pelago

Here’s a nifty way of combining JavaScript and Flash to create your own custom typeface page titles; it is also great for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.

Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text

Google the great gives us glimpses of insight into their growing empire.

Here’s a couple of sites using google maps API I found.

Trulia Real Estate
MapBuilder.net
smugMaps

More insight into the inner workings of the Google empire.

If you are wondering what words to work into your copy or are considering web advertising. You might want to give this Overture Keyword Selector a whirl to see if the words you are after are popular.

“Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in — Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.”

Similar to maps.google.com, this freeware downloadable application allows you to animate your path to the desired earth location. This app takes google maps to the next level allowing you to toggle the display of many business types along your path, as well as the ability to modify the perspective AND display a simulated elevation of giving it a 3d perspective. It was a little slow to update while I was using it, but other than that this app isn’t getting uninstalled soon.

For more info visit earth.google.com

Google continues to offer innovative niche search tools. According to Google, scholar.google.com:

“enables searching for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from all broad areas of research.”

Google is now a domain registrar, it was first noted by LexText, then NetCraft. View the following page for the official entry, just scroll down down to number 895.

Along with mozilla, Google has come up with a great shortcut for quickly getting the definition of a word or search term. If you type define:something google will find definitions on web pages and display the first one with a link to more.

Mozilla’s search feature works similarly but it usues dictionary.com’s search engine. If you type dict something onto the location bar of Firefox it will auto redirect the search to them.

For more useful Google search tools visit Google Labs or the Mozilla Dict extension home page.

Today, some search engines still look at metatags, but increasingly they put much more emphasis on both visible text on the page and “off-page factors” (popularity, linking structure of the Internet, etc.) to measure page relevance. Google doesn’t bother with metatags – it doesn’t even incorporate the description tag in the summary of page contents, preferring to grab text from the page itself.