The Safari web browser is now available for Microsoft Windows.
I rarely used Mac’s in the past but I was always impressed by the way colors were displayed. Somehow they were more vibrant. I just downloaded the beta 3 version from http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/ and I must say the the colors look better than Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.
As a web developer, I want to thank Apple because I can now check how my site will look in every browser without calling or asking friends. If this also manages to boost the market penetration of the open source, standards compliant web browsers at the expense of IE, then as a web developer I’m all for it. Safari is even better behaved than Firefox when it comes to obeying the CSS specifications.
If you noticed that the graph compares the newest version of Safari with Firefox 1.0.2 (3.0 is being released soon) and Internet Explorer 5.6 (hasn’t been used for over four years). That is because the web page hasn’t been updated with the Windows Safari beta yet. That comparison is between OS X Safari and IE 5 – the last version of IE that was released for the Mac.
I don’t expect this version to be perfect and I am not thinking of switching my everyday browser to safari, but I like what I see so far.
I was browsing some old posts on this blog and I kept coming across the adword ad below selling engine parts.
This brought me back to when I first started advertising using Google Adwords. I didn’t know the value of using negative keywords. The advertiser above is obviously targeting engines, engine repair and related keywords. They forgot to add “search engine” as a negative keyword. Someone who is browsing this blog is obviously looking for information about search engines not car engines.
I looked up the site and called the toll free number. I was prepared to leave a message but to my surprise someone answers. I then realized that is was 8:30 Eastern time but the number was a California area code. Even more surprised was the person on the other end as I politely introduced myself and gave a quick tutorial on negative keywords along with some tips and advice to pass along to the person overseeing the adwords campaign.
I remember the growing pains I endured learning Adwords and I was just glad to help :)
The Overture Keyword Selector Tool, located at http://inventory.overture.com. Hasn’t been returning updated results for quite a while now. Since January 2007 to be exact. And all tools that query the same database is also outdated. You wouldn’t be doing yourself any favors if you base your marketing campaign on old stats that the tool now provides.
Some alternatives are:
Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker provides more detailed reports if you subscribe to their services.
UPDATE:
You can generate keywords using SEO Book’s Keyword List Generator, and you can clean up your keyword lists using the Keyword List Cleaner
I just finished reading this article by Saul Hansel, printed in the June 3rd edition of The New York Times. The article sheds light on the some of the things that happen begin the scene at Google Search.
Some things that stood out to me in the article were;
- Google sometimes makes major and minor updates to their algorithms sometimes as much as 6 times per week.
- If after all the rankings are calculated for a search and the top 10 results don’t properly reflect the diversity of views on that subject, the 10 results presented will be changed to reflect the diveristy.
- (Something I already knew but I still feel the need to note it) Online stores find that a quarter to half of their visitors, and expecialy most of their new customers, come from search engines.
- Media sites are discovering that many people are ingoring their home pages, they are using Google to jump to the specific pages that they want.
- The constant tweaking at Google involve a balancing act. “You make a change and it affects some queries positively and other’s negatively”
- Query Deserves Freshness or QDF - this formula is used to determine if a topic is “hot”. It checks to see if news and blog posts are actively writing about the topic. It also checks Google’s stream of billions searches to determine if the user more than likely wants more current information.
SEOs that think Google is targeting them couldn’t be more wrong, the have the needs of its users and the quality of its search results as the highest priority.
Read the complete New York Times article here
http://downloads.yahoo.com/internetexplorer/index.php
ezguy from DigitalPoint Forums posted the above link today. It looks like Yahoo is now promoting the Internet Explorer 7 Browser and it comes fully optimized with the Yahoo Toolbar, Homepage and other goodies. I’m sure this is in response to Google integrating their search and toolbar into Firefox. Google is also heavily promoting Firefox; they are paying affiliates up to $1.00 everytime someone new downloads and installs the Firefox browser with the Google Toolbar.
The real headscratcher for me is – Why is Microsoft allowing this to happen? Don’t they want to promote their own search engine: Live.com?
