Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Yahoo Video

See this video on Yahoo: Past, present and future (“Yahoo chiefs Terry Semel and Jerry Yang talk to author and columnist Kara Swisher in front of a large crowd at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco”, March 2, 2004).

Yahoo Video by Philipp Lenssen

SERPs Competition Sites Have High PR

Interesting – most of the sites taking part in the SERPs competition now have PageRanks of 5 or 6.

SERPs Competition Sites H ... by Philipp Lenssen

Tool Knows Your PageRank

I wonder how they do it – this PageRank tool lets you enter a URL and tells the Google PageRank assigned to it. E.g. it worked with http://blog.outer-court.com, showing 6/10... the same value I also see using the Google toolbar.

Tool Knows Your PageRank by Philipp Lenssen

Google News With Wrong Images

Dr. Web points to the Google News Germany headline which read “German and Dutch Killed in Iraq” while showing a photo of Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher.

Google News With Wrong Im ... by Philipp Lenssen

Göögle.com

The new Umlaut-and-other-special-characters-Domains are available and many are already registered. Like www.göögle.com or www.göögle.de.

Be aware that when you run Internet Explorer, by default it doesn’t understand how to handle Umlaut-Domains. However VeriSign will ask you to install a browser-extension to resolve those domains. Installing it will also give you some dubious stuff you didn’t ask for (like Outlook plug-ins, or changed address bar functionality), with no easy way to remove it afterwards.

Now what is the use of domains like “Göögle"?

• The domain owner of "Google.com" might want to protect his own domain and now needs to register hundreds of variants (like goôgle.com, goögle.com, góogle.com and so on).

• Someone wants to go online with a fake page either for humor purpose (microsöft.com currently reads “Bill Sux”).

• A hacker wants to fool people (e.g. paypäl.com might ask for logins).

• In the case of domains with words that actually do contain an Umlaut in the first place – e.g. the German word “Gemälde” (“paintings”) –, use might be legitimate (though more often than not it’s straight-forward domain-squatting).

Possible New “Google” Domains

The new characters are [ä ö ü é è á à ú ù ê â û ô ó ò í ì î] and [ß] (which will be resolved to “ss”). Here are some possible variants of Google.com (these are not all possibilities):
www.göogle.com - www.göogle.de - www.goögle.net - www.goögle.info - www.göogle.co.uk - goögle - googlé - göoglé - goöglè - gööglê - gôôgle - göógle - gòògle - ...

The German "ß"

The German "ß" ("sharp s", as we call it) is a bit of an exception. Though entering it is supported it will actually lead to "ss". The german "ß" character closely resembles the upper-case "B". (This is why in German language, if you have an all-upper-case word or sentence, you replace "ß" with "ss" as well, e.g. "Großbuchstaben” turns to “GROSSBUCHSTABEN”).
This situation again can be a hacker’s friend: manipulate users to click on “eßay.com” in an email and they will end up at “essay.com”, potentially without noticing. If “essay.com” was a hacker’s homepage, it could be styled to look like eBay and collect user passwords.

Göögle.com by Philipp Lenssen

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