A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites-Revisited

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If there was a better so called E-Commerce Report, it has to be the one published on NewYork times dated 24 April 2008. A complete misunderstanding of user behavior and importantly user’s knowledge. The post titled A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites, talks about a new feature that Google launched called search with in search to help the so called big players on the net to combat their identity crisis. However, the bigger crisis is not that nytimes chose to make this a story (I fully appreciate the FYI nature of the news), the bigger crisis is the fact that the news post is written trying to suggest that the users are dumb not to understand a phenomenon like the one it emphasizes on.

My point is people are making too much of the fact that Google has launched a service that has greater SEO impact than Google itself would have imagined. But to place an argument on baseless assumption has become the norm of today’s journalism. The feature that Google has launched is

This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain Web addresses or company names — say, “Best Buy” — rather than entering a request like “cellphones.”

If I could use an image to depict what is the point nytimes is trying to make, it would look something like this:

What you are seeing is the result of a query nytimes on Google and the first result is of course the official nytimes website. But what is interesting (at least nytimes is trying to prove it to be interesting) is the fact that there is small little search box to search with in the site. How about a little knowledge of something called as “Google’s Query Modifiers”. If nytimes was a little more informed about this they would not have tries to sensationalize the story. But, I guess we all are the prisoners of journalism.

This feature in Google has always existed and if you would have wanted to search something within a site (not just necessarily the so called popular sites only), you could simply use the search query along with site: as a query modifier. I cannot imagine people have time for such crap and in fact even indulge in an argument to make a point. How about some sense of respect to user’s understanding of Internet and the world of web.

5 Tips if you are starting a blog – A step-by-step guide

As I’ve settled a little with my blog. I am taking this opportunity to help the newbies with setting up their own wordpress blog. Following 5 tips which are in the format of a step-by-step guide would make it easy for people to set up their blog.

1) The first and most important tip is to get your own website and avoid blogging with blogging services like wordpress and blogger. What I mean by that is, you need to have your own website like digitally yours one and not something like http://xyz123.blogspot.com or http://xyz123.wordpress.com.

However, it is not mandatory that you have your blog hosted on a TLD (top level domain). What I mean is it’s not cumpolsory to have http://digitallife.co.in, you can have the website and host your blog on a sub domain like http://blog.digitallife.com or as a directory like http://digitallife.co.in/blog/. What’s important is that you are the owner of the TLD i.e. http://digitallife.co.in in this case.

2) If you are a hardcore programmer, please use your own ways of creating your blog. If you are novice, the best option you have is to install the latest version of wordpress (I personally feel that wordpress is the best blogging platform). You can download the latest copy (2.3.3) from here. Please avoid beta releases if you are not an expert. There is a famous five minute installation of wordpress here.

3) WordPress is such a versatile tool that it gives you enormous power and with power comes responsibility. The responsibility of not screwing up. So to avoid any screw up of your wordpress on your server, I suggest you to make a replica of you wordpress and run it on your localhost. For this you’ll need:

• A WAMP (WAMP is an acronym that stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl or Python)). I use Vertrigo which can be found here. I will do an exhaustive post on the basic setup of wordpress on localhost using Vertrigo.

• After you have installed the WAMP, you can installed the wordpress (2.3.3) that you’ve downloaded. Start playing with installing themes and plugins as per the requirement of your blog. I’ll do a post on my favorite themes and plugins which I am using.

4) The next step is to ensure that your blog is seo optimized. Again, for this there are multiple plugins that you can find by visiting plugins section. Also, ensure that the URL of your post is not dynamic. What I mean by this, by default wordpress generates dynamic URLs for the posts that you publish. Something like this http://digitallife.co.in/?p=19. Instead your URL should be http://digitallife.co.in/highest-traffic-keyword-on-internet/.

This can be easily changed by customizing permalinks under the options section in your wordpress. Following snapshots will help you get a clear picture.

5) The last and most important thing is to take a regular backup of your blog. You must be asking me, how do I do that? It’s pretty simple, just use the plugin named WP-DBManager. I’ll do another post giving a complete tutorial on the usage and functionality of this plugin.

I hope, this post will be of some use to all the people planning to start their blog. These are just few tips when you are planning to start a blog. I’ll use another post with pictorial diagrams to tell you how to install wordpress on your hosting server.