In today's Search Ads column, "Google's Local Search Land Grab," Tony Wright tells you how you can help Google to digitize local search information, and help yourself in the process.

Two million articles on Wikipedia? Yoiks.

Color-coding Wikipedia entries for trustworthiness.

Online database of registered dog minders (Australia).

Amazon’s new payment options.

Grant to develop a digital archive for archaeologists.

National Digital Archive of Nambian Culture.

Site devoted to eye health information.

Upcoming: digital archive of missionary work.

OT: The Bear Stearns Golf Index. Heh.

It’s been announced on the Blogger blog that there’s a new way to browse for Blogger content. Now, when you go to a Blogger blog’s profile page, you can click on one of the elements of the profile page and browse all other profiles that also contain that same element.

For example, say we’re looking at the profile page for the Alaska State Historical Collections Mystery Photos, located at http://www.blogger.com/profile/11205033399138363188. The location of the profile has been filled out, as has the industry. If you click on Juneau link and you’ll get a list of all the Blogger profiles (390 at this writing) that are located in Juneau.

(Note that these profiles are the product of the bloggers themselves and there doesn’t appear to be any oversight. I browsed some profiles where some of the words were innocuous but the resulting listings were absolutely not safe for work. Be warned.)

The keywords/locations for which you’re searching show up in the result URL– for example, finding Blogger profiles that include an interest in tennis has an URL that looks like this: http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=tennis . I tried to add other interests to the search to find multiple interests at the same time (finding someone interested in tennis AND golf, for example) but that doesn’t appear to work.

If you want to find multiple interests, or people in a certain location that are interested in certain things, use Google. So say I’m looking for people in Texas who are interested in dancing. Notice that the profile pages include a Location: space and an Interests space. I can do the following search that takes advantage of the profile page patterns:

site:blogger.com “location * texas” “interests * dancing”

The asterisks are for full-word wildcards in the locations and interests patterns. In this case you’ll get four results.

Of course, if you just one to browse one aspects of a Blogger profile, do the browsing right from the Blogger site. The Google search is good because it allows searching across multiple parameters, but there’s no guarantee that Google has indexed all the profiles…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

A new directory has been launched for green products and services. It’s available at http://www.wecanlivegreen.com/ . In addition to the directory, there’s general green information available as well.

You can browse by state or category, or search by keyword. I did a search for clothing which gave me two categories and four subcategories devoted to clothing. I chose children’s clothing and got seven results. None of them seemed to be devoted completely to children’s clothing, with most of them being general clothes stores. The listings included a picture, store name, and one-lane description. Click on the Find Out More link for additional information about the company, including a Web site address and sometimes e-mail. The additional information is pretty minimal, unfortunately. (I also found that doing general keyword searches worked best.)

In addition to the products and services listings the site also offers forums, a “Green Living 101″ tutorial, and a newsletter. There’s a place for products and an event listing, but those places aren’t populated yet. Interesting but I wish there were a little more store information.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is creating an iTunes challenger tentatively named gBox.

Comments have become all but de rigeur on Web sites — assuming you like spending half your life filtering out spam, flame, trolls, and other horribleness. Google’s getting into comments, too, but with a twist.

Recently, the newish Google News Blog announced that a new feature would be rolled out in the US news section. This new feature will allow comments on news stories — but only from groups or people involved in the stories.

To find these stories, look for a little comment balloon on the story listings, which will lead to an individual page for the stories — check this story for an example. The comment, clearly marked as such, is included after the story along with a Google disclaimer. I didn’t see that there were many comments available for stories yet.

There were so many immediate thoughts I had upon reading the announcement it was hard to sort them all out. First was, “Good grief, this is going to be a lot of work.” Second was, “If someone manages to hack this (probably socially) there is going to be a volcanic explosion.” Third was, “How many people are going to take them up on this?”

Looking at the comments in action, I have the same thoughts. I also have the thoughts of “Who qualifies to comment?” I mean, is it exclusively people who are mentioned in the story, or is the circle wider than that? For example, say there’s a story about an allegedly drunk driver causing an accident on I-95. Who qualifies to comment? Only the people mentioned in the story, or does someone from MADD get to add their thoughts? And if that were so, how far out would that go? If the car driven by the alleged drunk driver was, say, a Nissan, would Nissan get to add a comment about its development of anti-drunk-driver technology?

I think this is a very daring idea, but there’s going to be a delicate balance between making it open enough to get lots of comments and making it worthwhile, and keeping control over what could be a flood of comments from everybody and their Aunt Bee, claiming the most tenuous relationship to the story…

I was going to start out this writeup with an obscure reference to Jane Siberry and Lena Is a White Table, but I decided hmm, better not. (And her name is Issa now, I missed that.)

What was I talking about? Oh yes. Penn State developers have come up with a new search engine. TableSeer allows searchers to identify and extract tables from PDF documents. The engine will also rank table results based on factors relating to the table, like title and date of publication. Check it out at http://chemxseer.ist.psu.edu .

That URL is actually for ChemxSeer, but does have a link to TableSeer. The direct link is http://search.ist.psu.edu:8085/tableidx.jsp and attempts to access that page repeatedly timed out, so I can’t give you any direct feedback about the search engine.

I can point you to a PDF about TableSeer, available at chemxseer.ist.psu.edu/about/digital_library/Liu-JCDL2007.pdf . I can point you to the press release about TableSeer, which includes some interesting stats about tables in papers, at http://www.psu.edu/ur/2007/tableseer.htm . But I can’t actually use the engine! Note to self: check this later….

The always handy Tech-Recipes has come up with a way to quickly search for free comic books online using Google. There are a couple ways to accomplish this, but if you are looking for title specific searches, this is what you would do:

Examples:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" spider-man cbr
and -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" simpsons cbr

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Stupid people out of luck

So much for buying and renting videos from Google. On Wednesday, August 15, the world's most popular search engine waves goodbye to the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/download-to-rent) feature on Google Video, the video site that's played a barely-audible second fiddle ever since Google acquired the nothing-but-free-clips YouTube late last year.…

On January 7 2006 Google announced a video store service on top of Google Video. You were able to purchase videos such as NBA games, Charlie Rose interviews, or shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (in the US at least). You were also able to set a purchase price for videos you uploaded yourself. Today, Google started sending out mails like the following, announcing the end of this program:

<<As a valued Google user, we’re contacting you with some important information about the videos you’ve purchased or rented from Google Video. In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective August 15, 2007.

To fully account for the video purchases you made before July 18, 2007, we are providing you with a Google Checkout bonus for $2.00. Your bonus expires in 60 days, and you can use it at the stores listed here: http://www.google.com/checkout/signupwelcome.html. The minimum purchase amount must be equal to or greater than your bonus amount, before shipping and tax.

After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.>>

As this case shows, “download-to-own” is a lie when it comes to DRM content. Digital Rights Management is an euphemism for copy-protection services that (mostly) treat consumers like criminals, and deprive them of their fair use of acquired content; in this case, Google indicates you won’t own the movies you purchased after all. When a DRM-based services ceases to exist, so may your purchases.

Jennifer Feikin in May this year was reported to have resigned from her job as Google Video chief. Google by now is using YouTube for much of the officially released Google content, like videos posted in their blogs. An internal Google goal from 2006 ordered to count the “total number of Google products and reduce by 20%”. I wonder if the technically superior but less community-oriented YouTube alternative by YouTube-owner Google ended up on the 20% list – or at least parts of it?

[Thanks Shivan, Jon Henshaw and Pacificdave!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Tadeusz Szewczyk is a freelance search engine optimizer, blogger at the SEO 2.0 blog and journalist. Born in Poland, he’s living in Germany for two decades now.

In the SEO industry agencies, experts and even bloggers have adopted a special mode of speech not to say slang that might be misunderstood by outsiders like clients, website visitors or the general public. To help you understand what search engine optimization experts really mean I devised this real glossary of SEO speak:

If you have SEO terms that you do not understand feel free to ask me in the comments!

[By Tadeusz Szewczyk | Original post | Comments]

On Saturday, Google AdSense users will not be able to login to their accounts, although ads will still be served.

From the Inside AdSense blog :

Tomorrow, our engineers will be performing routine system maintenance from 10am to 12pm PDT. Although you won’t be able to log in to your account for 2 hours, we’ll continue to serve ads to your pages and track your earnings as usual.

For our international readers, we’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

Toronto — 1pm Saturday
London — 6pm Saturday
Cairo — 8pm Saturday
Mumbai — 10:30pm Saturday
Melbourne — 3am Sunday

Matt Cutts, the Google engineer and public face of the search engine's spam-fighting team, has posted some SEO tips for bloggers that he first shared in a WordCamp 2007 presentation last month.

He's posted his presentation deck, a link to a video and transcript, and links to write-ups of the sessions, so you could conceivably spend the rest of the day today just consuming Matt's words of wisdom in various forms.

He also clarifyies the reported news that underscores are now the same as dashes to Google:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

Oregon residents now have a way to compare hospital procedure costs.

NARA is doing the podcast thing.

Iowa DOT launches bridge database.

Databases for bipolar risk genes.

News on the “alt” search engines at http://altsearchengines.com/. The gentleman
says, “Why do I (sometimes) hate my job? Because there’s a search engine for everything!” Funny, that’s why I love mine…

Google knocking off online video sales….

Cornell teaming up with Google Books.

The CDC has an island on Second Life. I can’t figure out why I find this so funny.

New Book: “24/7 Time and Temporality in the Network Society.”

Rhode Island improves search engine for business filings.

Yahoo new sports shortcut.

Footnote.com has announced that it has digitized the entire Project Blue Book, which is a collection of official records covering government investigations of UFOs, 1947-1969. It’s available for free at http://www.footnote.com/.

You can http://www.footnote.com/browse.php#6283401 browse the information or do a keyword search. I did a search for aluminum and got over 300 results. The results are presented in images of scanned pages, with keywords highlighted. The results I saw were mostly memos of UFO spottings and the conclusion that folks were seeing aircraft.

Frankly I have no idea what to search for in a UFO archive — not really my specialty. So I did like the fact that Footnote allows people to comment on and annotate interesting documents. So you can not only keyword search and browse the total collection, but also browse highlights. Scanned documents have a place to add comments about documents as well as annotations to the documents themselves.

Okay, I’ve got a bunch of pointers to summarize my WordCamp 2007 talk.

First off, here’s the PowerPoint deck that I presented. Google’s PR team was kind enough to verify that it was okay to release. I made the slides from scratch (not even a Google template), so there shouldn’t be any problems with notes in the slides or other metadata. Also note that I made this entire presentation the day of the conference, so let me know if there are unclear parts.

“But Matt, some of that talk is just bullet points! Where’s the context?” you might comment. Ah, I’m glad you mentioned that. John Pozadzides attended WordCamp and taped the talks, and he recently put up a video of the talk.

“But Matt, I don’t have an hour to spare to watch the video!” you might comment. Ah, I’m glad that you mentioned that. David Klein was at WordCamp, and he transcribed the talk into text form.

“But Matt, that transcript has a lot of words. It could take me 20-30 minutes to read all that!” you might comment. Well, I’ve already pointed to Stephanie Booth’s write-up of the session. You could also read the summary that Lisa Barone wrote. Or check out Stephan Spencer’s coverage for CNET.

Now you understand why I blogged about Alex Chiu a while ago; I used him as an example in my talk, so I wanted to explain what those two urls in my PowerPoint meant.

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

I also wanted to point out something I’m pretty proud of. If you were at the site review session at Pubcon last year in Vegas, you might remember that there was a chiropractor who wanted to do well for the query [san diego chiropractor]. At the time, Danny Sullivan teased him a bit and said “Well, you might want to put the words ‘San Diego Chiropractor’ together on the page that you want to rank.”

Well Danny, that site owner was David Klein and he took all the PubCon advice from the panel to heart. He started a blog, tweaked the copy on his site, and has even started to learn great linkbaiting techniques. For one thing, he transcribed the video of my talk, which traded some effort on his part to create a useful resource. Even better, he came to WordCamp with a creative idea, a pad of paper, and a digital camera. As he met folks at WordCamp, he had each person write their name, their website, and something that they wanted to do. Then he created an original cartoon of that person doing that thing. Go to the post with Matt Mullenweg and click on the picture of Matt to see what I mean. Matt said he wanted to be a writer, so David posted a cartoon of Matt as a writer.

How is this smart? People love to talk about themselves, and love to see themselves in the spotlight. So these little cartoons are natural linkbait: “Hey look, he drew me as a Photoshop plug-in developer!” How much did it cost to do this particular idea? Practically nothing: just the initial creative brainstorming and a little bit of elbow grease.

It was neat to see a regular site owner go from not knowing much about SEO in November 2006 to really improving his traffic with some creativity and straightforward changes. A good SEO can tune up your web site. But if someone is willing to take the time to study SEO, look for fresh ideas, and put in some effort, a regular person can definitely improve their website (and rankings!) as well. To see that come true with a chiropractor that several of us gave feedback to just last year was really exciting. That’s one of the big things that has stayed with me from WordCamp.

Update: Clarifying that Stephan’s write-up didn’t say that dashes and underscores were the same. Thanks, Stephan!

AOL’s Netscape is a great adaptation of the Digg model which uses paid editorial staff to submit & filter news items and influence what is served on the homepage.

Netscape is also a proven form of link building for SEO purposes, as Netscape links are organic and even if a story never makes it to the homepage (or channel page), the Netscape listings get ranked highly in Google, Yahoo and other engines.

Of course, with that authority comes misuse, and lots of spamming.. so much in fact that it’s hard for me to sometimes believe the Netscape Navigator staff lets some of those stories make it to the top (they were better off just packing it with Weblogs Inc. stories like in the early days).

Regardless, it’s been around for about a year or so now and Netscape seems to have shed the Digg clone image it had cast upon it by Digg-loyalists and has become a staple part of the AOL/Netscape experience. Or has it?

AOL Trashing Netscape?

AOL may be trashing the social news sharing service according to Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington due to AOL & old Netscape loyalists missing their former managable portal which was stocked full of AP wire driven news and parter content; not this social news crap Jason Calacanis was trying to fling at Netscape’s core user base, who were probably only still Netscape users because they love dial up connections, still use the old Netscape browser or email, or just never changed their homepage.

For whatever reason, after Calacanis left AOL, he left Netscape as not only its visionary, but its guardian.

From Techcrunch:

AOL is considering killing off the “Digg Clone” social news site that they launched a little over a year ago at Netscape.com, and redirecting traffic to the Netscape portal instead. One source says it’s a done deal. Another says no final decisions have been made. But the Netscape editorial team is rumored to be completely freaked out, and they are starting to talk to outsiders.

I for one would be sad to see Netscape (in its current form) go. Not only because it’s great for building links, but also because we all know that after a couple of months Digg will make changes which were influenced by Calacanis’s Netscape (like editorial staff suggesting the original news source on a story, or related stories) and Calacanis’s Netscape will go down in history as another great idea that was either ahead of its time or not supported by its ownership.

The site should be in its prime as normal web users start to take advantage of social media more & more, and seeing it go would be a real shame. Let’s hope Arrington just stumbled upon some hot air coming out of Camp AOL, and this rumor does not solidify. Either way, once someone posts the Techcrunch story on Digg, the rumor will surely explode along with Michael’s traffic.

When I joined Google in early 2000, we had a stretch where we didn’t update our index for 3-4 months or more. At the time, that wasn’t bad for a search engine; I remember one search engine around then that wasn’t updated for over a year. Starting in mid-2000, Google updated our index pretty much every month. People used to use the phase of the moon to predict timing of the next “Google Dance.”

Now raise your hand if you remember “Update Fritz” from summer 2003. That was the Google Dance where Google switched from a monthly batch update to an incremental update. That means that our crawl/indexing team updated a fraction of our index daily or near-daily. Back then we had not only the normal crawl but also a “fresh crawl,” and if documents were in the fresh crawl then Google would sometimes show a date in our snippet.

The Google crawl/indexing team has continued working hard, and several people have noticed Google’s index getting fresher and fresher. Now some documents can show up in minutes instead of hours or days.

I’ve noticed that as search engines have gotter better (fresher, bigger, more relevant), people keep adjusting their expectations upwards. I can’t imagine waiting over a month for search engines to update their index with news events any more, but just a few years ago that’s how things worked. And it only takes a few encounters with a fresh index until you ratchet up your expectations. My previous mental model was “normally it takes a day or so to show up in many search engines,” but I had my own “Zoiks! That’s fast!” experience tonight, which I’ll describe for you.

I was feed-grazing in Google Reader, as I am wont to do, when I saw a message that there was an update to Reader’s code for offline reading (Google Gears). In my experience, if I move on the the next feed, I lose that little message with the link to update the code (not sure why, but that’s a different post). So I click the link and update my code for offline reading.

In the process, I lost the post that I was currently reading, which was Rich Skrenta’s post about Persai. I wasn’t done reading the post, so what do I do? I go to Google and search for [skrenta blog] so that I can find Skrenta’s blog and finish reading the post.

And what did I see in my search results? The snippet from Skrenta’s blog was showing the post that he did at 7:54 p.m. Pacific time. It was about 8:44 p.m. Pacific time when I did the search. So from Rich hitting the “Post” button to me being able to see it in Google’s main search index was well under an hour.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the bottom of Rich’s post, showing that it went live at 7:54 p.m.:

I double-checked that Rich’s blog was on Pacific time by leaving a quick comment on one of Rich’s other posts.

And here’s Google showing a snippet from Rich’s post within an hour after it went live:

Now that’s a minty fresh index. It takes a lot of good design and infrastructure to be able to refresh large numbers of pages that fast. Congrats to the Googlers who are improving Google’s ability to re-crawl, index, and score web documents quickly.

Update: I was only checking every 10 minutes or so, but this post was crawled/indexed/searchable in half an hour or less: