There’s a chance that Google may not even know about your website. This can happen if it’s particularly new and no other website links back to yours. In order to tell Google about your site, you can go to a special page that lets you Add Your Site to Google: Add URL. This tells Google you exist, but it may still be several weeks before it comes and indexes your content. Regardless of whether it’s a hobby site, one about Mesothelioma or one dedicated to your grandma; if Google doesn’t know it exists, you’re not going to get any organic traffic!

Bing is an interesting effort from Microsoft’s part and could really be a contender to Google when it comes to search. Localisation is one of the interesting things it brings to play, although Google has been doing this too (albeit slightly more subtly). Anyway, back to the question, you can easily change your localisation options. If you look in the top right hand corner you’ll see what country it’s picked up for you. Here’s what I have:

If you click on the country (United Kingdom in my case) you’ll be shown a selection of countries to pick from:

Once you pick your country, your search results will reflect results pertaining to the country you have selected. So if you search for “fast weight loss” and your regional settings specify the US, then you won’t be getting any results coming from the UK any more.

I hope that this is what you’re after.

Ok, this is a made up question, but it’s designed to show you an interesting technique you can use to pull out the full name of someone when you only have their Gmail address. I read about this on the Securiteam blog, and I’ll be using their screenshots to illustrate as I walk through the process.

• Go to Google Calendar and create a calendar or open en existing one.
• Click on “Share this calendar
  
• Enter the email address you’re investigating in the “Share with specific people” section
• Click Add Person and Save
  

It might not be 100% kosher and Google may close this down in the future, but it’s no different to phone different furniture stores to find out if someone you know works there. Knowing how to look for the right information is something pretty useful.

This question was asked by “writer” from Biz A Biz and My Off and On Line Dating Life on one of the message boards I frequent and was in relation to a website called My Search Funds that lets you earn a passive income when you search the Web. It’s a pretty new development and what I like is the way it integrates with your search tool in IE7 and FireFox and makes the whole process transparent to you. However, every time you click on a sponsored link, you get a share of the advertising revenue that the website has paid for that link. I went into a bit more detail on my main blog about this:

Well, here’s how it works. Search Engines earn an advertising revenue for putting sponsored links on the search results page whenever you search. Each search engine has it’s own technique for doing this and it’s one of their major sources of revenue. Now, it order to encourage traffic to their searches, search engines tend to share some of their advertising revenues with whoever sends them search traffic. So, for example, if you use the search box in Firefox to search Google and click on a sponsored link, Google will effectively pop some money in Firefox’s account to say thanks for the traffic. Another example is the search box in the top right hand corner of this site. If you “search the web” and click on a sponsored link, I make a few pennies.

This is the revenue that My Search Funds taps into, and what they do is give you 50% of the income that’s generated whenever you search the Web. Now, I haven’t really studied the Terms of Service of the relevant search engines, so ‘m not sure whether this is really OK with them, but as long as I’m getting my search results, the worst that can happen is that I don’t make anything from searching. The user experience is also seamless, thanks to the fact that the search facility integrates directly as a custom search engine in FireFox and Internet Explorer 7. You won’t even know you’re using it.

Interesting idea, isn’t it. It’s great to make something small whether you’re searching for plasma tv mounts, shocking pens or 8Gb USB Pen Drives. There’s a viral element to it too, in that if you refer people to the scheme you get a small percentage of their earnings. So, if you decide to sign up, use my referral link

I had this question a couple of weeks back while speaking to a friend of mine about phones, GPS and other gadgets. Turns out that Google has a service called Google Mobile Maps that fits this question down to a T.

Google Mobile Maps consists of an application you install on your phone which gives you a wealth of functionality you can use. It lets you view maps, get directions, find places, show traffic information and even show your present location on a map. GPS tracking does depend on your having the right facilities on the phone, but more and more phone are now coming complete with GPS functionality and it’s only a matter of time before this becomes a standard feature.

The one thing to keep in mind is that this application is a data hog. It sucks down quite a bit of information down the line, so if you have a capped data plan or if you pay for your bandwidth it can be pretty expensive to use this program. However, if you have an unlimited data contract, this application is perfect, showing you directions, traffic congestion problems and even local businesses offering services you may need.

There are other products out there similar to this, but this one is free and does everything you could need on your mobile. Do you have any other suggestions?

This was an interesting question that Peter from Birchwood sent in. He was trying to focus his search in Google to get results between a couple of date but was finding that Google was still returning a whole range of results, including ones that weren’t relative to him.

Well, there’s a simple solution to this question, but with all things, if you don’t know how to do it, it can seem pretty difficult. The answer lies in the fact that Google has an operator that you can use in your search string that takes the form:
x..y
This will give you return results that fall into the range from x till y. So, for example, if you’re looking for works that Mozart composed between 1786 and 1789, use the search string:
Mozart 1786..1790
You’ll see that this includes search results with the years 1786, 1787, 1788, 1789 and 1790. It’s an interesting concept that can be extended to other types of searches also. So for example,
car stereo $100..$200
will give you a range of car stereos in that price range. Now, just commit that to memory, so you can remember it when you need.

As with everything there are a number of options for this, some of which are more effective than others, some of which cost more than others and some which are more elegant than others. My initial attempt was to use a tool that Google provides by which you can add a search box to your website. This lets users search your website or search the Web and is called Google Adsense for Search. This is a popular choice with webmasters because if users click on any sponsored links, then Google will share part of the advertising revenue with you. The downside of this solution is that you have very little control of how the search box looks or what the returned results look like. You can theme the page, but it’s very apparent that your user has left your website.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you can purchase search engine technology to fit into your website. For example, Google sells it’s Search Appliance at prices starting around $2000 for sites containing up to 50,000 documents. This can be integrated with your website and your viewes can enjoy a seamless experience.

I finally decided to take a middle-of-the road approach. We implemented a spider that crawls the website, builds an index of all the content and lets users search for anything they might be interested in. The spider used was an open source product called Sphider which is a lightweight indexing engine using PHP and mySQL and lent itself quite well to the task at hand.

So many options, huh?

So, let’s start at the top. What is PageRank? This is an algorithm used by Google to help measure the relative importance of pages on the Internet. It was developed by the two founders of Google: Sergey Brin and Larry Page. In face the “Page” in PageRank allegedly was coined by Larry Page. The best description I’ve come across about how PageRank works is a description by Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

How important is PageRank to you? Well, if you don’t own or run a website then the answer is “Not Very”. Google uses it to find the things you’re looking for on the Web, but you don’t need to worry about how it works. If you do run a website however, it’s good to know what your PageRank is and how you can improve it. There are a number of ways of finding out what your page rank is, ranging from running the Google Toolbar to websites that can tell you what it is.

And now for the $6 million question, how can PageRank be improved? Well, if you look at the description above you can gather that it depends on the number and quality of pages that link to your website. If you don’t have any pages linking to your website then your PR is going to be low. If you have thousands of high-quality pages linking to your website, this will push your PR up. There’s lots of debate around this topic on various webmaster and SEO forums. It’s also worth nothing that PR is something that is updated every few weeks by Google, so if your incoming links improve all of a sudden, it will take some time for this to be reflected in your PR.

My advice about the whole PR issue? Well Page Rank is simply one measure of the effectiveness of your website and focusing too much on this can be detrimental to your sanity. I would recommend that instead you focus on providing unique and valuable content on your website. If there is any real value there, people will have no problem linking to it and talking about it, and this will in turn elevante your PageRank. So stop worrying about the numbers and enjoy what you do!