When I moved this blog from hosted Wordpress , I submitted the site to Google and Yahoo! After that, I noted the respective crawlers indexing the blog and thought no more of it. I subsequently registered the site in Google Webmaster and Yahoo! Site Explorer and added a sitemap to help the robots index my site more efficiently. After a while, it was clear that Google was responsible for the vast majority of traffic to my humble blog....
John Chow notes the vast majority of traffic to his blog from search engines comes from Google. I see a similar pattern for this humble blog with over 95% of search engine traffic arriving from Google despite the fact that the blog has been indexed by the major players. Although I use Firefox (where the default search engine is Google) and I hardly ever use any other search engine, I was surprised that the number of visitors from Yahoo was a paltry 2%....
Google have announced ‘Docs & Spreadsheets’ which is an overhaul of the original Writely interface and integration with Google Spreadsheets. I must admit I prefer the Google Docs interface and was interested to see that Docs can still publish to a blog (just like Writely). The documentation suggests that tagging the article with keywords will be mapped to matching blog categories and that the document title will indeed be preserved in the blog entry....
Apart from the ‘vi’ shortcuts, I was slightly underwhelmed by Google Reader when it was released last year. Imagine my surprise, when I just used Google Reader to quickly check that I had reinstated full text feeds for this blog. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just don’t believe it. Google Reader launches with a modest splash screen with some exciting announcement (which I immediately skipped) and I was greeted by some unexpected and welcome changes to the interface....
Rakesh Agrawal presents an interesting summary of a talk by Carl Sjogreen describing Google’s approach to the software development process. Google Calendar was a relatively small project (3 engineers, 1 product manager). Google talk to real users (‘Grandma in NYC’) not techy geeks to find what users really want. Google ’eat their own dog food’. Lots of internal testing prior to public launch. Gap in the market. Lots of calendar products out there but none do what people want....