Month: June 2005

Google clearly understands the importance of grokking change. Thursday it launched and “experiment” it calls Google Sitemaps, an XML-based open standard that allows webmasters to inform Google of website changes. Slashdot thread here. Danny on this here.

From its blog post:

We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It’s a beta “ecosystem” that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.

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Earlier this week I spent some time on the phone with Bob Wyman, CTO and founder of PubSub. Over the past year Bob has been heckling me for focusing on “retrospective search – Google and Yahoo, et al, and not paying attention to his offering of” prospective search,” or searching what he calls the “GrayWeb” – that part of the web which is available and open, but is rarely seen because our view of the web is so dependent on traditional approaches to search. Wyman focuses on that portion of the GrayWeb that changes rapidly – the “ChangingWeb” where the future hits the present, where the unique element of the dataset is the fact of its newness. That window – when the information is knowable, but before it becomes forever eternalized in The Index – is where PubSub lives.

In short, PubSub crawls (mostly) blog feeds and offers a service that allows you to stay abreast of topics you choose as new information breaks. (PubSub just announced a political cut of this kind of data, for example). To me, PubSub felt a lot like Google or Yahoo news alerts on steroids, a Feedster clone. But after talking to Bob, I came away convinced that there’s more to PubSub than meets the eye.

PubSub is named for “publish/subscribe” – a well traveled piece of IT theory that has, at its core, the assumption of structured data. Back in the earlier days of the computer biz, Apple, DEC, and others realized the need for users to be alerted with things change – in a database publishing model, for example, a new rev of a document would create an alert. These companies invented publish-subscribe models that, for the most part, really never took off. Why? I think the code was overspecified, and the user interface cumbersome. Wyman worked on pubsub apps at DEC – in fact, he built the pubsub piece of AllInOne, a Notes-like application that had a brief moment in the sun in the late 80s, if memory serves.

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Now here’s a Google algorithm update they must have named just for me. Nicknamed Bourbon, (I guess this is better than Florida), the update is ongoing. According to “GoogleGuy,” a Google employee who hangs out in search related forums and assuages the fears of webmasters (he’s been know to show up here too…):

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well. So my “weather report” along the lines of http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000095.html would be a recommendation that rankings may still change somewhat over the next several days.

Hat tip:

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