I’m looking forward to Google Gears. It’s a new product that will be coming out shortly that’s been developed by Google that will allow internet users to take there normally web only applications offline.

This will be wonderful for those who are still using dial up connections to connect to the internet and perhaps their blogging platform.

Personally, I’ve been quite frustrated at times when I’ve been trying to work on one of my blogs and my server has gone down or my internet connection (cable) is out or acting up. It’s very hard to write posts or write draft articles on Wordpress when you can’t connect to your WP dashboard!

Hopefully Google Gears will work with WP and other blogging platforms too.

I wrote a post the other day about a new spyware program called Spy Sweeper. Now I’ve found a news story that says that when we are searching the web we should be careful of what search terms we use while searching as some terms - particularly those used for music and technology related searches can cause us to encounter more sites filled with spyware.

Have a look at this short video to see which terms you should be careful of using when using search engines:

It seems that Google’s been busy doing something this month. A number of people on one of the forums that I hang out in have said that their sites suddenly dropped in PR. In some cases they went right down to PR0.

What’s going on?

It seems that not enough people are seeing changes in their site rank for this to be called an early page rank update. The consensus seems to be that Google is updating backlinks. Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. Apparently Google does mini updates of these frequently, but when they do a large back link update they are likely removing duplicates and or spam or splog site links. Perhaps that’s why some people’s PR ended up going down. it’s possible that they had a lot of splogs or spammy sites linking to them.

It’s hard to say what’s going on because Google doesn’t announce it’s updates, and tends to keep it’s formula’s for determining page rank and other things related to a sites listing in their search engine secret.