When I write my own websites and frameworks, especially when they’re using rewritten URLs, I setup the sites to have their own 404 pages, so that people know that the site is there, but that there is a problem with the link they followed.

This just makes sense – since you can’t guarantee that incoming links are correct, and getting a generic 404 error page can make people think that you just don’t have a site at all – whereas seeing a branded error page, maybe with suggested places to find related content on your site, or at least some recourse to indicate a problem to a suitable site contact.

A History Lesson

Now, search engines, browsers and other agents, don’t understand page content, so having a framework simply replace the content with the ‘error’ message isn’t enough to let them know there’s a problem. For that, you should use HTTP response codes – which is where the ‘404‘ actually comes from as this is the numeric code sent to identify a ‘page not found’.

Many years ago (before the days IE6, if you can imagine such a dark age), many sites didn’t really setup these 404 pages (although, a significant proportion still don’t – but the majority do). Instead, rather poor and cryptic default error messages were sent from the web server, which would mean next to nothing to the average user.

So, back then, browser developers would replace almost anything sent from a server that wasn’t accompanied by a ‘good‘ response code with a ‘friendly’ message – usually on the lines of a more expansive message, and even a link to a search engine in some cases.

Most site and framework developers are now, and have been for some time, properly handling URL address and other errors, and the need for browsers to provide the ‘friendly’ message was pretty much removed.

Google Chrome – A little behind?

This, at least, has been my experience with the major browsers for the past few years – they don’t obfuscate what the server is doing.

Until Google Chrome came along, at least. It turns out that Google like their new browser to do what most others stopped doing years ago. On receiving the 404 code from the server, the browser’s default behaviour is to ignore any further content and replace it with Google generated suggestions and search form.

Now, I can see why Google would like this behaviour – any chance to channel someone through their search engine is a chance that someone will follow an advertised link, and then Google get money.

This default behaviour can be turned off from the browser’s options, but it isn’t exactly obvious what is happening nor is the option labelled clearly enough that I was not forced into a short round of ‘click and see if that works’. It is also quite naughty, I think, because there is no indication that a site/server actually responded and that its just a page not found.

Let’s see what Google say.

Microsoft Live Search is dead – long live Bing!

Microsoft, despite some not terribly heroic attempts to gain ground, hasn’t been too big in search. Google takes about 90% of the market share globally, with Yahoo grabbing another 5%, and all the rest (including Microsoft) fighting to get a look-in. This is a major shift from where search was at in 2005.

Recently, Microsoft has sought to break away from the search peloton, and become a significant third (or even second) choice of search engine by killing the Live Search brand and replacing it with Bing.

First Impressions

The first thing you notice is that they have dropped the plain white of Live Search, and that which has served Google so well for over a decade. The background is now occupied by a nice photographic vista which seems to update on an irregular basis.

The next thing that hit me was that the default location seems to be the UK (at least for me coming in from Australia). Thankfully, http://www.bing.com.au/ gives me access to the option to only search for sites in Australia. Not sure why Bing can’t auto-detect my location like Google does, but the option is cookied for now.

The results page is quite a tidy design – looks a little bit more fresh than Google, but that might just be because I’m used to Google.

One nice thing is what happens when you hover the mouse over a result – a floating panel opens with more content from the page so you get a neat little preview.

Instant Answers

From the press release:

Bing provides Instant Answers that immediately return highly relevant direct answers in response to a specific search. For example, entering a flight number will return the most recent flight information and display it prominently in the results, saving the hassle of going to a separate page. Other Instant Answers on Bing include stock prices, local weather, sports scores and more.

That’s kinda cool – the flight from Adelaide to Singapore is SQ268, and the last flight arrived 35 minutes early. Google apparently does this too, so I’m not so impressed. And both search engines get their data from the same source – Flight Stats.

More Search: Images and Relevance

Image search only turned up 7 images associated with “horuskol” – while Google returned 214. This may be a result of Bing’s attempt to return ‘more relevant’ content, although one of the seven images is rather tangential to my alias.

Image search does have some nice filtering – size, type (illustration or photograph), people (faces/portrait), colour and shape – these finer controls over results here are most welcome.

A vanity search works nicely, though. This blog hits the top 2 spots for “horuskol” on Bing, while Google nets me my Twitter and Wikipedia profiles ahead of my own site. Fair enough, but I’d rather have this site on top, thanks – the problems of placing PageRank over relevance (considering my WikiPedia profile page has been untouched by myself for about a year, I’d rather it drop off the face of the internet – but WikiPedia has a very high PR).

Layout and Features

I quite like the results layout of Bing – it enhances what is already a well-developed formula for results pages. Sponsored sites, followed by image/video results, followed by results. Placing related searches on the left hand side is nice, and there is a quicklink to search ‘filters’ (maps, news, images, etc) to indicate that a good number of results in those sections.

Bing is missing one trick, though – I mispelt “lord of the erings” when I was testing, but Bing didn’t offer the alternative spelling. Google very handily places the alternative text right up the top of the page.

Overall

Bing saw a leap in usage right at the start, and outdid Yahoo for a couple of days. This could of course be due to a reported ‘glitch’ in some version of internet explorer (which Microsoft had previously said wouldn’t happen), but I think there was a fair bit of media interest which people followed.

The blip is down again now, and Bing usage is about the same as where Live Search was before the change.

Then again, I’ve become tempted to make the switch myself – at least for a little while.

Last year, a self-proclaimed ‘Google-killer’ was launched – Cuil. They came out with huge bang, which quickly fizzled into a farce, and they have pretty much dropped off the radar. Apart from making riduculous claims, they also made a large number of technical mistakes which caused a lot of angst amongst web-masters around the world. All in all, Cuil has pretty much dropped out of the media, and doesn’t really factor in any discussion on search.

Last week saw a very different launch of a rather different search engine – WolframAlpha. Despite the media attempting to label it as another ‘Google-killer’, the developers and team behind it were very careful to show how their search engine would be different from Google and not in direct competition.

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My Tuesday morning newsfeeds were all a-buzz with the sudden announcement that Google’s long awaited contribution to the flock of intenet browsers would be released in the next 24 hours. It was widely known that Google were working on a new browser, but an accidental early release of some of the promotional material took almost everyone by surprise.

Wednesday morning came around, and my newsfeeds were all a-buzz with a bunch of stories talking about the first impressions of this new browser – mostly positive.

This morning, there were even more newsfeeds. These brought about the more detailed analyses and a few more interesting points about Chrome.

My First Impressions

I downloaded Google Chrome yesterday to take a look. The download itself wasn’t very large, and the installation was extremely fast.
The installer asked me politely if I would like to import everything from Firefox – and it really meant everything. My browsing history, my bookmarks (actually, not so much with the RSS feeds), even saved passwords.

And then I was in the browser – only a couple of minutes after clicking the download.

It certainly seems faster – Google Maps is a notorious resource hog in other browsers, thanks to all the supporting JavaScript that is going on there. It almost seems seamless in Chrome.
The multiprocess aspect of the software helps there – allowing the browser to do other things while waiting for the JavaScript to do its thing. This multiprocess design is also a big plus when it comes to getting a bad page script crashing.
Traditional browsers, like Firefox and Internet Explorer, will completely crash out, forcing you to reload the whole browser and choose between reloading all the previously opened tabs (including the offending page which may or may not crash again) or killing your previous session (very annoying if you were in the middle of publishing something on a message board, for example).
Chrome, on the other hand, just crashes the tab – letting you close it or reload it without affecting anything else.

I can’t see any difference between page layouts in Chrome or Firefox, even with sites that are nasty messes of tag soup, which is certainly a good thing.

Unfortunately, this is a beta release, and Google have quite a way to go before I seriously consider making use of the Chrome as my main browser. I depend far too much on the plugins available in Firefox.

Still, I would recommend anyone with IE to take a good look at Chrome, but maybe hold back for a couple of months before making the switch while Google get the main kinks out.

The Wider Audience

So, how has Chrome been received?

Clicky Web Analytics monitors traffic from around 45,000 websites, and they’re showing almost 3% of the marketshare being taken by Chrome already – almost twice as much as Opera and about half-a-percent less than Safari. Still, it is a long way off from Firefox and Internet Explorer (29.5% and 61% respectively).

Still, 3% in only about 48 hours is a reasonable uptake.

Speed Claims

cnet published the results of a series of JavaScript benchmarks of the mainstream internet browsers almost as soon as the browser was available. While the numbers are impressive (Chrome comes out about 10 times faster than the others), it should bear in mind that all of the benchmark tests are hosts on the Google website.

A few hours later, Ars Technica released some information about Firefox’s new JavaScript engine which is likely to be released with the next major update coming soon.

Licence Problems

There has been a big backlash on the web over some parts of the licence agreement for installing the browser.

It seems that the EULA has suffered copy-and-paste issues, with some of it not making sense, and even giving Google ownership of what you view and do in the browser.
It hasn’t taken Google too long to react, though, and now they have edited the agreement and made this change retroactive.

Final Assessment

Despite this, and a small number of other reported problems Google Chrome obeys alternate CSS, not playing with some Google apps, and a minor security issue, I think that this is a good initial release of the software.

Sure, there are bits missing, such as no plugins, but it is, after all, a beta. Google are up front about this, and are keen to get user feedback so that they can make the next iteration better.

If you want to give it a go, download it from here.