© Danard Vincente


Blogger Barry Welford recently called Google's local search functions half baked. His point is simple. Google find search results by using logical, mathematical algorithms. That's fine for many things. But human though is often illogical (especially when creativity is involved). If it ever plans to succeed in these areas, Google needs to find a way to drop the logic.

Local search isone of those areas.

If you can get past Google to search engines focus on local result (search engines like Canada 411), you get much more bang for your busk. Your efforts will be rewarded by a lot more clikc throughs to your website.

As Internet behavior becomes more oriented toward local results. Google is goign to see users look elsewhere.

© Danard Vincente


Search Engine Marketing Software has been around for a good long while now, but the product diversity available in search engine marketing is growing rapidly. How do you decide who to use? One anonymous blogger had this answer:

In order to understand this diversity in the real context of the marketer's needs, we ought to mention the essential factors that keep search engine marketing functional in the first place: web page ranking, advertising, keyword optimization, traffic and quality informative content.

The key to search engine success these days is to get listed in local search engines. Sure, you have to have good content and optimize your keywords, but getting the info in front of eyes close enough to you to use your services.

© Elsie esq.


Leads generate sales, right? Time is money. It takes time to generate leads if you do it the old fashioned way (rifling through lists and flipping through files). Since time is money, the more time you spend generating leads, the more money you lose - even if the leads make you money. It's a catch-22.

The solution is marketing automation. Marketing automation software makes life simpler by computerizing the time-consuming tasks involved in generating leads. This sort of demand generation software can produce your leads for you. Then you can dedicate your time to lead nurturing, focusing more of your energy on prospective clients and customers.

That should mean your time and energy are spent on the most productive part of your job, and that you end up closing more sales and making more money. You'll need that extra money - for a golf vacation in the Caribbean or a week in Hawaii.

Columns versus Rows at Googlestack

In an attempt to bring the column oriented storage closer to the readers, I've managed to find a series of really great explanations about these two distinct storage schemes. While still theoretical these will definitely serve as a good and thorough (but not so hard to read) explanation on the subject matter. Once we got through these we'll see some more practical things in the next posts. Here's the list [...] Read More


Open-source alternatives to BigTable at Googlestack

disclosure: I am a Hypertable MapReduce contributor, and this post has nothing to do with increasing publicity of the project, the opinions presented here are the opinions of my own One of the most important google stack components is BigTable, the underlying data store. With it's proven scalability and availability characteristics, there was no wonder that sooner or later some open source alternative would have been created. I have already described [...] Read More


Outline of The Google Software Stack at Googlestack

Introduction The beginning of the research on software scalability spurred the research on fault tolerance and management technologies. After all, if you have a lot of software running on hundreds or even thousands of machines you have to know what's going on inside this set of machines, and when things break, you want the software to take care of it. These concepts, scalability, fault tolerance and software management, are so inherently [...] Read More


Google’s Bigtable - Distributed Storage System at On Storage

StorageMojo » Google's Bigtable Distributed Storage System, Pt. I: I know full well that I lack the background to *really* understand this sort of system, but I love the idea of it, I love reading about it - and I love what Google are doing to push the technology envelope. [...] Read More


Girl Gamers Unite to form Versus at XboxSpace

Ex-Frag Doll UK Voodoo FD has teamed up with another UK Gamer Vixen to create a new gaming website called ww.weareversus.com. The site, which officially launched yesterday, will act as a home to the two gamers, as well as a showcase for VersusS TV. As part of the launch, Voodoo FD has also changed her XBox Live gamertag to Siren.The focus is on sharing and venting views and opinions on [...] Read More

KFS at Quantcast at Googlestack

With people claiming Quantcast is using Hadoop, and not giving a credit to the KFS it is necessary to give more details about the story, and not so surprisingly, the details are available instantly, and here they are (these details refer to Quantcast KFS deployment)


Two deployments:
-  130 node cluster hosting log data
- ~2M files; 70TB of data; WORM system
- Metaserver uses ~2GB RAM
- ~1TB of data copied in during [...] Read More