The Google Base team has begun integrating Youtube Videos into Google Product Search.
Video product reviews are getting a lot of buzz right now, as shoppers increasingly turn to the web to help them figure out what to buy. We’re excited to announce that we are including relevant and high quality YouTube video reviews on a number of our product pages in Google Product Search. Videos include reviews from sources like USA Today, Wired, and Digital Trends, and they appear above the “Similar Items” section of the page. For example, see the product page for this Nikon D90 camera.
In this video Matt Cutts reveals that Google does not use keyword for ranking “even the least little bit”. It looks like so much spamming had been going on that keywords were effectively rendered useless for ranking sites and pages.
There are two other use cases that spring to mind. Accessibility and composition.
In the UK, the Royal National Institute for the Blind recommends the use of metadata, including keywords, to aid navigation.
“Page information metadata must include a page TITLE, keywords, author and description. This should be as accurate as possible to ensure that users get all the information they need to navigate a site.”
Keywords can also provide a useful focus when composing text for a page. It’s a way of noting the few precise concepts you want to cover in a manner that will survive edits and revisions you make in the text.
This is an interesting presentation by Jesse James Garrett about Aurora, a design concept for a web browser. Key ideas embodied in the browser include context awareness, natural interaction, continuity and multi-user applications.
More information at http://adaptivepath.com/aurora/
In about two weeks time Google will start crawling, indexing, and displaying in search results any Google Apps documents that are published and linked to from a public web site.
In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn’t apply if it’s only set to ‘Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)’. If you don’t want your published docs to be crawled, then you can un-publish them by doing the following:
This is an excellent opportunity for press releases, reports and presentations to find a wider audience. It’s also means businesses might want to pay more attention to the themes used in their documents, incorporating their own branding elements.
Some have expressed concern that private or draft information will now be viewable by the public. Though I’m sure far more are unsurprised by the meaning of the term “publish”.
It’s really useful when designers describe how their built their sites, especially when the site is for a small business. A beautiful example is the revised Blue Anjou site:
Dirk has a succinct description of how it was put together over on the Concrete 5 forums.
I finally migrated our site from our ‘old CMS’ to C5. Using a modified version of the Superfish plug and the Image Slider. Also 960 Grid CSS framework.Custom Google Calendar block of my own making which is working pretty well and uses Textile filter to supply links to C5 pages.
Visually I like the way the home page, though quite dense, fits perfectly with the sites nature. The cork bord theme makes me feel like I’m already inside a friendly relaxed studio. I like the discount voucher top and centre, and the instruction to “Breathe” under the prominent list of today’s classes. Beautiful and usable.
Below you'll find links to the latest comments, notes and tweets that I've made while wandering around the web. These are consolidated using FriendFeed.
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