A cloud is moving toward Europe. It carries with it the thunderous, electrical, (digitized?) calling card of storm-fronted majesty, raining in streams of zeros and ones, boisterous, anarchical, bellowing the dirges of Europe’s heyday, reeking of Yankee imposition, a new brand of manifest destiny wearing a name tag pregnant with the usual oddity of foreign names-a name that gurgles from it foghorn style as it moves across the sea-Gooooooo-gle!

Was that a tad dramatic? Judging from France and the EU, it may be an accurate description of how they feel about it.

Quick loading web pages - a must for website optimization and a good policy in search engine optimization.

Why Quick Loading Web Pages?

Unless you rely ONLY on users with high speed Internet connections, you must take into consideration the quick loading issue for your web pages. According to statistics, a first-time visitor will not “waste” more than 5 seconds until seeing the content of your web page or, at least, until he/she gets an idea about what the web page is about. This means that for an average transfer rate of 3 Kbytes per second your web page must take maximum 15 Kbytes of disk space.

With an aggressive pricing strategy and years of brand recognition, Napster and Real will be hard-pressed to face the Yahoo machine.

The company started as the brainchild of a couple of Stanford grads, who felt the nascent World Wide Web needed a little navigational organizing. They created Yahoo! and offered visitors two columns of web site categories where people could find sites of interest.

Website link popularity is used to indicate how many other web pages link to your web page. It is calculated by counting the number of web pages that contain your link, also known as inbound links.

Proper website linking strategies can help you gain inbound links which in turn can greatly improve your search engine ranking. For this reason, it’s wise to maintain link popularity strategies as part of your overall search engine optimization efforts.

There are several linking techniques and strategies used to obtain inbound links. Here are a few popular strategies that just may bring you the results you need:

Can a Search Engine be Biased? by Jason L. Miller

Is there a conspiracy deep in the belly of the Internet beast? Are corporate entities secretly driving the information available to you-subtly stroking toward a global political opinion matching their own agenda? Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not.
For the unwitting, it is largely assumed that this info-universe is under the tight, objective thumb of algorithms, a mathematical surety of neutrality.

But in the world outside, humans prove craftier than processors, and find ways to outsmart search engines. Add some advertising, and the pure waters of objectivity become a cloudy, bleach-white mess.

The Secret Sauce in Web Site Marketing By Scottie Claiborne

Web site marketing is about getting people to your site, then convincing them to take action: buy, join, subscribe, read more, etc. I’m going to give you the secrët to unlocking the potential in your website. Right now. Absolutely for frëe. (Of course, if you WANT to send monëy, feel frëe to do so!

The Secret is Words

Yahoo Brings Video Search out of Beta by Chris Richardson

Yesterday, Yahoo Search did something that may be considered quite foreign to other search engines: they brought one of their search features out of its Beta stage and officially launched it. I am referring to Yahoo Video Search and according to Yahoo; it offers “the most comprehensive video search product on the Web.”
Not only did Yahoo shed the Beta title from Yahoo Video Search, they also made sure they didn’t introduce the feature empty-handed. During the Beta stage, one of the more requested features was having more searchable content in their video search index. According to the Yahoo Search Blog, in order to satisfy these requests, Yahoo formed partnerships with the following broadcast companies:

Relevancy. It’s something that drives the search engine industry in almost every aspect. From providing quality search results to contextual advertising, relevancy is crucial to any search engine’s success. The question is how do you define relevancy? More importantly, how do search engines define relevancy?

These questions continue to give the debate life because what may be relevant to one person may not be relevant to another user and/or a search engine.
So what determines relevancy? Because this subject has such a gray area, there are no clear-cut answers. Search engines have their own methods for determining relevancy and it’s usually based on their respective algorithms. However, we’ve all dealt with queries containing results that leave you scratching your head in confusion. Of course, there are other searches that can yield exactly what you are looking for. But why the disparity?

Personalize Me - Yahoo and it’s Goog to Know You by Jim Hedger

Some people like to personalize everything, mixing and matching from an enormous variety of options to suit their unique tastes. Others are not so fond of the concept of information personalization, fearing the trend will remove their ability to access the same options everyone else gets while trampling whatever sense of personal privacy they once held. Regardless of how consumers personally feel about the concepts of data mining and information personalization, it is more of a modus operandi than it is a trend in marketing. The major search engines are adopting this method of operation with both Google and Yahoo announcing personalized search features in the past two weeks and MSN presenting information on one they are working on.

A New Culture at Microsoft? Only Time Will Tell by Trevor Bauknight

It was like a refreshing breeze on a stifling summer day this past Friday as news of Microsoft’s plans for IE7 spilled out onto the Web. An IEBlog entry by Chris Wilson, a member of the IE development team, finally dropped two details that may change website development permanently. That is to say, it’s refreshing, if you believe it, and it may change website development permanently, if it actually happens.
The announcement that Microsoft would include proper (AKA the way spelled out in the standard everybody else has chosen to follow) PNG support and would remove the “major inconsistencies” in its CSS implementation may actually, for the first time since the divisive release of Internet Explorer, make it possible for web designers to create a page that looks and works the same on all browsers without resorting to crazy tricks to make it work.