Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

I was putting a clothes line up in my garden so I did a quick search to see how to tie a good knot. However, the links I clicked on came up with the Google malware warning page. I thought this was a little odd so I did a different search and the same thing happened. I ended up searching for the BBC and that was hidden as well.

It looks like someone at Google appears to have made a big mistake and added the malware warning to all search results. Rather than the url of the search result being the link the following is added to it, which redirects to the malware warning page.

http://www.google.co.uk/interstitial?url=(result url)

Clicking on a search result from JustSearch comes up with the following page.

Google Malware Warning

I had a quick look at the usual social media sites, it has already appeared in the upcoming Digg pages and Twitter is full of people talking about it.

Looks like somebody will be working late tonight!

[UPDATE: Looks like is has been sorted whilst I was writing this post. I find it a little bit strange that Google could make such a big mistake.]

[UPDATE: An explanation of what happened can be found on the official Google Blog.]

Philip Norton
Lead Developer, 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.

Fortunately Read the rest of this entry »

Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development

Gone are the days when a separate version of a web site was required to see a web-site. Many 3G Phones, such as the iPhone and Android compatible phones  support rendering of web pages in their full glory (except for Flash on the iPhone). While this creates the richness that one expects when you are surfing at home on your laptop or desktop computer. It can still be difficult to navigate around a large web pages. If you really want to make your website usable on a mobile phone it might be a better idea to go for a mobile version of a website.  Domains are available for mobile websites and  it is a good idea to buy the .mobi domain for your mobile website to host your mobile version of your website to show you are really serious about providing mobile content.

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Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development

Monday, Microsoft decided to make available to download the first release candidate of its new browser IE8. After a few years of development it seems to be due very soon, Q1 this year is more likely if nothing major is found in the RC1. So, is Microsoft going to fill the gap?

With Mozilla and Opera on their way to release new version of their respective browser, one might wonder if IE8 is going to challenge them. The browser war is not over yet but with all the improvement seen with Chrome, FF 3.1 beta and Opera 10 alpha I don’t see how the Redmond firm is going to win.

The same impression came from IE7, nothing new but loads of things to try to catch up. Still some of the features are worth a word. Besides improving the security Microsoft has worked on the accessibility of  the browser. Better keyboard navigation, enhanced zoom and on page search along with some other tweaks are here to give the user a better Internet experience.

The IE team also promised to make the browser more standards compliant. After claiming to pass the Acid test 2 in 2007 the team has gone quiet on this side. No wonder why after trying the Acid test 3.

IE8 scores 20/100 where FF3 gets 71 and Chrome 79. What the development community was hoping for it still far away. IE8 is certainly not going to render like every other browser which means after special stylesheets for ie6 and 7 we will have to make one for 8.

Conclusion

A step toward the right direction but no there yet. It supports CSS 2.1, its more secure, faster maybe but its not the like of those new browser with CSS 3 support and new javascript engine. Maybe next time Microsoft.

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development