I’m a huge fan of the Google Reader for blog feeds. It’s so user friendly. My favorite feature is that you don’t need to know the RSS feed address of a site to add it to your Google Reader. You can just drop the URL of the site into the field, and the Google Reader will automatically locate the feed for that site. The Google Reader also has a lot of sorting options (which I don’t use at the moment, simply for a lack of time) and shortcuts too. I just found out about these Google Reader keyboard shortcuts today, and I’ll...

At least, I think so. Yes folks, the pagerank update for Q3 2007 has been a long time in the making, but I think the Google dance is finally beginning. I’m not seeing big changes in the data centers right now, but what I am seeing is disappearing backlinks! Previously, when I checked my PR on http://livepr.ezer.com/url/ I’d see several hundred backlinks for each of my sites. I’m seeing a big fat ZERO for backlinks on my PR 5 blog, and no archive data either showing the results of the backlink update. Very mysterious…

Did you know that you don’t need to find an online dictionary if you want to define a word? Perhaps you’d like to know the meaning of the word Triskaidekaphobia? Just type the word into your Google search box, like so: define:Triskaidekaphobia And hit enter – voila! Definitions of Triskaidekaphobia on the Web: * a morbid fear of the number 13 wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn Just another way that Google is working for you

Let’s say you’re tracking down an ex-boyfriend, who happens to have the same name as a guy who was in an 80’s band. If you search for the boyfriend by name, obviously, you’re going to get tons of results that aren’t about the specific guy you’re trying to find. You can easily use the minus sign to remove things from your results. So, in this example, we’ll say your ex is named Kevin DuBrow, which is also the name of the lead singer of Quiet Riot. (I attended a concert of his in 2001 which also featured Warrant...

If you’re a Google geek like me, and love to travel, this is one Google search function you’ll use a lot. When you want to find airfare, just type your departing city airport code and the arriving city code into the search box at Google, like: TPA PHL That brings up a page on Google providing me with a place to input dates for my trip, and links to CheapTickets, Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline, and Travelocity. Input your dates, click a link, and you’ll instantly be taken to search results at the provider, showing the dates you picked....

If you do a search for any of the terms related to the massacre on Monday at Virgina Tech, you’ll find tons of hits, from news stories to bloggers sharing their thoughts. I even saw that the New York Times and the New York post bought google keywords to advertise their coverage of the events. Kind of tacky, I think. We had a member register on the GeekySpeaky forum under the name of the shooter in order to post spam. Truly tasteless.

Google is messing with me. I’ve been trying to get two of my other blogs, The Florida Blog and The Tampa Blog indexed for 4 months now. Nothing. My friend Deb also had indexing trouble on one of her blogs – for longer than I had issues – and just noticed it was finally indexed this week. Once she told me that, I decided to check the status of my “problem children” and found that they were FINALLY indexed, after 4 months. But a new blog I started 2 weeks ago? Already indexed. I think Google does this just to remind us all...

After learning that I was having indexing issues with two of my sites this afternoon, I started to look into possible reasons. Or rather, my friends Julie, Amy, and Deb put their collective heads together to help me figure it out. Possible reasons… 1) I’ve been banned by Google. I hope not, since it’s a new site, 3 months old, without objectionable content. 2) Duplicate content. One site is a subdomain of the other – Julie suggested that since the layout, links, and appearance are similar, Google might think the sites are a duplicate...

I just learned that one of my blogs isn’t being indexed by Google. Me, the self proclaimed queen of blogging, and I can’t get my 3 month old blog indexed. I’m not sure why – I haven’t deviated from the method I used when starting my other blogs, and they were all indexed. I’m using Google sitemaps on the domain, and the Google bot is visiting it. I’m getting search traffic from Google’s blog search too. This is going to require a bit of detective work on my part, I think. Or a bribe to Google.

Google announced today they’ll be making it a bit harder to prosecute people dumb enough to search on “how to commit murder“. Google hopes to make it harder to match up the search terms with the people searching on those terms, and will purge their system of identifying information every 1 1/2 to 2 years. Of course, you can still find out what people are searching on, if you’re lucky enough to have a court order. Why is Google doing this? So that we’ll all feel a little safer when we use Google, of course!