Chris' notes » Google

Google+ (Google Plus) iPhone App Released – First Look – Review

Chris — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:26:45 +0000

Post for the iPhone App Cafe

Google+ is the new hot social-networking site in town and has captured the hearts, imaginations and user-ship of millions in just a few short weeks. It’s now estimated to have over 10 million users and impressive engagement statistics along with the some all-star supporters. It has however, until now, not had an iPhone App!

Google+ has a couple of fundamental differences to the Facebooks of the world – most notable is the group-nature of contact organisation which encourages sharing with groups of people on an opt-in basis and which makes organising fun through, frankly, super-cool circles in HTML 5 on the desktop browser.

The Google+ mobile-web experience is lacking and so this app has been much-awaited. Let’s see how it stacks up!

The good:
– Push notifications for Google+ events
– Photo browsing is well-implemented and commenting is easy
– It’s a great iPhone-native experience over Google+

The not-so-good:
– No video chat in huddles
– The Circles interface on the iPhone is basic and lacks the cool factor that makes it appealing on the web
– It crashes a *lot* on iOS 5

Overall – this brings Google+ to the iPhone; nothing amazing here, but a much-needed native interface to enable Google+ to compete on the same level as Facebook and Twitter.

How to get Google to index your page very quickly

Chris — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:33:15 +0000

For those of you not looking for the back-story: Email a link to it to your Gmail account and Google will add it to their crawl list

A while ago, I had a page (albeit stupidly) that was hosted on a web server at an unlinked-to address with a randomised name (here to be precise – don’t worry, it’s not there any more!).

This page existed to quickly clear the database of a project I was working on for testing purposes. One day – I noticed that the database was unexpectedly empty. When I looked in to it, I realised that this page had been hit by GoogleBot. A pain; also very interesting. There were no inbound links to this page and it had not been submitted for crawling. How did Google find it?!

The only way that the link had been shared in any way, was that I emailed it to myself on my Gmail account. When I checked the timestamp on the email and compared it with the GoogleBot hit, it had hit literally a few minutes after I sent the email. Not coincidence.

This got me to thinking – can you do the same thing to get Google to index your page. You can.

I made a test page at: http://www.chrismaddern.com/durtificationary-post.html

The word durtificationary does not exist and has no hits or spelling corrections in Google. I made it up. I wanted to see if I could get it to be indexed and searchable on Google just by emailing it to myself.

See for yourself… http://www.google.co.uk/#q=durtificationary

It took longer than I expected to get indexed (it was crawled quickly, but not added to the results for a few days) but there it is now.

I’m running a more elaborate experiment now, to see if mentioning keywords in the email will cause association for Google (i.e. if the email is basically considered as a private page with an outlink).

Good luck.

Google Chrome Instant Search Bug Causes Google to block you

Chris — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:07:21 +0000

Playing round with the new Instant Search in Google Chromium (type “about:labs” for those who are interested) and I pretty quickly got locked out of Google.

It seems that the Chromium build hasn’t been marked as ‘safe’ for performing large amounts of queries in a short period of time and so consequently Google reacts by blocking your IP. Woops.

On a more serious note – it does seem to be an issue that there has to be some configuration of a request that will require a basically unlimited number of scripted requests to be made to google’s service…

Google Chrome 2.0 – Beta

Chris — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:51:15 +0000

I think that this video demonstrates enough of a reason for everybody to seriously consider using this browser. This is intuitive and I have wanted it for *years*!

You can drag a tab off of a window… and it creates a new window, seemingly keeping the process that the tab was running in consistent! …