Tag: search Posts

I had an idea roughly ten years ago out in Ottawa for a website or service that would let you pick your starting destination and get a list of possible ending destinations. That idea came out of a trip my friend Rob and I tried (unsuccessfully) to go on. We were both sick of our day jobs in Ottawa, had lots of money (compared to other 24 year olds), and had a long weekend coming up. So we started calling travel agents, telling them we didn’t really care where we went, as long as we got the hell out of town. Despite our efforts, we came up empty handed since none of the travel agents or their computer systems were really able to accommodate our request. Jump ahead nearly ten years, and it looks like we’ve made some progress. I found a website called Adioso which advertises itself as a […]

I’ve been using Google Reader as my main RSS reader for some time. For the most part, I’m pretty happy with it. They’ve recently added the ability to share items, which makes it far more interesting. The one thing I’d love to see though is the ability to add local comments on those shared items, comments that only my friends could see. So many times I’ve read items in my friends’ shared feeds and really wanted to say something, or get clarification. Going to the real site and posting a comment sort of implies a certain level of knowledge on my part (especially if it’s a technical discussion). However, that barrier is much reduced when talking amongst my friends, and I really would love to see side-channel discussions on shared items. That’s my request for the day. So Google, you missed my birthday a few weeks ago, but you should […]

Wow, what can I say. That is a pretty impressive sum of money. I read this before going to bed last night on Digg, but I thought it was fake. Turns out that Microsoft has just extended a 44 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! To be honest, Google has really handed Yahoo! their hand in search. I personally don’t know anyone that uses Yahoo to do search, although I’ve been told it’s still fairly popular in Asia. I have friends over at Yahoo!, and I once showed them my web logs from my blog indicating that something like 98% of all searches originate from Google. They refused to believe they were true, but that’s how the ball rolls over here. Granted, the readers of this blog are biased towards the technical side, but I think the numbers are fairly indicative of things in North America, as I’m sure most of […]

I’m not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don’t, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don’t remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform. To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from the Google Analytics dashboard. Edit your main website profile and enable the in-site search capabilities. It will ask you for a custom search parameter which it will use to determine whether or not a search is being done. I’m not […]

I went through my google analytics this morning for a few minutes. The one thing that surprised me was those of you who somehow get to my site by typing “duanestorey.com” into a google search. If you are part of the 219 people who did that last month, here’s a little tip for you. Up top in your browser is a little white thing we like to call the “Address Bar”. You can simply go up there and type in either “duanestorey.com” or “www.duanestorey.com” into it and press enter, which should immediately take you to my website. You’re more than welcome to use the not-so-standard “Google Approach Vector”, but you’ll save time doing it my way.