digits. They simply don't jump through Google's proprietary search hoops, which seem to getting more and more silly.
Google's other products and services (like Earth) are great, but I rarely use their search anymore.
Too bad the Netherlands is northwest of Germany. I suspect that I don't have to ask of which education system you are a product.
Not 100% true.
There are indeed parts of Germany that are north of the Netherlands, such as the Denmark Peninsula, and sections of Germany that are slightly West than parts of the Netherlands.... but that's hardly the point. I just didn't think it flowed as well as "Down under the North Sea". I simply picked a country in Western Europe near the Netherlands.
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment when it was pointed out that I mistook a Netherlands and New Zealand extention, and FWIW, I don't wish to be a part of an education system that turns out products who are quite so anally plugged on such lighthearted banter.
The problem with buying used games is it is akin to stealing from the game publisher. They don't get a dime of that revenue from the second or third sale of a game, only the first, so by you buying a $20 copy of a game, you're essentially stealing an $80 sale from them.
If I sell my used Taurus, have I stolen $20,000 from Ford Motor Company?
Dude, just 5 cases a year at $24K a pop is $120K a year in raw income
I've no idea why this would incur $24,000 in legal fees.
I would go in and say "I don't know how to work a computer and I never intentionally pirated anything". The RIAA would have to show willfullness, and if they could not, this case could be defended for $0.00. She could have said what she is saying now from the beginning.
I don't get the whoile $24,000 thing. She paid all of that money for a lawyer to tell her "Deny everything".
It sounds like she is more than computer illiterate.
I was going to ask the same thing, but was too cowardly to be the first.
Why on earth would that comment be modded a troll? It was an opinion, and not even mean.
Given that not all that many people have the 360, and given the heat issues tend to degrade the machine over time, even if it is not crashing now, if it is running at 99% CTEMP threshold, it most likley will not last the 5 years a console is expected to last.
People who are not having problems, most likely are ventilating their machines better. But obviously the temperature threshold is razor-thin, and this does not bode well for those who will be playing in the summer months, and when the fans begin to gather dust.
I think this is a bigger problem than people are making of it, personally.
The "small percentage" now is likely to become bigger when someone throws another log on the fire.
The next killer app in the mobile world will be a device that combines a music player, a video game system, a PDA, a phone, and a camera. Does the PSP have phone capabilities?
Already here.
The PPC-6600, and to a lessor extent, the Samsung i700.
Better games than a gameboy, IMHO (and yes I will admit to having a gameboy). You can get a Madden NFL SD card, and play the title right on the phone. It's got an MP3 PLayer, DIVX Player (I can watch a couple of feature length DVD's on a 1GB card), MPG Player, AVI Player, camera, and yes... an excellent phone with voice dailing, speakerphone, caller ID, etc. And of course, email, web browsing, IRC, SSH, and what have you. And the PPC has a keyboard too.
The Treo's have most of these features as well, although the gaming, multimedia capabilities, and especially the internal memory are notoriously lacking. Treo's are darn good telephony and email devices though.
Okay, maybe you do, but most people do not donate to charity even what they are perfectly capable of.
Actually, when people are paying darn close to 50% of their income in taxes every year, they are already "contributing to charity" on a supreme scale.
Also (as someone who worked for a charity), I can tell you that there really are scant few that don't simply take your money and use it for their own internal purposes... income, salary, etc. Most of the time that you "donate" money, it does not go where you think it does.
Is this the case for all of them? No. But unfortunately for about 90% of them, it is.
So, don't throw money at things with nice names just to make yourself feel good. Really think it out... who will this help, how EXACTLY will it help, at what point do they helpees get the money or services? Have you ever known anyone that was helped by an organization that you just donated your car to? You'll be hard pressed to find one.
Chances are you can do more good with $100 than a organization with overhead. Go buy 10 subway sandwiches, and give them to the folks sleeping in the street. Your $100 will have been MUCH more helpful than had you writen a check to a "charity" that may or may not send $10 to someone somewhere after they pay their employees, marketing, and other costs.
That being said, regardless of how much Bill Gates is worth, millions of dollars is millions of dollars. He didn't have to give it. He could have bought 70 houses instead. All this hand wringing over what percantage it was is silly. The man gave a large some of money to someplace he things will do some good. Let's hope he researched the charity well, and he is right.
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There is no practical definition of the term. Two juries will come to completely different conclusions when presented with the exact same evidence.
How lucky would you feel if someone pulled a drive-by threat to a public official? At minimum, all of your computer equipment would be seized.
I use WEP + individual MAC Address access. Perfect and uncrackable? No. But certainly the least attractice option when my three of my neighbors are running wide-open.
It's Google's algorithm. No? Catering to the Googlebot gets you listed higher. No? Ergo, the definition fits. The Googlebot determines "quality" or at least "relevance", and pleasing it lists you higher.
But of course what they're actually attempting to do is "scam" or "trick" google.
Right. And they are not only attempting, but more often than not, they are succeeding. They do it by pleasing the antiquated bot.
What google wants to find and serve are valid, relevant, unique, contentful, non-spam pages; spammers attempt to thwart that by impersonating those traits however they can.
Right. And the spammers are gaming Google quite effectively, since "the formula" is no longer very secret.
Believe me, there is no one in the world who wants "optimizing your site for google" to become passe more than google does.
Really? Google is in the sole position to change it. I would have taken some of that $100 Billion, and tricked out a new algorithm before someone else such as Yahoo or Microsoft did so.
Please do. Perhaps room prices will come down and vacancies will open up.
Sorry to hear about your luck. Allow me to recommend that you try out w3m; it's my primary browser, and makes me quite happy.
I actually use Firefox, and like it quite a bit.
I'm a little confused by this. Because writing standards-compliant pages makes them more accessible (to everything, including google's crawler), and some spammers therefore write standards-compliant pages, you're holding standards to blame for spammers' actions? That... seems a little wacky.
If google also ranked pages more highly for having correct capitalization and punctuation, would you at this moment be railing against the evils of capitalizing the first words of sentences?
I don't find Google's search results nearly as relevant as I found them 5 years ago.
I don't agree with some of their algorithms ... such as their lack of depth on dynamic content and the linking thing (buy more ads, you get more links whether your site is garbage or great).
In my opinion, content is king. Content is ALL I care about. Does that medical site have correct header tags whereas the one I viewed before didn't? If I find the information I need on the one that does not, then that page is more relevant to me.
It's really just that simple. I welcome any engine that will help me find the information I am seeking more efficiently. When searching, I don't give two and a half craps about standards as long as Firefox renders it so that I can view it.
We can argue all day over it, but I'll just agree to disagree with you on this one.
With $100 Billion in market capitalization, I would figure it out.
Well, not to sound callouse, but just saying what is the brutal honest truth .... I've been in this business for awhile, and client requests to "make pages accessible to the handicapped" are almost NEVER brought up. It's just not even on the radar. Some clients are perfectly willing to throw away the 10% or so of Firefox users and force IE down people's throats. The sad fact is that they don't give a second thought to the few percent of handicapped people that may or may not visit the site. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. It just is what it is.
And to disagree on one more point, it SHOULD be about having the greatest content in the world. That's all is should be about. A great search engine should be able to efficiently find the greatest content in the world, and place it at the top of the list. Creators of the content shouldn't be trying to convince the search engine of this. The $100 Billion engine should be able to figure it out.
Creators of the greatest content in the world likely won't spend too much of their time trying to game the Google algorithm.
But, everyone else will.
I welcome a better mousetrap, and a better search engine. I am sure there is one out there on the horizon.
I frankly look forward to finding more relevant search results.
Hey look, that's all well and good. But if you are going to book a room at the Wynn, MGM, or Palms hotel, you better pick up the phone and call, because you won't be able to browse the rates at your leisure from their site. As a matter of fact, all of the information will be obfuscated. Google won't help you, other than driving you to a third party site advertising LOW LOW rates for these hotels.
Like I said, they had to pull me kicking and screaming away from Lynx and on to Netscape, but hey, the times they change whether we like it or not.
The obnoxious flash crap and dynamic content is the wave of the future unfortunately, and the only people who will be obsessively putting up "W3C Approved" pages will be those trying their best kiss Google's royal behind so that they may throw a click their way.
As a matter of fact, that is more or less what a Google search seems like now.
The drug company's non-compliant White Paper looked fine in Firefox to me. As a matter of fact, it looked much better than all those animated gif, standards compliant pages offering to sell me the drug without a prescription.
Then why do I have hundreds of PHP pages catalogued in MSN and Yahoo?
It's also a matter of how many parameters an engine will take. Google seems to quit at the first number after the '?', while MSN and Yahoo will go past the second comma to retrieve content.
As for Flash, maybe you've got a point, but here's a question: How do you propose a robot deal with Flash? How does it tell the diference between a flash ad and actual content? Besides (and this is my own personal evangelism at work), Flash is inherently inaccessible (to people with disabilities, mobile/pda displays, etc.), and as far as I'm concerned, shouldn't be indexed by search engiens anyway, since they should help people find content that is usable to everyone.
Well, that's your opinion and you are certainly entitled to it. But information is information, and if I can find better information in some web application than I can on a small static page, then it is relevant to me.
Heck, I didn't stop using Lynx until very late in the game. I figured text was all that anyone would ever need.
Times change. A $100 Billion+ Market Cap company who sells search should change with times.
And FWIW, Flash and PHP aren't the main issues. There are many kooky link exchanges and title and keyword manipulation schemes that will place a SPAM pages well ahead of perfectly legit pages.
A recent example was my research on a new drug. Before I found the official prescribing instructions and manufacuteresheet for the drug itself, I found about 20 pages where I could BUY THE DRUG CHEAP WITH OVERNIGHT SHIPPING WITHOUT A PRESCRIPTION!!!!!
I believe I found the white page for the actual drug (what most people would consider relevant) on page three or four.
They just didn't "optimize that site for Google".
Did I find it anyway? Sure.
But you would be suprised at the number of soccermom's and AOL'ers that think everything that is fit to print is on page 1 or 2 of Google.
And that can't be good.
Agreed. This is a noble goal and I will add that to the list of things to do.
Its not just google - all search engines are wary of pages that are generated by passed parameters.
They shouldn't be. At least not in 2006. More and more relvant content can be found in dynamic and parameter pages than ever before.
And web developers should be free to use whatever scheme they wish to accomplish that goal, whether it is a script that parses dynamic content to static .html pages, or people who are content with page.html?8,55 - information is information. And if you want to catalog it, you must be flexible and ever evolving.
If Google wants to capture the world's information, then they have to be as flexible as the web is, was, and always will be.
Search engines should figure out how to capture information, not the other way around, IMHO.
It seems like Google, through sheer market domination, has convinced the web community to make it's [Google's] job easier ... or to suffer the consequences.
I'm not a big fan of that model. And I hope some good, stiff competition will change it.
Disagree 100%. Spammer (and just plain agreeement between sites, and even sites by the same owner) interlinking is extremely common because of this very well known part of the algorithm.
Daily, I encounter original written content, that is ranked in double digit pages.
As a matter of fact, I rarely find the most relevant pages of a topic in the first page of Google.
Does it happen sometimes? Sure. If there are only 10 pages about a certain topic.
But when there are 1000+ pages dedicated to a certain subject, the optimized pages come up well before the non-optimized pages. Regardless of quality of content.
I will sometimes look up a specific property, and instead of finding that property's homepage, I see travel sites, trip reports, about.com blurbs, etc ... well before the official homepage of the property comes up. Sometimes the official site has Flash, PHP, or other things that apear to throw googlebot off. It seems antiquated. They still catalogue pages like it is 1998.
I welcome other, hopefully superior ranking algorithms. Especially ones that deal with more modern dynamic page concepts.
This is true. But I shouldn't have to, IMHO.
I spend what spare time I have providing valuable (or so I have been told) content. Luckily, I get lots of hits from other links and through word of mouth and don't worry that much about it, but Google does list 50 spam sites ahead of mine. And many of them have nothing to do with the subject. They just have titles and meta tags and link exhanges that increase their placement.
Web pages now have "Credit Scores" and Google is the de facto credit reporting agency. I think Google has been given too much power. When people start creating alternate pages to please a particular search engine, it's gone too far. You are working for free, or for Google, however you want to look at it.
The Internet community is just not being served optimally by search. They are being shown pages by people who obessively "optimize for Google". I have noticed that the pages that spend that largest amount of time "optimizing" often do so to compensate for otherwise lackluster content.
Therefore, Google has become a showcase for header tag manipulators, and people who spend days on end trying to crack the Google algorithm, and succeed more often than not.
I am no M$ fan at all, but said PHP pages come up much higher in MSN search than they come up in Google, and from looking at the web logs, MSNbot handles dynamic content much better than Googlebot. It also visits 4 times as often, and the dynamic pages are updated frequently. Even Yahoo is a little better at handling rapid changes. Google has a 4 month old cache of one of my main sites. Search engines other than Google are now returning more relevant content, because they are archiving more pages NOT optimized for Google ... and those pages often contain the relevant information I am looking for. "Optimized for Google" is almost becoming synonymous with "Spam Site".
The whole "search engine optimization" thing is using up too many developer resources, IMHO, it is NOT helping web searchers find what they need efficiently, and I can't help but think that more competition will help.
The current state of search is simply a competition as to who can most effectively please Google's searchbot.
Too many people are skimping on quality content, and spending more and more time trying to "please Google". It has just gotten to the point of silliness.
It's gotten to be a real problem. You can have crap content but come in first or second if you obsess over optimization, but if you simply concentrate on content, and not Google, you may not come up in a search.
I'll would like to see an engine that can better evaluate content, and free people up from trying to cater to one particular engine.
I use frames and PHP on some client sites that are widely regarded as the best of the informative source of information in their respective fields, but they come up on page 5 of Google, wheras some meta tag hogs with flashing banner ads and one line of text related to the topic comes in number 1 or 2.
I would like to see "Optimizing your site for Google" to become obsolete.
What's AOL?
I have actually found the quality of Google's search to be declining over the past year.
I hate to say it, but the relevancy of search results of Yahoo and even (barf) MSN, usually turn up more useful information nowadays.
The whole "how to optimize your page for Google" nonesense has gotten so out of hand, that those who obsess over it usually land on the first two pages, while those that don't worry about it and simply put up the actual content I am seeking are usually in page 10+.
I have several bookmarked sites that I consider the authority on their respective subjects (even though they are somewhat obscure subjects) that appear in the first 10 placements on Yahoo and MSN, yet cannot be found in Google unless I wade through the double digits. They simply don't jump through Google's proprietary search hoops, which seem to getting more and more silly.
Google's other products and services (like Earth) are great, but I rarely use their search anymore.
Not 100% true.
There are indeed parts of Germany that are north of the Netherlands, such as the Denmark Peninsula, and sections of Germany that are slightly West than parts of the Netherlands .... but that's hardly the point. I just didn't think it flowed as well as "Down under the North Sea". I simply picked a country in Western Europe near the Netherlands.
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment when it was pointed out that I mistook a Netherlands and New Zealand extention, and FWIW, I don't wish to be a part of an education system that turns out products who are quite so anally plugged on such lighthearted banter.
I meant down under Germany.
That's my position and I'm sticking to it ;-)
Why do the folks down under always make up the silliest sounding words to describe the most simple objects?
"Oh no, that wallabee just stole my dijgeridoo!"
If I sell my used Taurus, have I stolen $20,000 from Ford Motor Company?
I've no idea why this would incur $24,000 in legal fees.
I would go in and say "I don't know how to work a computer and I never intentionally pirated anything". The RIAA would have to show willfullness, and if they could not, this case could be defended for $0.00. She could have said what she is saying now from the beginning.
I don't get the whoile $24,000 thing. She paid all of that money for a lawyer to tell her "Deny everything".
It sounds like she is more than computer illiterate.
Only in criminal cases, which I don't believe this one is.
I was going to ask the same thing, but was too cowardly to be the first.
Why on earth would that comment be modded a troll? It was an opinion, and not even mean.
Given that not all that many people have the 360, and given the heat issues tend to degrade the machine over time, even if it is not crashing now, if it is running at 99% CTEMP threshold, it most likley will not last the 5 years a console is expected to last.
People who are not having problems, most likely are ventilating their machines better. But obviously the temperature threshold is razor-thin, and this does not bode well for those who will be playing in the summer months, and when the fans begin to gather dust.
I think this is a bigger problem than people are making of it, personally.
The "small percentage" now is likely to become bigger when someone throws another log on the fire.
I'm on of the three people on the planet that actually bought a tablet PC, and I have to tell you ... it's pretty darn awesome.
I write directly onto the computer, and it will text recognize everything.
Windows Journal and One Note are the way to go if you need this kind of thing.
Granted it won't fit in your pocket, but it will in a briefcase or small backpack.
Already here.
The PPC-6600, and to a lessor extent, the Samsung i700.
Better games than a gameboy, IMHO (and yes I will admit to having a gameboy). You can get a Madden NFL SD card, and play the title right on the phone. It's got an MP3 PLayer, DIVX Player (I can watch a couple of feature length DVD's on a 1GB card), MPG Player, AVI Player, camera, and yes ... an excellent phone with voice dailing, speakerphone, caller ID, etc. And of course, email, web browsing, IRC, SSH, and what have you. And the PPC has a keyboard too.
The Treo's have most of these features as well, although the gaming, multimedia capabilities, and especially the internal memory are notoriously lacking. Treo's are darn good telephony and email devices though.
Actually, when people are paying darn close to 50% of their income in taxes every year, they are already "contributing to charity" on a supreme scale.
Also (as someone who worked for a charity), I can tell you that there really are scant few that don't simply take your money and use it for their own internal purposes ... income, salary, etc. Most of the time that you "donate" money, it does not go where you think it does.
Is this the case for all of them? No. But unfortunately for about 90% of them, it is.
So, don't throw money at things with nice names just to make yourself feel good. Really think it out ... who will this help, how EXACTLY will it help, at what point do they helpees get the money or services? Have you ever known anyone that was helped by an organization that you just donated your car to? You'll be hard pressed to find one.
Chances are you can do more good with $100 than a organization with overhead. Go buy 10 subway sandwiches, and give them to the folks sleeping in the street. Your $100 will have been MUCH more helpful than had you writen a check to a "charity" that may or may not send $10 to someone somewhere after they pay their employees, marketing, and other costs.
That being said, regardless of how much Bill Gates is worth, millions of dollars is millions of dollars. He didn't have to give it. He could have bought 70 houses instead. All this hand wringing over what percantage it was is silly. The man gave a large some of money to someplace he things will do some good. Let's hope he researched the charity well, and he is right.
You have to tip your hat.
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
I also run it on two laptops, one as slow as a PIII-850.
No major rendering problems with Slashdot so far. At least none that I notice. I dunno. *shrug*
What gives?