While on the google website the other day, a colleague and I noticed a new and controversial feature has now been implemented within google search! Google recently introduced a secondary search box into their search results.

This new feature was thought up by google while studying teleportation.

According to google “This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site” “sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.”

Now this is not a totally new feature, as you have been able to search within a specific site within google for some time. For example to search for 'development' within the Creative Jar website you would type “development site:creative-jar.co.uk” within google search.

Google will now also display a number of extra links under the webpage description taken from the webpage navigation which will allow the user to go directly to that page.

You will find a number of blog posts on the internet, with people expressing concern that this new feature may have negative aspect on their web site, and the fact that this may divert traffic away from the sites' internal search and navigation tools. There is big concern for sites that have ad revenue and sponsorship prioritised on their home page.

A few I read can be found at:

http://www.marketing.fm/2008/03/27/google-secondary-search-box-what-is-the-impact-on-sem/

http://www.davechaffey.com/Paid-Search-Best-Practice/implications-of-google2019s-secondary-search-search-within-site-box-1/

But it has been brought to light that some companies have asked for this feature to be removed and according to a googles’ spokeswoman the company has honoured such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

We regularly have problems when sending out HTML emails created ‘on the fly’ on a webpage postback. Various clients/users will get an email that does not display as expected, these display problems can never be recreated and the usual fix is to use plain text.

We stumbled upon the term ‘defang’ recently. Amongst other things, defanging means to ‘Render an email message or attachment harmless’, and is applied by Anti-Virus/email scanning software.

The only current problem with an HTML defanger, is that is can be too sensitive and may defang content that is not strictly HTML or non-harmful HTML. All text parts are scanned for HTML but this can be a complex issue since its hard to tell what the mail readers will interpret.

Anomy Sanitizer is an example of an email-scanner that defangs HTML.

The only safe option is use plain text, or use very basic HTML such as the <table> and <font> tags for every line of text – laborious but much more likely to get past the defanger!