May 2, 2012 · Web News ·

I would guess not many of you have noticed this, since much of our audience probably regards Bing as a joke, but the team over at Bing has redesigned their search results pages. The page is now much cleaner than it once was, with a true no-nonsense feel. The only items on the page are the search results, one or two ads and a list of related searches.

In addition to cleaning up the overall design by removing all of the color splashes and by moving the related search list from the left to the right, they’ve also removed your search history and the ability to narrow your search results by time period.

Although the page’s color palette now resemble Google more than it ever has before, the actual layout of the page is much more minimal than Google’s current design. Below, I’ve included a comparison of Bing and Google. Both searches were performed within an incognito window, so I am not signed into either service. If you’re interested in more details about the redesign, you can view the official post on the Bing blog.

September 17, 2010 · General Tutorials ·

Earlier this week, I received a report that something fishy was going on with one of my websites. The report indicated that some sort of spam had infiltrated the site, informing users about great deals on pharmaceuticals. Needless to say, since we had not recently gone into the business of selling drugs (legal or otherwise), this was a bit suspicious.

I headed to the page that was included in the report and checked it out in about 20 different ways. I opened it in each of the five browsers I have installed; I viewed the regular source of the page; I viewed the generated source (after the JavaScript has run and modified the source) of the page and couldn’t find anything about the pharmaceuticals reported in the message.

July 31, 2009 · General Tutorials ·

For many people, most of these things will be old hat. However, this post is just intended to recap four necessary steps for any webmasters trying to get their Web sites indexed by various search engines.

Create a Site Map

First and foremost, you must have an XML sitemap. Almost all search engines (certainly the three big ones) utilize a sitemap to become aware of all pages on your site. If you have good link structure, a sitemap might not be necessary, but, it doesn’t take much effort to put one together, and the benefits could be fantastic.

Many content management systems (CMS) will automatically generate a sitemap for you, but, if you aren’t using a CMS that does that, you have a few other options. If your site has an auto-generated RSS feed, that can be a good place to start. Most search engines will treat an RSS feed the same way an XML sitemap is treated, so that can make a big difference.

If you don’t have an auto-generated sitemap or RSS feed, there are quite a few tools you can use to create a sitemap; but you’ll have to make sure you update it each time your site architecture changes. A site called “XML-Sitemaps” will crawl your site and create a sitemap for up to 500 pages for free.

June 4, 2009 · Software · Web 2.0 · Web News · Web Software Reviews ·

The new Bing search engine shows text excerpts when you mouse over search results. Frankly it can be troublesome and many publishers will want to remove this option. If you would like to remove the hover text within bing, you need to add the following META tag to your head area on any/all pages you want the hover text removed for.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nopreview”>