inside aebrahim’s head

I just noticed that Google is munging search result URIs. For example, if you run a search on “mozilla”, the first result is http://www.mozilla.org/. However, the URI that they link to on the search results page is:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.mozilla.org/&usg=AFQjCNGjMwD4PF4GezESBBRN2It3HBj5Qg

I suspect that the usg parameter is probably one used to prevent bots from gaming whatever results they’re trying to garner, and possibly also to link clicked search results to a specific user or browser session. I understand why they do this, but the downside for the end user is that the copy link option in the context menu of any browser is no longer useful. One needs to actually follow the link to get the URL in a form that you can copy into another application.

From my perspective, this is a pretty major usability bug, and I hope they revert it.

I’ve been having a couple of issues recently with a Google Groups hosted list that I manage, for which no solutions seem to be available.

Issue #1 – Google Groups Atom Feed id and link attribute broken

I’ve detailed this issue more in my post to the Is Something Broken forum on the Google Groups website, but so far there’s no resolution. Basically the Atom feeds generated by Google Groups generate a id and link attribute that contains a relative link without an FQDN so that when viewed from an RSS reader, the links are broken because the RSS reader passes a URL without an FQDN to the web browser. I hope this gets fixed as it seems like a pretty major problem.

When viewed from Firefox’s Live Bookmarks it works fine, but not otherwise.

The RSS 2.0 feed generated by Google Groups does have an FQDN in the link attribute so it works properly. The “obvious” solution (other than fixing the issue, which is up to Google) is to use the RSS 2.0 feed instead of the Atom feed but that creates another problem.

UPDATE (18/06/2008): As of today, Google seems to have fixed the issue with the Atom feeds.

Issue #2 – FeedDemon 2.7 does not handle the pubDate in the RSS 2.0 feeds correctly

The pubDates in the RSS 2.0 feed seem to be generated correctly, like the following:

<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:02:27 UT</pubDate>

When the RSS 2.0 feed is added to FeedDemon in synced mode (where it syncs with the Newsgator servers), it seems to ignore the pubDate and pick some arbitrary date for all the entries, and all the entries share this same date.

When the RSS 2.0 feed is added in non-synced mode (where FeedDemon pulls from the feed server directly), all the pubDates are respected and it works properly. In Firefox Live Bookmarks it works properly too.

With the Atom 1.0 feed from Google, the dates are correct in all cases but the links are broken. But at the moment users are in a quandry as there appear to be problems in both Google’s feed implementation and FeedDemon’s parsing of Google’s feeds.

UPDATE (08/06/2008): Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon has been able to reproduce the bug and has added it to the FeedDemon bug tracking database.

CNet reports that Google Desktop Search is coming out of beta today with new features including the ability to search Firefox history and Thunderbird mail. This is great news for Mozilla, though other desktop search engines such as Copernic have supported Firefox and Thunderbird for months already.

Better late than never, eh?

I have a question for webmasters out there who have some experience with SEO. How does Google treat the following?

a) Text that has class=”foo” where class foo is undefined.
b) HTML comments (including IE’s conditional comments).

My expectation is that it that for (a), class foo will be ignored entirely (no loss or gain in terms of SEO), and that HTML comments (including conditional comments) are also ignored entirely.

Does anyone have evidence to the contrary? Maybe some Mozilla folks out there know about this. I’m not worried about this for my blog, but another site that is considering advertising Firefox in place of some normal header text. For them, even marginal loss in terms of SEO may place it below another competing site (which would be unacceptable). Thanks in advance for your input.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.

I’ve disabled comments for Gmail related posts, because all I get are requests for invites that I can’t fulfil.

I decided a while ago that giving out Gmail invites on my blog was too much hassle to be worth it. So I had a bunch of invites (27 in total) that I had unused, lying wasted. But all is not lost if you still want to get an account. Just head over to SpreadFirefox.com, where a huge Gmail giveaway is taking place. I’ve donated all the invites I have to that programme.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. According to this post by RobinMonks, the sfx team has decided that the Gmail invite program is no longer going to be an sfx feature:

Well, I just found out not 30 seconds ago myself that the Gmail automation process was taken down.

Here’s what I know:
1) For unknown reasons and reasons I might never know the SFX team decided not to make Gmail an official site feature.
2) The automation process while it was online was successful and worked wonderfully.
3) The greater percentage of users were happy with the system
4) The project has been handed back to me to handle by hand.

Of cource, it’s almost impossible to handle all of the invite requests by hand.

From what I gather RobinMonks has been making some important contributions to sfx. Not cool pulling the rug out from under him. Also, what about all the invites that people have already donated, and haven’t been given out yet?

In the meantime, if you haven’t yet got an invite and want one, you can try your luck over here.

Google has started to make its results open in a new window when clicked. This is annoying, especially when I just want to find a specific website, and not do a general topic search.

I have 12 more Gmail invites to give out. The first 12 people to comment with their full name (first and last) and unobfuscated email address will get invites. If I have to do more than copy/paste, then you won’t get an invite.

For those who are worried that spambots may pick up their email address, if you leave your email address in the email field then only I will be able to see it. It won’t be publically displayed on the site unless you write it in the comment field itself. For those of you using free webmail accounts such as Hotmail or Yahoo, remember that the invitation email may be classified as Junk or Bulk Mail, so remember to check those folders too!

Bonus karma to those who also give the URL of their blog with a Firefox or Thunderbird button on it. Ideally I’d like to limit this to people who don’t have a Gmail account yet. Since I can’t do that, I’m going to ask nicely that only people who don’t have Gmail yet sign up.

UPDATE: That’s a wrap. Invites have been sent only to the first 12 commenters. I don’t have any more right now, but keep checking back, I’ll post if I get more.

I have twelve Gmail invites to give out. First twelve people to comment with their full name and unobfuscated email address get them. If I end up with more than twelve invites, then more than the first twelve will get them. Priority goes to people I know or recognise. Also, if you leave your email address in the email field, then only I will be able to see it. It won’t be publically displayed on the site unless you write it in the comment field. For those of you using free webmail accounts such as Hotmail or Yahoo, remember that the invitation email may be classified as Junk or Bulk Mail, so remember to check those folders too!

UPDATE: Invites have been sent to the first twelve commenters. At this time I have no more invites.