GrenadePod » google

SEO is killing Google

pulegium — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:30:47 +0000

Google is not as useful as it used to be. This whole SEO business is just killing it. Granted, the page rank they invented made a big difference to the search results. Everyone else were just counting keywords and stuff whereas Google started to count incoming links in combination with the keywords. Obviously this is really simplistic representation of their algorithm, but should suffice for the purposes of this post.

So, no one really knew how it worked, or rather had some ideas how it works, but had little influence over the results. And as consequence we had so precise and spot on search results that made Google so popular. If you used other search engines you’d get pages with the most repetitions of your search keywords, with Google you’d get pages that have keywords, but also the number of external references and the “ranking” of those references counted. In other words your top results would be credible pages that have the keyword you were looking for. No one would link to pages that aren’t informative, or would they?

This is where SEO comes in. And spoils everything. People started to create pages full of keywords and link from other pages to them. So creating some sort of mesh of interlinked sites. Yeah, they’d probably get one or another link from external source, but not a lot. Yet each page in this SE mesh has loads of incoming links. And just what sort of pages these are? Well, if it’s not porn, then it’s all about online shops. Or price comparison sites if you’re too lazy to run an online shop.

All you have to do is link to several online shops, get the results (sorting is optional) and that’s it. No, not really, what’s a point in having price comparison site that no one’s using? So you create another 1000-2000 equally useless pages. What happens next? You’re on the top of the Google search results alongside other “competitors”.

All very well and good. For you. But not for me. I don’t give a damn about your price comparison stuff. I don’t even want to buy that stuff. I’m after the information. I used to type in (rather technical) phrase and Google would come back with the manual or some troubleshooting guide or links to forums. Not anymore. First gazillion pages would list price comparison sites. Or online shops.

Thank you Google. You’re not that good anymore. Still quite useful, but not amazing. As you used to be. Alternatives? None as yet.

So that this doesn’t sound like a pointless rant, let me illustrate my point. I’m on Server Fault, trying to give my 2p in the discussion about built-in RAID controllers. This guy’s asking about A6VMX motherboard RAID setup and whether that would work with his choice of Linux. I’ve spent decent amount of my life working with “proper” hardware RAID controllers and never met the built in one. So I’m off to do some research.

I go to the manufacturer’s website, but unfortunately their manuals don’t have enough information. No worries, I’ll google it. There must be someone out there that uses these motherboards. And if they (MBs) sport RAID controllers, someone must have written at least few words about it.

Ok, I’m not that naive, I’m not searching just for A6VMX (although why not???). I use more specific search term: “A6VMX raid configuration“. And what’s the result? Ha ha, surprise-surprise… A list of online comparison sites:

And only the second page of results reveal some posts on hardware related forums. Not very useful, but at least some non-automatically generated content… Mind you, the search was rather specific. Try something less obvious and you’ll be lost. I was looking for my TV reviews. Yeah. I wish there were any…

So Google, you’ve done great job, but failed to keep fighting against the SEO herd. I just hope you’ll find a clever way to fight back and make your search results as good as they used to be.

Building and running Google Chrome OS on VirtualBox

pulegium — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:49:22 +0000

This is (sort of) hot topic on the internets at the moment. Google released their Linux based Chrome OS to the public. It’s still in beta and under development, but you can try it now. There are lots of manuals such as this one, that instruct how to run already built image using Sun VirtualBox. But this is not fun, because:

Insecure. Who knows who’s built the image and if they aren’t sending your Google login data to themselves when you login
You’re stuck with that particular release. As I said, it’s in development, so new features and bug fixes get introduced on a daily basis

So I’ll show you how to (relatively) quickly build your very own Google Chrome OS. This instruction tells how to build Chromium OS with pre-built Chromium web browser. You will also need Sun VirtualBox.

In a nutshell:

Install Ubuntu as a VirtualBox VM
Download ChromeOS sources
Build ChromeOS
Create VMWare image
Boot it in VirtualBox
Enjoy

For the latest build release numbers check Chromium OS build page.

Preparation

Install Ubuntu

Do the standard installation, as you would normally do. I selected all defaults, and allocated 20GB single partition for the installation and assigned 512MB RAM.

Get OS source

Download/unpack http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/archives/chromiumos-0.4.22.8.tar.gz to /home/user/chromiumos/

NOTE! It seems that Google have removed OS tarballs and you now have to use these instructions to get the source code.

Install some additional packages required to build ChromiumOS

$ sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ g++-multilib \
bison flex gperf libnss3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr4-0d libasound2-dev \
libnspr4-dev msttcorefonts libgconf2-dev libcairo2-dev libdbus-1-dev
$ sudo apt-get install wdiff lighttpd php5-cgi sun-java6-fonts

OS build

Building local repository

cd ~/chromiumos/src/scripts
./make_local_repo.sh

Watch the output carefully and make sure it hasn’t failed with some errors!

Google says if the script fails, remove repo directory and call the script again. It hasn’t failed for me, so if you’ve done everything as per above you should be fine. I don’t really understand why calling the same script might make any difference…

This step is quite lengthy, so you might want to make yourself some coffee or tea. Or just take a short walk if the weather is good.

Create build environment

Another totally automated step. Just run

./make_chroot.sh

Which creates chroot’ed build environment for you. This uses all packages you downloaded in the previous step. There are adoption how to pull required packages from the remote repositories (Google and official Ubuntu), but I advise to take an easy way and download all packages first and build locally.

Get Chromium binary

make the following directory:

mkdir -p ~/chromiumos/src/build/x86/local_assets

And download chromium package from Google:

wget -O ~/chromiumos/src/build/x86/local_assets/chrome-chromeos.zip \
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/archives/chromium-chromiumos-r32516.zip

Building OS

First you need to enter you chroot’ed build environment. Use the following command:

./enter_chroot.sh

I also recommend generating password for shared user, so that you can sudo from the terminal:

./set_shared_user_password.sh

And finally build all packages:

./build_all.sh

At this point, go and make some more tea or coffee. Which I wouldn’t recommend, though. Simply because you will have trouble getting asleep. Because sleeping is the most sane thing you might want to do at this moment. Building OS packages takes ages!…

But seriously, it’s not that bad, it took about an hour and a half on my Ubuntu VM to build it.

Make VM image and boot it in VirtualBox

Build bootable image

Once all packages have been built, you need to create OS image to boot from. Image build process creates two artefacts:
- Master boot record (mbr.image)
- Root FileSystem (rootfs.image)

./build_image.sh

Once the image files have been creates, the script will tell you where to find them. It is going to be in ~/chromiumos/src/build/images//

Here’s what you will have once the image build is done:

pulegium@ubuntu:~/chromiumos/src/build/images/999.999.33509.212332-a1$ ls -lh
total 729M
-rw-r--r--  1 pulegium 5000  512 2009-12-01 21:34 mbr.image
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root  40K 2009-12-01 21:31 package_list_installed.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root  40K 2009-12-01 21:34 package_list_pruned.txt
drwxr-xr-x 22 root     root 4.0K 2009-12-01 21:29 rootfs
-rw-r--r--  1 pulegium 5000 950M 2009-12-01 21:23 rootfs.image

Exit Chroot environment and run image_to_vmware.sh script which will create you a VM image. The script will tell you where the image is stored. Copy it to your VirtualBox machine. Mine was called ide.vmdk.

Attach image as VirtualBox VM disk

Best to show where to click… So fire up VirtualBox and start creating new VM.

: Creating New VM for Chrome OS

Then when prompted tell that you are going to use your own disk image.

Tell VirtualBox to use existing image

Add new image…

Add new image

And voila!

Image added

Enjoy Chrome OS

This is it, you’re ready to explore the new flashy OS… Enjoy!

: Chrome OS login screen

Selection of preinstalled application. All web based and ready to go. Make sure you have connection to the internet. Chrome OS bit dull and TBH useless without internet...

In general I think Chrome OS looks OK'ish, but this menu smells of M$ Windows...

Disabling columns for specific pages

pulegium — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:36:36 +0000

Ok, I’m in this stage when I spend more time configuring and getting the website layout right than actually working on any projects or writing posts. I’ve never used WordPress before, so these posts tagged “WordPress” are more for myself to either implement something or as a reminder in case I need to tweak some settings.

So far I’ve only installed few themes, and basic plugins, mostly to get stuff like Google Ads and Analytics working, nothing too spectacular.

I was playing with Google search and got an idea of replacing the default WordPress search with GoogleSearch. There’s one issue though, I have two options:

Redirect users to Google page, which isn’t ideal, I want them stay
Display search results on my website

I opted for the second option, however it poses few issues – I have 2 column layout (and will possibly add 3rd one at some stage). Google results are best displayed in a single column view (debatable, but that’s my taste at the moment, which may change in the future).

So, how do I make specific pages single column? After some Googling I’ve come across this post, which seems to work fine for me.