Would Twitter have the success it has now if it wasn’t at Twitter.com? What about Digg, or Facebook, or MySpace, or Yelp? Before social networks appeared at those domains, there were other pages at those locations.

I took a time trip to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to see what [...]

When someone types “George Washington” into a search box, they are probably more interested in the Revolutionary War general and President than some random George in Washington. A search for “Washington Hotels” is more likely looking for lodging in Washington than hotels named Washington. Searches for places with signs that say “Washington Slept [...]

Three patents granted today to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all describe how each of the search engines might take a close look at page addresses, or URLs on dynamic web sites.

I wrote about the patent from Microsoft back when it had just been published as a pending patent application, in Microsoft Creating Rules for Canonical [...]

I’ve been asking myself how local governments could use their websites to help them govern more effectively and save money. The question led to this post.

Building Bridges in Communities

Reading through one of the local weekly papers in my area I noticed a large public notice announcing a public hearing for the replacement of [...]

There’s been some recent news about the possibility of Google working with the Dish Network to bring searches for television programming and YouTube videos to TVs, reported at places like the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ article tells us that besides actual tests of a Google settop box that allows searching for TV programming, [...]

With more than 3 billion search queries a month, a search engine like Yahoo might be tempted to take a close look at, and analyze the data it receives in its search logs. That data might tell it what people tend to search for at different times of the day, and different days of [...]

A misconception about web pages that lingered for a long time on the Web was that most people who visit your web site will enter your site on your home page. Another one is that the meta description you choose for a page will usually be what a search engines shows as the snippet, [...]

Sometimes when you search at one of the major search engines, you’ll see an extra set of links showing up under one of the listings in those search results. Referred to as either quicklinks or site links, most often those will show up for the listing at the top of the search results like in [...]