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Are You Ready For The Google Mobile Friendly Update?

April 20, 2015 By Digital Studio

Are you ready for Mobilegeddon? Google is releasing the mobile friendly update.

More than half of Internets biggest companies will “disappear” from Google on mobile devices as the US technology giant changes the way it ranks searches.

Google says businesses with desktop-only sites will still appear in searches but they will be ranked lower then those tailored for mobile use.

“As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns,” the company wrote in a blog post.

How do I know if my site is mobile friendly?

If your site is already indexed by Google as mobile friendly is to see if your site has the “mobile friendly” label in the mobile search results. Using the mobile friendly testing tool will show if you pass the test, but Google may still need some improvements to update their index to know that your web pages are mobile friendly.

If I make my site mobile friendly today, how long will it take Google to pick up on those changes?

The algorithm is real time. Google has to crawl your web pages to determine if they are mobile friendly. Tests show that it can take anywhere from an hour to over 72-hours if you do everything right for Google to show your web pages as mobile friendly.

How can I make my site mobile friendly?

Contact us

Filed Under: Google News

IE 7 vs Firefox 1.5 vs Opera 9 – The gap is closing

July 15, 2007 By Digital Studio

The upcoming releases of IE, Firefox, and Opera show that innovation in Web Browser Development has just come to an end. Companies are simply integrating the more popular features of rival products into their browsers. No radical changes are planned in any of the upcoming browser releases. It is very possible that in near future – IE, Firefox, and Opera will all have similar features and similar, tight interfaces.

1. IE 7 includes tabbed browsing, a capability that Firefox and Opera have offered for a while.

2. IE 7 has an integrated search box similar to that in Firefox and Opera.

3. Both IE 7 and Firefox 1.5 offer an easy method for deleting personal browsing data (browser cache, URL history, saved forms) via one menu option. The feature already exists in Opera 8.5.

4. Firefox 1.5 offer automatic updates similar to IE.

5. Opera comes with several advanced features that you can get in Firefox only with add-ons, and that IE lacks entirely.

Erik Larkin compares the three most popular browser on earth – Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1. He also mentions Flock, a social browsing application. Flock rethinks the browser as a tool for creating Weblogs, organizing bookmarks and connecting with others online.

IE 7: The new Phishing Filter in IE aims to warn users if they visit a known or potential phishing site–a function previously available only via third-party toolbars.

Firefox 1.5: Firefox 1.5 includes drag-and-drop tab reordering. The new Auto-update process is streamlined and smooth.

Opera 9: Users can choose which Web sites can run JavaScript or display images. And the impressive built-in RSS feed handler now supports Atom 1.0. However, Opera has no plans to introduce Firefox-like extensions, so if you don’t like the way it does something, you’re stuck.

Browser Market Share: Though IE has been losing market share, it remains dominant yet. The number of users jumping to Firefox has slowed recently leading some experts to suggest only a finite number of people are willing or able to try an alternate browser.

Read full story at PCWorld – Browser Face-Off

Filed Under: Apache and Linux, Blog, Google News, Search Engine Optimising

Google readies custom search engine service

October 25, 2006 By Digital Studio

Google is launching a new service designed to let website publishers build their own search engines using Google’s massive index of page links.

The Google Custom Search Engine service will let anyone, from individuals to organisations, put a Google-powered search box on their websites that only searches certain sites and pages. That way, the publisher of a website about hockey for example, could put a search box on his home page that only returns links to pages about that sport that he hand-picked. The service will also let publishers have a search engine that taps Google’s index in full but gives preference to results from websites they have pre-selected.

With Custom Search Engine, Google joins others that provide similar services, including Yahoo and Rollyo. These custom engines are part of the social search concept, which taps users to refine the search engine experience by contributing, categorizing, tagging and sharing search results. For example, site publishers using the Google service can let others contribute to their custom index.

Designed to be extremely easy and intuitive to use, the service will let site publishers build their own search engine in a matter of minutes through the use of menus and wizards, Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said.

The service is hosted on Google servers, so site publishers don’t get access to search query logs, a sensitive topic for users who are concerned about the privacy of their search activities. However, the entire search experience happens in the publishers’ sites, and they can personalise the search results page so that its layout is in tune with the rest of their pages, Mayer said. Google will display contextual ads with search results, but sites run by government agencies, nonprofit organisations and universities can opt out of this.

Google stood to benefit not only from sharing ad revenue with publishers but also from propagating the availability of its search engine, analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, Greg Sterling, said.

“People are doing searches on all kinds of websites, not just search engines,” he said. “Search has become the Web’s navigational paradigm.”

Meanwhile, there was considerable demand from publishers for custom search engines because they realised that providing that capability made their websites more attractive to their visitors, Sterling said.

The new service will become available Monday night (US time) at http://www.google.com/coop/cse

Filed Under: Blog, Google News

Net Buzz: Google Docs & Spreadsheets

October 25, 2006 By Digital Studio

When Google talks, people listen. Therefore, when Google offers alternatives to Microsoft, it is prudent to consider their impact. Google Docs & Spreadsheets, now in beta, is a multipronged assault on Fortress Microsoft.

The service provides documents and spreadsheets, and while many users also need presentation capabilities — if only occasionally — there’s no question these are the two main pillars of office usage.

As to be expected, Docs & Spreadsheets is an online service. The docs part came from Google’s purchase of Upstartle and its Writely online collaboration service with the spreadsheet component developed internally at Google Labs.

Having another office option causes us to examine, once again, how much is enough — and having it available online leads to a comparison with Microsoft’s Office Live online offering.

I’ve lost count of the number of applications that can open and manipulate .doc files on Windows, Linux, Mac or live on the Web. And though each has limitations, the more alternatives that are available the less the limitations seem to matter.

Return to your youth for a moment and conjure up a vision of the overlapping circles of the Venn diagrams you learned about in school.

Think of each circle representing a Microsoft Office alternative overlapping where they share a common feature or function. Each newcomer duplicates what it believes is the core set of functions required to be viable. While there will be differences among vendors, there will be a significant overlap as each vendor opts for the most significant functions.

As users, if we can confine ourselves to this core set of functions, we have documents that are almost universally accessible. This is a strong motivation to reduce the features and functions we use in building our Office documents.

Moving to the online element, Microsoft Office Live is much more. Its two fee-based offerings, Live Essentials and Live Collaboration, appear to overlap the basic Docs & Spreadsheets functions but really seem to be focused on attracting businesses that want to outsource not only their Web site hosting but also hosting of business applications and storage. Office Live appears to be a true software-as-a-service offering.

So, while a direct comparison is probably not appropriate, it is worthwhile to understand what Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets can bring you — especially because it is free.

You can move, copy and save documents easily from your local machine to your Google storage and convert them to, say, PDF, RTF or OpenOffice in the process. You can e-mail them to a special version of your GMail address and a few minutes later there they are online. Collaboration with other GMail users is just a click away.

So while Docs & Spreadsheets isn’t likely to cause tremors in the corporate IT world, small/midsize business and corporate users might, as they have in the past, start a grass-roots movement in this direction. Enterprise architects would do well to have a look for themselves.

Filed Under: Blog, Google News

Google to offer book downloads

October 16, 2006 By Digital Studio

Google has expanded its controversial book search service to allow people to download whole copies of books in PDF format to their computers, with the ability to print them out.

The feature will go live Wednesday at the service’s Web site (http://books.google.com), said Adam Smith, group product manager of Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

The books available for download will only be those that are in the public domain and thus not protected by copyright, Smith said. Until now, people have been able to read these public-domain books on the Google Book Search Web site, but not download and print them, he said.

Google will not allow downloading of copyrighted books, not even those for which it has obtained permission from the copyright holders to display their full text, Smith said.

The vast majority of the public-domain books available for download have been scanned as part of the library project of the Google Book Search service, Smith said. For the project, Google is scanning portions of the collections of some of the world’s largest academic libraries, including Google partners Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University.

However, critics say Google can’t scan copyrighted books it obtains from the libraries unless it gets permission from the copyright holders. The issue is at the center of two separate lawsuits brought against Google last year, one by The Authors Guild and three authors, and another one by The Association of American Publishers on behalf of five of its members: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons.

Filed Under: Blog, Google News

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