Is Twitter the Fastest-Growing Search Engine?

So what is the world's fastest growing search engine? According to one expert, it isn't Microsoft Bing or even Google but Twitter. Of course, you need to consider that the source might be a little biased since according to PC Magazine, the proclamation was made by Twitter CEO Biz Stone.

While speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Stone said that Twitter users perform more than 800 million searches on the site each day, a number larger than Yahoo! and Bing combined. Stone said that the high volume of searches proves that Twitter is more than just a social media network.

"That's been a myth since the beginning," he said. "We're much more like an information network or a source of news."

However, many people are skeptical about Stone's claims of such high volume of Twitter searches. Robert Andrews of PaidContent.org said that Stone is using an apples-to-oranges way of comparing Twitter to leading search engines since people are searching for different types of content on each type of site. Another problem, as pointed out by the San Francisco Chronicle, is that Stone is counting automated messages sent by apps like Tweet Deck that "are actually just automated calls those apps send out every few minutes to populate columns users have set up to see tweets on certain topics."


SOURCE:http://www.submitexpress.com/news/shownews.php?article=1498

Expand Your Market By Improving Web Page Readability

The importance of a web site being easy to read was brought home to me through personal experience with my aging mother. As a hard core Internet junkie, I felt compelled to share the wonders of the Web with her. Unfortunately, her eyesight had diminished and reading on the Web was an unpleasant experience for her.

I literally became her human page reader and the Internet became a mother-daughter activity. Sometimes I'd copy and paste the text of articles into Word and kick up the font size to 16 to print them out so she could share articles with her senior friends who didn't have geeky daughters.

Reading on the web can be hard work for anyone, not just the elderly. Eye strain runs rampant in the online crowd. Numerous studies have shown that reading performance drops dramatically on the web.

Making your web pages more readable is smart. You not only expand your market potential by making your pages more accessible to more people, but many of the techniques that improve usability, make your pages more search engine friendly as well.

Improving your viewer's reading experience on your site is easy if you keep a few things in mind. Here are my favorite readability guidelines.

1. Use contrasting colors. Text is easiest to read when the font text color and the background color are in high contrast. Low contrast irritates the reader and causes eye fatigue. Viewers with impaired vision may not be able to read low contrast text at all.




2. "Chunk up" your copy. That's technical talk for make your page more scan-friendly. Large blocks of dense text intimidate the reader and cause "information overload." Look at the two pages below. Which one would you rather read?
   
   
   Here are a few easy ways to break up blocks of text:
   
   
   
   • Use bullets and subheadings. They help get the readers attention and say "Hey you - this is important!" Colored bullets are an easy way to add color and visual interest to a text heavy page. Subheadings should be brief and convey a summary of the section. Too often we're tempted to use clever titles whose meaning is lost on the reader.
   
   
   
   • Keep your paragraphs short. Breaking a long paragraph into several smaller sections invites the viewer in to read. A little white space between the paragraphs gives the site a clean look.
   
   
   
   • Impatient visitors want to be able to glance at your page and hit the important points. You can help them by bolding important points or highlighting the text in a different color to draw their eye.
   
   
   
   • Use columns to control text width. Your goal here is to avoid running your text all the way across the page. Pick up any newspaper. Notice how they place the text in columns. The shorter width makes the text easier to read.
   
   
   
3. Avoid busy backgrounds. Nothing screams "amateur" like a noisy background that makes your text impossible to read.






4. Less is better. Many sites look like my kitchen table - always cluttered with things that don't belong there. The more extraneous items you cram on a web page, the more you confuse and distract the visitor.

   Web sites take on an unprofessional look when you start tacking on too many items. From a search engine perspective, too many ideas can dilute the relevancy of your main content. Challenge every item on the page. Does it really need to be there? Is it still functional? Can I do without it?




5. Strive for a clean font style for maximum readability. Imagine trying to read a web page in the decorative style below. Compare that with the sans-serif font next to it.

SOURCE:http://www.keyrelevance.com/articles/readability.htm

Google Desktop Search Moves Out of Beta

Google has formally launched its desktop search application, after a comparatively short beta test period of just five months.

Version 1.0 of the desktop search application adds a number of new formats to the list of file types searched and addresses many of the privacy and security concerns raised after the release of the initial beta version last October.

The program now indexes the full text of PDF files stored on your computer, as well as the meta-information stored with music, image and video files. Google Desktop is now also compatible with the Firefox and Netscape browsers as well as Internet Explorer, and is available in English, Chinese and Korean language interfaces.

Email support has also been beefed up. In addition to searching Outlook email, Google Desktop now also searches the contents of Thunderbird and Netscape email folders. Adopting a feature from Gmail, all email messages in the same thread are grouped together as a "conversation" in a single search result.

There are now a number of ways to initiate a search. As with the beta release, you can click the desktop search icon in the tray to call up a web browser that displays the familiar Google home page with an additional desktop search link. You can also now search directly from your desktop without opening a web browser, or switch between a search box attached to your Windows taskbar (Deskbar) and one that you can place anywhere on your screen (Floating Deskbar). If you opt for the Floating Deskbar, it remains visible on top of all other windows on your display.

Google is one of the few desktop search applications that automatically indexes all web pages you've viewed and stores them in a cache on your hard drive. I personally love this feature; it's both a terrific "personal web" stash as well as one of the easiest ways to view pages offline when no net connection is available. But this feature raised security concerns in the initial release.

Google has responded by allowing you to block secure HTTPS web pages from indexing. The program now also automatically excludes all password-protected documents from Microsoft Word and Excel.

Many of Google's advanced search operators are supported, allowing you to limit results to specific file types, include or exclude terms from results, and so on. Google has also added new operators to limit results for email, including the operators to:, from:, subject:, cc: and bcc:.

For the technically inclined, Google has created application programming interfaces (APIs) for desktop search. Plug-ins developed with these APIs are available for download, and extend the search capabilities to content types such chat clients, non-Microsoft Office file formats, the full-text of scanned images such as faxes and so on. More information about the Desktop Search APIs is available on Google's web site.

Google Desktop Search is available at http://desktop.google.com. It is currently available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above. The program requires 500MB of disk space, a minimum of 128MB of RAM, and a 400MHz (or faster) Pentium processor is recommended.

SOURCE:http://searchenginewatch.com/3487871