I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but a certain screaming baby has been occupying a lot of my time.

 A few weeks ago it was Google’s 10th birthday and they’ve made available the oldest index they still have so take a trip back in time to January 2001. It’s really interesting to see the results for some search terms - iPod doesn’t relate to anything Apple at all!

1,326,920,000 pages? Not a lot on current standards is it?

No matter how much I think Google’s domination of online markets is dangerous I still have to say they impress me again and again.

Google Analytics which must be one of the most adopted web analytics packages by now is now available on Google Code. So now you can extend Google Analytics as you need meaning you can have a custom installation for each website if needed.

Microsoft’s live search webmaster tools have been updated. Pretty much essential if you want to know what’s going on with your website on live search. The update basically means Microsoft now have webmaster tools comparable to Google’s.

Interesting screen shot on the article I found this on though - it’s for the microsoft.com website with a piddly 186 millions pages!

I posted a little while back about Google’s better support for Flash movies. At the time I was more worried about the potential for abuse by black hat SEOs however an article dissecting in more detail about what Google can and can’t see in Flash movies has reassured me slightly and what’s more it backs up my belief that if you want to be listing in search engines relying on Flash isn’t going to help.

The biggest thing that I noticed involved where JavaScript is used to embed a Flash movie into the page. In these cases it is unlikely Google will be able to access the Flash movie and therefore your content is again worthless. So if you’re using the fantastic standards compliant swfobject make sure you include backwards compatible object tags to ensure Google sees your movies! Or better still only use Flash where you can’t do the same thing in HTML and CSS.