10 years ago, the internet landscape was very different. Google was just very much in its conception phase, and some of the largest sites that are around today (YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace) simply did not exist. It was, perhaps, a simpler time, when the “world wide web” was still not truly mainstream, and more of a “proof of concept”. Dial-up modem access ruled and although the hype had started to … read on »

If you've never heard of Majestic12, then you've obviously never played Deus Ex (a great game, by the way). Back to SEO land, Majestic12 is basically a distributed search engine, that hopes to outgun the "Big G" (Google) in terms of its raw spidering and indexing. It's an interesting project, and I'm increasingly seein their bot in my server logs. Something that many people won't know is that they regularly give out statistics (you can … read on »

Despite what all the search engine companies like to say, the technology behind image searching is very much in its infancy and it will be a long while yet before any algorithims – or computers for that matter – will be able to sucessfully recognise and image based on its content. Quite simply, our human minds are hard-wired – from a very early age – to recognise and evaluate visual … read on »

Hot on the heels of Google’s Chrome’s “incognito” feature, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8’s “InPrivateBrowsing” and Apple’s Safari’s “private browsing” mode, Mozilla has announced that the new beta of FireFox 3.1 will also feature a similar technology. Since none of these new privacy features hide your browsing history from your ISP or the websites you visit, the only thing that is really erased is your online web-surfing habits on your own PC. … read on »

Cuil hasn't had an easy start to life. First it was born with a silly name. As with many online startups, no one knows how to pronounce it correctly (it's meant to be pronounced "cool" in case you are wondering). Then came the spectacularly bad launch day. Despite Cuil’s own self-promotion as a would be Google killer, Cuil’s launch resulted in less-than-satisfactory search results, and was widely panned. Despite being initially overwhelmed by traffic, Cuil … read on »