From the category archives:

Search Engines

Strange, Weird, And Unique Internet Searches

by Chaosmap on July 30, 2009

We all know that the Internet has everything—and we do mean everything that anyone could ever want to read about, see, or purchase. But how do people find what they are looking for on the Internet? And what kind of crazy stuff are they really searching for? Many sites and articles are devoted solely to cataloging just this sort of information.

Here are some strange search terms that people used to find www.tenerlife-training.net a news cycling blog, according to a blog post by the site’s owner:

• “sea snake santa”
• “eggbeater review candy”
• “purple kettle”

Who knows what motivates people in their quest for information? A Google search for “strangest Internet search queries” lead us to the following top results for certain terms:

For the search term “Google is”

• “your friend”
• “taking over the world”
• “watching you”

For the search term “what is”

• “what is Twitter?”
• “what is my IP address?”
• “what is love?”
• “what is a short sale?”

And finally, for the search term “news is”

• “news is free”
• “news is a verb”
• “news is actually manufactured in a complex social process.”
• “news is people”

So to recap, whether you’re searching for a purple kettle, a sea snake Santa, the definition of news, or answers to existential questions about life, love, and your IP address, the Internet is clearly the place to go.

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Four Reasons Why Your Website Needs A Sitemap

by Chaosmap on January 4, 2009

A site map of what links from the English Wiki...

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, but that is only the case if you make a sitemap for the sake of having one. Taking the time to understand the importance of having a well constructed sitemap means that you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your website needs. This will give you an enormous edge on any competitors who haven’t yet realized the importance of the sitemap.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with greater ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page—they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines. It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

For the above reasons and for many more as well, it is obvious to see why it is very important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. By doing so, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

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Younger Children Less Accustomed To Internet Advertising, Study

November 1, 2008

Image by Getty Images via Daylife According to a recent survey by Nielsen Online, children aged 12-17 are less exposed to, and less accustomed to Internet advertising than previously thought. As more marketers and businesses are beginning to rely on online advertising for revenue generation, the results of this survey, according to Jon Gibs, vice [...]

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How to use Search Engines – in Plain English (video)

October 15, 2008

This is a simple, 3 minute video from the commoncraft folks. It just came out, and is worth the watch! Learn how to dissect the vast amount of information quickly, by using Google Search, Yahoo Search, MSN Search and others — they all work in a similar way. Web Search Strategies in Plain English from [...]

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If Google Recommends Using Sitemaps – Should You?

October 3, 2008

Before we begin – What is a Sitemap? Google first introduced Sitemaps in June 2005 so web publishers could publish lists of links from their sites. Shortly afterward, MSN and Yahoo announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol along with Google. Sitemaps are now everywhere on the net, not just on the corporate business site. [...]

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Sergey starts a blog!

September 20, 2008

I’ve checked with folks at Google and they confirmed that http://too.blogspot.com/ is Sergey Brin’s blog. The name “too” reflects Sergey’s additional life outside work. One of his first posts is about the fact that he might be more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older. That’s based on data from 23andMe, the personal genetics [...]

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Shiny Chrome bits, plus a fresh tip

September 20, 2008

A few neat Chrome things that I’ve seen recently: CrossOver ported the open-source Chromium browser over to Mac and Linux using Wine. Bear in mind that this is more of a proof-of-concept and not the official version, but you can still download the binaries and play with it. If you like the look and feel [...]

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The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Shopping Checkout Processes

September 20, 2008

by Stoney deGeyter This is a continuation of a series of website marketing checklists. Check out all Web Marketing Checklists in this series. What this is about: This list covers items regarding the actual checkout process of the shopping experience, after products are added and the visitor moves to complete the purchase of the items [...]

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Bet You Didn’t Know Micro Blogging Could Be This Simple

September 20, 2008

by Karri Flatla When I finally did get on the micro blogging bandwagon (and no, I don’t count Facebook, not even the “new” one), I put my profile on pretty much all of the Twitter-ish sites I could find. Hey, why not? It’s sort of like one of those drinking games where you do a [...]

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Yahoo-Rhapsody Team Up Brings Music to Search

September 20, 2008

Yahoo has teamed up with Rhapsody to enable users to listen to the full copies of songs right on the Yahoo! Search results page. This is in addition to the other Rhapsody collaboration which provides music artist shortcut on the page. Whereas before, Yahoo search users can only find quick details about artists, this time [...]

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