For those unacquainted, Pipl is a people search engine leveraging the “deep web” to find information on a contact you search for. They use many sources, going deeper than your run of the mill search on one of the big search engines. Whether you are searching for information on a business contact, family or friends, it is a powerful search tool. Some call it creepy, others highly useful. Its popularity is proven as Lifehacker readers rated it the top people search engine.
Pipl recently released a beta version called Pipl Contacts Search which allows you to search your entire address book and use an address book style interface to see deeper information than you may know such as the various profiles they may have across the Internet, media like images and pictures possibly associated with them, publications whether PDF file or other documents with their name in it, and also of course web pages and blog posts.
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Business, Technology•
on June 12th, 2010•
Before July 1, 2010, you may want to renew your .com and .net domain names for a couple of extra years as the yearly registration price is scheduled to increase by about 7% after July 1.
VeriSign announced almost 6 months ago that it would be increasing domain name fees citing the need to increase the core infrastructure that supports the .com and .net top level domains.
This price increase might not hurt the pocket book that much if you own just a couple domains, but for those that have a size-able collection of .com and .net domains, it probably will be an obvious increase from the recent past.
Just a friendly reminder, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to jump on over to your favorite registrar, such as Namecheap, to renew for a couple more years before the price increase.
(The affiliate link above to Namecheap was included because we’ve found them to be a reputable domain registrar)
Over at the Conversion Room Blog, Google announced a couple of ways for both end users and website owners can increase privacy of website analytic and statistic data from Google Analytics, a robust and widely popular web analytics tool to show how visitors engage with their website.
For website visitors, Google developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, to opt-out of their website visits being tracked by Google Analytics.
For website owners, Google is providing on their Code site, some methods to anonymise the IP address information sent to Google for geographic reports. The website owner can now set their data collection to only send a portion of this IP address information. This may have an impact on the accuracy of geographic data reports.
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Google just announced that the new asynchronous tracking tag is ready for prime time.
It doesn’t take much to change the code, as you may or may not know, however, they have provided a guide to do so here.
Benefits of the new snippet of code:
The latest version of the Analytics tracking code offers an improved way to track website visitors with Google Analytics. It takes advantage of browser support for asynchronous JavaScript to enhance the speed in which the tracking code is loaded. With this version of the tracking code, you can also place the Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering. (info from Google Analytics team)
As always, establishing a baseline and measuring against it is key for Internet marketing. Knowledge truly is power in this respect. Google Analytics is a great, free, resource to help you in this regard.
Twitter glitch reset followers to 0 (click for larger image)
Never thought I’d see the day that my Twitter followers count was equal to @Oprah @APLUSK @cnnbrk.
Today while Twitter fixes a bug that allows you to control who follows you on Twitter, they had to reset the following and follower count to zero. Their engineering team is working on a fix. For now, many people can bask in being on an equal plateau as some of the largest followed accounts on Twitter.
And remember, that even though you may have a million Twitter followers doesn’t guarantee your influence is spread as wide. Always add value to the conversation, and listen.
Update #1: Twitter solved the issue, follower and following counts are back to normal. More on their Status blog.
After some time, Google has re-designed its search results page with an obvious sidebar with icons on the left side that can be toggled to show more search options. The new layout appears to be an attempt to simplify the filtering of search results down to exactly what you are looking for, as well as stand out to even the casual user.
This has been in the works for some time, and in November 2009, JavaScript tweaks were one of the only ways to see it.
It appears that the change is being pushed out globally to Google’s user base. Not all in one shot, because I’ve noticed that it has only appeared about 7 out of 10 times and is seemingly favored by my signing in with a Google Account and in the Chrome browser.
Here are some screen clippings of the new search result page: read more
