When you search on Google you often get results that have nothing to do with your original search query. Take the search for Appel for instance. You probably would not expect sites about Apple in the search results. Google on the other hand thinks that is what the user is looking for and displays three [...]

Categories: Google

Search giant Google lately has added Google +1 buttons to nearly every web property the company owns. Most Google users may notice the +1 buttons on Google search result pages where they are placed next to each site url. In addition, users who are logged in see if they or their Google+ friends have recommended [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Google Chrome

One of the stories that dominated tech news yesterday was that Mozilla started shipping a version of the Firefox browser with Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the default search engine instead of Google Search. Some news sites made it look like as if Mozilla dropped Google as the browser’s search provider in favor of Microsoft’s [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Search Engines

I reviewed the Personal Blocklist extension for the Chrome web browser back in February of this year. The extension offered to block specific domains from appearing in Google’s search results. Blocked domains and sites would simple be removed from results pages. One of the issues I had with the extension was that alternatives were not [...]

Categories: Browsing, Google Chrome, Search Engines

Advanced search operators like the + or – symbols can be used to optimize a search. The – operator for instance makes sure that the term following is not included on pages in the search results. An example for this is the query technology -blog which would only display results that would match the technology [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines

If you have been using Google Search in past years you may have noticed a cached and similar link next to nearly every search result on Google. The cached entry linked to a cached copy of the web page that Google stored on their own servers. The similar link on the other hand listed related [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines

Google back in May 2010 enabled https on their core search domain. Users back then were able to access https://www.google.com/ manually for improved security and privacy on the Google Search engine. Google quickly ran into a problem that the company did not anticipate at the time. Companies, organizations and schools began to block the search [...]

Categories: Google

I have only a good dozen websites listed under my Google account in Webmaster Tools. In case you do not know what that is, it is a service for webmaster to verify domain ownership to get additional information about the status of each website added in the Google search engine. You can manage crawl rates, [...]

Categories: Google

My story on Cnet’s Download.com installer that the company added to many downloads on their website has sparked the interest of other websites and software developers. Users who download software from download.com now download an installer first that comes bundled with a toolbar. This web installer then offers to download and install the installer of [...]

Categories: Security, The Web