Now he's watching every domain name I look up?

Google recently added a Public DNS service. For a good definition of DNS, check our new wiki. In short: DNS is how your computer figures out where a web server is located when you type in any web address by your computer, meaning: » Continue reading “Google’s Public DNS snaps up more of your browsing habits”

Ignore the mouse ... and his two-letter domain name

Ever notice that when you sign into, oh, say, Gmail, you sign in at www.google.com? What’s up with that?

The reasons are technical, but it should be noted that when more and more traffic goes through the same domain name, you should wonder why.

Before I go off the nerd deep-end, if you don’t know what a URL is or the parts of a URL are, check out our new Wiki.

We are talking about the host portion (or domain name), of a web site. Specifically, » Continue reading “Tutorial on Top-Level-Domain Names, Cookies, and Privacy”

A quick post regarding Yahoo! Analytics tracking parameters. Our conversion tracking software recently added support for Yahoo! Analytics tracking parameters, which, according to » Continue reading “Yahoo Analytics Tracking Parameters: Whoops”

I had to write after reading this article in the New York Times. In short, Google “sees” 92 percent of online traffic for the top 100 internet sites. Other big boys, Atlas (60%), Omniture, and Quantcast (54% – I assume combined) don’t even get » Continue reading “Google sees 92% of “top” web traffic”

Market Ruler, LLC develops software for web marketers – and as such, I’m always on the lookout for new technologies to make life easier on the PPC and SEO crowd.

I recently took the SEOMoz toolset for a spin, and in one of their tests, I saw that they automatically checked the Google PageRank of a site. Since I’m the type who likes to see how this is done … » Continue reading “Automatically determining PageRank, or, unsigned integers in PHP”

Found a workaround for a window focus problem with Google’s Chrome browser. » Continue reading “Chrome problems with window focus (workaround)”

Wow. It’s 2009, and apparently DNS can only support reading configuration file lines which are not greater than 255 characters. I received the following error » Continue reading “DKIM TXT Records in DNS exceeding 255 characters”

I recently updated to Firefox 3.0.6, and even prior to this I noticed a message box appeared every time a new window opened:

This may take several hours, actually.

I’m not a big fan of this whole waiting thing, especially » Continue reading “Upgrading … This may take a few minutes. (Firefox)”

Damage Control

Mark Zuckerberg defended the recent change to Facebook’s TOS in a blog post recently. As much as I appreciate any response from Facebook regarding their lecherous move, his rebuttal has no merit whatsoever. As a co-founder of my own startup in the 90s (unfortunately, never anything close to the scale of the 500-lb gorilla that is Facebook), this post is simply damage control.
» Continue reading “Technical rebuttal of Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuttal to Facebook TOS change”

The X and the "up" icon added recently to Google results

I noticed in the past two or so months, after Google upgraded their SERPs to enable users to rearrange and delete results (see thumbnail to right) that the outbound links Google was posting on SERPs were redirects through the google.com site (meaning, they were tracking clicks on outbound links.)

Since I often search for something on Google, then “right-click”, “Copy” to get a link, I noted the links were not the actual links, but Google.com links. This went away shortly thereafter.

Today, checking again, they are using JavaScript to track outbound links (View Source on a SERP and examine the outbound links).

For example, one of our » Continue reading “Analysis of Google outbound link tracking”