Google has rolled out yet another update to their troubled search engine algorithms. This update, belatedly dubbed “Penguin”, was supposedly targeted towards sites which engaged in spammy SEO tactics, but instead it appears to have penalized a wide range of legitimate and high quality web sites. Some of the biggest losers are sites many ByteGuide readers know well, including: comcast.com is one of the largest cable television companies and Internet service providers in the world. Comcast lost 31% of their visibility in the Google’s rankings. dslreports.com is one of our Read More

Recent changes by Google have created a boom in the SEO industry, but perhaps not quite the one Google engineers envisioned.  Google has been fighting a losing battle against “web spam” for many years, and this motivated them to engage in more aggressive tactics to keep their search results clean.  In the past, Google stated that there was nothing that a competitor could do to hurt your rankings in their search engine, but a few years ago they updated it to add “almost”: There’s almost nothing a competitor can do Read More

As the bigwigs of the content industry tries to sponsor bills that would give them legal power to effectively censor web sites over mere suspicion of “intellectual property” infringement opposition is getting stronger and more vocal. As a reminder the bills in question are the PROTECT-IP Act in the US Senate, and SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) in the US House of Representatives. They are aimed at fighting online piracy, but provide powers that allow them to be used for far more than that, and put online businesses at constant Read More

Apple enthusiasts across the world are having a big week as Apple releases the long awaited iOS5 update, and the iCloud service in one go. Apple also released a fairly bulky Mac OS X upgrade, which in addition to iCloud support also includes a few other improvements, like the ability to rearrange spaces in Mission Control, and bigger icons in Launchpad. Both iOS5 and the iCloud are major milestones for Apple. In addition to the iCloud support the iOS5 brings with it over 200 new features, most popular of which Read More

According to a study done by Science Express reliable and constant access to online information is affecting how we use our memory. Instead of remembering facts ourselves we remember where we can find those facts. This phenomenon was observed even before the age of the internet when people operating in groups know that they can get some information they need from specific persons in that group (someone that may be an expert on a given field). Instead of bothering to remember said information, they just remember the person from which Read More

Koopik has just launched their new daily deal service nationwide.  The new service aggregates daily deals from thirty-five different sources, so you visit one web site instead of dozens.  Even better, you can subscribe and have Koopik pick (or “pik”) deals for you and send them to you via one daily email. Koopik’s core strength is filtering out the deals you don’t want to see and filtering in the deals that you do want to see.  The first filtering is by location.  Once you set your location, you only see Read More

I am going to go against the conventional wisdom and predict that, not only will Google+ succeed, but that it will succeed BIG.  Here’s why. Adaptability Google has learned from its mistakes. Orkut was too kludgy to appeal to most users and lacked necessary support from the Google executive team — you can’t win at social on a small scale. Wave was too complex to explain to anyone outside the Googleplex – the elevator pitch for Wave was a slide deck.  Buzz was too tightly tied to Gmail and only Read More