Thursday, December 27, 2012

Tour Shopping on the Web: the... Bad and the Ugly

Back in 1994, when I started hand-coding my first big web site about the tourist resources of a certain European country, we browsed the Web, literally. Web masters created web sites "by hand" (using a plain-text editor). They manually added hyperlinks between pages and to other sites (creating the "web effect"). They submitted their sites to a handful of web resource directories/catalogs, which were also compiled and maintained "manually". The number of web sites was, by today's standards, microscopically small, but even back then many realized that maintaining catalogs of web resources manually, as well as finding information on the Web by actually browsing the Web, would soon become impossible. A few short years later, there was a whole bunch of search engines available. We stopped browsing the Web and started browsing search results.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Chicken Thighs, SEO, Structured Data... and More

Let's run a simple experiment. Imagine that you have some chicken thighs in your refrigerator. You are not much of a cook, but you are willing to try. So, you do what most of us do looking for answers to all kinds of questions - search the Web. Don't worry - the experiment doesn't involve actual cooking :-)