Saturday, 22 January 2011 08:55
Although the news isn't official, it appears that iWhois, a highly favored whois query service for domainers, has changed ownership.
Andrew Moulden, the prior owner has stated that the new site administrator will continue to develop new features into the product, while maintaining a strict "no frontrunning" policy, safeguarding queries.
So if you experience any outages or errors using the service, keep in mind it is likely to be improving over the new few weeks as changes are made to its fundamental behavior.
Some of the features we were able to take advantage of right away include a toolbar with all the typical domainer needs related to a whois query - such as Alexa rank, links, Google site query, pagerank and Estibot.
Even the secure,encrypted SSL search is working again, providing a unique cloaking experience even when browsing via someone else's unsecured wireless network.
We look forward to the new features and hope to be using them all very soon! We've also recently learned that none other than Richard Lau, formerly of MyDomains and nameDirect has taken over this tiny but unforgettable domainer resource.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011 12:52
Facebook revealed on November 15th 2010 that it had acquired Fb.com. the acquisition was between the company and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The goal was to use as the domain for internal email in the corporate offices for exchanging with cleints.
Today comes news that the acquisition cost for FB.com was a whooping 8.5 million US dollars, landing the sale on the top of this year's charts. The sale relocated the 6 Million member Farm Bureau over to Fb.org permanently.
“At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer.”
Monday, 13 December 2010 18:50
Recently, Google has reported making changes to its algorithm for search to include "penalties for bad reviews" and "reduced EMD (Exact Match Domains) rank value. However, some oddities have appeared as a result.
A great example is a recent search for Divorce. The top result has been for about a year Wikipedia's page on Divorce, which has thousands of back-links and boasts traffic of 3k visitors daily. Starting Dec 5th, this top search result was replaced by a page much less referenced, D.I.V.O.R.C.E. the song. And not the beautiful one by Dolly Parton or the original by Tammy Wynette, but a farce by Billy Connoly. Total inbound links? I have more toes.
Well maybe it's a dang fluke. After all, these algo-thingies are rough stuff. Okay, so how does the chart below representing the volume between Hair searches make you feel?
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| Stats courtesy of grokse |
Notice how on December 6th, 2010, the article for Hair, the biomaterial with thousands of backlinks, dropped from 3k hits to 1k hits, and taking its place was Hair the Musical, with only 100 backlinks.
These are only the anomalies which I have encountered in search. I am sure there must be many more. When will we hear from the big SEO companies about this?
While you may find this information inconclusive its timing seems spot on. Something in the algorithm has changed the nature of basic search to a large detriment.
We watched the live announcement today regarding Google Instant and were mostly impressed with the single character results returned from the new engine, a feature as of yet unparalleled in any other internet result. Most unusual is the behavior which typing "w" instantly returns your local weather forecast, or typing 'f' shows Facebook as the number one result. Here now are the results of all the single keystrokes (with an english language keyboard) that you can see using the new interface:
| Keystroke | Implied Search | First Result |
| a | aol / amazon | aol.com / amazon.com |
| b | bank of america / best buy | bankofamerica.com / bestbuy.com |
| c | craigslist | craigslist.org |
| d | dictionary | dictionary.reference.com |
| e | ebay | ebay.com |
| f | facebook.com | |
| g | gmail | mail.google.com |
| h | hotmail | live.com |
| i | ikea | ikea.com |
| j | jet blue | jetblue.com |
| k | kmart / kohls | kmart.com / kohls.com |
| l | lowes | lowes.com |
| m | mapquest / myspace | mapquest.com / myspace.com |
| n | netflix | netflix.com |
| o | orbitz | orbitz.com |
| p | pandora / paypal | pandora.com / paypal.com |
| q | quotes | brainyquote.com |
| r | realtor / rei | realtor.com / rei.com |
| s | skype / sears | skype.com / sears.com |
| t | target | target.com |
| u | ups / usps | ups.com / usps.com |
| v | verizon | verizon.com |
| w | weather | weather.com |
| x | xbox | xbox.com |
| y | yahoo / youtube | yahoo.com / youtube.com |
| z | zillow | zillow.com |
| _ | _ | en.wikipedia.com/wiki/emoticon |
| 1 | (local radio callsigns) | varies |
| 2 | 2010 calendar | timeanddate.com/calendar |
| 3 | (local services) | varies |
| 4 | 4chan | 4chan.org |
| 5 | 50 cent | 50cent.com |
| 6 | 60 minutes | cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes |
| 7 | 7zip | 7-zip.org |
| 8 | 8 mile | imdb.com/title/tt0298203 |
| 9 | (local services or callsign) | varies |
| 0 | 007 | 007.com |
| @ | @kingjames | twitter.com/kingjames |
| . | .net | microsoft.com/net |
| & |   | sightspecific.com/~mosh/www_faq/nbsp.html |
In order to run this simple test we used IE8 and Chrome browsers in New York and Los Angeles, and negated the local results (for instance, NY wanted to show 'lirr' for L whereas LA wanted to display 'lakers'). While we didn't have the time to test across all browsers in all states these results would likely be the most prominent for users with default settings in most US locations.
If your browser does not display the new search features, use this URL to enable Google Instant.
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