Miljoenhuizen.nl appears to be a real estate directory site, but the translation of the De Telegraaf Digital article mentions there is an auto dealer section as well. On that page, among others, was a listing for Zwartepoorte, a Dutch BMW dealership.

After rumors circulated that Zwartepoorte was bankrupt, the dealership conducted a search with the (in Dutch) keywords “Zwartepoorte bankrupt.” Google brought back the Miljoenhuizen site with a snippet reading: Full name: Zwartepoorte. Specialty: BMW…This company has gone bankrupt.”

The key to the snippet is the ellipsis between “BMW” and “This.” Google’s algorithm searched the page for keywords “Zwartepoorte” and “bankrupt” separately and retrieved the lines of text with those words in them. The text, however, refers to two separate entries on the same page. Obviously, to the searcher not clicking through or not understanding how this works, the snippet suggests something untrue.

One immediate reaction is that this is Google’s error and not the website operator’s, but Zwartepoorte opted to sue Miljoenhuizen instead since snippet appearances are ultimately under the webmaster’s control. The dealership won this case, the judge agreeing the site owners could change the text on the webpage so that the text would no longer appear but had refused to do so.

Hat tip to 24Oranges.

How To Look Your Best In Search Results

Because nobody makes snap judgments like a searcher.

During a recent trip to Google’s Kirkland, Washington office, Matt Cutts and colleagues spent an hour creating impromptu videos on various search-related topics. The first to be posted involves "the anatomy of a search snippet," and how much control a webmaster has over what information is displayed in search results.

The answer to how much control is: quite a bit, actually. This article will explore Cutts’s explanation of the snippet, and ways to make the best of your search presence. Much of managing your appearance in the search results involves telling Google what to index and what not to index.

Homepage Title

The first thing you see in your search result is the title, and this is the first thing that Cutts also addresses. In honor of being in the Pacific Northwest, he used Starbucks’ search result as an example, which labels its homepage as "Starbucks Homepage." This is your first impression.

Cutts questioned whether the word "homepage" was a good choice (Google took the title directly from the page) as few would search for that word. Starbucks being so recognizable, it hardly matters, but for smaller business it’s a good idea to optimize wherever you can. "Starbucks Coffee" might have been a better SEO choice.

A usability expert might argue, though, that straightforward is best, and giving the searcher what he or she expects to see will have a direct impact on whether a link is clicked. 

The Snippet

The snippet is where the webmaster has the most control of what is displayed about his or her site. Google often pulls the snippet text directly from the meta description tags, and Cutts recommends experimenting with the text to see what yields the best results for individual sites.

Longer snippets, as we’ve noted before, help searchers with informational queries, and may also be of benefit for SEO reasons. Shorter ones work better for navigational queries.

Google may also pull snippets from other places as well, depending on the query or situation. If no description is available, Cutts says Google may grab information from the Open Directory Project or other directories. Or, to find the context of a query, Google may look to beyond meta description tags to increase relevance.

If there is content you don’t want to appear in the snippet, you can add the "nosnippet tag" to your HTML, which looks like this: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Cache Page

The cache page acts as a backup if a website is for some reason unavailable. It will show an archived version of your site, show when it was last crawled by the Googlebot, and serves as a sort of content freshness indicator. Regularly updating content is a good way to influence what appears there, but also useful is the ability to tell Google what not to archive. To prevent the Googlebot from creating a cached version of a page, use the NOARCHIVE tag, which looks like this <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Site Links

Cutts was quick to assure viewers that site links were algorithmic and not payment based. In the Starbucks example, these would be headed "Store Locator" and "Career Center." So there may not be a lot of control over Google chooses as an important related page to increase searcher relevancy, other than using a NOINDEX tag for certain pages so the Googlebot knows what to skip, and making sure the language is clear as to what the pages you do want indexed are for.

If a page is seasonal or promotional only and you want Google to stop crawling that page after a certain time period, you can use the "unavailable_after" tag. Effective use of the tags mentioned also help control what appears on the "more results" page.

Is Your Site Top 5 Material?

But snippet lengths produced different results depending on the task, according to the 13-page report (PDF):

In plain English, longer snippets significantly improved the searcher’s ability to find what they were looking for with informational tasks (i.e., average June temperature in Caracas). But when navigating for specific sites, longer snippets cluttered up the way.

Other findings:

1. Users scan four results regardless of where the best listing is (Though we also know from previous studies that the top listings are inherently trusted more, and it appears searchers consider results in couplets – one and two together, eliminating one, usually the second, and then skipping to three and four, suggesting odd-number results are superior to even-numbered results).

2. Users scanned more results when the best listing was moved further down the page, regardless of snippet length, indicating users know at a glance if the result is the correct one.

3. Users look farther down the list for navigational queries than for informational queries.

4. Users expect to find their desired information in the top five results (Other reports have supported that results appearing above the fold, or where scrolling is required, are clicked on with more frequency. In relation to that, Microsoft’s study showed click accuracy rates diminished for rankings 4, 5, 7, and 8. Note: Result six is not included as below the fold, six becomes rank one.)

5. Users examine, on average, eight results before changing their queries, meaning results 9 and 10 are pretty much SOL.

Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny Sullivan’s new magical search stomping ground, Sullivan makes his own conclusion:

Sullivan also echoed Microsoft researchers suggestion that, for navigational searches, URLs should be placed above the descriptions.

The question of the snippet, though, remains somewhat controversial. The authors of the study readily admitted that with longer snippets, fewer results are shown on a page. Plus, search engines would need to improve dramatically at distinguishing between an informational and a navigational query to better serve the intent of the searcher.

This is where Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss weighs in, cautioning about making dramatic changes based on one set of results:

It may be smart to suggest a sort of compromise, rather than either/or dichotomies. In a world of AJAX, it would seem relatively simple to settle the snippet debate with a more information mouse over. Or, dare I suggest, that Ask.com is ahead of the game here by offering website previews in the results.

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That’s why I always use this snippet for Visual Studio 2005 that writes the whole thing for me. Download the snippet and place it in the Visual Studio snippet folder which is placed at My documents\Visual Studio 2005\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets\.

Just fill out the name of the event and the EventArgs type that by default is EventArgs. It will then write the XML comment and a method that raises the event in a safe manor. That method is given the same name as the event, but prefixed “On”. So, if you create an event called Saved, the method that raises the event is called OnSaved.

This is what happens when you type evnt and hit TAB twice.

And after you’ve filled out the type of EventArgs and named the event Saved, this will be the result:

   public event EventHandler Saved;

   }

This saves me for typing the same stuff over and over again.

For more snippets, visit Vault of Thoughts who has some nice ones.

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

It’s all drag and drop, with a very little bit of property and behavior check-off’s. My question is this: is it programming?

It’s certainly fascinating. It’s also tempting: no programmer can read that and not want to jump in for a test drive. It’s definitely “cool”, it’s obviously powerful stuff. But..

Let’s digress for a moment. I stumbled across Charles Petzold’s Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? presentation. If you don’t know who Charles Petzold is, I congratulate you for having managed to avoid even the most rudimentary exposure to Windows programming, but it’s time to broaden your horizons. Charles may be programming on the wrong side of the fence, but he’s a very bright and interesting guy and I recommend reading his blog even if it is Windows centric (I think he’ll come to his senses some day). A recent snippet :

We programmers, as you know, have malformed brains. Most of the time we tend to think like engineers, but if you give a regular engineer a new tool, the engineer will say “Thank you for this interesting tool. I will keep it in mind if a problem arises that seems to require it.”

A programmer, on the other hand, given a tool like XAML, starts to think: “This is very cool. I wonder what I can do with this in the absence of all other tools. What it would be like to live on Planet XAML? How would I move around? What would I eat? How would I procreate? And if the only tool I have is XAML, what do the problems look like?”

Ayup: that’s the difference between engineers and programmers.

Back to “Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?”. If you didn’t click through the link above, I want to tell you that you really should read it. But if you just aren’t going to do that (it is long, and you have other things to do), let me extract the stuff most relevant to where this blog piece started:

Most of the really innovative interactive design stuff found its first expressions in the Windows-based versions of Visual Basic, and here’s where I started becoming nervous about where Windows programming was headed. Not only could you move a button onto your form, and interactively position and size it just the way you wanted, but if you clicked on the button, Visual Basic would generate an event handler for you and let you type in the code.

This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a program not as a complete coherent document, but as little snippets of code attached to visual objects. That’s not what a program is. Thats not what the compiler sees. How did one then get a sense of the complete program? It baffled me.

Two paragraphs later he says:

For an author who writes programming books, all this stuff presents a quandary. How do you write a programming tutorial? Do you focus on using Visual Studio to develop applications? Frankly, I found it very hard to write sentences like “Now drag the button object from the tool box to your dialog box” and still feel like I was teaching programming.

Maybe because it isn’t programming? I’m not sure what this is – it’s something like programming, sort of, but not quite. Charles gives an example:

I saw an Avalon clock application that somebody at Microsoft wrote. It actually set the time once in code and used Avalon animation entirely implemented in XAML to keep the clock going. It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML. The only thing that would have appalled me more was seeing 60 tick marks implemented 60 identical chunks of XAML.

I don’t know what rule you go by, but for me its always been simple: “Three or more: Use a for”. This is why we have loops. This is why we are programmers.

If all you are doing is rearranging furniture in a room, you aren’t an interior designer. That’s true EVEN IF THE ROOM LOOKS GOOD when you are done. You can “write” useful and usable programs with Visual Studio and Xcode etc. but I don’t think it’s programming.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not against it any more than Charles Petzold is. Or maybe I’m against it every bit as much as he is. It’s hard to say where he is on this subject, and honestly I can’t really pin myself down either. I could easily see myself developing something much like that Apple tutorial demonstrates. I just don’t know that I’d call it programming.

I’ll leave this with a final quote from “Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?”. Charles relates doing some simple C programs to solve a puzzle posed in a magazine. He describes some of the thinking that takes place before actually writing code and then says:

Even after this preliminary process, there’s still coding to do, but there’s no APIs, there’s no classes, there’s no properties, there’s no forms, there’s no controls, there’s no event handlers, and there’s definitely no Visual Studio.

It’s just me and the code, and for awhile, I feel like a real programmer again.

Like a “real programer”. ‘Nuff said.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

…blogs barely existed until recently and now fully one in five Americans say they consult blogs “frequently” or at least “occasionally.”…in terms of blog activity, there is a slight gender gap (24% of men and 17% of women read them), and of course a generation gap, with 28% of those 18 to 29 using them and only 17% of those over 50.

Unfortunately, almost 60% say they “never” look at blogs. How do they know? Most Americans wouldn’t know a blog if it jumped on their table during breakfast shouting “I’m a blog, I’m blog, look at me, I’m a blog”.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Do you often use blocks of code? Well, snippets make it easy to save it or put it over the same conversion on a block already written on your page. It also allows you to save and reuse chunks of code over and over. Snippets save you time and effort in maintaining a large Web site. You can use snippets to store things like:

…

In this tutorial, you will get to know how to create snippets and use them to your heart’s content! Creating snippets are not that difficult and would take only at least 5 minutes of your time to do

Of course, you need to have the Macromedia Dreamweaver MX downloaded and ready on your PC and then, let’s start creating snippets! Here’s how

Upon opening Dreamweaver MX, click “Snippets” in the Window menu. You can also access it by holding down the shift key and press F9 (Shift-F9). A number of useful snippets are already pre-installed in Dreamweaver. Then, highlight the text or code you wish to turn into a snippet and click on the New Snippet icon below the snippets window. This icon looks like a file with a plus sign. Assign a title to your chosen snippet, plus, provide it with a concise description.

Depending on what you prefer, if the snippet is to wrap around text on the page, choose “Wrap selection” and if you want a single block, choose “Insert Block”. Then, add the code for the snippet, if you did not have any code highlighted. Whether you prefer it, you could also choose how you want the preview in the snippet pane to display – either as code or design. Lastly, click OK and you’re all done.

It would be very useful for you to check out the pre-installed snippets. There may be one or two there that can help you in managing your site!

Then, if you’re wondering how to use your newly created snippet, here’s a guide on how to use it: 1. Open the snippets tab through the same procedure given above, then click in the page where you want the snippet to be placed, in whatever view you prefer it: code or design; 2. Navigate to the snippet you want in the folders and double-click on the snippet to add it to your page.

It’s as simple as you’ve read itSo start creating your snippets now, and put them to good use! -30-

Kay Zetkin discovered the pleasure of writing through her daily journals as a teen-ager. Writing in it helped sort out her thoughts, relieve her feelings and record what she observes of the world.

For her, writing is an effective tool to express your viewpoints… To write is already to choose, thus, writing should be done along with a critical mind and a caring soul. She hopes to become more professional, skilled and mature in her craft.

One curious snippet…

Web’s Biggest is unique in that they have created a virtually replica of the whois database. This enables them to search almost every website in the English-speaking world. Other search engines rely on hyperlinks and manual submissions to find websites and miss more than half of them as a result.

Doesn’t that violate whois guidelines or something? I know I’ve seen notices at most places similar to NetSol’s…

“…The compilation, repackaging, dissemination or other use of this Data is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Network Solutions. You agree not to use high-volume, automated, electronic processes to access or query the WHOIS database.”

I’m not on one of my normal “witch-hunts”, just curious.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

A snippet from the Forbes article …

“The other thing I’ve noticed about search is that there are so many new ways to search–all the majors are adding features all the time, while upstarts are coming up with interesting ideas in search technology–that it’s tough to keep track of them all. There’s an inherent problem in searching for search sites.”

… One thing I’ve found after some ten years of searching the Internet for useful information is that there really is no single way to get the job done right every time. Search engines are a little like ice cream: Most everyone likes the old standbys–and their own particular flavors for their own reasons. “Googling” entered popular parlance for a reason, but there are times when getting outside the Google universe can make a difference.”

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

… you can get a more detailed look.

Here’s a snippet …

“…Internally, Google has a very poor track record of moving its own products into a final release.

Google News and Froogle Shopping have both been in beta for 2 years or more — that’s well overdue for them to get a final stamp of approval.”

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.