Archive for category Internet
Why do Google Search Results Change?
Posted by Randy in Internet, Networking, Programming, SEO on July 30, 2009
I was recently asked by my wife why Google search results change. I had noticed it before but didn’t spend much time dwelling on it because my first thought was that Google uses many locations and many datacenters to hand out search results. The varying results are differences in the data stored at each location. Depending on which datacenter you are getting results from at any given time, you can see a huge change in results. As an example to this I made a quick video to show how going through a proxy server can make Facebook and youtube unblocked if they’re blocked. In this video I’m going through a Linux server in Texas at first. Note the total results for the keyword while going through the proxy are 282. By removing the proxy and refreshing the search the number changed dramatically to 635,000 results.
I saw a video explanation of this behavior that stated that Google was a beach, and while I enjoyed the analogy, it isn’t entirely correct. There is a lot happening on the internet, but there’s no way Google can index it all at once, or even catch it all. That’s why they have many data centers, each pulling their own part of the weight. I’d imagine that the synchronization of the data takes time, that is if they actually synchronize the data at all. It may be that Google does this to randomize search results a bit in order to gauge relevancy of each result. At any rate, the keyword results can vary.
Also, after making this video, I captured the packets using wireshark and found that the request from my home internet connection was querying IP 208.67.217.231 and my proxy server is pulling the query from 74.125.159.103. Also neither of the search results were correct. After digging into the other pages of results there is a total of 64 results omitting the repeats. ICHY reports that the keyword has 3,640 competition. So, from what I can see of the data on both sides, ICHY doesn’t report very accurate competition numbers according to their own explanation of the relevant results. Other keywords in their list yielded similar results discrepancies.
Slow wifi on iPhone 3GS
Posted by Randy in Apple, Internet, Networking, technology, Tips on July 24, 2009
I bought a new iPhone 3G S yesterday. These things are very nice, and I’m not an Apple fan boy by any stretch. One thing that was bugging me, however, was the slow speed I got a very high quality landline phone service so I was getting from the wifi. I was getting faster speeds from the 3G network than my home wireless, and this is while I was sitting right next to the router, so it wasn’t a signal problem.
I found the solution to this after reading through many, many forum posts. I saw others were having the same problem as me and were getting responses from people like “reboot the router” or “reset your network settings on the iPhone.” This is all well and good and I’m sure those people meant well but there was a big problem with their responses.
First of all, everyone having this trouble said that the wireless worked fine on their computers but not on the iPhone. Secondly, there aren’t many settings to “reset” inside the iPhone’s network settings. There’s just not anything in there that would cause this type of issue.
The solution to the problem ended up being an advanced setting on the router itself. From what I can tell of the issue and it’s solution, the iPhone’s wifi is just a bit more picky than a standard PC wifi device. Here are the settings I eventually had to change on my Netgear router.
The important items here are the fragmentation threshold and the CTS/RTS threshold. Each of these were set to their max value previously. After changing these two settings, my iPhone started working like a champ.
If you are experiencing the same problems with your iPhone or iPod Touch’s wifi, change these settings on your router. Also note, these settings have slightly different names on some routers. Refer to your router’s manual for more info.
Edit: I’ve gone much lower with these number with much success for my less powerful mobile devices. Going too low does seem to cause issues with more powerful computers on the wireless network. Test this out with lower settings and post your success or failures in the comments.
[phpbay]mac mini, 5, “”, “”[/phpbay]
Digital Converter Box Coupon and How to Use it
Posted by Randy in Free Stuff, Good Deals, Internet, technology, Tips on June 17, 2009
If you are using an analog TV, chances are it no longer works correctly. As of June 12th all major broadcast companies are no longer broadcasting in analog. It’s a strictly digital world now.There is a program to help everyone convert however, in case you haven’t heard of it. It’s at dtv2009.gov. You can go there and request two free $40 coupons from the government to purchase a converter box. If you have an analog TV and no converter box, you have to order a converter box to watch TV now.
After you request your coupons, the next step is to order your converter box. The absolute best deals on digital converter boxes are
here
Back from vacation
My family has been on vacation in Cocoa Beach, Florida. So I’ve been too busy to blog. That will change this week. I’m ready to get going on some new thoughts and reviews. I’m relaxing after an eleven hour drive and watching Home. I’m only about halfway through it, but it seems to be pretty good at explaining how awful we Americans are. Apparently, we are going to be the end of the world.
Technology in Reverse
Posted by Randy in Internet, technology on May 22, 2009
Is it just me or is technology going in reverse? I thought we were making progress, you know with things likes tapes, CDs, DVD, and BluRay. Things like that have generally been going in the right direction. Other things are completely backwards. This seems especially true for things in the communication arena.
For instance, around ten years ago we had these things called alpha-numeric pagers. We could even get two-way alpha-numeric pagers. The service was around $10 per month. This was the precursor to today texting conversations over a normal cell phone. The only major difference is that it costs a lot more to text over cell phones.
This isn’t the reverse part though. We all expect prices for things to climb at least a bit. It’s no surprise that once “texting” caught on with the populous and not just the geeks, the cell phone providers would start jacking with the prices. No, the reason texting is a reverse in technology is the fact that MAKING A PHONE CALL IS SO MUCH MORE EFFICIENT.
Everywhere you look there’s someone typing on a cell phone and even though some of them are extremely fast, they can’t be communicating faster than just using the phone. Image we were in a word where there was no such thing as voice calls. The only thing we had is text-messaging. Now image someone invented the PHONE. Can you just image what kind of shift toward that technology we would have? Everyone would be talking on the phone.
So, just because something is new doesn’t mean that it is better. This is especially true with the internet. There is a lot of talk about Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sites that offer “Web2.0” experiences. They are “so-called” user-driven content sites, social networking. This isn’t a new invention. Web2.0 has been around since the early days of the internet. It’s only a big deal now because there are lot more people on the internet.
Twitter is about as useless as these apps get too. It’s horrible realy. I’m sorry but there have been much better technologies in the past. If you take out the marketing side of Twitter, where everyone is trying to sell something, it is just a low efficiency chat room. You are limited to 140 characters. I understand the concept of micro blogging. It’s the same concept of chat rooms. You have friends/followers, and they see what you say. BIG DEAL….chat rooms have been doing that for ages. IRC has been around forever. It’s still the most effective way to chat on the internet, if you ask me. What about IMs? You have friends. You change your status. They see it. It’s the same thing as twitter. The only difference I can see is that you can search for people to add to your friends/followers.
So where IRC would allow you type much more at a time, was more anonymous, was easier hold a conversation in, and was/is a much faster conversation experience, people just love these Web2.0 apps. Even Oprah joined Twitter.
The driving point behind most of these new sites is the ability to advertise to people. They are great for online marketers. Since that is the case, the marketers push these sites heavily. This makes them more popular. Unsuspecting internet users just go with the flow and join these sites because “everyone” is on them. Everyone else is joining for the same reason. That is the angle the marketers take. They talk about how popular the sites are before they even get popular. This in turn drives the traffic up.
In conclusion, my ability to communicate is much better thanks to phones and IRC. I’ll stick to those things. Texting and the new Web2.0 social media sites are very inefficient. The pseudo-geeks that use these things should realize that real geeks and nerds look for efficiency. These new technologies are much less efficient than what we’ve used in the past. Why are we going in reverse?
Really cool online auction idea
Posted by Randy in Internet, Web Development on May 4, 2009
At this point, most people have heard of eBay. A high percentage of them have probably signed up for an eBay account and have made a purchase on the online auction site. EBay has been the defacto online auction site for years. Through those years many other auction sites have tried to get some of that market share with little luck. Most just didn’t have the right marketing. After all marketing is a major factor in whether a site succeeds or not. One can have the best site on the internet, and if no one knows anything about it, it’ll never rank well on search engines or become a high traffic site.
Sometimes there are ideas that just can’t be ignored, even if they have suffered from poor marketing. This is especially true for one of the coolest sites I’ve come across recently. It is a great idea and already there are many sites trying to copy the idea. The idea is simple really, but it is ingenious. This site is an auction site that works slightly different. It is possible to win items and end up paying pennies on the dollar for the item’s worth. As an example, a Macbook which normally sells for around $1300 could sale for $200 bucks.
What’s the catch?
Well, the catch is all in the way you bid on the items. It’s more of a competition. It’s actually pretty addictive. Bids are incremented by a certain amount. There are regular auctions and penny auctions. The regular auctions increment by a larger amount, while penny auctions go up a penny every time someone bids. Any time a person bids, it costs them a certain amount of money. I believe the current going rate is around 75 cents per bid. When they bid, the current bid price goes up a certain amount and they become the high bidder. These auctions are also timed, but every time a person bids, it adds a little more time to the auction. So if one waits till the last second to place a bid, hoping to be the last bidder, the time goes up and a bunch of other people jump on board.
Now it doesn’t go on like this indefinitely. There is a permanent end time for auctions as well. This is pretty easy when you understand what’s going on.
It is very possible to get a great deal on something on this site. I’ve seen items go for 10% of the retail cost with the bidder only spending about ten bucks for bids. There are TV’s, game systems, laptops, and many other things that get auctioned there at amazing prices. Check it out here!!
Just How Relevant is Google
Posted by Randy in Internet, SEO, Tips, Web Development on May 1, 2009
We have all come to expect good things from Google. In fact, many of us have come to believe that Google is the best at everything they do. This is especially true with their original application, their search. For the past few years Google has ruled the search market. It got there by making the most relevant search results appear every time a user executed a search.
Those days may be over. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend that Google isn’t giving very relevant content. I don’t think I’m alone, and I have a pretty good idea why we are getting such bad results. It’s not entirely Google’s fault. There are many “white hat” and “black hat” search engine optimizations that are being used to manipulate the results. Marketers are trying to draw content to their sites. That’s how they make money after all. SEO has been used ever since the first search engine. If you check this page, Google just seems to be lagging behind in making their algorithms detect unwanted SEO.
This isn’t to say that those marketers are doing something wrong exactly. It’s just that most of them are concentrating on Google. Google is, after all, the most popular search engine. They know what works to get ranked on Google, so they do it. They do a lot of it. This skews Google’s search results, but doesn’t necessarily effect Yahoo search results because Yahoo uses different algorithms to determine where a result ranks.
Google also is notorious for de-indexing RELEVANT sites by mistake. For instance, this site seems to have been de-indexed, and I’ve not been attempting to SEO this site much at all. It could be due to my use of a WordPress plugin called All-in-one SEO pack, though that really shouldn’t have anything to do with it either.
Here is my single example that has been perplexing me for a month or so:
Once upon a time, there was a script for the XChat IRC client, called “XLack”. This script is my favorite system information script for XChat. I’ve used it for probably 4 or 5 years. The home site for the script used to be xlack.tk. This was where everyone would go to download it. That site is now a parked domain. It has been that way for close to a year. If you search google for “Xlack”, xlack.tk is still the number one site. It is no longer relevant at all. It’s a parked domain. In fact, if one tries to find a site from which to download the xlack script, one finds that there are none listed on Google.com.
Now take that same search over to yahoo.com. A simple search for “xlack download” gives you this site, which has the relevant download link of the actual script. Yahoo.com provides more relevant results. Try it on any of your search and see if you don’t get better results from Yahoo or even Live.com. I guarantee you’ll have more success from them these days than you do Google.
Twitter and me
Posted by Randy in Internet, Web Development on April 16, 2009
I first tried twitter about a month ago. I wasn’t very impressed, at the time. I have this theory that we are actually going backward in usefulness on the web. Back in the 90’s we had web apps that did a lot more than twitter, yet twitter is supposed to be sooooo amazing.
Well it is. Here’s the thing. As the internet get more and more crowded, certain things become more and more popular. Marketing is getting extremely popular on the internet. That’s not to say that marketing hasn’t been popular on the internet for many years. It’s just getting exponentially more popular. Twitter is a marketers dream. Facebook is another that works great for marketers. After all marketing and social media presence is a major factor in whether a site succeeds or not. One can have the best site on the internet, and if no one knows anything about it.
You see, these apps are just less robust versions of old forum software. They are also meant to grab a larger audience where forums are meant for a smaller niche. This broad audience and simplistic design make these apps extremely useful for advertising. Unfortunately, the normal user will see less functionality from these apps than software from 15 years ago. Those users won’t understand this, however, because they have never been exposed to that older technology. They just know that all of their family is on facebook or myspace. So they join the sites and start getting bombarded with new advertisements.
If you are smart, you’ll jump on the marketing bandwagon soon. There’s a lot of money in it.