Googling on Up.. or Down

Thanks to the individuals over at Titan SEO. This blog is a based on theirs - which can be read here

Google has made yet another update to its ever-changing algorithm, and this time it is a change that will affect a whopping 11.8 percent of its search results.

Last week, Google announced its latest algorithm change will decrease the rankings for sites with a reputation for having low-quality or second-hand content. These sites are often called "content farms" or "scraper" sites, and although Google has declined to specifically name the type of site the new algorithm will be punishing, they have been clear that they want the change to affect sites known for copying the majority of their content from other websites.

One concern for many sites such as eHow, which carries both shallow and deep content, is that they will be penalized for the low-quality content but not necessarily rewarded for the high-quality information. Another unfortunate result of this update is that some clearly non-spam sites were also penalized. For example, ecommerce sites that included manufacturer-provided product descriptions for their merchandise were penalized if another site used those same descriptions.

However, a good measure of the effectiveness of the new algorithm is the external confirmation that 84% of the sites affected were among the top 50 sites most commonly flagged by users as "spam". These are the sites that typically look for the top search trends and generate a small amount of poor quality content on the cheap, and it shows. Luckily for the searcher, most of these sites are the ones you hope will disappear.

Hold onto Your MicroChips

According to an article from CNET.com China will install CPUs developed by government-backed research institutions into a test supercomputer by the end of 2011.

The Loongson microchips will underpin the Dawning 6000 high-performance computing system, which is scheduled to be available for tasks as early as summer, China's state-owned People's Daily Online publication reported.

The Dawning 6000 will use up to 10,000 Loongson microchips and will eventually have a computing speed of more than 1,000 trillion operations a second, according to the article. (1,000 trillion operations are equal to a petaflop.)

For perspective, the Chinese Tianhe-1A leads the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, with a consistent speed of 2.5 petaflops and a theoretical peak of 4.7 petaflops.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20040162-92.html#ixzz1FwbLkPPm

Is the Cloud Falling From the Sky?

An article on ZDnet outlined an incident that affects anyone who puts information up on the aforementioned “cloud”..
First of all what is a cloud?
Cloud computing describes computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Parallels to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid where end-users consume power resources without any necessary understanding of the component devices in the grid required to provide the service.
The blogosphere was buzzing Monday with news of Google’s Gmail outage. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan outlined backup options, while young Zack Whittaker could barely contain his glee that Microsoft wasn’t alone in hosing a major webmail product. And yet, despite the inconvenience, the sky simply isn’t falling. The cloud is alive and well and Gmail remains one heck of a safe place to store your email (and everything else for that matter).
The outage referred to an incident last week when Google lost 38,00 users email account information. Basically for these affected users, their Gmail homepage looked like it did the first day they singed up for the service. This called into question obvious concerns regarding the safety of the cloud as a storage hub for individuals information.
As Christopher Dawson explains, Every time something like this happens, cloud naysayers take the opportunity to tell us why it’s a bad idea to store valuable information out in this mythical, mystical cloud. Those naysayers are usually no fans of Google, since the web giant has so much riding on cloud strategies and would just love for all of us to join them in embracing the unseen, distributed web. It’s not like Google has a competing desktop product for what it does. The Chrome OS only solidifies the idea that computers need merely be portals to the web with anything of value stored and synced across Google’s servers.
Therefore we are all left with our fingers crossed, and are eyes turned up toward the Google gods, hoping that every time we punch in our UN’s and PW’s that we see our electronic correspondence safe and sound up on the cloud.