Simone Carletti's Blog » Search Engines

Google Site performance tool says Google is not serving Gzipped resources

Simone Carletti — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:53:46 +0000

Google just launched the Site Performance tool, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

It’s likely 2010 will be “the year of site speed” and this feature can become a really important information point. However, I just noticed a really weird behavior.

Look at the following screenshot.

Google Site Performance suggestions for simonecarletti.com

Enable Ggzip compression

WTF?!? All the assets are linked from Google and Google does gzip compression. Why Google is saying Google is not Gzipping?

Headers don’t lie.

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Last-Modified: Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:49:31 GMT
Content-Type: application/x-javascript; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:13:27 GMT
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:13:27 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 0
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Age: 4066
Content-Length: 45879
Server: GFE/2.0

200 OK

Combine external JavaScript

Hey Google, that would be great but I can’t combine these libraries. *You* should combine them since you are serving the content and considering you are motivating webmasters to use your service.

Minimize DNS Lookup

Sorry, it’s not my fault again.

Combine external CSS

Yeah, I would be happy to do so but one style is for print media and the other is for the screen. I know, I could embed the media type directly in the CSS definition, but also you could understand they are here for different purposes.

In conclusion, 3 of 4 Google suggestions depends Google itself. Has anyone here noticed a similar behavior?

How to run Google Chrome OS on Mac OS X with VMWare Fusion

Simone Carletti — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:44:17 +0000

As soon I finished watching the Google Chrome OS announcement video the first question that came to my mind was: Will it work on my Mac? Is it possible to run a Google Chrome OS preview using a virtualization software such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop?

The answer is yes. Google Chrome OS actually works inside a virtual machine.

If you are running VMWare or Virtual box, setting up a Google Chrome OS instance is really straightforward. Thanks to the guys at gdgt, you can download a Google Chrome OS image ready to be used with VMWare or VirtualBox. Also, Paul Miller from Engadget published an awesome screencast with a step-by-step tutorial to run Chrome OS as a virtual machine.

Here’s a screenshot of my Google Chrome OS virtual machine.

Google Chrome OS on Mac OS X using VMWare Fusion

Are you ready to join the Search Marketing Arena?

Simone Carletti — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:50:08 +0000

Last week I officially unveiled Search Marketing Arena, a new project I started in cooperation with my friend Simone. Search Marketing Arena aims to be a Q&A website about Search Marketing including (but not limited to) Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and advertising.

Search Marketing Arena is based on the same platform as other excellent Q&A sites such as StackOverflow, SuperUser and ServerFault. This is a really powerful and revolutionary platform that mixes together the best features from a wiki, a blog and a forum.

This means that Search Marketing Arena is different than other SEO focused discussion points such as Webmasterworld.com or Search Engine Watch. Off course, different doesn’t necessary mean better even if we would try to do our best to make the arena a nice place!

What makes Search Marketing Arena different is a user-focused project. Search Marketing Arena is absolutely free: no premium sections, no invitations required. You don’t need to register and you can ask questions or browse the site without an account.

If you decide to register, you can collect reputation and badges.

User list with badges and reputation

Badges are like medals. Badges are awarded automatically by the system depending on how you interact with the community. For example, you can gain a Student badge as soon as you ask your first question. You become a Supporter after your first vote.

Here’s a full list of available badges.

The list of available badges

The reputation is an other key feature. You gain reputation each time someone up-vote your questions or your answers. You also gain 15 points when your answer is accepted as the correct one.

Of course, if you don’t post good answer you might receive down votes too.

List of upvotes and downvotes

The higher is your reputation score, the wider is the range of features you have access to. Search Marketing Arena is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow users. Once the system learns to trust you, you’ll be able to edit anything.

For more information about Search Marketing Arena and all its features read the FAQ page. Search Marketing Arena is also available on Twitter.

Any feedback? Send us an email or write a comment here, we’re always looking for feedback, suggestions and also criticisms.

Still here? Visit Search Marketing Arena and ask your questions.

Ruby on Rails and Canonical link tag

Simone Carletti — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:54:27 +0000

On February Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate URLs on sites. The element is called Canonical Link tag and the syntax is pretty simple.

This tag, added in the HEAD section of an HTML page, tells search engines that the preferred location for the content of the request page is the value of the href attribute, in this case http://example.com/page. If you want to learn more about the canonical link tag, have a look at Matt Cutt’s introductory post or Google Webmaster Central.

The new version of my Helperful Rails plugin provides a new method named canonical_link_tag, a super simple helper to generate the canonical link tag. The usage is similar to the auto_complete_link_tag helper.

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canonical_link_tag
# =>

canonical_link_tag(:action => "show")
# =>

canonical_link_tag("http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish")
# =>

You can install or upgrade Helperful via RubyGems.

1	$ gem install weppos-helperful --source http://gems.github.com

Google SERP full of “This site may harm your computer” warnings

Simone Carletti — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:24:13 +0000

Since a few minutes Google SERP pages have become completely unusable. Any result is flagged with the This site may harm your computer warning message, it doesn’t matter which query are you searching for.

Here’s a screenshot.

Funny enough, Google also flagged itself as potentially harmful.

I suppose the problem to be caused by a really weird bug. Changing browser or logging out from your Google Account doesn’t matter, thus I guess this bug should affect a really wide range of users.

Update: A thread is available at the Google Blogoscoped forum, #googmayharm can be used to track conversation on Twitter.

Technorati: probably the worst and less reliable API service I have ever developed with!

Simone Carletti — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:55:22 +0000

December 30th, 2008. This post was published long time ago on the Italian version of my blog then moved here after the English blog has been opened. Please note that the following post can contain outdated information and (probably) multiple typos.

I have to admit I’m really frustrated with Technorati, in particular with its APIs.
It’s probably the worst API service I have ever developed with: let me explain why.

I’m not really a newbie in the web service field. I love XML stuff including feeds and APIs. I’ve developed many products and classes which interact with public web services via XML-RPC, SOAP o ReST based interfaces.

Technorati API are essentially unreliable.

An API interface cannot take more than 10 seconds to return a response. If my website needs to send a query to Technorati, my visitor can’t wait 15 seconds for a response!
Ok, there are many other ways I can improve my website, for instance with AJAX calls, but this is not the real problem!

I don’t know where I could start to tell you how much I’m frustrated with Technorati API.
Ok, let’s try to start from yesterday experience!

I’m developing Zend_Service_Technorati library, part of the Zend framework package.

I’m really proud of it, Zend framework is the best library package for PHP I have ever used, thus I want my class to be reliable, powerful and easy to use.

After the proposal has been approved, I started to collect test cases to drive development.

This is what I had to handle with:

Cosmos claim option is out of office, try again later

From cosmos documentation:

claim: The default setting of 0 returns no user information about each weblog included in the result set when available.

Set this parameter to 1 to include Technorati member data in the result set when a weblog in your result set has been successfully claimed by a member of Technorati.

Unfortunately, for somewhat reason Technorati decided this option doesn’t work when type is weblog.
Don’t ask me why, that’s the way it goes!

Before committing test cases, I decided to give an other chance to claim option. It wasn’t the first time Technorati fails to return a response. For some-other reasons, it worked thus I had to create two test case for the same configuration.

Then I tried for the third time and the option didn’t worked again.

Technorati doesn’t seem to know Google

A few minutes ago I decided to go ahead with development and create search test cases.
I composed API URL in my browser and requested a search result for google keyword.

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google
0

Gulp!

This answer shocked me… Technorati doesn’t have any post about Google?!?

I tried again but unfortunately, each keyword returned 0 results.

Ok, search interface is buggy, let me try with tag API.

None, I’m sorry dear developer, I don’t have any post tagged as google.

Probably Technorati doesn’t love Google, I supposes, thus I tried with other common words.

No, this was not the problem. web tag didn’t worked as well!

Contact us… if you can

First, let me say I tried to contact Technorati 3 times via support interface in the last 9 months for these problems, but I never received any answer!

I hope this post will have enough visibility to be taken in consideration by someone from Technorati Office.

Because I don’t want to criticize, I decided it was the time to try to contact Technorati for the 4th time.

I haven’t been really lucky with default contact us interface, thus I decided to try support website.

Let me login before. May be they give me more attention if I provide them my identity, I thought.

This is what happened when I tried to login (more than 6 times).

No no, this is not a screenshot error. This is what Technorati returned me: a blank page! Definitely, this is not my lucky day…

Really frustrated I decided to come back and try again API interface. I composed a simple search for google again: it worked! Cool, now let me try msn: it works! Great, I can work now, I thought.

Thus I decided to start with an error test case, as usual. I composed the following URI: http://api.technorati.com/search?key=MY_API_KEY. It should generate a “missing query argument” error. This is what the request returned.

I opened source code. Advanced Search page in HTML format was returned instead of a simple XML error: have a look at source.txt.

No, I can’t work in this way. Textmate > New > Blog file, let me write a few lines.

I hope, soon or later, someone from Technorati will read this and answer my call. I’ll be more than happy to work with them to debug and fix this slow, unreliable and painful API web service.

Introducing Public Suffix Service 0.5.0