This is something which I'm really excited about and I believe is a real killer feature for Google Search. Unfortunately with the frantic hype around Apple's announcement of the iPad, this news has not yet got the attention it really deserves. Back in October 2009 Google announced Social Search as an experiment on Google Labs. Users could then opt-in and test the feature which enabled them to find more relevant results from their broader social circle. The result is relevant information recommended by your contacts which is bound to be better than from strangers, and which results in a more personalized search experience. Yesterday Google rolled this feature out of experimental and into beta which means it's now available for everyone.The principles ...Read More
Update February 4: Following this post and my email conversations with the folks at Digg, they corrected their robots.txt file on January 29.I was recently looking through some of the major tech news sites around the web and studying their usage of the robots.txt protocol. I came across Digg.com and found a potential error in their robots file which is costing them a lot of lost search engine traffic, as well as revenue from advertising. Since it looks like an honest mistake, I thought I write about it so that you won't make the same mistake. For those of you not familiar with robots.txt, it is a way for webmasters to give instructions to search engine crawlers (also called robots and spiders) ...Read More
In a blogpost on Google's official blog tonight the company is delivering a direct attack on the Chinese government and states that Google has had enough and will effectively stop censuring its search results in China. The firm lists three points for taking this momentous decision:1- Google and a number of other organizations have lately been a target for a sophisticated cyber attack on its corporate infrastructure originating in China
2- Evidence that the attackers' main object have been to gain access to Gmail accounts of human rights activists inside China
3- Evidence that Gmail accounts of a large number of human rights activists in U.S., Europe and China has been regularly accessed by third parties. This has been achieved through using ...Read More
How could I miss this!? I blame it on becoming a father and not having enough time to keep up with all the fantastic albums being released :)Anyways, if you don't know The Swell Season then you really should check them out! The duo consists of Glen Hansard, singer of the Irish rock band The Frames, and Markéta Irglová who is an actress and musician. The couple became internationally famous for their roles in the fantastic movie Once and subsequently won an Oscar for best original song.Their new album Strict Joy was released back in October, and except for having a wicked album cover, it sounds really good. Here is a mix with two tracks from the new album, plus ...Read More
Not a week goes by without new allegations and threats against Google from German officials. Recently there were reports of federal and state officials debating to make the usage of Google Analytics illegal because of fears that Google might create detailed user profiles based on users' interests. This would consequently impose fines on websites using this tool to collect and analyze anonymous usage data from their visitors. In other bizarre news, local officials in a small city have voted for a plan to charge Google per kilometer for Street View footage.The latest assault comes from Germany's minister of justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (FDP) who in the Spiegel magazine (poor translation here) threatens with legislative actions unless Google is rethinking its what ...Read More
My name is Hessam Lavi and I live in Berlin, Germany. I'm an ex-Googler and have worked with Search and SEO for almost 5 years now. Apart from the obvious (optimization, conversion, web analytics etc) I'm also passionate about music and photography. 
