I have to admit that I have not used the Wolfram Alpha search engine as much as I should have in the past year. The specialized search engine, the company calls it a computational knowledge engine, offers some interesting features that other search engines do not offer. One of those features is its password generator, [...]

Categories: Online Services

So called scraper sites or scrapers are one of the dark phenomenons of the Internet. The sites basically republish the RSS feed of one or multiple unique websites on a domain, usually without rights or link back to the original source. Technology in this sector has advanced in past years, and scraping has been combined [...]

Categories: Web Development

So called sitelinks are displayed if a specific search term has an authority site associated with it. If you search for Ghacks for instance, you will notice that my site is displayed at the top. Below the standard listing are the site links, which previously used about the same amount of space as a standard [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines, Web Development

Google launched a new search engine algorithm earlier this year that they internally called the Panda update. The idea behind Panda was to introduce a quality variable into the ranking equation. Sites with good quality contents would see an increase, sites with low level quality or article farms would see a decrease. That worked so-so [...]

Categories: Web Development

Creating a new website can be a very rewarding process. Webmasters usually run into a phase shortly after they have setup the site where they have to wait until the site gets indexed in the big search engines. This can take minutes, hours, days and sometimes even weeks, as it depends on the search engine [...]

Categories: Google, Web Development

Bing back in February announced the integration of Facebook likes into the search results. Friend recommendations appeared only on some results pages at that time. This changed yesterday with the roll out of the second stage of Facebook integration. What’s the reasoning behind adding friend likes to the search results? According to Microsoft, it stems [...]

Categories: Facebook, Microsoft, Search Engines

You may know that I have switched by primary search engine from Google to Bing sometime last year. I was fed up with Google for several reasons, including their constant push of Google owned properties into the search engine results and the deteriorating quality of search. I suspected that Bing’s quality was not really better [...]

Categories: Search Engines

FilesTube is a popular meta file search engine that lets you search file hosting sites for hosted files. It supports a variety of file hosts, from Rapidshare and Mediafire over 4Shared and Megaupload to Filesonic and Fileserve. The search engine is extremely popular, with an Alexa metrics rank of 145 at the moment. When you [...]

Categories: Online Services, Search Engines

A common attack form on the Internet is to optimize web pages or domain for specific keywords to make them appear on the first search result pages of popular search engines such as Google or Bing. The attack is enabled once the page or domain receives first visitors from the search engines, which are more [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox