Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

For the record, I refuse to get drawn into the debate about the Google share price. This blog is about Google's search services, not its progress as a listed company. At times, I'll concede, one may impact the other, at which time I reserve the right to change my mind. If you really need to know, then you can track the stock here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog

Gmail just took a leap into real usefulness. If like me you don't use web-based email, then a Gmail account is kind of useless, if cool. This has just been fixed with the arrival of the Gmail notifier, a system tray application that alerts you to incoming email. Dig out your passwords!

Local search for Pubs. Following on from my post of July 13th, below, regarding the challenge the SEs have of accurately associating local information with index entries, the first phase of data has gone live for my near.co.uk client. This is largely an exercise in publishing data that can be found by locality at this point and not really a consumer service. However if you are looking for a pub in a postal town near you, it is still likely to help you. And yes, I know the order in which the results appear is not terribly logical. As I said, it is not really a consumer service yet.

In December 2003 there were 32 sites that attained a PageRank of 10. Today, just after a PageRank 10 List (of unknown repute) has been updated, we see that there appears now to be 62!

In the meantime, Google's own backlink command (link:www.johnston.co.uk) that allows you to check on which sites in Google index, with a PR of 4 or greater, link to yours, is broken. It seems to be showing everything except the PR4 and above links, which doesn't do much for one's ego. Normal service will be resumed soon, we hope.

The Google Cache improves. A useful addition to the information stored in the Google Cache and subsequently published to the web for our consumption, is the precise date and time that the page being viewed was crawled by the Googlebot. Knowing when a site's pages are crawled is very useful when trying to accelerate the indexing of new content, and to understand about the optimum times for content changes.

Many sites enjoy 'daily indexing' in view of the frequency of their content changes and this fact is more obviously displayed beneath their entry in the SERPs by a date attribute appearing after the page URL the file size, e.g. www.johnston.co.uk/ - 19k - 31 Jul 2004. For those pages that do not see the crawler every day, and this is often the case with pages that are targeted for improved performance in the SERPs, then understanding the pattern of crawling is very helpful.

To see examples of this, make a search, such as for a Google Consultant and scan down the list to find results that do not have a date attribute in the entry on the page. At the time of writing, the third entry down for Ring John qualifies. Click on the Cached link to view the Google Cache of this page. At the end of the very top line of the information Google presents is the following: 'as retrieved on 13 Jun 2004 03:29:07 GMT'.

The Google Cache always was a useful tool, it has now just got significantly more so.