Terry Pearson’s Blog

Have you ever wondered what a web site looked like five years ago? Or maybe you want to see the first ebay page ever.

The internet archive can be a valuable research assistant for those looking into the history of the internet. The archive claims to contain 55 Billion pages in their Way Back Machine.

The internet archive has become more than a historical museum of web pages. It now has a vast database of audio, text, software, and even movies. It is their hope that they can preserve all data that is made public on the internet.(or as much as is legally allowed).

There are now tools that can be used for uploading your videos and podcasts to the internet archive. I am not sure if it is required, but at the very least, it is strongly recommended that your content be licensed by the creative commons license when uploading.

According to Rajesh Segu’s Blog, “the Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month.”

I can’t imaging having one terabyte of storage, much less a petabyte! This is simply an enormous about of data.

I believe you will find the internet archive an invaluable source of information in the form of books, music, history, and everything else that makes up the internet.

Check it out at http://www.archive.org/.

It appears that Google is experimenting with a new site called Search Mash.

The new search engine portal has a nice interface. The design is very “web 2.0 – ish.” One unique part about it, is that when you click “more results” in just makes your page longer than it was before. It scrolls down with the added results at the bottom of the results page.

Another cool feature of SearchMash is that you can be anywhere on the page and start typing, and your words will be typed in the search box. This is a very creative approach to the search engine page. It makes sense.

Spencer Schaffner said that he likes SearchMash because it combines the image search and the normal search into one.

Abhijit Nadgouda of Ifacethoughts.net had a very good article about Searchmash.com. He did his research and did a very good job describing the different features of the new Web 2.0 search engine interface.

I have not decided whether I like this new interface or not. I have not found a reason to dislike it, except for the fact that it is not as familiar to me as Google. So I guess my current stance on SearchMash is “indifferent.”

You can check it out at http://www.searchmash.com/

If you have the desire to see who visits your website, and how much, Google Analytics is for you.

If you wish to have free professional analysis of search engine terms that point to your website, Google Analytics is for you.

If you wish to see charts, make goals, integrate with adsense, etc., Google Analytics is for you.

Google has made this tremendous project free to everyone. The do have a slight ulterior motive. Google wants individuals to use this tool to help track adsense and optimize their sites for the Google Adsense ads.

But, Google being the mostly awesome company that they are has provided this tool to everyone. Even if you never would think of posting ads on your site, Google will still let you use the tool for free.

Today, I made the decision to create a Google Analytics account and begin tracking stats on my site.

One of the first things I did was to first read a good review on Google Analytics. I then went to Google Analytics Website and signed up for an account. I am so far, very impressed by the interface and the tools.

I also found a Wordpress plugin for Analytics. While it was fine to hardcode the Analytics Javascript tracker (formerly known as Google Urchin), it is much easier to have a somewhat graphically based interface for the tracker.

If you have a website, you know that it can sometimes be hard for all your pages to get listed in the search engines. Usually your first page is listed within a month or two, and then it may take six months to a year to get the rest of the site crawled.

Every search engine has different ways of searching and categorization, so it almost takes an expert to optimize your site for all search engines. However, you can make it much easier for the big ones to get to content on your site. By the big ones, I am referring to Google (of course), Yahoo, Microsoft, and A9 (Amazon’s Search Engine).

If you could only choose one of these to focus on, it would have to be the search engine behemouth, Google.

Believe it or not, Google wants to index your site. They want to know as much about your site as you do. By doing so, Google can become a promotion tool for your site. After all, promotion of our sites is what we want, otherwise why put all your website out in public in the first place?

With a new tool from Google, getting search engines to “see” your site has never been easier. Just go to www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. It is easy to get setup. I think that anyone could handle it. If you have wordpress, you can have it dynamically update your sitemap using the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress. If you have some other content management system, try to search “Google Sitemap Generator for CMS X” where “CMS X” is your content management system. There are even php and perl scripts you can run on your server if you have that kind of access.

The sitemap will basically give google a very good idea of which pages to index. It is a little like a tour of your website for search engine spiders. They may choose to explore elsewhere (unless you use a robots.txt file), but they will for sure find the pages on your sitemap.

Congratulations, you should now be well on your way to a better searched site!