Category: Site Related

Hey Searchbloggers – One of Searchblog’s ad clients was wondering if they could engage you in a short survey. If you’re game, please answer these 6 simple questions, it’ll help tune the ads on the site. (For the survey to be useful, I can’t say who the advertiser is!)

I promise not to do this very often, and appreciate your help. Thanks.

This morning you may notice some subtle changes to Searchblog. We’re working to fix some design inconsistencies, clean up the back end code, and streamline the search and archives function. Please give me feedback! Thanks.

Way back in the early days of this site, when its pagerank crossed 5 or so and traffic started to pick up, I got hit by some pretty hardcore comment spammers. This was not hand rolled stuff, this was robot love, and lots of it. It brought the CPU to its knees, hitting my site with multiple sessions and scores of links in each comment.

Of course, we all know why folks comment spam – to gain search juice. My fearless sysadmin and I fought back with all manners of countermeasures, and we ultimately found a solution which pretty much defeated the robots – a neat little hack that pretty much ensures robots cannot get in. Humans, however, can still get in, in particular if they obey some simple rules – no more than two embedded URLs in the comment, and no previous record of bad behavior.

Well, I’m sad to say it seems that a new form of comment spam has sprung up – the human comment spammer. I’ve been somewhat bipolar about these guys – I mean, they have to earn a living, and sometimes their attempts at feigning relevance are hilarious – but it’s time to draw the line. More often than not, they leave relatively inane comments, like the one in the title of this post, and are nearly always hopelessly polite. They usually have no more than one link, often to some random site in Germany or Bulgaria looking for search wuffie.

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I’m focused on pushing a rev of the new FM site this week, so my posts are short, not very analytical, and basically not very fun. For me to write, or, I imagine, for you to read. But I do have a lot on my mind, so stay with me through this week…thanks.

The big news today is clearly Google’s move into selling video (read: an entirely new revenue stream and a very disruptive market force for cable, on demand, DirecTV, etc) and its more aggressive focus on becoming a desktop software distributor (with Pack).

I’ll have more to say on this, but I’ll have to be content with taking a “second day” approach to the story. Why? I’m under embargo. I spoke with Google about this stuff earlier in the week, and agreed to not divulge the contents of our conversation until Google lifted its embargo (in this case, it’s when Page speaks today). This practice of embargo is fine with me, nearly every tech commpany does it. And I always honor them, though I have a policy of writing about things if they break early, as this news did.

But because our conversation had more details than have hit the press, I’m going to wait to post. It’s Friday in any case, and who knows what else might come up?

Every so often I use this site to promote something – well, something besides the book, of course. This is one of those times, so bear with me. FM is hiring. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, here’s the info….

Many noticed this morning that my site was oddly…Chinese. Well, it was a glitch as we were moving to a new server, nothing more. Got some index files mixed up, but all is well now. Sorry about that!