I am sure there are many such guides available, but I think that this article from Computer Weekly is a nice short summary of how we got to where we are.

On the 7th of September, it will be 10 years since Google was first formed by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They rose metiorically to be the kings of the search engine at a time when search engines were getting increasingly important as the web grew and grew.

They are now at such a size, with a wide range of products and services that even the colossus Microsoft is getting the jitters.

It’s latest offering is a web browser. On initial inspection Google’s Chrome browser looks fantastic. It is much less cluttered than other browsers, but more importantly it is very fast, using multi-threading techniques and advanced memory management to keep it running smoothly.

Also, interestingly, Microsoft are not only concerned about the challenge to Internet Explorer’s dominance; Google Gears has been around for a while but is now part of the browser. This allows you to store data used in your Google Apps (Word and Excel replacements) on your own PC. This means you can still use your Google Apps if you don’t have an internet connection: one of the limitations of Google’s online Apps when compared with Microsoft Office.

Some are saying this is more than a browser: Chrome + Gears may well turn out to be the new desktop operating system - a serious threat to Microsoft’s dominance.

Early days, but this is surely the technology of the future: all your apps online, data stored in the cloud, and monthly subscriptions - like TV. The software companies certainly want us to go that way: it will reduce software piracy; make rolling out new versions much simpler and overall keep much tighter control over their intellectual property.

With YouTube threatening the dominance of the big TV companies and the Google Phone, Google are getting bigger all the time: an incredible growth in such a short time.

Happy Birthday Google!

There are a lot of these “un-boxing” videos around the web nowadays — geeks opening their new gadgets for the first time and showing off their features.

This one is definitely my favourite.

More viral marketing fun.

Our Man Dave Haygarth has obviously been moonlighting!

What a fantastic example of viral marketing!

Search Engines are providing a service, and as such, they’re only as good as the service they provide.

As a SEO person, I’ll repeatedly advise my clients that Google is THE one to optimise for in the UK, largely on the grounds that it’s simply the search engine that people use most.

What’s really perturbing, (or perhaps really reassuring?) is that Google gets it wrong.  It’s a natural thing, and people in Google spend so much time striving to get it better and better, but inevitably at times they just get the results plain wrong.

A couple of classic examples can be seen in my hobby and obsession of cycling.  I scour the internet for content on cycling from all sorts of angles; best bargains - niche, bespoke advice - hard-to-come-by event results, etc.  It’s a microcosm of the SEO world… commerce, blogs, forums, mainstream, niche, etc.

I wanted to check out some reviews this evening of “Frogglegs Cantilever Brakes” - a pretty niche product as it happens - something important to me at this particular time for whatever reason. Top of the Google results this evening for “frogglegs review” was this page. It sums it up for me - when things go wrong. I searched for a review - of which there are many on the internet, but unless you’re a search maestro, you’re going to have to wade through a good number of ‘SEO’d sites before you get to the ‘real thing’.

Another classic irritation is - perhaps more seriously - a very well respected site - Wiggle - who have made much of their ‘Hitwise’ awards for great SEO. So much so, it seems, that they attract clicks from people (experienced SEOs included… ) for products that they don’t actually have for sale. I went on their site having Googled the prices for a particular set of cycle road racing tyres and found that they weren’t immediately available. No bother - they were available in 2-5 days. But hang on… 2-5 days passed…. two weeks passed… I had to check my account to find out where this product I’d bought - on the strength of its visibility in Google - was. “Should be in stock within 30 days”. Hang on…? I’ve already paid - I Googled it - you came up tops…!

The lesson for today is that sometimes SEO does its job a bit too well. Yes - sometimes it pays my bills, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I knew I’d just brought traffic to a site only for that traffic to be effectively useless. (And okay smart alecs… I also can’t sleep at night because of a three month old baby !)

Crazy idea: rapping about SEO. A bit of fun but he does make some very valid points!

My favourite is his rap about “conversion”: basically, stop focussing on ranking and hits, and work on converting visitors to paying customers.

Whoever would have thought SEO would have its own budding hip hop star.

Catalogue|E-Business - one of the leading magazines for online and catalogue retailers has posted an article about using Email and Social Media as your marketing tools in the tough times ahead. These marketing methods are both cost-effective and measurable.

I would also add Search Engine Optimisation into this mix.

Most SEOs will tell you that if your site is built in Flash it will essentially be invisible to Google (and most other search engines).

Thats about to change as Google has announced improved indexing of Flash-based content.

However, as e-Consultancy quite rightly point out, designers should not see this as a reason to build websites totally from Flash: Google still cannot use the tag structure as it can with HTML to work out the importance of keywords through their use in titles, headings and links, so Flash should still be used sparingly.

Also, designers often create Flash-based sites that “re-invent the wheel” when it comes to user interface design, often making sites difficult to use and usually in-accessible to those with disabilities. You also often cannot link to a page within a Flash site as they are all essentially part of the same page.

Advanced Javascript and CSS effects can often help create a feature-rich interface without the need for Flash, but Flash does still have it’s place in certain areas of presentation, not least in streaming video where it is now the most popular format (as seen on YouTube).

If ever you think SEO is just a long list of boxes to tick, you get a wonderful impression of how complicated the search engines’ algorithms are when these odd things happen.

Here in England, we have the option on Google to search “the web,” or “pages from the UK.” Watch what happens to Apple - the world’s 33rd biggest brand - when you check the “pages from the uk” option…
Google Search “Apple”
Google ‘Pages from the UK’ Search: “Apple”

So what’s going on here?  Why aren’t they #1 ?  Read the SEOmoz Blog for more info and an entertaining read.

Firefox 3 is officially out of beta testing — first release today (17 June) and the team behind it are aiming for a Guiness World Record for the most number of downloads in a 24 hour period.

Firefox has a long and distinguished lineage, all the way back to the Netscape browser which grew out of the Mosaic Browser — one of the first browsers I ever used back in the early days of the web in about 1993. It took Microsoft by surprise then and they took a while to catch up with what was still an inferior offering. Fast forward a few years and fed up with Internet Explorer’s rapidly aging features, lack of support for modern web standards and major security flaws, those of us who use the web a lot moved to the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Most of us still use it to this day, even since Microsoft belatedly joined the web standards table with Internet Explorer 7. There is a tremendous community behind Mozilla and also a lot of great add-ons that extend Firefox functionality and make our jobs as web developers and SEO’s a lot easier.

According to BBC News “New features in Version 3 include automatic warnings when users stray onto webpages booby-trapped with malicious code. Also in Version 3 will be “Smart Location Bar” that lets people return to places they have visited even if they have not bookmarked them or cannot remember the full web address. ”

I highly recommend checking it out if you use the web a lot. Get it here.

My favourite add-ons:

Ebay Companion - Ebay features integrated into the browser
Fireshot - take and annotate screengrabs. We find a picture tells a thousand words. Much easier than trying to explain what changes you want making in words!
Web Developer - lots of tools for looking more deeply at website code: one for the geeks (this must be popular as it is #1 in Google for the search “Web Developer”!)

I would also recommend SEO Quake but unfortunately that does not yet work with v3. I’m sure it will soon and it integrates a load of useful SEO tools into the browser so they are just a few clicks away.

Loads more add-onscan be downloaded here.

Any other Firefox users like to share their favourite add-ons?