SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

You may think that Christmas seems a long way off, but not if you look at the trends in Google.

A simple search for “Gift Ideas” shows that the rate of searches for those terms starts ramping up in November:

Also, searching for the term “Black Friday” shows an even quicker ramp up in November:

Looking into this further, I decided to focus on the predicted top toys for Christmas 2010.   According to CNN Money:

So let’s take a look at Google Trends for the top 5 mentioned above:

1) Nerf Stampede

2) Loopz

3) Monster High Dolls

4) Lego Harry Potter Hogwarts

5) Singamajigs

My bet is on the Singamajigs – look at the sudden ramp up!   I also suspect there is plenty of misspelling traffic available for this one!

Posted in Google | No Comments »
Tags: 2010, Christmas, Toys

For a while now I’ve found that certain websites consistently crash when viewing them with Internet Explorer 8.

The page starts to load and then the following message pops up (Operation aborted):

As soon as you hit OK, the page content then disappears:

Initially I thought this must be either a bug with IE or maybe my Anti-Virus software.   Searching on Google for the error leads to a Knowledgebase article which explains about an error condition which is now fixed in IE8. 

Knowledgebase article KB927917

According to the article, the error was removed from IE8 which instead now reports the problem in the bottom left of the window.  This obviously isn’t the case as you can see from the above screenshot!!

So – more Google searching lead to the following thread on the Adsense support forums:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=4d928e1f84ae2211&hl=en

http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=5b99e3565c8f5bfb&hl=en

Could this be the problem I’m seeing?   To prove it, I decided to block the ads from loading by altering my hosts file.  

I redirected pagead2.googlesyndication.com to the loopback address and what do you know – the page loads!!

I’m not sure how widespread this is or if there are any specific conditions needed to reproduce the error (I’ve seen this on several PCs), but it might be worth looking at the bounce rate for UE users in your Analytics!

Posted in Google | No Comments »
Tags: Adsense

I’ve been seeing this feature appearing in a lot of results recently.   When searching for a group of keywords, when you reach the destination page there is an overlay such as the one below:

I’ve only noticed this recently and it doesn’t appear on all destination pages?

Clicking on the “Jump to text >>” link takes you direct to the most relevant place on the page for the search query.

It appears that this is a feature of the IE Google Toolbar, however it must’ve been automatically enabled as it’s not something I chose to switch on?  

Now, I’m not complaining as I often find this useful to quickly find the information I’m looking for, however other users don’t like this feature as can be seen in this thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=5e7f4946c1b363d4&hl=en

If you want to disable the “Quick Scroll” try the following:

1) Click on the wrench icon in the toolbar

2) on the Tools tab, deselect “Quick Scroll”

3) Click Save

Posted in Google | No Comments »
Tags: Google, SEO