I know that Google accesses fresh data in a flash. And with “flash” I mean, several minutes. Now it could well be in seconds as a random check on the number of indexed pages in my blog showed that shortly after I posted my blog, Google, lurking around, zapped it, scanned it and indexed it.

Or maybe Googlebot is just all over the place.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Yahoo! released its beta version of SearchScan, a free service similar to Google service, where I made mention about Hong Kong’s Citybus as an unsafe site to visit. (How come Google’s brain is always ahead of many things?)

The service is currently limited to users in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain.

It aims to check the following:

* Browser Exploits — These are sites that can stealthily harm a user’s computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfee’s data will be removed from search results automatically.

Aaron Wall came up with a comprehensive article that outlines the value of a #1 ranking in Google. Why is it more important than Yahoo! or Live Search? What are the opportunities to explore? These and many other questions (or questions we should have asked long ago) are answered in this article:

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

Indeed, a recommended read for everyone.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Elements is Hong Kong’s latest addition to its impressive list of high-end malls and shopping venues. Themed subtly after the five Chinese elements and offering over 1 million square feet of total shopping experience, Elements is a place to go for certain flagship shops and exclusive outlets of highly regarded brands.

Its website has been launched recently. One of the aims I would say is to promote the Elements brands, improve public attendance to the mall and the properties of its tenant shops. Since Elements has embarked a large scale advertising and marketing campaign such as the one big billboard around the Outlying Islands ferries terminal, people get to know about the mall.

A strange URL shows up within Google search results (see image). I was under the impression that this type of URL can’t be indexed since it is not properly formed. But I guess even with a badly formed URL that I suspect came out of a wrongly coded HTML (ampersands within a line break
tag), search engine spiders can retrieve it if it has an href attribute.

To me, it doesn’t highlight Google’s Easter Egg feature, but an HTML coder’s mistake.

First noticed at SE Roundtable.

Popularity: 19% [?]