Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

If you run a business you’ll know how important it is to be able to access critical systems 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This is why having a Blackbury or iPhone is essential for any modern day business. You can receive emails, check orders and stock all via you phone.  Can the same be achieved with SEO and if so what iPhone plugins will you need?

1. Email – In conjunction with Google Alerts
The e-mail app on th iPhone is great, it’s easy to read e-mails, sync with your e-mail account and write the odd short e-mail. Being able to have emails 24/7 means you can reply to link requests, e-mail your content supplier or developer at any time. If your using Google alearts to check inbound links and brand mentions you’ll get them all into inbox.

2. Wordpress App
If you have a blog on your site then it’s most likely going to be WordPress, being able to add new posts or pages and moderate comments on the go makes blogging slightly easier. You’ll often find yourself on the bus, train or waiting for an appointment, this ‘dead time’ can be used to add content to your site. The WordPress app for the iPhone lets you add posts and pages with pictures and moderate comments too. It also features to autosave, so if you get a call your post will be saved locally.

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John Campbell

Google Labs is an infrequently updated part of Google that showcases new or interesting things that Google are working on. One thing that was of interest to me recently was the Similar Images search feature. This will allow you to search for a term using the normal Google image search, but adds the option to click on a link next an image and view more images that look like this one. For example, lets say you wanted to search for images of London, you can click on images of the London Eye and see different images of the same thing. Here is the official video from Google.

I thought I would have a play with this feature and see what I could do with it. One thing I always have trouble finding is an image of a mouse cursor. When I am writing user manuals I like to have the cursor in the image so that the user can see where they are mean to click. So after a image search for cursor I found the following results.

Google Image Search For Cursor

I then clicked on the similar link for the 6th image along on the second row and got the following page.

Google Image Search Similar Images

As you can see the feature if nearly there. From this page of images quite a few are indeed cursors, but the majority are not at all like the original image. For some reason Google seems to like to display images of cupid for this particular search.

I had more success when I tried searching for logos, which I presume if because they look quite alike. Searching for the logos of Wordpress, BBC, and Microsoft gave some good results.

So the big question is Will this become part of the main image search? I think the answer is probably yes. There are a quite a few products and features developed over the years that have become live, such as Gmail and iGoogle, so I think that we could very well see this feature appearing on normal Google image search results. You can already view images by face and drawing type, so this is probably just another extension of this. I just hope they refine the image recognition before putting it live.

Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

WebMynd is a useful Firefox extension that adds additional results alongside the organic search results.

I find it very useful because it is configurable to search many different major areas at once. In this example I have selected Flickr,  deli.ic.ous, Twitter and YouTube to appear alongside my search results. However, other sites can be chosen at will from a bewildering array of icons.  Some useful some not.

From left-to right: Amazon, Wikipedia,  Daylife News, Los-Angeles Times, Forbes, Factiva Coverage, Techchrunch, Hackernews, Your Top Sites, One Riot Pulse, Yahoo Shopping Network, Youlicit Results, Digg, Economist Articles, Reddit, Linkedin, Snappy Fingers Answers, Dawdle Games , CNN,  Google  Books,  Fluther Results and your WebMynd history. (It would be a useful add in to be personalise the list of information sources. Being in the UK, American news is less useful to me than say the BBC.)

As you surf, your search history is recorded. Some people might find this useful,  however, I am suspicious of such things so I switched that off from the  start.

I have found WebMynd most useful for the Twitter results as you can search for occurences of phrases in conversations. This has applications in reputation management, link building and many other areas of search engine optimisation.

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development

Performance is a big issue on the web, if you pages take too long to load then people will go elsewhere. Sometimes your problems can be solved with cache control on your server, but still some cases require optimisation of your code. For this task, you should be using a technique known as ‘profiling’ – essentially a debug log of what your script or program did during execution, which functions were called and how long it took. It gives you a great glimpse into what it is that is taking too long to execute which means you have something concrete to look at when you need to optimise your system.

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Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development