David from the American Mathematical Society has posted an explanation of the mathematical operations that determines Google's Pagerank.

Phew. At least that's understood then.

I found this page about how Google sees itself as developing the "perfect search engine" interesting...

PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

Just in passing, I used Google's search engine interface on my mobile phone this past weekend, it's staggeringly fast and surprisingly usable despite not all sites being mobile browser friendly... including this one. Uh oh.

Sometimes I really struggle with the concept of people tricking search engines into listing their sites by including popular keywords on their pages, yet the keywords they have used have little relevance to the content on their sites. They simply serve to draw more people to click on their sites in say, a Google search. It kinda defeats what search tools like Google are trying to achieve.

Gerry writes,

"Sometimes, those involved in search engine optimization lose sight of certain absolutely critical issues. The objective should not be to optimize for any particular search engine. It is to optimize for people who search. This is a subtle but essential distinction. It's easy to get obsessed with the technical aspects of Google and Yahoo!"

Here is the article in full: Search engine optimization: beyond search keywords

Matthew Eaves is using his new site to research Google Juice

egoSurf appears to be the work of one person, totaling nine hours over the Christmas period.

We are your typical webmasters. Ego maniacs. We need to be stroked in many ways. Hit counts, page views, bandswidth usages, and, the whole grail of them all - an excellent ranking in search engines.

Think he means, Holy Grail. There is some truth in what he says... not sure about ego maniac description however!

Give us a search term, tell us your web sites (domains, resources etc), and where you want to look, and we go do the hard work. We'll query your search engine of choice, then check what results point back to your domains. For each 'hit'??, you get egoPoints.

So, I have searched for me using egoSurf. I have 7524 egoPoints at present... does that mean if I become more 'visible' to Google and ranked higher in their searches for my keywords, I'll increase my egoPoints?

Hmmm. Could be handy this... especially as the scoring system is easier to see whether your Search Engine Optimisation work to gain a better Google ranking has had any effect. Since Google rankings are between 1 and 10... small changes / improvements just can't be represented... whereas egoPoints would perhaps give a better indication because of the wider scale... maybe? Needs to be explored some more. Interesting nevertheless.

Just found a Google Page rank extension for Firefox. It's an easy extension to install - just click the link to install in a Firefox browser. You might have to tell Firefox that it's okay to allow this to be installed (security feature which you'd rather have than didn't)

With the advent of (Tiger's) Dashboard widgets, I've chosen not to install Konfabulator and the Page Rank Widget... I figured that one set of Widgets is enough for anyone... plus the floating panel was either always hidden behind browser windows or on top getting in the way!

Read more about Google Page Rank. Stephen Powell refers to it as a measure of Google Juice...

Spotted this Google Page rank tool on Tom Smith's blog I didn't know it existed either. Perfect.

I've now crept from a respectable 4/10 to a fairly desirable 6/10.

So many people use Google - it is the king of all search engines - those green with envy look to better it, read on...

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4570868/

Some of you will know why I've put my old Filemaker blog to bed....ok I'll remind you....Google wouldn't index my blog entries, cos Google couldn't follow Filemaker URL's.

I'm now using Drupal and guess what, Google hasn't indexed these blog entries either! Oh good.

I'm wondering if this is to do with Drupal URL's that look a bit like this

http://www.jonathansblog.net/?q=node/view/20/

Google doesn't seem to like following links with '?' or '=' in the URL. I did a bit of searching on the net for people who might have experienced the same, they have! Luckily, Drupal supports 'clean url's' which turn this.....

http://www.jonathansblog.net/?q=node/view/20/

into

http://www.jonathansblog.net/node/view/20/

How neat is that!?

It took a bit of doing though, for anyone who needs to do this, here's how....

1. In Apache's conf/httpd.conf do the following:

uncomment LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
uncomment AddModule mod_rewrite.c
for the drupal site, in the directory node, set AllowOverride All

2. In root directory of drupal, edit .htaccess:

verify RewriteEngine on
set RewriteBase if required

3. In Drupal navigate to /administer/configuration and set Clean URLs to Enabled.

Fingers crossed that Google indexes my content. I nearly got to the point of starting my blog in Moveable Type, I'm so glad I didn't in the end, I do like Drupal. Also, people have described Moveble Type as the Windows version of blog software!

Google Alert provides users with regular updates on upto three 'search strings' or 'keywords' of their choice. My top three are 'artist illustrator', 'Jonathan Furness' and 'Ultralab'.

Essentially this service performs these three searches and emails you (sometimes daily) with the details of any new webpages containing these keywords. Handy if you are interested in how your website or chosen keywords are being used on the Internet.

Here's an example of what Google Alert can send you.....

Google Alert has new results which can also be browsed interactively:

|   Search 1: artist illustrator
|   tracking top 50 of about 330,000 results

48. Delphine B, artist illustrator

With all the Net surfers, the one day old visitors or one evening...
Welcome on my site! Artist, illustrator, portraitist... A whole program!!!
...  

http://www.chez.com/oeil/index2.html


|   Search 2: Jonathan Furness
|   tracking top 50 of about 4,500 results

36. LTO : Collaborative online projects - summary

 ... Collaborative online projects - summary. A Day in the Life of??????? by
Jonathan Furness. Explore children??????s imagination and creativity ...  

http://www.take2theweb.com/pub/intuitivemedia/lto/ea.html?1059131626


|   Search 3: Ultralab
|   tracking top 50 of about 23,700 results

35. Topic Exchange: Channel 'ultralab'

part of the Internet Topic Exchange. Topic Exchange: Channel
'ultralab'. ... About the 'ultralab' channel. Also
available in RSS 2.0 (XML). You are not logged in. ...  

http://topicexchange.com/t/ultralab/

Fellow bloggers, Matthew Eaves and Pete Bradshaw are a little surprised that after Google has crawled their blogs, that they appear number one in the Google listings!

So how hard is it to get the number one spot? Well, that depends on several factors, from the 'search string', e.g. ultralab cheese to keywords used in your pages and how many links people have made to your pages.

There aren't very many Pete Bradshaw's around, nor many Matthew Eaves' though there is another Matt Eaves on the net! Likewise, not many Jonathan Furness' either.

I'd be really impressed if they made it to number one as 'matthew's blog' or 'pete's blog' - not such an easy feat. Getting Tom Smith to the number two spot is pretty staggering, and slightly bewildering - just what would it take to take the number one spot?

I'm going after Jonathan's Blog for the top spot, I'm currently number four, with my old blog taking the third place. My old blog has been running for some years now, plus it has a few significant sites pointing to it. Maybe if i let them know of my new blog, it might make a difference - I don't really want to kill it off.

URL's help a little too, having www.jonathansblog.net as the web address should count for something.