Find out how 25 top online retailers handle misspellings, synonyms, hyphenation, plurals, and other real-world search queries... [xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE]

It would appear that Google Images is not as quite as good as Google Search. Many people wonder how they can get images inserted into the Google Image Database. Some of their images if they are listed are more than a year old and some have broken links.

So how does one get their images into the Google Image Database? It happens on normal crawls, and sometimes it does not. However, Webmasterworld has some pointers on making sure you are going to get into Google Images Database:

Double check that your images are linked to with:

a) a quality appropriate filename.
b) if possible, the title of the page should match the kw.
c) if possible link text pointing at the page should match the kw.
d) that the image is not blocked by some referrer blocking scheme.
e) that the image uses a standard <img src=> tag (js will not work)
f) the page has as high a pr as possible (well duh).
g) use a quality alt attribute with the kw in the img tag.
h) use a quality TITLE attribute with the img tag.
-- [Webmasterworld]

[Elwyn Jenkins: googlology]

nder an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. Weblogs.com continues to grow its high water mark at about 2.8 weblogs a day; this appears to be due both to high activity on existing weblogs and to new weblogs coming online."  [Scripting News]

How to get listed. Perhaps the most important piece of advice here is to stay away from Yahoo! Geocities and other similar places. It does pay to have your own domain name and be in a good weblog family:

New York photographer Gilbert King created a site to exhibit his work, but he can't get displayed on the most desirable piece of real estate in the Web world: the Google index. "I've spent over a year on this and I'm frustrated," he said. "If you don't get listed on Google, it's almost as if you don't exist."
    The search service Google has become so dominant on the Web, and the importance of being listed there so vital to many, even the phrase "to Google" something or someone -- that is, to search the Web for that thing or person -- is now considered a verb.
    The once-small Silicon Valley startup's distribution of Web information is so pervasive that the industry-tracking Search Engine Watch estimates Google now represents two-thirds of all searches. "We live in a Google-obsessed universe," said Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan.
    Google said its technology should be able to locate you naturally. Its bank of about 10,000 computers "crawl" the Internet continually, updating listings of about 3 billion Web pages. Essentially, Google finds your page if other pages link to it, the assumption being that the more pages that point to your Web site, the more popular your site should be.
    There is not much advice on the Google site about how else to get listed beyond the "submit a site" section under the help index. Hopefuls can type in their Web address and cross their fingers.
    Those requests go to a computer that inserts the suggested address into a long list that may or not be checked, depending on a set of private criteria that Google uses. "Fundamentally, [you] hope the site gets crawled," said Google co-founder Sergey Brin. "If you get other sites to link to you, you're generally set. Other than that, there's not a lot you can do." -- --
   More ways to get on Google
    * Get your own domain name. Google said its computers tend to gloss over homemade sites at free services such as Yahoo! GeoCities.
    Register your site at www.dmoz.org, the "open directory" of the Internet, which Google indexes regularly.
-- [Salt Lake Tribune]

[Elwyn Jenkins: googlology]

Blogging arrives
Great news from the American Dialect Society. The word "blog" was the group's second favorite coinage of 2002, beaten only by "weapons of mass destruction." "Blog" is a word derived from the term "web-log," meaning a daily or even hourly writing log on the Internet. Blogs perhaps reached their most influential moment in 2002, when they spearheaded the campaign to hold Trent Lott responsible for his comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. "Blog" was also voted "most likely to succeed." I'll say. [The Weekly Dish]

Adina Levin gets ridiculously easy group-forming (aka blogchannels). She compares it with BlogThreading:

[...] Topics are great for aggregate blogs that assemble posts about coffee shops, Austin events, or other specific subject.

Threadneedle is better for aggregating a human conversation, whose topic meanders under a named thread.

A topic-focused blog won't get you a human conversation (that would be ai-complete). A human conversation won't get you a subject-organized index (not without editing after the fact).

She's also thought up a perfect application of blogchannels: Book-specific blogchannels, which could be coordinated with AllConsuming. Or would they actually compete with AllConsuming? Anyway, can't wait to see that happening. Phillip's working on it.

[Seb's Open Research]