google

Google's "Edit Search results" experiment

I Googled something a minute ago and noticed that my SERP looked a little different:

Google Edit search result links

In particular, check out those three grey icons. They appear next to every result on the page, but there isn't any noticeable indication why they're there. So I clicked one :)

Google search result edited

The link turned green, which was fun. But the most exciting thing was that it moved to the top of the page—with a nice, slick animation. Apparently Google is letting me customize the results of my search.

Check out Google's editable search result experiment after the jump.

we're all afraid of getting stabbed violently by People Who Don't Know X

... why Steve Yegge doesn't like giving interview tips. go read how to get a job at google, but try to learn something instead of freaking out when you turn out to be a Person Who Doesn't Know X :)

new gmail label colors!

i'm pretty stoked about the new gmail label colors that just showed up for me. they make it easier to see at a glance what messages belong where.

they also added a little (x) link after each label in the message view, so you don't have to use the drop down menu to remove labels... thanks for keeping up the improvements, google.

gmail gets new urls, breaks better gmail

one of my favorite features of the better gmail firefox plugin is the "smart read button". when you select a message, it says either "mark read" if it's an unread message, or "mark unread" if you've already read it. or at least that's what it used to do. apparently the updates to gmail broke that feature. i'm a bit bummed, someone will come up with a fix soon...

another notable change is the urls: gmail is combining url fragments with javascript to fake out your bookmarks and browser navigation. for example, you can now go directly to your spam folder by typing http://mail.google.com/mail/#spam

they also added a filter assistant, kinda like the one better gmail had. when you're reading a message, click the dropdown where you used to add labels. there's an option for mute (which used to be available only via hotkey), to create an event, and to "filter messages like these". the filter assistant is pretty slick... almost like they had some inspiration :)

it seems like gmail's been stagnant for a while, but it looks like they're following up the new Gmail IMAP support with a few more features. hopefully google has more good stuff in store for us. then maybe we won't need Better Gmail anymore.

google analytics is down

all of my reports have flatlined :-(

i want a refund.

i'm starting a grassroots movement

a couple of days ago my coworker jacob was looking through his server logs and noticed that several people found his site by searching for "jacob is so stupid". when we found out about it, he was near the bottom of the second page on google...

we (a.k.a. myself and other coworkers, not jacob) decided that we could do a bit of grassroots seo work for his site, and help his page rankings in the process. so if you have a minute, google "jacob is so stupid" (no quotes), and click on his blog. (his domain name is jacob.peargrove.com, the page is called "Jacob's Blog" or "Jacob’s Blog » 2007 » January").

as of the time of this post, his blog was showing up around the top of page two.

msplinks.com kills MySpace link SEO karma

MySpace has been redirecting all external links in comments through msplinks.com for a couple of months. Msplinks turns any posted link into a redirect, supposedly in an attempt to cut down on spammer redirects and phishing.

From Tom:

Hey everybody, we just launched another program to stop dirty spammers from hasseling[sic] you. When you input a link in myspace it may be converted to a redirect link.... They still point to their original url, but let us easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites. booyah!

Until a week or so ago, only links in comments were redirected through msplinks. This fit well with the explanation given in Tom's message. Now external links in profiles are redirected through msplinks as well. The effects of this change are drastic and somewhat sinister.

Google acquires a conflict of interest

Google acquired DoubleClick this month. which should be a good thing. but it looks like they acquired a conflict of interest too... they got quite the package deal