Feross.org

Google loves me. Don’t believe me?

Google loves me so much that they want me to explain why they call themselves Google. Out of over 32 million pages, Feross.org is the #1 result for the query “Why is this website called Google?” (click here to see for yourself!).

See!… they love ME! I told you! And Google chose my April Fools day prank to be #1, because they love my sense of humor, too! (or because the phrase “website called google” appears prominently in the title, but I bet its mostly the first reason).

Ahh… the mysteries of The Google.

Prediction

I want to make a prediction here. That this post that you are reading right now will become #1 for the same query “Why is this website called Google?” within ONE WEEK. If Google liked my off-topic April fools post so much, then they will surely love this post, perfectly titled and targeted for this query.

I will check back in one week and report on this prediction!

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I just read an interesting opinion column about technology illiteracy over at TidBITS. The author, Adam Engst, argues that as technology becomes easier to use and hence more transparent, society has lost the ability to converse about technology.

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I remember checking the search engine rank for my first website FreeTheFlash.com in a whole bunch of now-dead search engines like Altavista, Excite, Gigablast, Hotbot, Lycos, and a whole bunch of others I’ve probably forgotten. Today, of course, I only bother to check my sites’ rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search/Bing (I wonder what Microsoft will call their search engine next?).

Now that Yahoo Search is officially dead, replaced by Bing, I thought it would be nice to post a couple of videos about the good ‘ol days of The Big Three: MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

MSN vs. Yahoo

Google vs. Yahoo

MSN vs. Google

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I recently decided to ditch NetNewsWire and use Google Reader as my main RSS reader. Google Reader helps me keep up on the latest tech news and important internet trends.  I’ve been really happy with it so far, except for one thing.

Google allows you to post articles that you’re reading to various social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg. But, Google’s built in “Post to Twitter” feature opens up a new window (or tab in Firefox’s case) at Twitter.com just to post a new tweet. Lame!

I already use an amazing Twitter client for Mac, called Tweetie. I’ve gotten used to it’s slick interface that opens a tiny little tweet window when you want to write a new tweet. It’s so much better than opening a whole new tab!

I wanted this functionality to be available to me in Google Reader. What was I to do?

Well, the company behind Tweetie, AteBits, offers up a handy bookmarklet to help users easily tweet stuff while surfing the web. You just create a new bookmark and set the URL to be:

javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+window.location

But, we can improve this by adding the title of the website to the Javscript code, which looks like this:

javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+document.title+'%20'+window.location

Then when you click on this bookmark, a new tweet pops up that looks likes this:

Awesome, right? Now, I just need to add this custom Javscript URL to Google Reader’s “Send To…” section, right?

But, it’s not that easy! Google blocks Javascript URLs (probably for security reasons or else it’s just an oversight on their part) and you get presented with this sad error mesage:

But, I want Tweetie in Google Reader, darn it! So, I whipped up a little PHP/Javascript workaround. I’ll post it here, because I imagine that others have had this same problem.

<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        <!--
        window.location='tweetie:'+'<?php echo $_GET["title"]; ?>'+'%20'+'<?php echo $_GET["url"]; ?>';
        window.close();
        //-->
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

This trivial script just looks for a title and URL passed in via GET parameters, redirects the browser there, and then closes itself to get out of the way. All that remains is your new tweet window in Tweetie and Google Reader in the background.

Then, I just uploaded this file to my server (It’s located here: http://feross.org/tweetie.php in case you want to use it).

Then, I just filled out the Google Reader settings window like this:

Feel free to copy these settings if you’d like to set up the same functionality for yourself!

Now, I can tweet any/all the interesting stories I read from Google Reader super easily. If you follow me on Twitter, then get ready for a firestorm of tweets!

Hopefully someone finds this useful!

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Total US searches increased 5% from June 2009 to July 2009, though Google’s (GOOG) share of the total search market decreased from 66.1% to 64.8%, according to search-share rankings from The Nielsen Company – compiled using a new methodology.

via Searches Climb 5% in July; Google Loses Share — Seeking Alpha.

About time we start to see some serious competition and a challenge to Google! Don’t get me wrong… I think Google is awesome, but more competition is better for consumers and will force Google to do even better.

These are exciting times!

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