Google Chrome has recently made the unpopular move to fundamentally change how URLs are shown in the browser. In almost all browsers (except Safari, below), the full URL is shown in the address bar, https protocol and all. However, with version 69 of the Google Chrome browser, a change has been made to attempt to … Read more
It’s heavily rumoured that Cloudflare will soon be announcing a Public DNS server. Their website, every1dns.com is currently empty, but Google have a cached version of the site available. The two DNS servers, easier to remember than Googles are said to be 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. According to their website, both support encrypted DNS as well … Read more
As of recently, Google have ‘broken’ Google Shopping. It appears they have set up a blacklist of words which cannot be used in searches. The problem is commonly called the Scunthorpe Problem. This is where certain words or phrases are caught by a spam filter or search engine because the words used contains a string … Read more
Often, the choice of which payment provider to use is a case of which offers the lowest cost, or which offers the functionality that’s required for your business. Once past these limitations, many payment providers are the same; offering either an on-page or external redirection site to take payment, and returning a secure callback to … Read more
If you’re considering having a website for your company; there’s plenty of decisions to make – from which company to host with, and who should design and code your website, or whether to make it yourself. If you’re thinking of writing a website yourself, don’t fall into the trap of site generators and especially content … Read more
All websites aim for a high conversion ratio; and if you have a high number of visitors but a low take-up rate or high bounce rate; it may be time to review your marketing techniques. The wiki site, Dark Patterns, discusses the different techniques used in marketing – focusing on the bad, but also giving … Read more
While not wishing to start a trend of video blog posts, this video from Google Shopping simply says it all; Don’t let your shopping experience turn into something like this.
Most developers will come across a need for paged content; perhaps for products on a website, or for long articles; but how is this best done for search? Google have recently announced more support for previous/next pages, and have offered two options; Using the <link> tag in the <head> container, to ‘Canonicalise‘ the individual pages … Read more
If you’re a regular user of Google, I’m sure you’re familiar with the plus operator. It’s used as a tool by power users to narrow down results to ensure words will be in the search results. If not, you’re probably familiar with Google rewriting your query to try and help your results; most commonly this … Read more
In a fairly unexpected report, Google have announced that SSL will be enabled for a number of users by default. Along with GMail, secured by default last year, and Twitter and Facebook providing secure versions as an option, Google will be introducing secure searches to users over the coming weeks. Google have provided a secure … Read more