SearchViz

12/01/2011

Our thanks to those with whom we've worked, as colleagues, partners, and especially customers. Without you, there would've been no first post. And we expect to carry on relationships with many of you despite this final post.

We have made the difficult decision to wind down SearchViz.

11/11/2011

The new Who2 just launched. We had the privilege of helping redesign and rebuild one of the oldest biography sites on the Web. Let us (and them!) know what you think. You can leave comments on the blog and add facts of your own on the bios.

Without quite intending to, Martin Luther changed the course of Christianity and Western history. His 1517 complaint against specific abuses in the Roman Catholic church -- a document now known as the 95 Theses -- sparked the explosive Protestant Reformation that swept Europe for the rest of the cen...

09/26/2011

If you're a news organization doing good work (and you know it), Google gives you an opportunity to indicate it. As with relevance in general, the key is not stuffing; it's quality.

09/02/2011

Google is like a mad scientist of data.

Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends.

09/02/2011

A useful update in Google Webmaster Tools. But what about in Google prime?

Google has changed the way they handle reporting links within Google Webmaster Tools. Instead of considering subdomain links as external links, they are now considered internal links. Google made this announcement on their Google Webmaster Blog, explaining that this applies to both the non-WWW and W...

09/02/2011

If you make something worth selling, try not to suck when telling the world about it. Honestly, we could do a better job of that ourselves. But we try to at least keep our blog from sucking.

Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

08/31/2011

Design is everything.

It probably started with HTML, and then Yahoo, of course. But eBay escalated the hatred and Google and Facebook have institutionalized it. To have lame typography, to avoid opportunities to speak not just with what you say, but how the...

08/25/2011

"How do I turn the Google on?"

Read 'College students stumped by search engines, research finds' from our blog The Lookout on Yahoo! News. The members of the generation that is sometimes dubbed the "millennials" are alternately reviled or lauded by the news media for their tech-savvy, gadget-loving ways. But a new ethnographic re...

08/24/2011

Pretty interesting case study of a videocentric web redesign.

Nerdy confession: I am a little bit obsessed with site redesigns. Not just because the Lab just launched one of its own, but because new looks, with all the decisions, editorial and economic, that go into them, have a money-where-your-mouth-is quality to them: Websites, mobile and desktop, are the …

08/16/2011

KISSmetrics' cookie monster has disturbing implications for online privacy. Even more troubling is that this technical review doesn't indicate that there are user-controllable (e.g., browser selection or preferences) mechanisms to prevent cookie respawning. If you know of any, please share.

I thought I'd take the time to elaborate a bit further regarding the technical mechanisms described in our 'Flash Cookies and Privacy II' paper that generated a bit of buzz recently. For a bit of background, I, along with Chris Hoofnagle and Nathan Good, had the honor of supervising Mika Ayenson and...

08/09/2011

An important read for any serious publisher who has tried to manage content digitally.

No publication has a better story about back-end chaos than BusinessWeek. Before it was acquired by Bloomberg LP, the publication sank a shocking $20 million into the back-end development of Business Exchange, a professional social networking site being built atop a proprietary content management ...

07/28/2011

"Google offers fashion advice and accessories tips to optimize your appearance."

Google has long been obsessed with speed. It's paramount in pretty much everything they do. Which is why the launch of Google+ with some — gasp — attention paid to design is even more surprising. But a new service Google is launching this evening very much puts the focus back on speed — an obsessive