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How to find unread messages in Gmail
If you receive a significant amount of email, then it’s not always easy to keep up with which mails you have and haven’t read. You may indeed mark emails as ‘unread’ to remind you to action them later and if you do it’s easy to lose them among pages and pages of old emails. Help … Continue reading
How do I: use Power Search in iTunes
The standard way to search in iTunes is to use the search box top right. However, if you have a particularly popular or generic term, e.g. food, then you’ll want to drill down further and here’s where Power Search comes in. Except it doesn’t on the place you’re most likely to search for apps, your … Continue reading
Influence of social media on search rankings
There had long been anecdotal evidence of the influence of social media on search engine rankings, but now the data has slowly been emerging to back it up. Of course a simple view of search engine results shows the inclusion of Tweets on the results page and Facebook pages ranking highly against common search terms. … Continue reading
Techcrunch and information overload
A few years back I used to scan and then clear out my RSS feeds everyday. Over time I’d narrowed the feeds I subscribed to down to a manageable amount and in twenty minutes could get through the days main news, plus the kind of serendipity you get from niche blogs to keep you on … Continue reading
Tracking inbound links using Google
Having moved this blog back to the hosted version of WordPress, I was curious which sites still linked to it. Back in the days when I managed an SEO team, this was second nature, but I have to admit I’d forgotten how to track inbound links using Google. A quick search brought up a couple … Continue reading
OneBox to rule them all
Google has entered the online music market with a new service for finding and buying music online, OneBox, through a partnership with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike. The US-only service allows people to search using song titles, artists or snippets of lyrics. The songs are then available as ad-supported streams and paid downloads. As … Continue reading
Top 10 posts of 2008
In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008′s most popular posts! 10. Gearing up for something more useful The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10. 9. Google … Continue reading
SearchWiki. A test too far?
Google has unveiled its SearchWiki product which adds a familiar social media flavour to Google’s clean search engine results page. When signed and opted-in, the changes recall elements from Digg, StumbleUpon and most strongly Wikia search, the community-powered open-source search engine from Wikipedia. It allows for comments, influencing of the results (personal rather than community … Continue reading
A trillion channels and nothing on?
Amid what Google describes as a potentially infinite web, the search engine has identified a landmark trillion meaningful URLs (unique URLs). This is quite some figure when you consider that they passed the billion mark only back in 2000. The mind-boggling figure illustrates the challenge for search engines in trying to judge value among so … Continue reading
Google tightens the net over Yahoo
Yahoo have followed up their initial trial with Google’s search technology in signing a non-exclusive deal to carry Google ads on Yahoo properties in the US and Canada. The deal also includes moves to improve interoperability between the companies respective instant messaging services. Understandably the move has provoked a huge reaction in the blogosphere given … Continue reading
