Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Code Description Where "" Allows searching for a specific phrase - exact match search. Individual word prevents synonyms Basic,Mail OR / AND Boolean search function for OR searches as Google defaults to AND between words - must be all caps Basic,Mail \ Implements OR Basic () Allows grouping of operators and helps dictate order Basic,Mail - Excludes a word from results Basic,Mail * Acts as a wildcard and will match any word or phrase Basic #..# # represents a number in this instance. Use to find numbers in a series. Basic $ Allows for search of USD Basic € Allows for search of Euro Basic in Allows searches for unit conve...

A note from Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai: Information is at the core of human progress. It’s why we’ve focused for more than 26 years on our mission to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful. And it’s why we continue to push the frontiers of AI to organize that information across every input and make it accessible via any output, so that it can be truly useful for you. That was our vision when we introduced Gemini 1.0 last December. The first model built to be natively multimodal, Gemini 1.0 and 1.5 drove big advances with multimodality and long context to understand information across text, video, images, audio and code, and process a lot more of it. Now millions of developers are building with Gemini. And it’s helping us reimagine all of our products — including all 7 of them with 2 billion users — and to create new ones. NotebookLM is a great example of what multimodality and long context can enable for people, and why it’s loved by so many. ...

Google (and most other search engines) have special operators and search url suffixes that many internet users are unaware of. Here is a fresh list for your searching pleasure. intitle: Restricts the search to the titles of the web pages, for example if you want to search for the web pages having WordPress or Blogging in the title, use the syntax intitle:WordPress or intitle: “digital photography” (multiple words can be grouped into a phrase by putting them inside quotes). inurl: If you include this keyword in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL (address of the website). The query inurl:teaching will return documents that mention the words teaching in their URL. intext: The query using intext:term results in documents containing the term in the text/content. For instance: intext:Globalization will return documents mentioning the term globalization. Additionally, you can use allintext:term with phrases or combination of word...

I don't know why this never sank in. I think it went in one brain cell and out the other. Last year, around November, Google changed the clicking behavior of their text ads for Adsense. It used to be that you could click on the title, link, or the description portion and it would click through. Now you can only click on the title portion. The net effect of this, according to the pundits, is that clickthrough rates for text ads went down up to 60% . Clickthrough rates go down, revenue goes down. However, image ads remain 100% clickable. The solution? Change your setup to serve only image ads. Now that the quality of google's image ads has generally improved, it should not be an issue. If you are using their new Custom Channels, you can actually do this without having to change any of your ad code that's in your pages. As a general rule, it's a good idea to watch your CTR and eCPM figures carefully after making such a change - it doesn't work the same for every imple...

"To the moon, Alice" -- Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden, The Honeymooners) The BlogOSphere has been buzzing the last couple of days since everybody discovered that the Googly-Bear decided to update it's PageRank algorithm (there had been hints for weeks before, to be sure -e.g., Danny Sullivan, Oct. 7 ). Ah, "poor little me", huh? Legions of very big blogging-related sites and commercial ventures -- Washingtonpost.com, Forbes.com, Engadget.com and SFGate.com noticed a downgrading in their PageRank. Some sites went up in PageRank. Our eggheadcafe.com site went from 5 to 6. One of my newest "playground sites", blogmetafinder.com , went from zero to a PageRank 3. This UnBlog remains unchanged, for now, at PR 5. Most experts agree that the key determinant was the practice of "buying links" such as text link ads and the like. Apparently, Google just decided to close up this last little loophole, and they did it with ample warning too. Now, this is ...

Google now "sees" underscores in URLS as word-separators(delimiters). Previously, in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. Now, it will see iphone and review. Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! To explain in another way, you won't take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don't have more than two or three equals signs in the URL. So, if you've been tormented about whether you should implement URLrewriting in your site or blog, don't fret. The number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn't a factor in your Google rankings. Although it doesn't matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). The file extension in ...