Monthly Archives: April 2005

Google Marches On

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Speak­ing of Google…
I had noticed over the last couple of days that Google had star­ted pre-fetching search res­ults or rather, enabling your browser to do that. Of course this only works with newer browsers that sup­port this fea­ture (not Inter­net Explorer!). I see that the knee-jerk-reactionists over at slash­dot are pre­dict­ing death and dis­aster. Google (and Moz­illa), of course, tell you exactly how to dis­able it should you wish to do so. Mozilla’s FAQ entry is on-line too.

I also noticed this morn­ing that I am now using 246 MB (20%) of your 1243 1286 1289 1300 MB. on Gmail. That’s an unusual num­ber! I won­der where that came from. It looks sus­pi­ciously like 1000MB more than the space I was using yes­ter­day! Could they, would they, have simply added 1000MB to whatever stor­age every­one was already using? Pre­sum­ably in response to Yahoo’s decision to provide 1GB of stor­age. But they’ve not doubled They are doub­ling it like some spec­u­lated.

Update: Weird! The space avail­able keeps growing!

Update: As Serge points out in com­ments, The Gmail What’s new page now has info on this. They are doub­ling the stor­age. They’ve also announced the ‘rich­text’ sup­port I had noticed in the com­pose pane.

Hysterics, Pedantics, and Knee Jerk reactions

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This is the geek ped­ant in me speak­ing now: wordpress.org is not the same as WordPress the blog­ging soft­ware, and it is not the same as the tens of thou­sands of WordPress blogs out there. Which means that head­lines like Slashdot’s WordPress Banned by Google for Spam­ming really annoy me. That should be WordPress.org Banned by Google for Scam­ming Adsense.

Cre­at­ing link farms, chains of self-referencing web­sites, cross link­ing, and some of the other things that people do to game the search engines and in this case profit from ad place­ments is wrong, no doubt, but it is not spam­ming. Spam­ming has always meant send­ing out unso­li­cited con­tent, whether by news post­ing, email, or blog and guest book comments.

What Matt has allowed to take place on his server, has noth­ing to do with any of those things. Google have rightly pulled those pages from their index because their terms and con­di­tions state: No Google ad may be placed on pages pub­lished spe­cific­ally for the pur­pose of show­ing ads, whether or not the page con­tent is rel­ev­ant.. Noth­ing what­so­ever to do with spamming.

The only men­tion of spam­ming in those terms and con­di­tions is … In par­tic­u­lar, avoid links to web spam­mers…. These art­icles didn’t have links to any­where (as far as I remem­ber), they were purely designed to attract high pay­ing Google ads and thus click-throughs to legit­im­ate Google advertisers!

The things people are pos­it­ing about Google ‘hav­ing it in for’ WordPress because of Blog­ger or about every­one else’s WordPress blogs some­how being affected by this, are just non­sense. Get a grip people! Stick to the facts.