Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with web and search

"Proactive? Paradigm? Aren't those just words dumb people use to sound smart?"

drjimmy11 — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:49:10 -0800

Where does one proactively look for software (specifically Flex) jobs these days? So I'm on the market. I have about ten years web/software development experience overall, with the last 3 focused in Flex. I'm in Los Angeles and not keen to move.

In the past I would just put my resume up on Dice and get bombarded by recruiters. This time though, the response has been a little more sparse, and I'd like to find something sooner than later.

So:

Are the major search sites (Monster, Careerbuilder) as useless as I remember them for tech jobs?

Is there anywhere tech-specific besides Dice I should post my resume, or search for jobs? This would include job sites or message boards or whatever.

Are there any other strategies I'm missing, or should I just browse the websites of specific employers who i think I might like?

Thanks!

SEO Filter: My boss has asked me for a blue sky list of SEO tools. What are your favorites?

DrDreidel — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:08:24 -0800

SEO Filter: My boss has asked me for a blue sky list of SEO tools. What are your favorites? (more details inside) I work for a firm that does online marketing and PR. I started with them as an intern, but got hired to help out with our search practice. I've been apprenticing, so to speak, doing mainly organic search for the past year or so.

A lot of the work I do is keyword research, where I will take a term relevant to our client and give them insights on what people really mean when they search for this term. To do this, we subscribe to keyword discovery. This lets us plug in one main term and will return up to 1000 actual queries containing that term along with their relative popularity.

We also do optimization by page, where we will take a set of pages and find the best relevant unique keyword for each. We then pepper that keyword into the different tags and meta info on the page in an attempt to rank highly for that keyword in Google.

My boss approached me asking for a blue sky list of SEO tools, assuming no restrictions on price. As I haven't been in the industry long, I'm really not sure what to ask for. Some quick and dirty searching has led me to software called SEO Elite. Not sure if that's really for me. I also am considering a subscription to SEOmoz to learn best practices and such. So finally, my question to all of you MeFite SEOs: What paid tools make your job easier? Or, what tools do you wish you had access to but don't due to budgetary restrictions?

How do people on the Blue do it?

reenum — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:50:57 -0800

How do people find new and interesting links on the Web? Every day, I read Metafilter, Boing Boing, kottke, etc. These sites all have links that I see for the first time on these sites.

Now, I know kottke and Boing Boing have users sending them links. But, my question is: how do these normal people find these links? Are there special techniques or things I'm not doing that helps others find new and interesting stuff whilst I view the fruits of their labor?

I guess what I'm asking is how people search for subjects and find new and undiscovered information about those subjects?

How do I change the name and URL of my website without losing visitors and Google search placement?

rintako — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:39:15 -0800

How do I change the name and URL of my website without losing visitors and Google search placement? I want to change the name and URL of my website. It currently receives 3000 uniques a day. About 90% of my traffic is from outside sources such as Google, or others that have linked to my content. How do I change the name and URL so that my visitors can continue to come find my site, and so I don't lose my top 1-3 positions on the Google search pages for my terms?

Search me that flash mr google

Smegoid — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:06:26 -0800

What's the latest wisdoms on flash and search engines (aside from "don't use flash")? Looking for tips geared towards new media sites (collectives, art galleries etc.) Being the most net savy of my group, I got tasked with designing our online portfolio and a site for the art space we co-manage. Did it all in flash as it seemed the thing to do. Despite filling out all the meta content in the html file, we're still pretty blind to search engines (been up since 2005). In particular people are complaining that none of their work shows up when searching for their name. I've poked around to see what the current deal is, and short of not using flash, it seems there's no good way to make yourself visible to the search engines. Anyhow we got out of the gallery business awhile ago, but we'd still like to maintain the site as a sort of memorial.

So anyone with more experience have some tips? I was thinking a text based splash page, or maybe cutting down the site into text based html with flash navigation and movies, etc.

Here's the site www.nestmontreal.ca

As you can see, it made sense to use flash for the look we were going after. But being invisible to search engines really sucks!

Many thanks!

Need help hiding my name online!!

giddygirlie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:47:38 -0800

Keeping my name private on my website - can robots.txt help? I only use my first name on my website, for privacy concerns, but my husband is a public person (professional comic book artist) so he uses his full name.

I just noticed today that if I google my own name, my website comes up as #1 on the search listing. I think this is because I have linked to my husband's site (the URL is his name) so now google is finding my first and last name together and referencing my personal website.

Is there a way to write a robots.txt file that will discourage robots from finding my name on the site? My alternative is to replace all instances of linking to his site with a tinyurl link instead and hope that google refreshes its cache soon.

I don't keep any content that is offensive, I just don't like work people spying on my personal life. :)

Ideas for search by distance

zingzangzung — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:17:52 -0800

How can I best display a search by distance feature on a website? I am building a website which will have a search by distance feature eg find a cafe within 5 miles of x. It's for the UK and uses postcode/latitude longitude info. The obvious way to display it is to have users select a postcode, and a distance radius. However, this means the user has to know the starting postcode, which they may not (if you are searching in different city from your own perhaps). So I could display a drop down of placenames associated with postcodes. But at its best this gives me a drop down with hundreds of options, and in large cities there are multiple postcodes which confuses it even more. I've experimented with a series of selects, ie first select a region, then from places within that region, which is a bit better, but not yet quite what I want. Whether this is because of the data I have, or the way of displaying it I am not sure.
So I am looking for ideas and suggestions, examples even, of good ways to display this feature that will work well for the user. I'm going round in circles with it a bit, and need some fresh input.

Where does autofill come from?

M Edward — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:38:34 -0800

Firefox Filter: Is there any way to view the autofill lists outside of Firefox? Where does Firefox store the autofill information? Like previous google searches? Is there a way to view them with a text editor?

I am looking for something I googled a long time ago but going through the entire history of my searches line-by-line with only 4 at a time showing is driving me batty.

Search engine uses old meta description

clockworkjoe — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:28:10 -0800

Why does my site keep showing up on search engines with out of date met descriptions and keywords? I'm setting up a website for my parents' small press, using Joomla as a CMS. Here it is. http://www.beautifulozarks.com

However, whenever you search beautiful ozarks on Yahoo or Google, you get the the generic Joomla meta description "Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system" instead of the new meta description "Ozark books and photographs on Ozarks history, travel, nature, the Irish Wilderness, and folk culture by Leland & Crystal Payton published by Lens & Pen Press."

It has been several days since I updated the meta description and keywords. Why don't the search engines use the new description? What am I doing wrong?

Open source XML web searching?

Mo Nickels — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:48:57 -0800

I'm looking for suggestions for open source software that will allow me to take a large amount of XML, do searches of it through a web interface (especially allowing selecting trees or tags for narrowing searches), and return HTML-formatted results. Have you used any open source software like that? It needs to run as out-of-the-box as possible. This question was helpful but it wasn't sufficiently the same and the answers require more programming than I have skill or time for. The XML would have to be invisible to the user: the users would not be downloading the XML as files, they would merely be looking at it rendered in styled HTML on the web server. The software would have to pay attention to the DTD and respect parent and child trees and allow inter-record linking.

How can I find out who is behind a Web page ?

plumberonkarst — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 09:14:23 -0800

How can the identity of a web page creator be discovered?I have a problem with a local web page that is letting out sensitive cave locations and I want to try to contact the owner and let them know and perhaps inform/convince them to remove the problem. The web page is rather odd for 2 reasons.

1) There are many spelling mistakes and the offending data is in the background images. The web page creator states emphatically that they will not give out the locations ,yet they inadvertently do with the background. This makes me think it is a neophyte web user and new cave explorer who is just enthusiastic about the caves. The fact that is in an Angelfire host adds to my neophyte thoughts.

2) Some of the terminology used on the web page indicate a very high level of cave and karst knowledge. I rarely use the terms and I work with cave scientists/geologists daily.

This leads me to believe the web page is created in a neophyte style to cover for someone in the "know" to disseminate information that should not be shared. Caves unfortunately can have a lot of politics and some disgruntled people will purge information in retaliation for real or imagined "slights"

This web page has become a problem for a few reasons.

1) Damage has already increased dramatically due to extra traffic in these rare and fragile examples.

2) The caves are partially on private property and the posting of the locations is severely threatening years of negotiated access.

3)Directions shared on the page lead to certain locations where severe bodily harm can easily happen due to certain biological elements and as well trespassing instructions.

I will not post the web page as that would add fuel to the fire. Does anyone have any legal methods they can recommend to perhaps find this persons email/method of contact?

It's all for charidy, mate.

asok — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 04:49:27 -0800

Goodtree. What is this? Is it as dodgy as it looks?

Any search engine ninjas out there?

zooropa — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:49:37 -0800

Does this exist? Search tool that displays multiple results from various news sources. This one is for all you search experts out there. Here's what I would like to do:

Let's say I have three companies that I am keeping tabs on and trying to follow all their news. Is there a search engine or Web 2.0 app that will let me plug in three or more companies (let's say Apple, Microsoft, Sun) and then display a single page with links for all their news stories (AP, Reuters, blogs, etc.)?

In other words, I could plug in Apple, Microsoft, and Sun on a page and it would return a page like this:

Apple
- story a (link)
- story b (link)
- story c (link)
- story d (link)

Microsoft
- story a (link)
- story b (link)
-story c (link)
- story d (link)

Sun
- story a (link)
- story b(link)
- story c (link)

Thoughts?

Diggdot.us search from Firefox?

noahv — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 10:33:39 -0800

Is there a search plugin for Firefox to search Diggdot.us? They don't offer an on-site search, and I've had no Googluck.

Is there a site search script or service that will output valid XHTML 1.1?

sjvilla79 — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 22:28:50 -0800

Is there a site search script or service that will output valid XHTML 1.1? Spent most of today looking at different site search engine options for my website. No luck. So, can anyone recommend a service or script that doesn't produce invalid or deprecated code in its results? Also, I'd like to be able to modify the style of the results to fit in with my blog's design. Cheers.

Gullible is not in the dictionary

ludwig_van — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:56:34 -0800

I'm using FireFox 1.07 for Windows XP. Previously, when I typed "dict [word]" into the address bar, FireFox would take me to the dictionary.com definition for [word]. Now typing in the same command just takes me to the first result of a Google search for "dict [word]," the same as if I typed anything into the address bar. Recently all my Firefox bookmarks disappeared as well. I haven't updated Firefox or changed anything that I know of. What happened, and how do I restore the old functionality?

Webbot

benjh — Mon, 09 May 2005 08:11:48 -0800

I need my own web bot. I need an application that will go to a set of web sites that I specify, grab information based on either (1) whether there are changes to the site, or (2) by keyword search.

Would prefer something client based. I've Googled, I've donwload.com'd, but I can't find anything that does what I want it to do.

Weird Google Search Results

MrAnonymous — Thu, 20 May 2004 09:27:13 -0800

Every once in a while, when I search Google, I end up with some weird search results. All ads. It doesn't happen all the time and I don't know if it's Google stooping to a new low, or if it's me and some kind of adware. Note that I also get a pop-up window with this page that has a couple other ad links. I'm running Symantec SystemWorks and Adaware. I know I got something on my system a few days ago, but I thought I'd had it cleared out. Apparently not...?