Computers

In Japan it’s April 1st already and it looks like Google Japan released an April Fool’s joke there (or a meta joke, in case the service will permanently stay): Google Dajare, in order to foster “Google’s mission ... to organize the world’s laughter”. Dajare, as Wikipedia explains, is a kind of comical Japanese wordplay, “similar in spirit to an English pun relying on similarities in the pronunciation of words to create a simple joke.” A search for 国内線 (which the Google translator says means “Domestic flights”, though that may be inaccurate) shows the onebox is live in Japan, indeed.

[Thanks Ionut!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's April Fool's Joke for Japan (Probabl ... | Comments]

Tim Gingrich of the Go Too Far East blog spotted a sanlunche (“a kind of modern-day mechanized rickshaw”) showing an ad for Google AdSense.Tim says the Chinese characters 恒久信任，携手共赢 translate to “Forever Trust, Succeed Together…”
[Thanks David! Photo used with permission with thanks to Tim.]

Update: As Ionut points out in the comments, the ad was a piece of garbage the driver of the sanlunche apparently found and utilized. [Thanks Ionut!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Ad in Beijing | Comments]

“Make pages for users, not for search engines,” the Google Webmaster Guidelines say.Yet the top result in a search for German computer store Atelco – atelco a40 bochum – includes the potentially revealing word “GoggleBot” in the URL. Currently, Google indexed around 723,000 pages on Atelco’s site which include the string “_gogglebot_21_”.

Clicking on the page will cause a redirect to another address. Stefan, who sent this in and blogged about it, wonders if this is perhaps blackhat SEO (I don’t know either). If so, he argues, the page should receive a double penalty: one for their unclean SEO, and another for having the nerves to name the URL as they did...

[Thanks Stefan Nitzsche!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Over-Optimized Page in Google Result? | Comments]

InThemes.com is a directory for skins you can apply onto Google’s personalized homepage. Google themselves have an iGoogle themes directory, but Sterling, who sent this in, says he created this as a theme developer who was “frustrated with the manyshortcomings of Google’s own theme directory,” including the long time it takes to add themes; the amount of low-quality themes the official directory is filled with; as well as the lack of search or categorization (though the official directory by now has search). Sterling adds, “Although it’s only been up a month, I’m attracting some good interestfrom the theme developer community.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Unofficial iGoogle Themes Directory | Comments]

Harry sent in a screenshot of what seems to be a new Google “onebox” he stumbled upon: direct code snippets. A onebox is a special Google result* that usually polls information from another Google search service, in this case, perhaps Google Code Search. On the other hand, it may also be possible that Harry is seeing something done by a browser extension, though that may not be very likely; I asked Harry and will add a follow-up in either case.

[Thanks Harry!]

*Note originally the term “onebox” referred to Google’s initiative to only offer one box for all uses to the searcher, and not the specific special hit in the result.

Update:Harry says “there’s no add-on causing that behavior. To be sure, I just performed the same search in Internet Explorer 6, and the same result came up.” Harry was searching for session_set_save_handler, though I can’t reproduce the onebox here. (Perhaps it’s US-only or still being rolled out, or just experimental at this point.)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Code Snippets Onebox | Comments]