A few days ago, Steve Trefethen blogged about searches against CodeCentral. His point is that having a semicolon in the page title makes Google searches more difficult. I noticed that if you query for the exact title (like "ID: 21679 Query Microsoft Index Server Using Delphi") even in a Delphi tuned engine, like my own The Delphi Search, the results are quite good: the CodeCentral entry is the first. Instead if you query for the entry title along (like "Query Microsoft Index Server Using Delphi") the CodeCentral entry goes off the first result page. It gets to the second place (following Steve blog entry!) if you surround the sentence with quotes, but this means you need to know the exact title to find the entry. And if you look for the entry number, things go even worse...
Meanwhile, I've been playing a little with Google Webmaster Tools, a very powerful way to know how Google PageRank and Google searches see your site. I used the tool in the past, but it provided limited features. Now you get a lot of information. Spelunking the info for my main site www.marcocantu.com, I noticed for example:
- there are 172 broken links on the site, mostly in the Code Repository section.
- the site has the top stop in these searches: marco cantu, historia de pascal, tipos de conjunto, repeat pascal, and 7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777. Now this last query is quite funny. It returns a page with a DFM file containing an image, and the sequence of 7 is in the encoded image bitmap.
- the top external link to my site is for mastering borland delphi 2005.
- there are 37,964 links to the home page of the site, out of a total of 119,592 external links (I wonder how many are from other sites I own)
This will certainly be another Google resource I used often. I'll soon add my other sites to it, including this blog.