Sometimes all it takes is precedent to fuel similar actions, so webmasters should be aware a Dutch court found a website operator liable for how a snippet appeared in Google’s search results, even if the appearance was the result of an algorithmic quirk.

Mom always said, "Put your best foot forward." It’s valuable advice, because often how you appear on a first meeting sends subtle signals about you and can influence what happens next. We should also be concerned the same way with how we appear, what information is presented about us, in the search results. 

Microsoft released the results of an eye-tracking study focusing on the impact of search ranking, and more provocatively among industry experts, the impact of informational snippet length on user task performance. The early (and already debated) conclusion is that 1. a top 5 rank, not top 10, is crucial; 2. snippet length has a direct impact on search success.

Whenever you write class libraries, custom control or just about anything else, you probably raise a lot of home made events. That’s a simple thing to do, but tedious to write over and over again.

Apple has put out a tutorial introducing programming with Core Data, Xcode and Interface Builder. Even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life – and maybe even especialy if you have not – go take a look at Building a Sample Core Data Application.

Battelle extracts a useful snippet from a recent Gallup poll on internet usage.

The Macromedia Dreamweaver MX have these powerful new addition to its toolset – introducing, Snippets!

Eric Ward takes an in-depth look at the wiki-based search engine, modestly named, Web’s Biggest.

Arik Hesseldahl of Forbes looks at recent developments in search, Jux2 and Firefox search add-ons.

Danny Sullivan points out that most of Google is still in beta. For those of you with Search Engine Watch subscriptions …

When it comes to describing your site, Google assembles what is known as a snippet description to display in their search results. Sometimes it’s a good description – one that prompts potential visitors to click on your link. Other times, it isn’t. Take the case in point where the following page (ranked at #1) in a keyword search for scuba dive “entices” the potential site visitor by listing the various PADI locations from around the world…

We will create a mobile stock quote tracker program in this article. The program retrieves the real time quotes of symbols specified by the user and displays the results in a user friendly format. The user can also specify the high and low thresholds for setting alerts. The View Stock Alerts screen displays the stocks that have crossed above the high threshold and stocks that have values below the low threshold.

The stock symbols selected by the user are stored in a simple MS Access database containing a single table “tblStk”

Here is the data structure of tblStk

Dear Dan,
My name is Brandon Stone. I’m senior tech and webmaster for a company called Martin Yale Industries. We manufacture office and graphics equipment. I took over the company website about a year ago. It had previously been ignored for about five years. So, I went out and bought a copy of FrontPage and taught myself to build webs. I have been building for about 2 years now, and have had a lot of success in the search engines. Thanks to WebProNews, that is. Without WebProNews, I don’t think that I would be anywhere near as keen as I am. I definitely don’t think my company would be #1 for “desktop graphics equipment” in Google.