front pageaboutRSSVISI Data Center 2.0: Winning Strategies for What’s NextOctober 31st, 2006  ·  by Chris Dohman  ·  No CommentsVisi is showing off it’s new data center in St. Paul along with a lineup of fine educational sessions. The event is Thursday, Nov 2nd with both afternoon and evening sessions. It is free to attend but you must register.Educational sessions include:* Maximize hits on your Web site through Search Engine Optimization* Leverage WIKIs for your business* Fully secure your growing enterprise and data* Deploy a high availability server networkVisi has been very kind to donate the hosting account for this blog because of it’s ties with MIMA. Thank you Visi!→ No CommentsTags: UncategorizedWindows Live: Jeeves Who? We Have Ms. DeweyOctober 29th, 2006  ·  by Paul Jahn  ·  1 CommentSince ask.com retired Jeeves (site hat tip, Christy), it now looks like Microsoft decided to step it up a notch with their new promotional search engine, Ms. Dewey.It’s gotten a bit of attention so far. Functionally, it won’t be replacing anything, but we’ll see how much buzz it generates for Windows Live.For user experience, it’s part comedic, part provocative, and part sarcastic. There are a number of canned responses depending on what you search for, and some of them are hilarious.The responses can vary, but really funny ones can come from one-word searches like:policeaccidentnhlsoccerrenohalloweencigarette…almost any sport nameI suppose I can start checking out ChaCha Search if I’m looking for human interaction, but it’s pretty fun to see a viral campaign like an effort to integrate video with search.→ 1 CommentTags: Uncategorized
Learn about Gooblebot’s New Crawl Rate Control
October 18th, 2006  ·  by Chris Dohman  ·  No Comments
Back in May we saw some reports that Google was testing this tool and now Vanessa Fox has announced the new crawl rate tools are available in your webmaster tools. Four new tools in all were announced including:
Googlebot activity report charts
Number of pages crawled per day
Number of kilobytes downloaded per day
Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)
Crawl rate control
Faster: A faster crawl will enable us to crawl your site quickly, but may put more load on your server.
Normal: Recommended rate.
Slower: A slower rate will reduce Googlebot’s traffic on your server  but we may not be able to crawl your site as often.
Enhanced Image Search
“You can now opt into enhanced image search for the images on your site, which enables our tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images. After you’ve opted in, you can opt out at any time.”
Sitemaps Number of URLs submitted  Found
“Access the Sitemaps tab to see the number of URLsSitemapsd in each Sitemap you’ve submitted.”
A couple things I did notice was that the googlebot activity charts do not highlight the individual days and the chart looks cut off about three weeks a