All the big names (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves etc) are trying to find ways to drive users to, and keep users at their search portals. Most of the stuff they are adding, while interesting and sometimes cool, isn’t really all that useful.

Then along comes a relative unknown who finds an easy way to do something that really does help you search and isn’t just eye candy. One of these new companies is Kartoo. The KartOO visual meta search engine gives a visual representation of search results which allow you to see how the different returned results related to each other and an easy method of narrowing the returned topics down till you find what you are looking for. This allows you to decide quickly and accurately which of the returned results best suit your needs and is more innovative then all the search engine interfaces I’ve seen thus far. But it isn’t without faults. The page uses Flash, which while it is pretty, it’s also slow for low speed connections, the pictorial results display could be more intuitive and due to the design of the site, you can’t link to specific searches on other sites. Still, this is the sort of innovation all the search engines should be concentrating on, (along with the actual search algorithms) because the display of search results is more or less uniform across the big three and in all cases usually requires multiple attempts to find the information you’re looking for. I still don’t understand the significance of the Genie at Kartoo though.

Interesting news from Sony has it that there will be many options for hard drives to be attached to the forthcoming Playstation 3 (PS3) and that those drives can run Linux (to enable people to consider the PS3 a “entertainment supercomputer”). It isn’t really a surprise that Linux will run on a PS3 because the Cell processor at it’s heart is an IBM chip and IBM is a big supporter of Linux and helps port it to all of their CPUs.
I guess this means that the default PS3 will be just a powerful games machine but with the addition of a add-on drive becomes a full multi use entertainment PC running Linux.

Apparently the reason the PS3 won’t have a hard disk by default is because no hard disk sold with the unit would be big enough in the long run. That makes sense really since the Xbox had a 10gig and the Xbox360 will apparently have a 20 gig drive, and yet the mainstream PC hard dives now are over 100gig. Any machine that can potentially be used to store video and other such tasks will fill a 10 or 20 gig hard drive very quickly.

There are some interesting factors to take into account here. PS3 will be a “connected” device, meaning that much of the entertainment value will be online. If it can run a full GUI OS like Linux then it will very likely have a web browser as well. Since the most popular Linux web browser is Firefox (by far), it may well boost Firefox’s overall market share depending on how many of the units are sold. The great thing is that if you are already coding to the W3C standards, you won’t need to do anything to take advantage of it.

Microsoft has released a beta of a program they originally bought when they acquired the Hong Kong based “Creature House” company. The new software covers both vector and pixel based graphics. The program was called Expression but under the Microsoft banner it’s called Acrylic and is a free 77 MB download from Microsoft’s site. The beta will cease to function in October so you get roughly six months of free use however it doesn’t save pixmaps in anything other then it’s default format.

The recommended hardware is also pretty significant, suggestions are Windows XP SP2, a Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of ram. They have also stated that the beta is not optimised at this stage and is fairly slow as a result. Looking though the forum posts for Acrylic shows people describing Acrylic as unpolished and a “glorified MS Paint” and others making note of it’s very good pedigree. One forum user even speculated that Acrylic might be Longhorns answer to MS Paint. Time will tell how it turns out I guess, but I doubt the competition is quaking in their boots just yet.

Word has it that there are ten different updates coming for Windows systems, one of which is classed as “critical”. The news comes directly from Microsoft’s “Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification“. It breaks down to seven updates for Windows, one for Exchange, one for Microsoft Services for UNIX and one for (ISA) and Small Business Server. Make sure you have auto-update turned on or run Windows Update manually after Tuesday.

In Virus news, they never miss a trick when looking for a social engineering tactics to find new ways to encourage gullible users to install Malware. The latest is an E-mail claiming to have information about Michael Jackson committing suicide. Following the E-mail link in an unpatched Internet Explorer will result in the installation of the Trojan horse program borobt which opens your computer to all manner of malicious behaviour. As normal, this problem only affects Windows computers, Mac and Linux are not affected.

Nokia has released some phone software that allows users to create simple template based “pages” for their mobile phones which can then be picked up by other phones via Bluetooth. The idea is intriguing and if picked up by other phone makers could be of interest to both business (sort of a phone swappable business card) and personal (a good way to find “prospects” in the clubbing scene) users.

The software is free, and can be found here. According to the drop down list on the download page the software is available for the 3230, 6260, 6600, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682 and the 7610. If your still confused about how it works, they have a nice flash demo on the main page.

With technologies like 3G slowly becoming more mainstream and smart phones becoming more prolific, I can see this sort of functionality extended beyond the short range of Bluetooth and wireless. The possibilities are endless. Imagine being able to look up a business number in the phone book and enter that number into your phone to get a look at small page detailing their offerings before you call. It isn’t there yet, but give it time.

It may not be a bad idea to watch your incoming Google search hits more closely then usual over the next week or two to see how you are affected by one of the biggest changes to their search system since its inception. The changes, going under the codename “the Bourbon Update” has mostly taken place already but final tinkering will no doubt be ongoing. There are a plethora of reasons for the update but most seem related to improving organic search quality and reducing fraudulent results which is ironic since Google in my opinion and based on our own search statistics, are already way ahead of the other search engines in these regards. However it would be fair to say that not everybody has been happy with the results of the update and there are many reports online of previously popular sites losing much of their Google traffic. Hence my suggestion that you watch your Google stats closely over the coming weeks to find out how the changes affect you.

Our incoming Google referrals have risen by 4% in the last few weeks, so right now I’m pretty happy with the changes, but our growth has been totally organic and we’ve not engaged in any potentially shady methods to increase our ranking having basically just followed our own SEO tutorial. Also the number of external sites linking to, or mentioning us has grown gradually but dramatically over the past year, so I wasn’t expecting us to be adversely affected. It seems that one of the worst things you can do nowadays to hurt your rankings is to have your number of incoming links increase dramatically in an unusually short period of time, (something that is often a strong indicator that you are engaging in questionable tactics to gain Pagerank). That is however not the only thing you can do to get yourself in Google’s bad books so watch your Google referrers in the coming weeks to see how your sites are affected, you may find you will have to take some action in order to restore your traffic to pre-Bourbon levels. A good review of the Bourbon update can be found at dotcomicide where they suggest that the changes are to better detect the following questionable practices:
– Non related Links. (Links from sites that have nothing to do with your content.)
– Duplicate Content. (Affiliate sites and sites which copy the content of others are likely to be adversely affected.)
– Fraternal Linking. (Cross linking sites on the same host or in some other way related.)
– Run of Site Links (Links to you from every page on another site.)
– Low Quality Reciprocal Links. (Links swaps with sites that in Google’s mind are SPAM or very low quality.)
The above factors are not new to the search engines, they are just receiving more attention from Google then previously. The best SEO advice I’ve ever seen is mentioned on that site and can be best worded as: “put yourself in Google’s head” which is something I’ve been suggesting to clients for some time now. Basically if you think about your site from the search engines perspective, you can get a good idea of those things that will adversely affect your ranking, as well as those things that can improve it.

Microsoft IE 6 is old and full of security holes. Not a week goes by that someone says, on one forum or other that I us, “I have to use IE 6 at work”. Well okay there are employers with great confidence or cavalier attitudes. However, people who can switch are doing so fairly quickly and Firefox is starting to get a decent percentage of the market.

Microsoft, as recently as November denied it would update Internet Explorer 6, and wait for IE 7, which was initially planned to be available only with the next release of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) but yesterday they released a tabbed browsing toolbar via MSN for their browser according to C-Net. Of course this is nothing new as Maxthon has offered this as an add on shell built over the IE browser for a long time now. What this doesn’t do is fix any of the underlying problems IE has.

The foolish among us will mistake this for a browser update. It isn’t. Don’t be fooled, go get Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 will not even be available for users of anything older then XP SP2, so users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000 will have to use Firefox or Opera to get a decent fully featured secure browser.

[Franki: Interesting to note that for the first time ever, Firefox is scoring above Internet Explorer on HTMLfixIT. See the usage stats to the right of what you are reading.]