Following the success of Facebook Week, every week on Read/WriteWeb we are going to focus on a particular Web Technology topic and investigate it. We'll write 4-5 feature posts on each topic, run a poll, and also revisit past R/WW posts on the subject. We're calling this new feature the Read/WriteWeb Files.





This week we've opened up a file on a recent statement from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. It was during Yang's debut earnings conference call on Tuesday 17 July, in which he said that "the next 100 days or so" will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan. Here is Yang's full '100 days' statement:

"Looking ahead, we want to dramatically improve our performance and capture the major growth opportunities we see ahead for the Internet. I intend to spend the next 100 days or so focused on mapping out a strategic plan for the long-term success, working with our teams to put the right organization and the right people in place, and making any necessary changes.

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Labels: 100 Days For Yahoo: Read/WriteWeb Files

Google Trends has new data. The last update was in March, so Google should allocate more resources to this project and push new data more frequently. Some trends: the number of searches for Google Maps grows faster than for Mapquest, the leader in online maps; Facebook has stirred a lot of interest lately, but the number of searches has barely surpassed orkut's searches; Google Reader grew a lot since last year's relaunch, while the interest for Bloglines is constant; YouTube generates more interest than Google. Can you find some interesting trends for this year?

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Labels: New data in Google Trends

This is the third and last in my series of blog posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). In the first post, I introduced robots.txt and the robots META tags, giving an overview of when to use them. In the second post, I shared some examples of what you can do with the REP. Today, I'll introduce two new features that we have recently added to the protocol.As a product manager, I'm always talking to content providers to learn about your needs for REP. We are constantly looking for ways to improve the control you have over how your content is indexed. These new features will give you flexible and convenient ways to improve the detailed control you have with Google.

Tell us if a page is going to expireSometimes you know in advance that a page is going to expire in the future. Maybe you have a temporary page that will be removed at the end of the month. Perhaps some pages are available free for a week, but after that you put them into an archive that users pay to access. In these cases, you want the page to show in Google search results until it expires, then have it removed: you don't want users getting frustrated when they find a page in the results but can't access it on your site.We have introduced a new META tag that allows you to tell us when a page should be removed from the main Google web search results: the aptly named unavailable_after tag. This one follows a similar syntax to other REP META tags.

For example, to specify that an HTML page should be removed from the search results after 3pm Eastern Standard Time on 25th August 2007, simply add the following tag to the first section of the page:The date and time is specified in the RFC 850 format.

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Labels: Google officially introduces the unavailable-after meta tag