Nick Dominguez

I find it both odd and cool that almost a year ago this month I wrote this post and this week I bumped into this. It’s great to see Google finally getting into this space and also giving someone like me both an easy and interesting way to display data that is both meaningful to me and to others.

I just now realized that as of a couple of months ago I have been using Gmail for 3 years and when I think of how it’s changed the way I think, organize and write emails it’s pretty impressive. When Gmail first came out there was alot of excitement around the amount of storage Google was offering, we all went from 10mb of storage in our hotmail accounts to over 2GB, but it’s now clear to us now that what makes Gmail so special is really how it changes the way you use email. I don’t want to write about all the features Gmail has and how to use them, I’m simply riffing on the fact that Google has really changed the game radically and we might tend to forget that sometimes.

I wouldn’t normally write a post to promote a search engine over another, but after playing around with Ask.com a bit this morning I felt compelled to write something quick.

Ask has apparently launched a pretty large marketing campaign to gain market share against Google and after watching one of their ads last night I decided to check them out and see what they had been up to. My only familiarity with Ask was from their purchase of Bloglines a service that I’ve been using for a few years now. I was surprised to find some nice things about the service. I would have to say the thing I like the most about Ask so far is their “Save” feature for search results. It’s true that Ask isn’t the first to provide this feature, but they really make it easy and simple to use. Unlike Google or Yahoo, you don’t have to create an account to immediately start saving your results, which is nice and their interface is pretty user friendly. Surprisingly Google doesn’t have the ability to immediately save results immediately to personal folders, they have their “Notebook” application which allows you to store results to notebooks, which is nice, but maybe a little cumbersome for the task. Yahoo provides search result saving, but I don’t really use their service so I’m unfamiliar with how it works.

Some other nice features

• Pronounciation audio on dictionary results.
• Great blog search
• Mobile content search
• Great white pages search

Alot of people have been talking about human-machine interfacing to make systems “smarter” and it looks like Google has jumped in the game with Google Co-op. The first real example that I saw was…

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Out of sheer curiousity and slight boredom I decided to start using the “Google sitemap”:https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login xml file on this site about a couple of months back.

Not that I entirely care too much about search ranking but since I did this my ranking in Google dropped dramatically, I would say that my site pretty much just disappeared from the results. Why? because the xml wasn’t built properly, which was my fault, I used one of the sitemap generators that are floating around on the web and hadn’t updated the file since new pages/content was created on my site.

So, a bit of advice. If you’re going to implement the sitemap xml file on your site, make sure you update regularly and make sure it’s correct, because it could work reversely and have negative effects on your Google search rankings.