Fagoogle Butterfly

Well Fagoogle did not last long. But didn't anyone notice the butterfly in that logo? I think MSN and Google would make for very strange bedfellows.



Sorry, couldn't resist!

Screen Scraping Resources

Old article, but a great resource on screen scraping.



Includes Philipp Lenssen's (of FindForward) screen-scraping With PHP5, an article on scraping almost any website and a few other goodies. A must read.



Cheers to Paul Hiles of Erimus Web Design for the dig.

Yahoo Dropping "Web" From Search

I was reviewing a post in one of the forums concerning Yahoo and stumbled upon something odd at Yahoo Search. While conducting a search for Singapore Web Hosting, the word Web was not bolded in the result titles. Furthermore, the cache versions of those pages did not reflect that word as being highlighted. The word, web, was being bolded in the abstracts. Just not the other two areas.



The same phenomenon happened for singapore web design. Other variations, same thing (such as texas web design, free web design, etc.) Quite strange.



Close examination of the results revealed that this was not always the case. Two results out of the top 100 did have the word web bolded in the title and highlighted in the cache version of the pages. Also -- the paid result titles had the word Web in bold lettering.



I immediately went to Daniel Brandt's Yahoo-Watch to see if they may be possible SiteMatch sites.



I ran the one query and saw that those two did not have the big green dollar sign next to them. Actually Daniel appears to have dropped all of the usual designations from the results, so I am not sure if they are SiteMatch sites or not. When did he stop showing the designations?



This is a screenshot (opens in new window) of what I saw. Ignore the red arrow on the one result with the directory category. The directory does not have any bearing on whether Web appears bolded in the title/cache or not. (I was too lazy to remove it.)

Backlinks Grabber : Free Online Tool

This is a cool tool from the people at TextLinkBrokers, the Advanced Backlinks Grabber a free labor-saving tool designed to be the fastest, easiest way to compile a very large list of sites relevant to a keyword or phrase.



What this tool does exactly:

• Performs a Google search for up to the top 20 sites ranking for that keyword.
  
  
• Crawls their backlinks and lists them by Pagerank, while eliminating duplicates and sites under the specified PR threshhold.

Then it sends you an email containing a list of all the backlinks that were found multiple times in the search - these are considered 'themed backlinks' - in an html and/or .csv list, with PageRank, for importing into Arelis or other software.



I gave this tool a try and it does exactly as advertised. I recieved an email with a whole slew of PR5+ pages (as I requested it to do) that appear in the Google results for a link: check.



UPDATE: Aaron Wall reported that Gmail "clipped" the report that was sent to him, and he did not get to see it all. Due to the amount of processing time needed to produce this report, it might be advisable to have it sent to a regular POP3 email account.

AuthorPower : Online Author & Editor Resources

Writing articles for the web is an art. Getting your articles published with your byline hinges on a number of factors including style, grammar, spelling, proper crediting of sources, and unbiasedness to name a few.



If you are considering writing an article for an online publication, take a look at the ZATZ authors' resource which is loaded with author guidelines, tips and toolkits. Even if you are considering publishing articles, the site has more of the same for your editors.

Google Browser Beta Invites?

I don't know the credibility of this, but a recent post at SEO Chat Forums by ericwfrost eludes to a Beta download for the new Google Browser. Downloads are apparently by invite only.



I think that the Gbrowser buzz is going to eclipse that of their recent IPO.

SEO and Web Development

Holy Moly! A good freind, SEbasic, was on hiatus for a while at his SEO and Web Development blog. Now he is back with a vengance.



If you are new to this game and need some quick information that will get you up to speed, pay his site a visit. Start with the Outsourcing Your SEO and work your way down the page links on the left. He covers DocType Declarations, Hidden Text, Basic SEO Tips, Search Engine Glossary of Terms, Cloaking, Doorway Pages, and has a useful list of Information Links.