A number of tools are appearing allowing the interrogation of the released AOL material: AOL Search Database (currently under heavy load) and (IMO) a more superior site: DontDelete (new domain so you may have to access via 63.212.167.185) I am currently indexing the entire dataset myself (2.1GB of search goodness) and hope to bring you […]

You may have heard recent stories about a number of Merrill Lynch employees being fired for transmitting offensive material over the corporate E-mail system. Well a thread over at Irish Webmaster Forum contains a link to a page on the website of YourCar.ie [please note that the page contains offensive material], an Irish on-line car […]

[EDIT] You can find some mined gems from this data over at the plentyoffish blog (and while your there, learn about a guy who makes >$10k PER DAY from Adsense on his free dating site). According to this post AOL released, and very, very promptly removed, the entire search records of 500,000 users collected over […]

Google has updated its Sitemaps application and added a number of new features under the umbrella ‘Google Webmaster Central‘: The Sitemaps UI seems to have been cleaned up quite a bit and my first impressions are that it is somewhat easier to navigate and problems/errors are far better highlighted now. So far I have only […]

Via SeoMoz: A very interesting article in MSN Careers gives a straight-forward description of what SEO is and refers to SEO as one of four ‘Cutting Edge Jobs’. Search engine optimizers (SEOs) increase a firm’s Web site traffic by improving its search-engine page rankings. This is an especially important task in today’s Internet-driven world, where […]

Via Ajaxian: I noticed that in the original post, as well as including a neat article about AJAX, the author makes reference to job vacancies at the company he works for. While he probably didn’t write the guide specifically as link bait for those positions (but who knows?), it very certainly has helped create free […]

Matt Cutts has posted two more videos: 1. Session 9: All about datacenters has some info about variations across datacenters; 2. Session 10: Lightning Round! some other bits ‘n pieces regarding how Google scores HTML tags, in particular bold tag verses strong and i tag versus em.

More Matt Cutts Video Blogs about updates, dupe content and PageRank amongst others.

You can find a very good synopsis of a recent study by Hamburg University into Internet usage habits over at WebSiteOptimization.com. You should check out the clickthrough heatmap for Google (Figure 5: The Golden Triangle – Eye Tracking on Google Results (Hotchkiss 2005)) which shows the importance of the top 3 positions in Google SERPs. […]

Matt Cutts video blogs about Google and SEO.

From the IXQuick press release: As personal privacy concerns create growing alarm about the freedom of the Internet, the Ixquick metasearch engine (www.ixquick.com) has taken a pioneering step: starting today, Ixquick will permanently delete all personal search details gleaned from its users from the log files. This may be a welcome development for searchers but […]

Just noticed that my Google Analytics accounts now have 10 profiles per account. I use Analytics for all my projects and having more profiles per account means less logging in and logging out Now all I have to do is figure out a way to consolidate these accounts without losing historic data Great news all […]

MyHome.ie, one of Ireland’s leading online property websites was sold for €50m to The Irish Times, owner of Ireland.com.

How to block Windows Update from automatically installing Internet Explorer 7.

One of the greatest difficulties in designing a website is achieving consistent layout results across browser-platform combos. If you want a nice service that lets you see your webpage across multiple browsers and platforms…

From SiliconRepublic: PraxisNow, an Internet marketing consultancy, surveyed more than 300 business websites located in the greater Dublin area and found a lack of awareness of how to use the sites to bring more revenue to the companies that maintain them. A massive 95pc of the sites surveyed were estimated to have 10 visitors per […]

From Hitwise.co.uk: As of June 2006 Google now commands 77% of all search executions in the UK. Both MSN and Yahoo each account for just 7% of that market. I am not aware of similar statistics for the Irish market but would imagine that the UK market could be quite a good proxy for Ireland. […]

I often see questions related to getting your website into country specific SERPs. There have been some urban myths regarding where your IP address resolves to, where you server is located and the TLD used.

Following on from a funny thread over at Michele’s blog about SalesOnline.ie, I take look at how easy it is to change the look of an element when someone passes the mouse cursor over it.

A bit of a laugh as well!

I have been working with a great little company called ‘The Real Dirtbusters’ for the past 18 months or so. You may have seen their numerous vans around with the large Slimer logos (yep Slimer from Ghostbusters fame).

I recently had to investigate an issue with a client’s website reported by a customer who was unable to use the website’s navigation….. Guess what? In 2006 they were still using Internet Explorer 5.0….. Here’s an outline of some of the practices and software available that will help keep your PC safe and clean.

Well I finally found the time to put up a site of some description. I decided on a blog so that I could easily publish my ideas, rants and news. Now comes the hard part, getting the site ranked well for my chosen keyphrases. Technorati Profile