August 21, 2003

That's right, lgn. I think if you take out the redirect that you mentioned in the post just above, you'll be fine. chinook, I like your suggestion a lot. Personally, I'd enjoy having a search like that with knobs I could fiddle with. I think we're both pretty unusual searchers though.
Dave_Hawley, if you haven't seen the pictures from the GoogleDance at the Search Engine Strategies conference, here's a picture that captures how I feel:
http://www.google.com/googledance2003/images/z0759.jpg

At the dance, people in orange were Googlers who were acting as staff, guides, and helpers. In my mind, I wish it could always be like that--a sea of orange shirts to help people with anything they need.

Not yet Aravind, sorry. I do have a tech person who has promised to provide me with a 'write up' of additonal details, but it gets kind of busy around here...
Also, I will be traveling tomorrow, and not posting at all on Friday. Back to you soon, I hope.

"Google, the problem is that we love you. You are one of us. The underdog that was built on brains not brawn, you're cool. So we expect more from you."
I hear you, Namaste. In this case, lgn put up a couple 301 redirects, and the second one interacted nastily with how we were rewriting the url. But you can be sure that I'm going to be bugging folks around here to see if we can handle that rare case with the 301 redirect better. The goal is to handle it correctly any time that a webmaster does something unusual; we're not there yet, but we want to get there. I know that people expect more from Google; it's something that I think about pretty much every day. That need to make sure that we're doing everything we can to be the best search engine possible makes things pretty stressful sometimes--but it also makes it pretty rewarding when you can roll out something that you know will just work right for most people without them having to do something special.

Okay, that last sentences doesn't parse so well, but I hope you get the idea. Anyone ever see L.A. Story? The "interesting word usements I structure"?

dirkz, I'm pretty biased on this one, but I've seen a few people register for-profit businesses with "google" in the domain, and I personally think it's kinda rude. I also see emails when confused users believe that googlewhatever.com is associated with Google. It causes unhappy users, confusion, etc. etc. My personal advice would be just to grab a different domain name and write to people that link to the old domain and ask them to change their links.

lgn, you've actually got two 301 redirects, from www.old.com to www.new.com, and from www.new.com to www.new.com/index.htm. I would drop that second 301 redirect. Normally we canonicalize www.domain.com/index.htm to www.domain.com, and that could have caused problems in your case.
No penalties or anything like that, so once we get your multiple 301's straightened out, I think the site should be in good shape in the index. I'd start by dropping that second 301 redirect.

So you started a Google-related for-profit business with "google" in the domain name? Seems like that could confuse consumers..

lgn, thanks for the report. I noticed that there were still a couple urls listed under the old domain. I'll ask someone to check on the status of that 301 redirect.