I’ve been looking very hard recently at jQuery as it seems to provide such a useful lightweight toolkit. My background is Microsoft .net and I have been using the ASP.NET AJAX framework but jQuery has been on my radar because the buzz online about it is huge and it just seems to do some great stuff so easily that would fit in well with the AJAX features.

Well looks like Microsoft (and Nokia) have been keeping a close eye too as they’ve announced they’re going to make jQuery part of the official development platform. Excellent news and I’ll certainly be using jQuery in the very near future.

A post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog is announcing GoogleBot is now crawling through selected forms and therefore indexing search results. Some of the more sharp eyed out there might have spotted this already as your search result pages might have been appearing on Google.

This is certainly interesting from an SEO perspective as it makes a host of other pages available for keyword targeting and in particular the page that is indexed by Google is more likely to be exactly what the searcher is looking for e.g. storage in Birmingham would return a search results page for stores in Birmingham. Which of course should hopefully make the bounce rate drop.

GoogleBot seems to have some requirements from a form before it will try to crawl it including it must use the GET method. As my ASP.NET forms use the POST method, then redirects to a search result page with the form values in the QueryString it means my search forms won’t be crawl-able. Time for me to think of an alternative solution!