True or False: One visit to a site can infect your machine?

Too TRUE.

This is something that people tend to not believe - don’t want to believe - it’s just too scary.  You can have malicious code infect your computer just by visiting a web site.  When conditions are right (stale operating system and low browser security settings) it is all too possible.

What I like about the Watch Guard series is the way it is explained.  It is not too techy, not too dumbed down, and it is shown in real time.

Thank you to my Honeybear for showing me these - and for fueling my curiosity.

Stoopid Tests

I am usually good at tests; I don’t know why. But nothing is quite as annoying as knowing what you know, and having questions posed so poorly as to be almost unanswerable. It is completely possible that I ‘read into’ questions too much. And it’s also possible that posing questions to test someone’s knowledge or skill level is a skill of its own. I have noticed poor test questions on a couple fronts: matters of context, analogies and antiquation. There are things that are simply a matter of context and personal preference. For example, who decides what browser cache setting is best? I don’t like to cache my pages at all, since it saves me the trouble of hitting the refresh button to preview changes I make. But for the average person, page caching can improve their browsing experience. So questions posed as “What is the optimal browser cache setting?” is totally dependent on the context the browser is used in. One of my favorite questions starts like this “Which is the best method to ______.” Then there’s the analogy question. Analogy questions should come with a level of accuracy that tells you exactly how precise they are trying to be. One case this crops up in is the difference between a LAN and WAN. My favorite question in this category is true or false (yeah, thanks for all the options) “The Internet is like a WAN.” Well, that depends on how technically accurate you are trying to be. In the end, if you look close enough, nothing is like anything else! <L> But best of all, I can’t stand having to learn about antiquated methods such as FRAMES. It’s been years since I have used frames, and I don’t plan of starting again anytime soon. My newest peeve in this ring of the circus is having to learn the menus and settings for Outlook Express and Netscape Navigator.

I’m sorry, Netscape Who??  Why, in the year 2008, would I want to learn anything about Netscape Navigator? I didn’t know this was a technology history test…

Or better yet, how to sign up for a hotmail account. Yikes, if someone can’t just figure out that on-the-fly, don’t go into the technology field, please. You could make an entire test just on how to sign up for every web service out there. (Please, no one actually do that!)

Then there are items that make you wonder about the entire course and its validity.  The one I found today was “Twisted pair is unsuitable to bend around corners.”  Please tell me why I am taking this certification test again?  What really matters is that the test I am taking is considered by the business community at large to be reputable.

Visual Search a Design Nightmare

With visual search engines like Redzee appearing on the horizon, the nature of search will be changed. Right now, in regular search results, your site is represented as text consisting of the same alphabet as everyone else. Searchers have to read the description of your site to figure out if they would like to go there. By contrast, a visual search displays a screenshot of the resulting sites, giving the impression that you can tell which sites are better by looking at an image of the site that is reduced to 35% of it’s original size. It is true that if you had been to a site before, but couldn’t remember the exact URL and didn’t bookmark it, you would be able to pick it out easier and faster than a regular search.

But visual search is a marketing bonanza that will be a design nightmare. Design changes will be requested to make the screenshot look more appealing at a reduced size. Pages will take on a more ad-like appearance, since getting people to look at your page is a desired effect, and just placing in the results will get eyes on your site. And if the screenshot is done in a certain manner, just ranking will get your advertising seen.

And how long will it take before pages are optimized to rank for a popular query just to splash spam in your face while you search? The problem is that an image is whatever you tell the machine it is. If you have an image of your product or service and tag it as ‘free ip tv’ then the machine has no recourse than to resort to your designation of what that image is. This is one reason why I don’t trust it when any search engine says they are p*rn free. As long as the machines cannot tell that they are being lied to, people will lie to them.

Google Analytics + Google Web History =One Interesting Theory

While searching today, I noticed that the number of returns on my query was prefaced by “Personalized Results” and I don’t remember turning any such feature on. Had it always been like that and I just hadn’t noticed? This lead me to search for “google personalized” and I was very surprised by what I found. I skipped past the iGoogle result (which was number one) and went straight to the sub-result beneath it titled “Google Web History.” ( I tried iGoogle once…I don’t even remember how long ago. But I didn’t like it so I just stuck with plain old Google as my home page.) Clicking on this link was very enlightening. Google is keeping track of how many searches I perform, which results I visit, how many times I have visited each result, and at what time I did these actions. Then I checked out how much information had been accumulated - everything as far back as May of 2006!! Two years worth of search history available just on me. Imagine how much data they have if you multiple that times the number of Google users. No wonder they need all those server farms.

When I think of the information I can get from Google Analytics, and the information I have seen in my Google Web History, I can’t but help to think that Google is using more parameters and metrics than they are letting on. If you logically combine the information that Google is collecting, it is an entire flow of search sessions. I think of Google as a sea, and each search session as a boat on that sea, and sites as docks in the sea that the boats do or do not stop at. If they can analyze the sites that you frequent and the search terms that you enter, then logically they can create search currents that send you to places that you are more likely to want to go. But this also works in the other direction; the currents could also steer you toward sites *they* want you to be exposed to.

If they are tracking search flows, then the visitors to your site could have an impact on your SERP. For example, let’s say I start a blogger blog about Sea Monkeys, and the leading Sea Monkey expert with a Google account starts to visit my blog once a month. Then the expert starts to visit every week. According to my theory, this would make your rank placement rise. If established experts are given extra ‘weight’ like .gov and .edu links do for PageRank, then your visitors could be given ‘credibility scores’ and influence your SERP.

I cannot prove that the quality of your traffic is being quantified for use in search algorithms. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Maybe your SERP will be affected by sites that you visit. If I am researching paid link sites or black hat SEO, then I will in all likelihood be visiting some unsavory neighborhoods. If I ’slum it’ possibly this could reflect badly on the sites I am associated with.

Maybe I’m a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Or maybe not.