As MG Siegler (who first reported the news) points out, the company is known for its Google Web Toolkit designer, which is likely the reason for the acquisition.

Instantiations greets its site visitors with the following message:

No word yet from Google on this. Perhaps they’re waiting until tomorrow to announce it along with the reported Slide acquisition. You have to wonder if any other acquisition announcements are in store from the company.

The price tag on Instantiations is as of yet unknown.

Cutts recommends making sure that whenever you write your own mouseover code that you don’t roll your own custom solution, which he says might do some really weird things that nobody else has done before.

"We write our algorithm so that we try to detect all the common idioms, so if you’re using a mouseover sort of thing where you mouseover this menu and there’s five more links here, or some text or stuff like that, we try to handle that in all the common cases," explains Cutts.

"So whenever we’re parsing through css or looking through javascript, we’re trying to detect hidden text we try to specifically make sure we don’t accidentally trigger on somebody who’s got mouseover code, so if you’re using common mouseover code, go and find sites that are very well known, and you use code the same or similar to that, in terms of how the mouseover works, you should probably be fine," he adds.

"We want the algorithm to trigger on when you use display:none and you’re sending it 9,999 pixels that way, and you’ve got four pages of text, and it’s really, really irritating and our users complain about that," Cutts continues. "So we do our best, and when we spot that there are problems, we try to iterate and improve the algorithm, but I dont’ think we have very big issues with false positives in terms of that."

The summary of Matt’s advice here is that to be safe, just make sure you don’t write your own completely weird code from scratch. He says to look and see what other sites are doing.

The guy who asked the question asked him if his advice is basically to just copy other people’s code. The audience found this amusing, and Cutts was quick to defuse the notion that this is what he is really saying. 

"I think you’re oversimplifying it a little bit," Cutts said. "I don’t want you to commit theft on someone else’s code. But there are for example, libraries that are released…script.aculo.us and things like this that are well known that you can use that aren’t just copying other people’s code."

What do you think of Matt’s advice when it comes to display:none and AJAX? Does this limit creativity with regard to code creation? Tell us what you think.

Stay tuned to WebPronews for more coverage of the SMX Advanced conference from Seattle (that goes for articles and for video). You will also be seeing more info from Matt’s Q&A session, specifically.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

They will start looking more like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

You can read a bit more about that here. Web technologist Niall Kennedy suggested that this was probably a change being made to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream.

Alex Chitu at the blog Google Operating System had a different and frankly, more interesting theory, which is that it is a solution for the lack of referral information in a future Ajax interface.

Matt Cutts recently explained in the following clip that Google was testing AJAX results on a small number of users to open up potentially faster searching capabilities. Listening to him discuss how this would affect analytics puts the URL changes a little bit more into perspective.

Chitu’s theory was confirmed when a Google spokesperson told CNET that this was the reasoning for the referral URL change. "These guys are working hard to make things milliseconds faster. They’re always experimenting," the spokesperson said.

In the above video, Cutts says the experiment is only available to less than 1% of Google users. Basically what it does is loads search results without loading the entire page each time a new search is performed. Milliseconds indeed.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Nathan Buggia, Microsoft’s lead program manager of Live Search Webmaster Central, started things off by directing people to look at the Arbor Snowboards site.  Although great for users, it’s much less so for search engines.  Buggia recommends that folks learn about some better alternatives at janeandrobot.com ("search friendly design patterns for web development).

Sharad Verma, Yahoo’s senior product manager of Web Search, later stepped up to give some more specific advice.  While CSS is good, he believes external CSS is better, for example.  You shouldn’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, and don’t hide text using CSS.  As for Ajax, use href links, use spot Ajax, and turn off JavaScript in your browser and ensure that the content is navigable.

"Search engines are getting there," Verma noted.  "We are not fully capable but we are making progress."

This brings us to Tony Adam, Yahoo’s SEO manager.  He recommends being strategic in your Ajax implementations, and applying progressive enhancement to the task.  Adam suggests working with standards or platform teams to build standard interactions, and looking at what Jeremy Keith has done.

One last, solid piece of advice from Adam: "Take care of things before it even starts."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

The data won’t show right away, but apparently it will after some time (I just enabled Site Search today so I don’t know exactly what happens). Here’s how:

1. (First you need to make sure you have some kind of search engine for your site; e.g. in this blog, there’s a search box to the right side in the navigation utilized by the Google AJAX Search API; also, you must have the Google Analytics tracker script available in your pages.)
2. Go to Google Analytics
3. Next to your site, click Edit
4. On your site’s profile, again click Edit (in the top right)
5. Scroll down on the settings page and check the “Do Track Site Search” box
6. In the Query Parameter input box, enter e.g. “q” (no quotes) when your query parameter is q, as in http://example.com/search.php?q=hello+world
7. Hit the Save Changes button
8. Repeat for all of your sites

[Via official Google Analytics blog.]

Comments

The roadblocks are the various browsers out there and creating an application that works on all of them is not just difficult but time consuming. So it’s rather nice of Google to offer up an open source solution like GWT that aims to speed up the debugging process.

Once the front-end Java programming language is written, the GWT compiler converts Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Bruce Johnson and Dan Peterson of the Google Web Toolkit Team write:

In addition to making debugging far easier, GWT’s unique compilation-based approach to AJAX has the nice property that it rewards developers for good software engineering practices. Java source code that is clear and organized can be easily optimized by the GWT compiler, which is a nice antidote to the frequent hack-and-slash approach that’s all too common in JavaScript development. As your application grows, the GWT compiler begins to pay off in even bigger ways.

Unused code is automatically removed so that scripts are smaller and pages load faster. Complex code can be automatically coalesced and simplified. Most importantly, because the Java language is statically typed, many common errors can be caught during development rather than production.

Google’s Web Toolkit Version 1.4 for Windows can be downloaded at the company’s code website, and is licesensed under the Apache 2.0 open source license. 

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-takes-ajax-debugger-out-of-beta-2007-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/ses-css-ajax-web-2-0-search-engines-2007-08 http://www.webpronews.com/ses-css-ajax-web-2-0-search-engines-2007-08#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:45:01 +0000 Navneet Kaushal http://www.webpronews.com/?p=39987 As the web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to these, from an SEO perspective. This session explores issues and solutions.]]> As the web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to these, from an SEO perspective. This session explores issues and solutions.

Moderator:

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:

• Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
• Vanessa Fox, Product Team Lead, Zillow.com
• Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
• Amit Kumar, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo!

Q&A Speaker:

• Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Google, Inc.

Shari Thurow is the first speaker of the session. She begins by citing the pros and cons of CSS:

Pros:

• Adding HTML pages lets webmasters control the design options like margins, font/typeface appearance.
• With CSS one can alter the "look" of a website quickly and easily.
• One can drastically shorten the download time of a webpage.
• Usability pros say 8-12 secs.
• Representative from Yahoo says 30 secs or less

CONS:

• End users will have to install fonts in their pcss else the webpage will now appear as the designers intended.
• Logo or corporate identify
• Banners (advertisements or self-promoting)
• Condensed font employed for screen real estate
• Usability testing (task oriented) and focus groups (user opinions) might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers.
• Print materials
• A/B and multivariate testing
• CSS-formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page making the content appear unfocused.
• CSS can be used to hide text on a webpage.

Adding an H1 tag to a graphic will not make search engines believe text is more important.

Tips:

• use stylesheets
• Only determine use graphic nav versus css nav after testing with your users
• Make sure your pages display appropriately on multiple browsers
• Hidden elements (layers, text) are acceptable to SEs as long as those elements are meant to be seen and used by site visitors.
• Do not use CSS to exploit SEs.

Next to speak is Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.com on AJAX and Web 2.0.

Tips for using AJAX:

• Use AJAX but not too often.
• Use AJAX only if it boosts your business or generates more income.
• Let AJAX be a choice and not be made mandatory.
• Set proper (301) redirects of "wrong" linking to the AJAX application.
• Leave it to the professionals. AJAX is HIGHLY insecure. Only TRUSTWORTHY vendors and consultants must be used.

Tips for Web 2.0:

• As authentic content does not come cheap, let your users write it for free of cost.
• Keyword research is not required.
• Spelling errors are acceptable in content written by your loyal user, even if that means mistakes in headings and titles.
• Content written by users will better your site’s freshness factor while also rank high in non-community pages too.

Next up is Vanessa Fox of Zillow.com.

Vanessa spots the most common optimizing mistakes as:

• Blocking links
• Blocking content (AJAX is a big reason)
• Not providing content

Tips:

• AJAX does not let Search engines see (as well as users with JavaScript turned off) lots of content.
• Vanessa also echoes that user generated content is a great help.
• The more information there is for search engines to index. There is more freshness, etc.
• Remember to have information though.
• Blank discussion boards are like ghost towns.
• Be certain you know a source you can get content from.

Yahoo’s Amit Kumar lays emphasis on what he calls the guiding principles, technologies, techniques, and resources. These are:

Guiding Principles

Build for your users: Yahoo! will adapt.

Think "Accessibility"

Users vote by attribution — the way we determine what people are looking at and people like is by how many links a site has. It’s important to remember in the context of AJAX. Make sure users can link to you.

We accept hints! Use sitemaps.

Technologies

CSS

Issue: understanding your pages

Core to the web, like HTML

Flash and JavaScript

Issue: reading your pages

Need to consume carefully.

AJAX

Issue: Finding all your content

Think "form filling"

Badges

Issue: Where is the content from?

Attribution

Techniques

Graceful Degradation

Turn off js/css in your browser, make sure everything still works.

Alternate Nav

SItemaps

Site Explorer

robots.txt

Closing the session today is Google’s Amanda Camp who basically spoke about webmaster guidelines, an old Google blog which discusses Flash presentations etc. An interesting quote was, “What to do if you have javascript, etc. Really, just make sure it degrades gracefully.”

SOURCE: SEARCH ENGINE ROUND TABLE

Comments

Tag:

The Yahoo Developer Network release YSlow, which requires the Firebug add-on for Firefox. Once in place, YSlow looks at a site’s performance and stats to determine where troubleshooting should take place.

In the Performance View, YSlow recommends where changes can be made if they are needed. A site that makes a lot of HTTP requests, or doesn’t use a content delivery network for eligible content, would have those sections of the report flagged for review.

Under the YSlow Stats View, the add-on calculates the size of a page for both empty and primed caches. Also, YSlow shows information about cookies the server places on the browser for the page.

A Components View lists all page components by type and other details. Webmasters can view the HTTP response headers for any of those components.

Those who plan to attend The Ajax Experience in San Francisco this week can learn more about YSlow there. A session presented by Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance Team will cover the use of YSlow for performance analysis.