Both the writer and Matt Cutts quickly lose sight of the real issue and veer off-track into the actions taken by Google after the fact. However, the real conclusions that should be made come from what was happening to Google’s results BEFORE someone (a high-profile someone) pointed it out to the company.  The data gathered in reporting how JC Penny scammed its way to the top of Google’s search results without anyone noticing is not so easily explained away.

How Google Search Spam Keeps Getting Worse

It has been suggested by stock investors and analysts on Wall Street that Google as a company is a one-trick pony whose only ability is to make money from online advertising clicks.  Perhaps there should be more concern that Google is a one trick pony whose only ability is to count incoming links to webpages.

Google has a carefully constructed mythology in which it insists two core ideas are true.  First, that content is king and that quality content will naturally attract links and, by extension, that the best quality content will attract the most links.  Second, the company has webmaster guidelines, and unofficial company spokespersons, constantly reiterating that counting links is not all there is when it comes to ranking highly, and that those who engage in forbidden practices like buying links or link schemes will be detected and punished.

The Times article proves that neither of these things are true.

While investigating the mysterious #1 Google ranking for everything from dresses to area rugs it was noted that there were tons of incoming links with the same anchor text from websites all over the web.  Many of these links came from low-value, low PageRank webpages and websites.  In fact, many of them came from seemingly dormant webpages.  Most came from sites completely unrelated to the search terms that JC Penny was ranking #1 for.

Unfortunately, the article heads off course with the sensationalistic news that JC Penny was manually penalized for cheating Google’s rankings, or more officially sounding, "violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines."  Google’s Cutts and other commentators have attempted to spin this as a lesson in what happens if you do naughty things like buying links or other black-hat SEO tactics.  Ironically, it actually proves the opposite.

Google Cannot Detect and Filter Spam or Black-Hat SEO

The article notes that JC Penny was able to rank #1 for all of these high-volume search terms for MONTHS, completely undetected by Google. It was only AFTER a journalist detected it and gathered up the evidence that Google MANUALLY adjusted the rankings to penalize JC Penny’s, who unlike smaller website will reap no long lasting penalty from Google because they are both too big to eliminate from the rankings and because they are blaming their SEO contractor for the issue.

In other words, if you cheat, lie, and steal your way to the #1 Google ranking without attracting the attention of a major journalist, you are going to be very successful for a very long time.

Here are the real lessons to be gleaned from the New York Times article.

1. Black Hat SEO Works — Not only does it work, but it either takes a very long time to detect, or it cannot be detected at all.  JC Penny violated one of the "biggies" by buying links and no one noticed a thing until it was all over.
2. Google’s "Hundreds" of ranking factors are a joke — Google goes out of its way to say that there are hundreds of factors that go into a ranking, and there probably are.  Unfortunately, none of those factors has anything near the weight of backlinks.  Google-bombs have shown this to be true for years.  All that really matters is that there are a lot of links with the right anchor text and any webpage will rank higher and higher for that term.
3. Links are Links – Google always says that links from "related" pages are more valuable than links from unrelated pages.  This is either untrue, or the additional value is so insignificant that it affects nothing but tie-breakers between two equally linked webpages.  Most of the links Penny bought were on pages that have nothing to do with home goods or clothing and yet they were enough to propel them to the top of the SERPs for months during the holiday shopping season.
4. Google’s Algorithm Is Flawed — In order to "fix" things, Google had to MANUALLY tweak its search results. In other words, the company’s vaunted algorithm would keep ranking Penny’s #1 for all of those terms without manual intervention.  That means that unless what you are doing ends up in the New York Times, chances are that no one will detect what you are doing and that even if they do nothing will happen.  Google can’t have an algorithm with hundreds of thousands of manual patches on it that have to be managed.

Link Counting Is Dead

The biggest lesson from the JC Penny search spam scam is that link counting is worthless.  It may have been true that links were earned in the past, but that is no longer the case.  Webmasters routinely link to their own stuff for the sole purpose of SEO.  Numerous website owners and publishers post articles anywhere and everywhere for the sole purpose of getting links to their websites.  Bloggers and others routinely exchange links in order to help each other out.

Perhaps most telling is the increasing number of websites that deliberately link without the primary keywords.  Technology websites writing about Norton Antivirus no longer link to the company using the anchor text Norton Antivirus because that will just boost another company’s website.  Rather, they link with the work Norton or with a unusable "click here" type of text.  Keep in mind that these websites no exactly what they are doing and they are deliberately withholding link value for their own benefit.

The day has come for Google to admit that counting links is no longer a meaningful way to rank websites.  While it may be useful as a lessor factor, it has no place in the mix as a primary ranking criteria.  The only reason Google continues to dominate search is that it has the best index of websites to pull from, not because it returns the best results from an equal index. 

As technology matures and indexing becomes less of a technical challenge, the company’s edge will diminish.  The only question is whether Google can figure out a new trick before that happens.

NY Times Exposes More Google Spam is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Another major reason Google is broken is the title tag.

The title tag is one of many codes used in the programming language of the Internet called HTML. In HTML, the webpage creator defines a title tag by putting something in between <title> and </title>.

You might think that whatever is input between the title tags is the title that you see on a webpage, but you would be wrong. The visible title at the top of most webpages is actually created by something called a header tag. Header tags are also powerful search engine optimization factors, but secondary to the title tag.

The title tag does not impact anything that you see ON a webpage. Rather, the title tag determines what is displayed in the title bar of older web browsers before their were tabs for each web page that was open. Today, the title tag determines what is displayed on the tab of a particular webpage. Any modern browser with more than one webpage open uses tabs and the title is almost never completely displayed, yet the title tag is STILL one of the most powerful Google ranking signals.

Overemphasis on Title Tag

Once upon a time, the search engines on the Internet were very unintelligent. The earliest ones did nothing more than count the number of times word or phrase appeared on a webpage. Thus, if a webpage said, Ford Trucks, ten times, then it was “better” result for someone searching for “ford trucks” than a page that only said it six times.

Of course, when people caught on, they just started repeating the word as much as possible. They stopped even bothering trying to include it in text somehow and just started putting words at the bottom of the webpage and repeating them over and over. Some webpages started doing it with the same text color as the background color so that it didn’t look bad to people, but all of those keywords counted.

The main reason for Google’s success was that it did not depend on those keywords for its rankings, so all of those spammy webpages didn’t clutter up its search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Instead of using the text of a webpage, where there was too much keyword spam to use reliably, Google uses the title tag to determine what a webpage is about. While counting incoming links can tell you which pages are best regarded, you still have to pair the content with the searcher’s intent. The best root canal webpage in the world is a terrible result for someone searching for beach volleyball, no matter how many links it has pointing to it.

Thus, Google search rankings are a result of a combining how well the text in the title tag matches the text typed into the Google search box and then how many links are pointing to the best matching webpages.

This is how the content farms consistently show up high in Google search rankings. A webpage with a title tag of “how to use hp laserjet 1012 printer on windows 7″ is a better match for the same search than a webpage titled HP LaserJet 1012 Windows 7 Printer Drivers, even if the latter has more incoming links and better information. By constantly adding content with every possible variation on popular or frequent searches, the content mills can rank their webpages high for specific Google searches.

Repetitively publishing such similar content just to capture subtle variations in search text typed by users is not feasible for legitimate publishers. The New York Times, for example, would not be well served by publishing an article about pentagon spending in numerous variations just so that it will rank highly for not just the original title, but for other ways that users might search for it. Thus, the Times ends up with one well-deserved high ranking, while someone else claims the high rankings on all the variations.

Ironically, the more legitimate a resource is, the less likely it is to customize its title tags on every webpage. For example, many government webpages are the actual, legally defined authority on certain subjects, but because they do not “optimize” their title tags, other webpages (legitimate or not) show up above them despite the boost that Google gives to webpages housed on .gov domains.

For example, searching for “colorado school rankings” brings back not the official Colorado Department of Education website, nor the test results for the official test, but rather numerous sites that republish the data of the former.

Why don’t the real websites rank higher?

Because their title tags are things like “Colorado Department of Education” and “Unit Assessment Test Rankings”.

No matter what data is on your webpage, if there is another page with a closer title tag to the search performed, it won’t show up, even if the exact phrase does appear in the body of your article.

Up Next: Why Google Is Broken – Anchor Text

Why Google Is Broken – Title Tag is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

However, none of these issues addresses the real problem with Google’s search engine. The real problem with Google search rankings is that many of the core principals upon which Google’s search algorithm was built are no longer true, or were never true in the first place.

Google Ranking Algorithm

The full Google ranking system has never been disclosed by the company. However, early researchers of Google search engine functionality used papers published by Google founders, as well as patents and other public documents, to piece together the core ranking system used by Google. Subsequent comments and pronouncements by the company, as well as real-world business research and methodology have painted a fairly strong picture of what goes on at the heart of Google’s ranking algorithm.

According to official and semi-official pronouncements from Google, there are hundreds of “signals” that go into ranking the webpages returned by Google’s search engine in response to a user search query. However, the vast majority of these so-called influences are insignificant compared to the “core” ranking signals.

The crux of Google’s search rankings is the paradigm that each link pointing to a website is an endorsement of the quality of that’s webpage’s content. The idea behind this ranking signal is that the more people who recommend a website by pointing their own readers to it, the better that website must be. However, this paradigm falls apart completely under the most minor scrutiny.

To be valid in for search ranking, content publishers must link elsewhere only because of perceived value.

This is so naïve as to be laughable. Webmasters and web page creators link to all manner of content around the web for all manner of reasons. Sometimes links are to things that are funny. Others are links to something negative.

A recent New York Times article pointed out that one website owner ranks highly in Google search results almost solely on the basis of those so enraged by the company’s business practices that they have filled forums, review sites, and more with negative reviews and scathing commentary. Despite the context, each and every link counted as a vote up in Google’s search algorithm.

After this particular high-profile embarrassment, Google tweaked its algorithm, supposedly so such things wouldn’t happen in the future, but more likely with no more affect than lowering the rankings of this particular website.

The “no follow” tag was supposed to prevent problems like this from occurring. By adding a no follow tag to a standard HTML link, the content creator can curate their links to prevent their approval from passing through a link. However, in order for the no follow tag to work, the web content writer must understand both webpage programming (HTML) AND both understand, and care about, how Google ranking power flows through links. This is obviously not the kind of thing that your average review writer has a grasp of.

Which brings us to the first reason Google’s search algorithm is failing.

Web publishing is no longer the providence of “experts.”

When Google was first created, there was a small, if significant, barrier to entry to publishing web content. While tools such as Geocities and even AOL allowed users to create webpages, one had to first know such a thing existed, and then decide that it was worth whatever effort was necessary to publish online.

Doing so required nothing less than sitting down at a computer with an Internet connection (not all of them had one then), typing the webpage, and then publishing it somewhere. Under these circumstances, it was a logical assumption that anything that someone bothered to write about and then link to, was something that the person felt was somehow noteworthy. Any “bad links” would be buried under the better links that more people wrote about.

These days, however, publishing online is something that is not only easy, but known about, and used by virtually everyone. Numerous services from Twitter, to Facebook, to Tumblr, and more allow almost anyone to post almost anything with virtually no learning curve. The computer isn’t even required anymore. Most smartphones provide a half-dozen ways to publish content online right out of the box.

Today, a link might be an endorsement or recommendation, but it could just as easily be a gag, a way to help a friend find a homework assignment, or a legal disclaimer automatically inserted without the user’s knowledge into every post or email sent.

Unfortunately, it seems as though Google’s search engineers don’t get out of the Googleplex enough to realize that the world around them has changed fundamentally. The search ranking continues to really on the fantasy that the search numbers of the Internet will swamp under all of those non-worthy links.

It doesn’t take much analysis to come to the conclusion that non-endorsement links are just as common as those fully intended to pass on their so-called link juice, and that is BEFORE one takes into account the number of people deliberately creating links meant for no purpose OTHER than to add a little more ranking power to each website.

Why Google Is Broken – The Title Tag

Why Google Is Broken is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

The truth is that Google’s search algorithm grows less useful every day. Far too many people, for far too long, have been gaming a system that wasn’t really all that clever in the first place. The reality is that Google makes many very big, and naive, assumptions in its search rankings, like the only reason someone links to another page is that they think it’s good.

The only reason it still stands as the number one search engine is because no one has come up with a better search ranking algorithm AND paired it with an index that rivals Google’s.

It’s that last part that makes it difficult to judge other search engines and the quality of their rankings. The greatest webpage ranking system in the world is worthless if it does not have the ability to rank all of the web pages out there.

Blekko Search Fail

Before we get to how good Blekko is as a search engine, let’s start by saying that it has failed before it even matters.

The key to using Blekko is something called a hash tag. You either no what that is, or you don’t. If you do, great. If not, then Blekko is a search engine that you have to learn to use. FAIL.

Search is a basic function that people already believe that they know how to do. In reality, most people are terrible at searching, and by extension terrible at using Google search engine. For example, searching for something like, “life insurance” is just not smart. After all, what is it that you are looking for with that search?

• Do you want to know what life insurance is?
• Do you want to know how life insurance works?
• Do you want to know what kind of life insurance there is?
• Do you want to know who the life insurance companies are?
• Do you want to buy life insurance?
• Do you want to get a license to sell life insurance?

Obviously, a search like this one is a bad search and whatever Google, or anyone else, returns as your search results has to be considered good enough, because there isn’t really enough information to go on.

As a rule of thumb, if you are searching on less than three words, it’s a bad search.

You can get much better search results from Google by not only searching for more words, but by using Google search operators. Put a phrase inside quotation marks, and Google will search for pages with that exact phrase. Use the minus sign and Google will find webpages that match your search but do not include the word with the minus sign. Finally, use site: to limit Google to only searching a single website domain, or a certain type of domain.

For example, if you want real, straight, unbiased, ad-free tax information then add site:irs.gov as the last word of any search you make. The site operator restricts Google to bringing back the highest ranked webpage from the IRS instead of the webpage that spends the most time building links pointing to it with the right anchor text.

Almost no one who searches Google each day uses ANY of the search operators to improve their searches. At best, they just keep trying different combinations of words until they find something that looks about right.

If no one has bothered to learn anything about how to use Google other than to type words into a box, and it has been the ONLY really respected search engine for years, then how likely do you think it is that anyone will put the time and effort into learning how to use hashtags for search?

Blekko Search Algorithm and SlashTag

Blekko’s slashtags are re-branded hashtags. Instead of using #keyword like on Twitter, you use /keyword, hence slash-tag.

The idea is that you perform you search for the information you want with a slashtag. The slashtag makes your search results better.

What is a slashtag?

Good question. A slash-tag is a useful keyword or phrase created by blekko users in which they group the best websites and webpages they have found. This human element eliminates those glaring mistakes made by Google where some spammer’s ad filled webpage ends up #1 in Google search results because he uses bots to build backlinks by spamming blogs and article spinners to post “original” articles all over the web with links back to his webpage using the targeted link text every time.

Blekko works because none of the true, honest, and good-hearted, blekko users would ever include such a junk website in their slashtags.

And, therein lies the rub.

How Blekko Will Fail

Blekko can, and may be, successful as long as it stays a small, under the radar, not worth the time, search engine. Then, the Pollyanna style world envisioned by the blekko search engine just might work. But, the day it is even a minor factor in the world of search, or as a generator of traffic, the dream dies and along with it, blekko.

If we have learned anything in the past decade or two, it is that the only thing less useful than a slow-moving manually created web directory, ala Yahoo Directory, is a fast-moving, automated, platform built around user input. Before it’s rebuild kicked them all out, Digg’s front page was populated almost exclusively by stories dug by a small set of power users that dedicated themselves to manipulating Digg at every stage. The honest, kind-hearted, Digg users (the same group blekko is counting on) couldn’t get on the front page to save their lives.

How long before slashtags for mortgage are filled not with the best mortgage resources on the web, but a SEO consultant’s client list? Then comes the internet marketers pushing their own websites, and those of other IM-ers who will return the favor in kind. After that comes the outright spammers and bots. Blekko will fight them off the best it can, but in the end, those willing to do just under the level of what it takes to be banned will overtake blekko and any usefulness it has as a search engine.

The company’s ideal is that by using your friend’s slashtags, or those of well known blekko-ers (?), that the spammers slashtags will be relegated to the unused pile of trash at the bottom of the Blekko well. Unfortunately, that means that you have to have friends using Blekko first, and not just a little either. They need to be building tons of useful slash tags in order to cover all the topics you search on. Barring that, you’ll need to already know where good expert resources on a topic are in order to use their slashtags.

Sure, you can use the BestHubris slashtags. I jumped in and created an account to try it out

But, if you don’t already know that BestHubris is a great resource for business strategy information, computer software interface design criticism, and a wealth of online marketing resources, then how will you use my slashtags?

You can search for slashtags, of course. Search for /life-insurance, like the poor Google user from our example above. Today, you won’t find an overwhelming list, but if blekko takes off, that won’t be the case. When that happens, what is the difference between trying to decide whose life insurance slashtags to trust and trying to decide which of Google’s search results for life insurance to trust?

There isn’t one, and that is the whole point.

One last thing to remember is that your friends do not know everything you will ever need to know, no matter how big of a group that is. For example, might hot water heater is leaking out the bottom. I have lot of friends, and a lot of them have had a hot water heater replaced, or installed, or fixed by a plumber. Still not one of them knows enough to give me advice. Certainly none of them knows enough to create a slashtag, even if they had heard of blekko.

In the end, the only way to know everything is to look at everything. That’s what Google’s search spiders do each and every day. Ranking the web pages they send back regardless of whether or not you know (or can find anyone) anything about those topics is what its automated algorithm does.

Human users end up either messing up that information with their own self interest, or worse, unknown self ignorance, or they end up just not having the information at all.

Lest you think that I’m just opposed to blekko, you are wrong. I love blekko. If its index is deep enough, blekko could be the best search engine for research online.

Have you tried Blekko search engine?

Do you think blekko will succeed?

Why New Search Engine Blekko Will Fail is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Need more recent results for Google searches?

Want to reduce irrelevant Google search results?

Consider using the More Search tools menu located in the left toolbar on the Google search website.

I’ve noticed a lot of Google search users arriving here on Best Hubris and other websites are trying to add dates to their searches in order to get better Google search results and reduce irrelevant Google search data. For example, several searchers appear to be inputting 2010 into Google searches hoping to get results from the current year.

Unfortunately, the Google search ranking algorithm doesn’t work that way very well. Any webpage that has the number 2010 in its text will qualify, while webpages and articles posted during 2010, but without the actual number used in the text will not qualify. This webpage for example has the keyword 2010 on it three times so far. That means it will match searches for 2010 better than many other pages that are just as current.

So, if you are looking for current HP LaserJet 1012 drivers for Windows 7 by putting 2010 in your search, you might find this page instead of the one on this website that actually has a way to use HP LaserJet 1012 printer drivers on Windows 7 with a workaround.

Most searches will show a choice of dates limiting functions that include Past Month, and Past Year. Using these search date parameters will do a lot to make your Google search results more relevant.

For more specific date range based searches, use the custom date search function.

A good tip for better Google searches made easy is to just enter a start date into the custom date search interface. Google will automatically use the current date as the end date giving users a way to search the Internet from a specific date up until now fast and easy.

For example, if you are searching for information about how to use Windows 7 or want to search on new Windows 7 features, limit your Google search dates to March 1, 2010 or April 1, 2010 start dates to capture information published about the actual full Windows 7 release software and avoid all of those webpages and articles that were written about the Windows 7 beta.

That way if you want more information about advanced search in Windows 7 you won’t be reading all the speculation about what might be in the final product, or trying to match up screen shots of Windows 7 search features that were taking on Windows 7 Release Candidate instead of the full retail version of Windows 7.

Better More Recent Google Results is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Well, sort of. If by accessing Google, you mean accessing everything except for the core Google service of search.

Ready made for the “much ado about nothing” files, come the Google Command Line Tool and Google API. Unoriginally titled, GoogleCL, Google Command Line (I guess) is a Python application build using Python gdata libraries in order to make Google Data API calls from a command line. This would be so very important and a great tool for web developers and search engine researchers everywhere, if it only had any functionality at all related to search. Instead, GoogleCL allows you to play with a bunch of the toy Google products and services.

Want to upload a bunch of pictures to Picasa from the command line? Sure, no problem.

Want to create Calendar events from your command line? You can do that too!

Want to read about Southwest airlines rewards credit card? Oh, wait, that’s my thing. Oops.

What about managing contacts from the command line? You bet!

How about posting YouTube videos? Of course.

If it is a tangential side Google service developed in order to show up Microsoft or Apple, then it can be accessed using the Google command line tool.

How About Command Line Search Tool and API?

No! What are you crazy? People would use that to poke holes in the already fragile Google search index and search results rankings by being able to automate tedious processes like checking search ranking positions, whether or not a particular webpage has been indexed or not, and how many incoming links point to a webpage, and where they come from.

Google wants you to like them, and wants you to think that they are the best source of cool, free, open-source tools in the galaxy, but they aren’t dumb. Search makes money. Sure, AdWords brings in the actual dollars, but the only reason anyone bothers is because advertisers know that “everyone” uses Google search regardless of operating system, browser, and in many cases, even location.

The reason everyone uses Google’s search is because it is the best search engine on the Internet. Of course, the entire underpinnings of the company’s search rankings is coming apart at the seems as more and more content publishers seek to manipulate Google’s search rankings for their own benefit. Now that SEO is something that everyone, everywhere, does and pretty much everyone does the same way, the only thing that really matters any more is link count and how close the title tag matches the search. A command line interface might expose that reality to more people (or at least allow it to be proven beyond doubt).

So, enjoy the latest plaything from Google. Just don’t expect it to change your life.

Have a great day.

Google Command Line Tool is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

However, too many websites miss the boat on one of the most important search methods. While everyone seems to nail down giving users the ability to choose a single option from a list, the vast majority are missing the obvious option of giving users the ability to also choose to search all EXCEPT for one member of the list.

Consider Google’s own Shopping Search engine which functions by retrieving products for sale online that match the shopper’s search keywords. For all but the most uncommon products, Google search returns hundreds or thousands of results. While this is a great demonstration of Google’s ability to index almost any shopping website, it could also quickly overwhelm shoppers and cause them do abandon their online shopping search.

To alleviate the problem of too much information being too hard to sort through, the Google Shopping Searches provide a variety of filtering options to their users including, price filtering, minimum store rating filters, and filtering by category. The option to filter results to a single store is also included. But, what is conspicuously absent is the ability to eliminate a particular store from the results.

For example, when searching for certain products, especially higher-end items, or those that are sensitive or otherwise important to the shopper, it may be very desirable to eliminate all results from eBay. This is actually quite difficult to do.

Since the retailer ratings only apply to eBay in general, and not each individual seller, they cannot be eliminated this way. Simply including –eBay in your search query doesn’t work either because the word "ebay" isn’t in the webpage that has been found, it is only in the name of store, which is not part of the search criteria.

The best way to eliminate eBay, or any other single store (or multiple stores for a truly advanced search) from the shopping results would be to have a "Not" or "Except" option that could be used on the "Stores" list. Alas, neither Google, nor many other shopping sites offer this ability. Since most shopping searches at Google are clogged with result from eBay, many users move on to other shopping search engines instead, creating a big potential loss for Google.

It isn’t just the big search engines either. Consider the stock photography meta search site EveryStockPhoto which was recently the subject of a favorable write up at Web Worker Daily. I spent just 5 seconds on the site before realizing that it had enormous potential. But, after 5 minutes, I left without bookmarking the site, and with no intention of returning.

The problem?

EveryStockPhoto searches several stock photography websites for stock photos that match your needs. One of those sites is Flickr. As you might imagine, based on size alone, Flickr results dominate the results returned on any EveryStockPhoto search. Unfortunately, unlike dedicated stock photography websites, Flickr has a wide variety of users, some of whom are very savvy about rights, and licensing images, and a lot more who are not quite as savvy.

As a professional freelancer, I can’t afford to have any potential trouble around my products, even simple misunderstandings about whether or not a photograph was or was not intentionally licensed. Regardless of how the ultimate legality was eventually decided, most likely in my favor, just the appearance of trouble would be enough to scare off many clients for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, there is no way to eliminate Flickr from the results, or even sort by source so that I could manually ignore them. I can choose which site to search, but that kind of defeats the purpose, since each site already has its own search functionality. In fact, a site like Everystockphoto might be better off having a NOT search instead of a regular select one search.

And, so it goes.

Best Search Website Option for User Interface is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

In addition to writing about new utilities, I also am constantly looking for new computer tools that will make me more efficient, more productive, and therefore, more successful, all while earning more money. That, my friends, is a tall order.

The key to finding new software is to keep up on technology by reading several of the numerous resources and websites out there that publish Internet news, computer tips, and review new software programs. This works great for finding new things to write about. However, it isn’t so great for finding a specific new utility or program to do something right now. You either have to remember what was already written about and go looking for it, or you have to wait for someone to hit your particular need on the head.

Like Inigo Mantoya, I hate waiting.

Search for Free Computer Programs and Utilities Effectively

Unfortunately, searching for new software isn’t as easy as just typing what you are looking for into Google. For starters, if you are looking for something that is new to you, or that you are not all that familiar with, you might be searching for all the wrong keywords.  This happened to me last year when I wanted a utility to make may Windows XP computer boot up in a certain order so that I didn’t get error messages about there being no network connection from programs that booted up before the wireless network was ready.

I searched in vain for boot order utilities and various other keywords. The problem was that there are plenty of good, well-known utilities, that REMOVE programs from your startup. I didn’t want to remove these programs, I wanted them to start at boot-time, I just wanted them to do so in an order that made sense.

Finally, a colleague pointed me to a program called Startup Delayer. Then, the light bulb came on. There are plenty of utilities out there that affect how your programs boot by delaying, or otherwise stalling certain ones. This has the effect of altering the boot-up order, but they don’t describe their features as “Change Windows XP boot order.”

Once I had the right keywords, I was set. As it turns out, you can substantially speed up Windows boot time by using a startup delayer. Just like if you double-clicked a dozen program icons at the same time, Windows would try and run them all at once making every program take longer to start up, when Windows boots, it tries running all those programs at the same time. By delaying the programs that don’t affect your routine or the user interface (like those that run in the background) just a few seconds, your computer comes online and is functional faster. You just don’t notice the other processes are still starting up in the background because you can already start typing, or whatever.

The other, more annoying, problem is that there are too many websites out there that do nothing but catalog EVERY program that comes along. That isn’t very helpful when you don’t want to try out 10 utilities, you just want to pick and choose from the best.

Even trying to search for reviews or descriptions is useless because tons of websites don’t do anything other than copy and paste in the software description right from the developer’s webpage. That is hardly objective. There are plenty of other lazy, sneaky, tricky, or downright unethical websites clogging up search results for computer software as well.

So, how to find useful new software fast and easy?

Use the site operator for your searches.

The site operator works by typing site: into your search query followed by the domain name of the website you want to search. This limits your search to only a single domain. Find a handful of trustworthy sites that feature the kind of software you like and you can use those to find your new utility. Then, click near the top left of the results screen where it says More Options. Click on Past Year. That will help limit your searches to the current crop of software and utilities and make sure that rave reviews you are reading are about the current version AND that they are comparing to the most recent versions of competing utilities.

There are plenty of good sites out there. Currently, I use (in no particular order): makeuseof.com, lifehacker.com, and downloadsquad.com. If I would rather browse, I head over to filehippo.com.

Today I need a new replacement clipboard utility. The one I have isn’t very easy to use and hogs a lot of memory, so it is never running when I need it. I want one that keeps more than one entry on the clipboard, though I don’t need it to keep 100, and it I want it to run in a very small amount of memory. Preferably, I want one that doesn’t require the super resource hogging .NET.

So, I’m off to search: clipboard utility site:makeuseof.com then clipboard enhanced site:downloadsquad.com, and so on.

Wish me luck.

*

*

Best Way Find Good Utilities Programs and Software Online Fast is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Although many reviewers reserved judgment about whether Bing was better than Google, a few search engine reviews were so bold as to claim that Bing was equal to Google Search.  No major reviewer would make the claim that Bing was better than Google Search.  All of which begs the question, "Why should anyone bother to switch?"

One possible motivator is privacy.  Google keeps user’s search data for 90 days.  But, that isn’t all that Google collects.  Google Ads have been installed an countless websites around the web, each of which potentially collects another data point about you and your Internet habits.  Google Analytics has been installed on even more websites resulting in yet another potential collection.  In short, Google can already see you coming and going, maybe it would be best to perform your searches somewhere else, if another search engine was just as good as Google searches.

Unfortunately, Bing is not as good as Google Search.  I haven’t performed any tests, and I haven’t bothered reading anyone else’s tests or searching reviews, or search engine results.  I don’t have to.  I can tell you that Microsoft Bing is not as good as Google Search without performing a single search query.

How?

Microsoft’s Bing search service offers no method to restrict your searches by date.  The lack of a time restricted search is just one reason I never took Live Search seriously either.

Nothing knocks quite as much web spam off the first page of search results like restricting a search to the past month, or past year.  Sites looking to snooker you into clicking to see their ad-filled pages built up high-ranking sites and then move on.  Revisiting those pages risks unintentionally making edits which lowers the search engine ranking.

More importantly, there are numerous topics for which information that is two years old is no longer accurate.  Things like taxes, computer programs, electronics, media, real estate, investing, jobs and careers, and even fields like medicine can have important changes that take what was once true and make it inaccurate, at best, and completely false at worst.

Without a way to limit your searches by time, there is no way to know if the information you find is out of date, unless you already know something about what you are searching for.  Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of a search engine?

After all, if you know something about what you are searching for, you might already have a good idea where to find some good information.

In "News" searches only, you can choose to sort by most recent instead of by best match.  Of course, that trades one issue for another.  Instead of having to wade through the search engine results of a regular web search to find links that a recent, you get to comb through the results by date looking for ones that are relevant.  Neither choice is worth doing.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Maybe you’re curious about Microsoft’s current search efforts, but you aren’t a huge techie and you don’t know what this year’s search engine is named.

Try this search on Bing: "microsoft search engine"

Actual Screenshot from Microsoft Bing 7/29/09 

That 3rd result about "Microsoft’s New Search Engine" looks promising, doesn’t it?  (Too bad it’s about Microsoft’s previous search engine.  Oh, wait.  It is actually about the attempt BEFORE the last attempt!  In fact, it is about the beta release of Microsoft’s MSN search engine at search.msn.com!  If you’re wondering that is from 2004, five years ago.

Google recently rolled out a "More Options" link on every search page that allows you to use time-based criteria easier and more effectively for any search.  Before that innovation, Google allowed you to search within a specific time frame from its "Advanced Search" screen. 

In other words, Google has offered date based searching for a long time.  Microsoft, a company that has made its entire living off of playing copy cat to other’s innovations, missed the boat on this particular feature.  Or, perhaps, they are simply incapable of delivering such queries and results at this time.  Either way, the lack of date based searching makes MS Bing a non-starter for this user before a single search is performed.

*************************

************************

Why Google Search Is Still Better Than Microsoft Bing is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC