In a recent USA Today article Google's Matt Cutts reveals the top five tips for driving traffic to your Web site and getting it more highly ranked in the search engines.

The article is filled with great information and provides insight on what techniques are effective for optimizing Web sites in order to get them more highly ranked in the search engines.

Cutts' top tips include:

• Spotlight your search term on the page
• Fill in your "tags"
• Get other sites to "link" back to you
• Create a blog and post often
• Don't overdo it

In addition to the article, USA Today posted a 23-minute interview with Cutts discussing how to improve your site's search ranking - view it here.

Matt Cutts is widely recognized as a top search engine ranking expert.

This blog of mine is quickly becoming an encyclopedia of all the crazy problems that can happen if you're not careful. I'll have to do some more right-brained thinking for my next entry... At any rate, if you've been using Rails with MySQL, there's a hair-pulling problem you may run across when generating a new project from scratch, now that Rails 2.0 has SQLite3 as the default database.

Fire up a new rails application and add :

rails test_app

and then pop a simple migration in there:

cd test_app/
./script/generate model User login:string password:string

Now, being up on our Rails news, we know that config/database.yml is set up by default for SQLite3, so let's change it to work properly (being careful to avoid tabs---only spaces allowed in YAML). Here's a development section as an example (please read the whole article before trying to use this, though):

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: test_app_development
  user: test_user
  password: test_password
  host: localhost

Now, we can just

rake db:migrate

and be off on our merry way, right? Well, of course not---we know we need to create the database using mysql or mysqladmin first:

$ mysql -p 
> create test_app_development;
> grant all privileges on test_app_development.* to 'test_user'@'localhost' identified by 'test_password';

But there's still a problem somewhere! Because you get

rake aborted!
Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

when you try to rake db:migrate. Why is it looking for 'root' when you've already specified 'test_user' in the database.yml and your config/environment.rb designates that you are indeed in development mode?!?

Well, I was dismayed to find out that the hours I spent researching this problem were because of a typo in config/database.yml above:

  user: test_user

NO!

  username: test_user

YES!

So, long story short, if you get the dreaded

Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost'

using rake db:migrate or anything else in rails, and you have the database created and the user there matches the user in database.yml, PLEASE check well for typos in database.yml, because it's finicky and Rails won't let you know if there's a problem.

How often do you use Google (the search engine and its products) during your day? For me, the number is pretty ridiculous.

Will Google execute its master plan and take over the world continue to dominate search forever? Reports liken search and Google to advertising and television. Before cable TV there were a couple major networks that dominated the advertising dollars. Then cable created niche networks and gave viewers more choices. Advertisers loved it because they could focus their campaigns and viewers loved it because they had a choice.

Not to say searchers don't currently have alternative search methods, but as search is expanded and refined I think the little guys can collectively chip away at Google's market share.

Speaking of refined, alternative search methods, here is a list of engines I'm keeping an eye on:

Results Displayed Visually

Quintura

This search engine allows you to visually refine your search. I like that you can narrow your search down then glance at the narrowed results, and then if you don't like what you see you can just move the mouse, and your original results reappear. In other words you don't have to navigate away from the results page to refine your search results.

Kartoo

Kartoo also allows your to visually refine your search, but it shows screen shots of the sites as you rollover a result. The results are visually displayed as a map that is linked together by the terms that refine them. Their mascot also "surfs the web" as your results are being generated.

Searchme

Searchme also displays your results visually, and allows you to refine by vertical search category (images, movies, web). The results are displayed in a "stack" and if you like the stack you can save it to peruse later.

Viewzi

Viewzi allows you to choose how to display your results. They have several views to choose from. The site information view provides a lot of useful site information about the site you query, but I'm not sure how accurate some of the data is. Nonetheless it is an interesting approach to search.

Niche Search Engines:

Truila-- Real Estate

Healthline-- Healthcare

Like.com-- Shopping

Globalspec-- For engineering, industrial and technical communities

Spock-- People Search

Blinkx-- Rich media search engine. From their website, "Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video. Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!"

Community Search/Human Edited-Search:

Del.ici.ous

The idea is for you to search other people's bookmarks. You are basically searching others' favorite results of the query.

Squidoo

Members create a "lens" about something they are an expert on. You can search the database for entries that match your query.

Wikipedia

Anyone can add, edit, or contribute to the encyclopedia's entries.

Sproose

From their website, "How Sproose works...Machine Calculated Results => Sproose Users Vote Websites => User Improved Results"

Mahalo

Mahalo actually builds search results pages themselves. From their website, "Search results built internally by our full time staff are checked by other Full Time Guides and our editors. We also have a place on every page where you, the public, can report problems or errors with our pages. Our Guides then check these errors and correct them. Additionally, we have a dead link checker which helps us remove links that are no longer functioning and a full time team watching the news to make sure that every hot search term or news item is updated quickly."

ChaCha

I personally use this service a lot. There are a couple of ways to use it.

• Dial 1-800-ChaCha
• Ask a question after the beep
• Receive a text message with the answer. (It is human-powered, so someone is actually looking up the answer for you)

• Go to ChaCha.com
• Type your question in their graphic mobile phone
• Add your phone number
• They will text you the answer (again, human powered)

I don't have an iphone so I love using this service. I'm sure they will have to think of ways to adapt as more and more people have their internet on their cell phones, but I think it is a very useful service while I have my simple cell phone.

All of my friends previously called Auburn's Foy Student Center where they will answer any question you may have, any question. But I think ChaCha is a great alternative to bothering the folks at Auburn.

I don't think there will be any new search engine (any time soon) that could really threaten Google, but collectively I think there is a chance to take away some of Google's dominance. On the other hand, if any search engine begins to pull away from the pack they may just get Google-gobbled up. Obviously Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, but they also have acquired smaller search engine types.

Google bought Israeli Search Engine Orion.

Google bought Kaltix, a three-month-old, three-man Stanford startup that's working on personalized and context-sensitive search.

Google acquired a key player in face and image recognition biometrics, Neven Vision.

The 2008 Georgia Men's Tennis Team was honored at the White House for its second consecutive National Championship.

Git is "an open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency." It's also well-suited for smaller repositories and is very popular in the open source community because of its ability for many people to work on the same project. Git is much faster than most other, more common version control systems.

We're still running Subversion here at Plexus, which has suited our needs spectacularly. Despite its features, I don't imagine that we'll move to git anytime soon, particularly because of its rather steep learning curve. I have created an account with github, a free online git repository hosting service, to help me get better acquanted with git. It definitely takes a little while to get the hang of. It's a lot different than Subversion.

Git resources:

• Git Tutorial
• Everyday Git - basic set of commands
• Git wiki
• Github - free online repository hosting
• Ruby on Rails repository on github

Projects using git:

• The Linux Kernel (after all, git was written by Linus Torvalds)
• One Laptop Per Child core development
• Ruby on Rails