Symetri Blog

As you return to work after the holidays and your co-workers settle back into the day-to-day office rigmarole, why not spice up your 2008 with a little generated insanity?

Meet the ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron:

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name) beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time 'timing' the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight 'electronic noise' built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown Admin wonder where his packets are.

It's only $10. Get it. Get it now. Before They do.

Labels: gadgets, internets

From New Scientist's Tech Pages:

The open-source search engine backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could go live as an early test version as soon as next week. Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor invade privacy by storing users' search terms.

In a SETI@home-style project, 500 volunteers are running web-crawlers to compile Search Wikia's web index, which so far totals 100 million pages. Jeremie Miller, the project's technology chief, hopes an "alpha" version of the engine will be running by Christmas. As well as search, it will offer "wiki-style tools to improve search and basic social networking", he says. Users will also be able to vote on the effectiveness of search hits.

But don't expect too much, too soon. "The alpha version will probably break in numerous ways we can't predict, but that'll help us improve it," Miller says.

Now that you've read the blurb, feel free to openly laugh at the title if you have not already.

While I do commend not sharing search terms with advertisers, if you don't store search terms somewhere, then how can you compile information on popular searches? How do you sort through millions of variations? How do you know what to give people when they search for something if you don't have anything to match that search term to?

Ah, maybe they mean something else. Over the past few years, Wikipedia has become (a bit of) an elitist community where if you don't spend long days editing and updating entries, any submitted entry has the potential of being attacked within two minutes by someone who does, all in a world where every single Pokemon character has its own page.

At this point, anything with "Wikipedia" attached may be slightly soured, but we are looking forward to something new, even if we only end up making fun of it.

Labels: google, internets, online tech, search engines, Wikipedia

Symetri has some very exciting news in the world of SEO: Search Engine Watch has picked us up as a regular contributor to discuss the finer points of SEO education as it pertains to both those coming in to the field and those trying to keep up with the ebb and flow of technology, companies, and algorithms.

Check out our premiere, SEO.edu: Can You Learn SEO From a Book? and keep on with us - it's going to be a brilliant ride.

Labels: blogging, education, internets, Search Engine Watch, symetri

The good folks over at search engine land have hit on a recent tale of Google, the EU, and really, really old cookies. 30+ year old cookies, to be exact. Danny Sullivan goes into a great deal of detail about Google's data retention, the EU, and how silly the EU is for making this a spectacle.

That got me started thinking about cookies and all the other crap that gets to collecting like so much lint, blocking up the flow of information and bogging down your system. The message to all of this is simple: Clean your browser. So I wondered how often people are cleaning their browsers. From a study in 2005:

Nearly 40 percent of Internet users delete cookies from their primary computers on at least a monthly basis, according to a study by JupiterResearch. The finding has big implications for advertising and marketing firms that depend on cookies for tracking and targeting.

Based on a survey of 2,337 U.S. respondents, the study finds that 17 percent of Internet users delete cookies on a weekly basis. Approximately 12 percent do so on a monthly basis, and 10 percent make it a daily habit.

Ten percent of internet users delete cookies every day? Only 10%? Clearing cookies, clearing your cache is like brushing your teeth.

Granted, this is good news for, well, some of the business I do; cookies track analytics, visits, time on site, exit pages, and all those goodies us SEO dorks pore over for hours, comparing the merits of pie charts vs. line graphs. The more cookies and the greater their longevity, the better the tracking and the more solid the data. So I'm sure someone will give me a spanking for this: Clean Your Computer!

Every time you see an image on your screen, that image is stored on your hard drive. Almost every site places a small piece of information to go with it: the cookie. Most cookies identify you or a bit of information, like if you were already at the site before. Some can be malicious and track in much more detail.

I'm not going to delve into the methods of cookie deletion when so many resources already exist on the web.

But don't stop there. I personally use webroot's Window Washer and have for about 5 years. It does cost $30, but it's worth every penny, eliminating unnecessary files at dozens of levels. Looking for free? Lavasoft's Ad-Aware is free for personal use and not only kills tracking cookies, but specifically targets spyware. Good stuff.

So clean your browser. Daily. Brush your teeth. Probably twice daily. Get a haircut. And get a job.

Labels: cookies, google, internets, software