Google Custom Search... How to boost your Google site ranking in 5 minutes or less (guaranteed)!

Well, almost. With Google’s Custom Search API , you can add a powerful site search feature to your website in a matter of minutes. This API allows you to easily create a customized search engine, influencing the results displayed. If you own a company that serves a particular market niche, for example, you can become a central hub for information on that topic, improve the “stickiness” of your site, and increase the likelihood that your users will read information on your site before being whisked away.

Google gives us several ways to control the results that are displayed via a web search. From keyword promotion and demotion, to site inclusion or exclusion, the methods allow for a surprising level of control. For example, if my site visitor performs a standard Google search on “Sharepoint”, my company does not appear in the top few search results. However, if I create a custom search engine centering on the Sharepoint topic, I can choose to display results from my site exclusively (probably not very helpful to the end user), or simply emphasize my site results over others. This means that my site visitor would likely see pages on Sharepoint from my site first, but sees other sites with Sharepoint information after that. Yes, ads are displayed in the free edition, but a business account will only set most people back about $100/yr to remove the ads from results pages. Not bad.

While a Google Custom Search Engine can be a great tool to improve site stickiness and engage your site visitors, they can’t find what isn’t there!

Annoying Interfaces of the day - Outlook/Word and the grocery store

The Grocery Store:

Why is it at the grocery that we simply adapt to terrible user interfaces? Better yet, why do they even reach the market? Aren't they tested?

Case 1: The self checkout line. You have to run your credit card through a completely separate machine, but have to bounce back to the checkout interface at the end to signal you're done.

Case 2: How am I supposed to know hitting the big green button marked enter INSTEAD of my PIN will allow my card to be run as credit, not debit? I mean - I DO know it from repetition, but they look at you like you have 2 heads if you act confused. If you ask me, we as a grocery consuming culture are all bonkers.

MS Outlook/Word
I am sure you have noticed that Word will red squiggly underline misspelled words for you. Great. But it doesn't do this until you move the cursor off the word. I would think Microsoft, in its business devotion, would have come up with something by now that would allow you to contextually click a word before you've moved off of it and get several close spellings to what you might be trying to type. But nope, all you get is a formatting menu if you right click on a word before the re squiggle shows up.

I dunno, these things annoy me.