AOL Goes on Early Christmas Shopping, Buys Yedda For AOL, Christmas shopping starts as early as November. Exactly six days after acquiring Quigo, an advertising company, AOL announced that it has acquired semantic social search question and answer service, Yedda. In an undisclosed amount and without much hype, AOL expands its internet property with Yedda becoming its wholly owned subsidiary.

So, what is Yedda and what’s in the buyout for AOL? The official press release says,

“Using Yedda’s technology, AOLwill incorporate the Questions and Answer functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com and will further integrate “Questions & Answers” into its experiences in the coming month”

Yedda’s patent-pending technology automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics while selecting the best available users to answer the questions. The technology is similar to other people-powered, sematic search engine that has been proliferating the web search market. Yedda’s semantic matching technology direct questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can offer their expertise thereby starting a community-wide dialogue of invited people who will discuss the topic. To put it simply, Yedda is a people-powered search
engine in the likes of Hakia, iRazoo among other semantic search engines.

Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL says the acquisition will bring AOL’s traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to question. “In the course of our daily lives we often leverage the experience and expertise of friends, colleagues and professionals like doctors and lawyers to get answers to questions we have,” says Grant.

For its part Yedda CEO and Co-founder Avichay Nissenbaum said that the services and technologies that the Yedda team has developed will fit perfectly with AOL’s strategy.

“We will continue to empower knowledge communities throughout the Web, directly and through our network of partnerships, and we’re looking forward to weaving our unique value into the various AOL properties,” says Nissenbaum.

It looks like AOL is slowly building up its web infrastructure and preparing for someting big in the future. With two acquisitions in a row, makes me to start believing that Google maybe should pay close attention to what AOL is really up to.

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Get your favorite site feeds via FeedCrier, a service that delivers updates to your instant messenger client. No download is required; just type in the username for AIM, MSN, Jabber, or Google Talk, along with the website you're interested in getting updates from, and you're done. This would be a good way to get the latest news updates delivered to you almost in real time. FeedCrier is a similar service to web app immedi.at; both are excellent tools for keeping a very close watch on a particular feed.

If you've been using Yahoo! for all your calendar needs and want to switch over to Google Calendar, tech tutorial site Tech-Recipes has written up a step by step how-to for this process—which can be a bit overwhelming for those folks new to this whole online calendar/importing business. If you're the designated tech driver for your friends and family, you might want to check out how to fix Mom and Dad's computer after you've taught them how to import their Yahoo! calendar events.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Add Double-Click Actions to Your Right Mouse Button with ClickZap (Windows only)
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• Add Movies to Your Netflix Queue from IMDB or Amazon with Movie Dude (Firefox with Greasemonkey)
  "The Movie Dude Greasemonkey script links popular movie sites to one another so that--for example--you can quickly add a movie to your Netflix queue after you've read about it on the popular movie web site IMDB, or after you came this close to buying it on Amazon."
• Set Up a Self-Cleaning Mac with Hazel (Mac)
  "The Windows Janitor cleans out files of a certain age from a given folder on PCs, but Mac users have an even more robust, graphical alternative: the automated, rules-based file manager Hazel."
• Batch Add Email Addresses with AddressContext (All platforms)
  "The addressContext Thunderbird extension batch processes to and from email addresses for a set of messages from the context menu."
• Better Gmail 2 Firefox Extension for New Gmail (Firefox extension)
  "Google updated Gmail, and now we're following up with Better Gmail 2, a Firefox extension that adds features to the new Gmail interface."
• Turn Your Webcam into a Motion-Sensing Security Camera with Yawcam (Windows)
  "Got a webcam bundled with your last computer but don't know what to do with it? Turn it into a motion-sensing security camera with freeware application Yawcam."
• Skype 2.0 Beta Adds Video for Linux (Linux)
  "Skype's latest 2.0 beta for Linux adds long-awaited video chat features to the popular freeware, cross-platform Voice over IP (VoIP) application."
• Add Thumbnails to All Images in Explorer with Xentient Thumbnails (Windows)
  "Freeware application Xentient Thumbnails replaces all image icons on your desktop or in Windows Explorer with a thumbnail preview of the image."
• Kick Off Your Daily Browsing with Morning Coffee (Firefox extension)
  "Morning Coffee bookmarks your regular reads by day (or by combinations of days) and opens up the appropriate set of bookmarks for each day with the click of a button."

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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."

* Duplicate Content — If multiple documents contain the same information, then only the most relevant document of that set is included in your search results.

* Host Crowding — If there are many search results from the same site, Google may not show all the results from that site or may show the results lower in the ranking than they otherwise would have been.

One of my favorite computer science papers is a 1990 paper titled “An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities”. The authors discovered that if they piped random junk into UNIX command-line programs, a remarkable number of them crashed. Why? The random input triggered bugs, some of which had probably hidden for years. Up to a third of the programs that they tried crashed.

That paper helped popularize fuzz testing, which tests programs by giving random gibberish as input. Some people call this a monkey test, as in “Pound on the keyboard like a caffeine-crazed monkey for a few minutes and see if the program crashes.”

I can tell you that the web is a fuzz test. If you write a program to process web pages, there are few better workouts for your program than to pipe a huge number of web pages into your program. I’ve seen computer programs that ran with no problem across our entire web index except for *one* document. You would not believe the sort of weird, random, ill-formed stuff that some people put up on the web: everything from tables nested to infinity and beyond, to web documents with a filetype of exe, to executables returned as text documents. In a 1996 paper titled “An Investigation of Documents from the World Wide Web,” Inktomi Eric Brewer and colleagues discovered that over 40% of web pages had at least one syntax error:

weblint was used to assess the syntactic correctness of a subset of the HTML documents in our data set (approximately 92,000). …. Observe that over 40% of the documents in our study contain at least one error.

At a search engine, you have to write your code to process all that randomness and return the best documents. By the way, that’s why we don’t penalize sites if they have syntax errors or don’t validate — sometimes the best document isn’t well-formed or has a syntax error.

But: the web is a fuzz test for you too, gentle reader. As you surf the web, your browser is subjected to an amazing amount of random stuff. Here’s a scary example: a couple months ago, someone was surfing a website and noticed that an ad was serving up malware. I know of a completely different web site that apparently got hit by the same incident.

So the take-aways from this post are:

1. Fuzz testing is a great way to uncover bugs.
2. Lots of great web pages have syntax errors or don’t validate, which is why we still return those pages in Google.
3. If you’re an internet user, make sure you surf with a fully-patched operating system and browser. You can decrease your risk of infection by using products off the beaten path, such as MacOS, Linux, or Firefox.
4. If you’re a website owner and Google has flagged your site as suspected of serving malware, sometimes it’s because your site served ads with embedded malware. Check if you’ve changed anything recently in how you serve ads. When you think your site is clean, read this post about malware reviews and this malware help topic for more info about getting your site reviewed quickly. Even if your site is in good shape, you might want to review this security checklist post by Nathan Johns.

Google AdWords is running limited testing of a feature which lets its advertisers block domain parking sites which their AdWords ads will be served on; specifically ‘Domain Ads’ and ‘Error Page Ads.

If Google rolls out full force with this blocking of the serving of advertiser AdWords ads on domain parking sites, this could potentially be a real blow to domain registration and parking companies, leading to deals with other paid search engines to fill the void.

Before advertisers begin blocking Domain Ads however, put some thought into the source of this traffic, which may be type in URL traffic or organic search traffic, and may convert quite well for you. Just because a user comes from a domain parking page does not mean that user will not buy on your site.

I’m sure one fear Google has with a widespread rollout of Domain Ads blocking is that advertisers will begin blocking these ad distributions without taking into account that they could be cutting off a valuable lead and business generation vehicle.

According to a thread in DigitalPoint (hattip Barry), not all advertisers will be blocking their domain parked ads:

Domain Ads and error pages have ALWAYS performed best through ALL accounts that we manage so there is no way they will be excluded.

So, again, before blocking the serving of your AdWords advertisements in Domain Ads, be sure that those ads do not convert for you, because if they do, you’ll be losing customers for your company.

Link baiting is a proven form of attracting valuable and search algortihm friendly organic links to a site with thought provoking material, news or an incredible offer. Sometimes a well written article or blog post, or a ‘giveaway’ can result in tens of thousands of visitors in a day, along with organic links from their blogs or social news sites and forums. But what happens when your link bait is too good?

I was reading through DigitalPoint forums last night and found this account of excellent link (or traffic) bait, but an unprepared hosting account, which led to the site being booted off of its server.

I had a contact who works for a brewery, we got a load of branded soccer balls from them for pretty much next to nothing. We agreed we would cover shipping and post them out, taking applications from our site. The brewer gets some nice publicity and doesnt need to waste man-hours or post/packing costs, and we get some traffic and publicity.

Anyway I put up a page on the site for people to fill in their address. Within 12 hours, my stats were showing about 65 thousand page views. I don’t know how high it would have went - we got kicked off our host, for apparently using too much server resources. It was on a reseller.

We weren’t running any complicated scripts or anything, so its disappointing to say the least to get canned simply for a lot of page views - we were way under our bandwidth allowance.

Since it went a bit wonky I cant really post the url here. I’ve heard of peoples sites crashing from digg first page, but no way thought I was in danger of being overwhelmed with this. I did underestimate things, but I think more of the blame is on Godaddy for canning me with no real reason.

Brewery + Free Soccer Balls = An Amazing Offer and very geared towards college students & soccer fanatics, plenty of whom own blogs. This is an example of not only a good traffic builder, but also an excellent way of generating links, bookmarks and notice to a site (mixed with some posts on soccer forums and social sites). Heck, the linky mix of balls and beer is as much of a given as betting that all the SEO girls want Rand Fishkin.

Problem is, like many site owners who have small shared hosting accounts, this user was not fully prepared for the influx of traffic. Here are some ways to prepare for this after effect of a really good idea:

Bandwidth and Server Drain

Access your web hosting plan and allow for a boost in bandwidth for the rest of the month, so you do not run out of bandwidth. If you’re planning a link bait or see the profile of your news rising on Digg or Delicious, contact your hosting company immediately to let them know of the upcoming server load. Worse case scenario is that they’ll charge you a little more for this, but it will be worth it. If you can’t contact your host, it’s time to change to a company which you can get a hold of. Don’t mess around with bad hosting.

With a VPS (virtual private server) or reselling account, you should be able to handle this easily by limiting the amount of allowed bandwidth from other sites, and adding that bandwidth to your major bandwidth drain site. If you have a regular hosting account and fear a bandwidth drain, contact you host immediately for extended bandwidth.

Install WP-Cache 2.0

If you use Wordpress to power your blog (or as a CMS for your site) the WP-Cache 2.0 plug-in can be a godsend for cutting down on server drain during link baits or marketing campaigns (which used to be the SlashDot effect, now commonly known as the Digg effect).

WP-Cache is page caching system which makes your site much faster and responsive. It caches Worpress pages and stores them in a static file for serving requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond. (more…)

You are awoken by a telephone call at 6 in the morning; a friend tips you off that many Google Account passwords have been revealed to abusers due to some Google security issue. You try to login to your Gmail to check this but can’t get past the password box – it turns out someone kidnapped your account already and changed your password. The kidnapper can now freely roam in your Gmails, your Google docs, your AdSense pages, your Blogspot blog (if you have one) and so on.

What do you do now?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

StatCounter.com’s PageRank was punished for a while, but now it’s back to 10* – and interestingly enough, all of a sudden** all paid links on that page are using the “nofollow” attribute to stop them from passing PageRank. You can almost hear the echo of the political background chatter that must have taken place between Google’s webspam team and the StatCounter people... or does anyone think any of this is due to Google’s algorithmic ranking?

*Local differences when checking PageRank notwithstanding.

**At least when checking Archive.org’s cache from August this year, all links were still “normal,” non-nofollowed.

[Thanks SC user!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]