Industry News

Google turns 15 this week — celebrating its official birthday on Friday. But it already is gearing up for the celebrations with a special easter egg. Search for “google in 1998,” and you’ll see how Google used to look back then, in the year of its birth.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, shared the news on Twitter. Here’s how it looks: Kind of nostalgic seeing the old look — and some of the names of other search engines of the period, which Google used to link to at the bottom...

While it's easy to say what SEO isn't, it's a lot harder to pin down exactly what SEO is these days. On the other hand, SEO is still the same thing I said it was when I first started writing about it over a decade ago -- that is, making your website the best it can be both for people and search engines.

I really enjoyed this interview with Flipboard’s Marcos Weskamp about the ephemeral nature of digital design. From David Zax’s write-up, How Flipboard’s Head Designer Grapples With The Web’s Manic Pace Of Change:

Graphic design today, says Weskamp, is something like making mandalas, the ritual symbols sometimes designed by monks. Mandalas are occasionally made of soaps, sands, or powders, rendering them inherently ephemeral. Many artists do their work in the hopes of creating something...

Ian McAllister states a common rallying cry of the Lean movement in his answer to the Quora question What should a lean startup functional spec / product requirements doc look like?:

Functional specs or product requirements documents invite scope creep and are walking dead documents.

I’d like to start my rebuttal with something Joel Spolsky wrote in Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1, back in 2000:

Failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take...

Ghost Rank 2.0 was hit hard by Google. It seems that at least one of the underground and under the radar networks was severely hurt by Google and many of the sites using them to rank well in Google are now penalized. Google's Matt Cutts did issue a warning on Twitter a few weeks ago...

I assume by now, you've all seen the news that Google has secured ALL searches leading to all their organic search query referrer data to go completely 100% not provided.
In fact, I checked this morning, and this site shows 93.4% of all Google organic search queries as being not provided. What about the other 6.6%? Maybe the SSL migration of Google is not 100% complete yet?

Selective Multiple Protocol Transport And Dynamic Format Conversion In A Multi-User Network (US Patent 5848415) A content server using an object database supports a network of multiple User clients. The database is loaded with virtual objects which...

In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity — except for clicks on ads. Google says this has been done to provide “extra protection” for searchers, and the company may be aiming to block NSA spying activity. Possibly, it’s a move to increase ad sales. Or both. Welcome to the confusing world of Google secure search. Two Years Ago: Secure Searching For Logged-In Users

In October 2011, Google began encrypting searches for anyone who was logged into...