Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, has officially resigned from Google. His last official day at Google was December 31, 2016, he announced on his blog. [Read more…]
Yelp Was Down
Yelp logo. (PRNewsFoto)
Update
May 16, 2016: 12:01pm Yelp is now back up and running, it appears that the site was down for several hours today, May 16, 2016. While it was down, they were displaying this message:
Previous blog post below, as I initially reported it:
It appears that the Yelp website is down. This is the first time in many years that I have seen this website go down, and it’s certainly newsworthy. So many people rely on reviews from Yelp, good or bad, and many businesses rely on having good reviews on Yelp. [Read more…]
Did You Know? There is a Simple Version of Wikipedia
I bet you didn’t know that there is a simple version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia. While we certainly are familiar with the more technical side of Wikipedia, if you replace the “en” in the Wikipedia URL of any entry with “simple”, you will get the “simple” version of that entry. It’s explained to you as if you are a five year old. [Read more…]
12 Websites Blocked by the People’s Republic of China
This week I am Beijing, China doing a keynote address about SEO and domain names. There is free internet access here at the China World Hotel in Beijing, but is it really free? Maybe I should say that it is “restricted”. [Read more…]
Sales Spam on Google Plus
By now, I’m pretty used to getting spam on LinkedIn, as I get it at least several times each week. But now, it seems as though the sales spammers are now targeting Google Plus, and somehow sending unsolicited sales spam that show up as notifications on Google Plus. Here’s the latest one, that I received just today. I have scratched out the name of the person and their company and URL, but you get the idea. [Read more…]
Facial Recognition: Microsoft Website Tells You How Old You Are
A website by Microsoft is using facial recognition to tell you how old you are. And if you ask me, it’s actually pretty accurate. Well, in at least most cases that I tested. The website, called How Old Do I Look?, allows you to find an image by searching on Bing.com, or you can upload your own photo. Their facial recognition algorithm will analyze the photo and tell you how old the person in the photo is. Or, if there are several people in the photo, it will look at all the faces and determine how old they are. [Read more…]