JLH Design

Cuil.com debuted it’s search engine.  I’m not going to declare it the next Google killer or a total failure based one day’s results, however I did find this interesting.

If you visit their section for webmasters they have:

If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, please let us know

Where the “please let us know” is a link to an actual email address.

I doubt if many remember this but Google used to actually use email back when they were young (and not billionaires)

Before I am too quick to judge cuil’s capabilities I’ll keep in mind Google’s once humble beginnings.

Okay, the title may be jumping to conclusions but please help me understand this.

I noticed an odd referral today in my stats for this blog. It was for the search term [ip address 74.6.8.94], it seemed a bit strange so I checked it out.

The IP address 74.6.8.94 belongs to Inktomi Corporation:

Every one of my single post pages contain a little plug-in that shows the user’s IP address, like:

So it would make sense that the IP address of the crawler would be added into the text of the page and returned for search results.

The ODD thing however was that this search referral was from Google, with the Yahoo! IP address.

The Google Search for [ip address 74.6.8.94]

Returns one of my pages at the 10th spot, and clicking on the cache of that page shows the Yahoo! address stored in the cache:

To be sure this isn’t normal behavior the following thumbnail is for a cache of another page showing the Google IP address 66.249.65.100:

So the question I have is how does a Google cache get taken showing a Yahoo! IP address? I’m sure there is a logical explanation that I am just missing but I am hoping that somebody out there can explain it to me.

Added After Initial Posting

After I initially posted this I thought it would be a good idea to see if this one page was an anomaly or if other indexed pages showed the Yahoo! IP address, apparently the one I showed above is the only one. Note that the other two URLs shown are this post and the home page which were already updated in the index when I went back and checked.

I have been quite busy with other stuff and have been quite derelict in my duty as a blogger. Hope to find more time/inspiration/desire in the near future.

In the meantime….

• Google, PLEASE fix the Webmaster tools so that the statistics regarding home page crawling, the cache links, and what Goooglebot sees are at least close to reality. I realize you’ve got limited resources with only a few hundred thousand computers and all but at least set aside some computing time to push fresh data weekly on a Monday at 1:00 pm or something. The GWHG is inundated with people who get the wrong impression of their sites performance based on this data. Considering that probably only a very small percentage of the confused masses actually find their way to the GWHG I would say that your tools are statistics are actually hurting more people than helping. At some point when a tool becomes harmful it really ceases being a tool. If resources are a problem then I suggest a disclaimer placed within the webmaster account stating that the statistics provided are not up to date and generally wrong and for amusement only. People respect the quality of Google’s index and expect a certain amount of quality with their other offerings, webmaster’s tools while innovative and well intended, are doing more to harm that reputation than help it.
• There was a Sebastian siting. I wish he’d finish taking over the world or whatever he’s doing, I miss his presence.
• You should consider joining Adam Lasnik’s Question of the Day room over at friendeed. While not search related at all it provides some good entertainment and insight It combines Adam’s elegant style as a writer with the preciseness of a programmer and his philosophic outlook on things,
• While you are at it join me on friendfeed.
• Or Plurk
• Or Twitter
• Or Facebook
• John Mueller lasted a little over three days without posting on his vacation. He is incredible.
• Barry can’t find the source of the spiders.
• Speaking of spiders, and I was, example.com has a robots.txt that includes:

  • User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

  • Yet Google has indexed over 15,700 URLs for the site. A fine example of how robots.txt is a crawler directive and not to be used to limit indexing of content and how ineffective a 404 is at removing indexed content. (there is money to be made in that last statement, maybe I should write a post about that?)

According to Google’s default #1 search result for [jedi mind trick]:

Jedi typically perform this ability with a wave of the hand and a verbal suggestion (for example, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”). If the trick is successful, the victim will reply by restating the suggestion (”These aren’t the droids we’re looking for”) and will immediately think or do whatever the Jedi suggested.

Two days of ago Google’s most famous Googler said that the DMOZ home page had disappeared due to a ill conceived 301 redirect. Today the official DMOZ blog took time out of their busy schedule of not approving competitor’s sites to clarify the situation and say that the real reason was actually:

…changing the root domain from dmoz.org to www.dmoz.org. What we all witnessed yesterday and what was reported by the great sites above was part of an index recognizing, adjusting and updating in real time. This was confirmed in discussions we had with Google…

From this exchange I can only wonder about a few possibilities:

• Google waved their hand and said, “those are real time adjusting and updating” and DMOZ obliged and responded with, “those are real time adjusting and updating”
• Matt Cutts needs to talk to his crawl team who seemingly fed him some bad information
• DMOZ actually doesn’t have the skills required to institute a proper 301 redirect
• Google fell on the sword and decided to look like fools and said that they can’t handle domain canonicalization
• If you have a site with a home page with PageRank of 9 or less (that’s only a small percentage of the web) you should reconsider instituting a 301 redirect, lest Google will loose you for a few days of recognizing and adjusting
• Minty fresh results only apply to lower PageRank blogs and not older established sites
• Google actually had a big screw up, instead of sending Adam Lasnik out to say it was a Bad Data Push, they waved their hand and buffaloed DMOZ into doing their dirty work for them
• There are screw-ups, cover-ups, and foul-ups going on here

Note to DMOZ, if you have to continually remind people that you are not dead or dying, you are dead or dying.

• Today, “DMOZ is not dying folks. We’re growing every day. Globally.”
• Two days ago, “the editor community is very much alive and thriving”

Quick hitter: This is often asked by site owners.  There are millions of possible reasons, but usually the most likely is that other sites rankings have increased.  Study the sites that went up, the answer is usually within those results.  Seems like a simple enough concept but almost always overlooked.

Setup

The fire storm that got started when Matt Cutts made a simple call for webmasters to start submarining their competition with reports of paid links got me wondering. Is Google setting a trend here or following one?

Read the rest of this entry »

Update 4/18/07 - Adam hinted, Vanessa delivered. Two new tools rolled out in Webmaster tools. A much more involved content removal system to give you even more control and expanded page analysis that now includes phrases.

I believe you’ll see really cool new tools and information in Webmaster Tools which will answer an increasing majority of questions we now see in the forum.

Vannesa Fox elaborated on this a bit more in her uneasily casual conversation that was taped with Rand Fishkin. I don’t want to steal their thunder and paraphrase it, so suffice it to say it’s well worth watching and listening to.

This is just strange, strange, strange…but funny, it even includes the words “Butt Munches” which means its gotta be good.