For a short while yesterday, every page displayed by Google reported messages and warnings about harms affecting your computer. This was in a way that every URL you find in search results have the text displayed as the site might harm the computer.

The Google pages displayed in search results when clicked will display advisory warnings similar to the malware infested websites. The suggestions to the users were given as returning to the previous page for picking results or trying another search for finding out what the users were looking for.

Google has reported that this bug lasted only for around for 40 minutes and this was resolved within a time frame of 55 minutes. This was only a human error which helped when Google tries to flag the sites which are known for installing malwares.

The errors for the pages were noticed at around 6.27 AM and 6.40 AM. This began disappearing at around 7.10 AM and 7.25 AM. The duration of this problem for any user was only for 40 minutes.

Some blogs started reporting this news as a means by which the service was denied to the Google users. Some sites considered it a menace when users try to find out more information from their sites. They hence started showing expectations saying Google will take steps to prevent such things in the future.

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hakia, the semantic search engine, just came out with its Syndication Web Services for web publishers or businesses looking to provide semantic search on their sites. Syndication Web Services provide the semantic technology which powers hakia. It delivers an XML feed with options to customize the feed.

The Syndication Web Services technology offers 30,000 free searches per day which is also free of advertising. This offer is only available to early adopters until they fill up their partners’ quota. These are some of the interesting features of Syndication Web Services:
Web Search -Provides search results from the entire web
Vertical Search – Provides search results from a particular vertical such as, health, or from a particular database.
News Search – Provides news articles for the given query.
Categorizer – Helps to identify categorical items from a given text ( can be a text block or URL)
Summarizer – Displays a summary of a given text block/URL. Will be of most use to content management systems.
Characterizer -Helps to identify and expand various keywords, phrases or tags; perfect for SEM professionals and publishers.
TMR (Text Meaning Representation) – Displays ‘text meaning representation’ of a given text block, most useful for core technology development.

According to Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO of hakia, this new hakia implementation is meant to be useful to a wide variety of applications, right from advertising to even document management. The best results will be seen by webmasters with complex projects, as they will benefit from the unique improvements made possible by the semantic search technology.

Now we come to Russell, a small time advertiser who like thousands of others had used Google’s AdWords to advertise one of his sites, WorldLabel.com. All was going fine until one day Russell noticed that seemingly spammy campaigns had been set up in his account.The site being advertised was “lastminute.com” which claimed to offer a loan of $1500 instantly, and the keywords for this campaign were variations of “loans” ,“fast cash” and so on. A little research showed that Russell had received a “phishing” email that had looked like an official email from Google asking him to login to his account to change some settings. In this case, Russell was saved by AdWords’s abuse filter and has since then changed his password. But for those of you hearing those alarm bells ringing, the best thing to do when you recieve such email is to ignore it. If you just can’t ignore, then never click on it, open a new window and type in the actual URL (in this case the AdWords home page) manually.

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The unimaginably growing complexity of web design and its related activities have necessitated the proper usage of two files namely robots.txt and .htaccess.

To start from the beginning let us say that both the files can be created using any text editor such as notepad and both of them must be placed in the root folder of your web server which implies that whenever your are opening the file system of your host, these two files must be visible to you. Please note that some web servers prefer to keep the .htacces file hidden. BUT search engine crawlers and spiders can easily trace them.

Let us now try to define the individual purpose. Robots.txt basically controls the movement of the robots, sent by the search engines, inside the existing file system of your web server. So, if you want some prohibitions, you can mention it in robots.txt. You can even customize the robots.txt according to your needs. On the other hand .htaccess file primarily serves the purpose of URL redirection and module rewrite.

Let us take an example: while revamping your website, you want to omit some of your old pages, which had been already crawled by the search engines. Now, such sudden omissions of web pages, which have been already crawled, casts a tremendous negative impact and they treat it as unfounded tagging the infamous URL Not found. The best way is to redirect the old pages intelligently to the existing pages, so that crawlers don’t fall in a soup, instead they find a landing platform, wherein they also redirect the visitors.

Module Rewrite has gained importance when people have started noticing that search engines prefer user friendly URLs instead of automated URLs generated by several programs. This is worth mentioning that even popular software packages like PHPLd and WordPress also have kept provision for module rewritten URLs to earn you the additional advantage of generating Search Engine friendly URLs.

It is to be mentioned that the presence of either robots.txt or .htaccess is mandatory in your web server, but it gives you a complete control over the web server and moreover you can dictate the crawlers and spiders in your own way.

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