Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

OCR -Optical character recognition- is a type of software designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text. OCR also has the capability to translate pictures of characters into a standard encoding scheme representing them (e.g. ASCII or Unicode).

Why am I blogging about OCR?  Well because Google has its finger in this Open Source Pie.

OCR History

Tesseract was the original OCR engine developed at the HP Labs between 1985 and 1995. HP decided to abandon OCR research and, for ten years, the software’s development has been frozen. In 2005, HP made Tesseract open source (Apache License) and Google, together with a research institute, have continued the development of the program.

Why is it important for Google to be invloved in OCR?

OCR is useful for Google Book Search and it could be useful for Picasa or Image Search in addition to an object recognition engine. And, if Google improves the software, it could be launched as a successful alternative to commercial applications.

Watch this space…

To Validate or not to Validate…That is the question.

Does your HTML code validate? … But first, do you know what valid HTML means?

Let me start by explaining what Valid HTML means.

Validating HTML documents (web documents)  is conforming them to the W3C HTML and XHTML standards.

So what is the W3C you may ask.  The W3C is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (W3). Its main job is the development of standards for the world wide web but it also undertakes educational and outreach programs and develops software as well as serve as an open forum for discussions about the Web.

So back to my original question … to validate or not to validate?

I personally think that it is good practice to have valid html documents as per the following 7 reasons to have valid HTML code:

1. Web Site Accessibility
2. Search engine friendly pages
3. Faster Loading
4. Less load on servers
5. Easier to update and maintain web site
6. Browser compatibility
7. Access more visitors

However, is it crucial to have valid HTML code in order to rank?

I say no, and Matt Cutts from Google agrees with me:

To stress my point, I did an HTML validation test on each of the 3 main search engines’ home pages; Google, Yahoo and MSN and here are the results:

Google: 51 errors
Yahoo: 34 errors
MSN: They actually pass!

Bottom line… Validate if you can and know how to but if you don’t or don’t know how to don’t lose sleep over it, you will still rank.

Do you know what a directory is?

A directory is a human edited list of websites that is categorised by topic.  The first major directory on the internet was Yahoo! 

Soon after DMOZ (founded by Netscape) became the first and largest directory edited by thousands of volunteers from all around the world.

The importance of directories: 

Directories are important because they (the good ones at least) are regarded by the major search engines as authoritative, which means that a link from them to your site would be considered an authoritative link.

How do you submit your site to directories?

Very easy.  Follow these steps:

1. Go to the directory of choice
2. Navigate to the best category that fits your site’s theme
3. click on the “suggest url” link
4. Read the rules of the directory
5. Fill in your title, description and url
6. press submit

 Tips on submitting to directories:

1. The title of your listing should be your site’s name
2. Read the rules
3. Make sure not to stuff your description with keywords
4. Read the rules
5. Make sure you stick to the character limit specified by the directory
6. Read the rules
7. Note the directory editor’s style and submit listings in line with the directory editor’s style
8. Yup, you guessed it … Read the rules!

Do you use Adsense to monetise your site? If so then you might be interested in this, Google has posted an Adsense Optimisation Tutorial on its official Adsense blog.

What is Adsense?

Adsense is a Google advertising program that allows website and blog owners to place Google targeted ads onto their sites and get paid either on a per click, per impression or per action basis.

How much money can you make with Adsense?  

The sky’s the limit really, it all depends on the field (niche) you’re in and how much time you have to writing unique insightful and useful content about a topic of choice.

I’m using adsense on one various sites of mine and the I’m definitely happy with the results I’m getting.

Ebay has decided to end its spat with Google as it resumed its advertising campaigns with the internet search giant.

Ebay decided to pull its ads out of the Google ad network “as an experiment”  to see how much it relied on Google for its traffic.  The experiment’s outcome…“Ebay didn’t have to spend as much on Google ads”.

During that time, Ebay increased its ad spend on Google’s rival networks, Yahoo, MSN and ASK during the same time.

Background of the Google - Ebay Spat

It all had to do with the competition between the two Silicon Valley giants in the field of online payment;  Ebay owns PayPal and Google owns Google CheckOut.

The spat began when Google decided to hold a party to promote Google CheckOut during the same time that Ebay was holding its annual sellers convention in Boston for thousands of its largest sellers.  Google thought it would be a good idea to invite these same sellers to its party, the inivitation read “Let Freedom Ring”.

Nice one Google!