My initial thoughts on using Google Instant are that we have another example of an engineer creating a solution in search of a problem.
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Google’s side projects aren’t always a s successful as you first may think. They’ve dabbled in social media and failed. Now the promising Wave has been given the heave-ho.

I tried wave a little, but ultimately didn’t have much use for it.

Official Google Blog: Update on Google Wave

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

In many ways it reminded me of a product called Groove that was ulitmately bought and pretty much shelved by Microsoft as they incorporated some of the technology into Office products, and also I’m reminded of Scrybe.

They were all technically very clever and did interesting things but with tech driven development we sometimes get great solutions in search of a problem.

Now I wonder how long Google Buzz will last?

Blekko is a new search engine founded by Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson.

I was delighted to be given an early Beta pass and just wanted to take a moment to thank them for the invite.

Naturally I have been playing a little with the search engine and have adapted my serps bookmarklet with a Blekko friendly version. As their service is beta, the bookmarklet is bound to break as they adjust things. Please leave a comment below if you find a problem.

Elsewhere:

• Aaron posted a good seo focused review of Blekko that had me salivating
• Search Engine World have also covered Blekko in detail and
• TechCrunch Review: The Blekko Search Engine Prepares To Launch
• Blekko Review – A search engine with a difference | Semto SEO Blog

StudioKraft Creative Web Services have updated their terrific tool that’s particularly suited to PPC and local SEO – Find Cities In Radius.

This script will list cities within a certain radius from a starting zip or post code and works for the UK in addition to the US, Canada and Australia.

Internet Splat Map By jurvetson

Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media has put together Link Building with the Experts – 2010 Edition..

A long article created from interviews with 10 other leading SEO / link building experts, it’s a must read for any business that wants to succeed on the web.

Working Hard For Vector by roberlan

A friend of mine Augusto Ellacuriaga has recently launched Quality News Network. It’s the first niche targeted network in Spanish in the US.
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Back in May 2009 Matt Cutts head of Google’s Webspam team talked about Spellmeleon.

Finally, there’s an even more aggressive feature (internal Google code name: “Spellmeleon”) for when we really think the user messed up. In that case, we’ll include a couple results for the corrected query first, then results for the user’s original query. Take the query [ipodd] for example. Our algorithms strongly suggest that the user meant to type “ipod” so we’ll include those search results first.

At the time I commented that “Spellmeleon needs to be more aware of British English spelling when on google.co.uk”.

Fast forward 8 months and it’s been reported by Starstruck who runs Search Engine Optimisation that Google have actually made things a lot worse for the British.
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Vedran the SEO expert who blogs as SEO Rabbit has just published an article of mine – Conversion Rate Optimization Tutorial.

It’s a lengthy read showing specific examples of how conversion rate optimisation can affect your business and increase the customer base. I then go on to show examples of how to test, and finally what elements you can test.

I hope you enjoy it.

As more and more people are getting the hash variation of the Google results URL here’s another update to the original Bookmarklet To Trim Google Search URL to also handle the “#” variation of Google results.
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After I wrote the Google Results Bookmarklet some feedback form Marty Lamers led me to revise my previous Onpage Links Bookmarklet to also include the text boxes that make it easy to grab the links.

I’ve updated the styling to highlight the nofollow links, and to “stripe” the output to make it easier to read.

At the bottom of the page I’ve created several of the textarea boxes, so you can grab various types of links:

• All the no followed links
• All the followed links
• Just the external links
• Just the external followed links
• The external nofollowed links

Once more drag the link in the big green box to your bookmark bar and when you’ve on a page you want to analyse hit the bookmarklet. It will open a new window showing all the links and with several text boxes with the links as detailed above.

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