Interesting findings: visualized bird migrations

Data visualization is a complicated matter for us designers. Many times an outstanding amount of info can be difficult to translate into a readable, easy and hopefully beautiful design/infography/edition/etc. But as in every other aspect in life, the simplest solutions might be the most accurate. This is the case of this brilliant project by e-bird, a project which collects all the data of the migrating birds in the US in a year and transform them into animated gifs. The gifs are sorted out by bird species and I have to admit that they have kind of a poetic look to them, like the birds take over a vast territory, moving back and forth sort of like a moving flame (I guess the orange shades of the animation are the cause of that). The animations are classified by species and they cover the period of a whole year, it’s actually very interesting to see how the different species take over specific territories. It’s definitely some pretty amazing work that’s worth taking a look at.

Via, featured image

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Pixellogo template review: Logo-2467

Today’s Pixellogo template review features Logo-2467, a colourful and elegant design with a classic look. This logo design consists of three overlapping feathers, each one in a different colour gradient that converge at the base. The feathers are slightly crooked to the right giving the overall design a dynamic feel. The colours chosen vary from dark and earthy to light shades of blue, and although they might not seem to combine by their own, in this case they make a cohesive look.

The overall design is completed with a serif font, in this particular case in italic which works for the classic look of the logo template. The combination of this font style and the inclination of the feathers make up for the dynamic feel of this logo and for the elegant style of it. This logo design would work well with communication related companies, editorial brands or magazines, newspapers. The colours translate really well in print and this is what this logo would look like in a business card. Make sure to visit our catalog for more logo templates!

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Impresion digital 4

Easy options for de-personalization

Today I saw the start of a graphical ad campaign by DuckDuckGo aimed at explaining how search personalization creates a ‘bubble’ that traps your search ability. Here is the link to the ad-site if you want to give your brain a wash.

Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying,

“a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

The heart of the matter isn’t new, TED’s got a pretty decent presentation from a ‘user’ perspective dating back to May 2011:

So what’s DuckDuckGo squawking about?

I think it’s time to burst their bubble by taking a look at the options we have and why the suggestion of ‘try something new’ doesn’t really ‘fit the bill’.

It is very true that search engines know a lot of ways to customize search results based on information that the browser gives the sites you visit. You have some options depending on what you need to accomplish.

For every-day searches:

• Use the browser you use the most often.
• Your search results will be relevant to you if you use Google or Bing.
• DDG results will be relevant to the way DDG thinks results should be filtered because they are avoiding personalization.

For research based searches in your location:

• Use ‘incognito’ or ‘private browsing’ modes. (* see below for Google tip)
• Your search results on major search engines will not be related to your personal tastes, just your location/language.
• DDG won’t change search results according to their advertising.

For research that is not based on language or location:

• Use a fresh browser, switch your language on a system level, and use a proxy to make your queries from multiple locations.
• Search results will need to be combined and compared at this point because there will be differences each time.
• From what we’ve seen, this level of unique information does elicit a variety of search results even from unbiased search engines because language and location are very large factors in search queries.

* When searching with Google you can add “&pws=0″ to the search URL to see the search without personalization. This only turns off the ‘personalized web search’ function so the results will still be in your language and relevant to your location.

You could also add a short-cut to your browser so that you can search with personalization turned off by default, change the default language, location, etc..

While changing the search parameters is only ‘mostly effective’ I will be doing a follow-up post, complete with video guides, on how to do this and how to make it simple with shortcuts in the address bar.

If you still want to guess at the macro images from last month you aren’t too late. We are accepting guesses until we announce the winner next week, so feel free to go back to the old posts from last month and let us know what your little eye spies.

PS: There have been two versions of Minecraft 1.2x released today so far, some features weren’t even in the public builds so there’s some fresh bugs and features to explore. We have been waiting for this version to release to announce a new contest based on Minecraft! Stay tuned for full details in a post to come very soon!

Panda 3.3: Building a Better Panda

Following up on my previous blog post from Monday where I recapped the launch and implementation of the Google Algorithm update affectionately known as "Panda." First released in February of 2011, Panda has been through several iterations and has a profound effect the quality of search results, webspam and SEO.

Google confirmed on February 27th the release of the Panda 3.3 update in conjunction with forty other search updates occurring in February or currently in progress. Although it seems very similar on the surface to Google’s January release of Panda 3.2, which was described by Google as a "data refresh," Google describes this update as follows: This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

In their blog post, Google states that they are retiring the link evaluation signal that has been employed for many years. An act that is going to cause some heated discussing around SEO water coolers everywhere. Google was reluctant to release too much information regarding the details for fears of revealing details regarding ranking signals.

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often re-architect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

Another update of Panda 3.3 will focus on local search rankings. Google revealed that the traditional algorithmic ranking factors are now playing a larger part in triggering local search results.

Here is the released details of the Panda 3.3 Algorithm update:

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms. 
• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal. 
• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
• Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

Other details of update and changes that Google has made recently can be found here:

• Flight Search on mobile
• Improved health searches
• Better related searches for images
• Upcoming concert dates

One Year After the Panda Attack

It has been just over one year since the Panda Algorithm produced a prolific amount of pandemonium across the World Wide Web. I came across this great infographic posted on Search Engine Land created in conjunction with BlueGlass SEO detailing how Panda works, what it impacted and the stages of the updates implemented from Panda 1.0 through to Panda 3.2.

Here are some of our past blog posts detailing the Panda Updates as they came out, along with strategies and tactics to counteract the effects of the Panda Algorithm updates.

• Panda’s take on Popular v.s. Productive
• Resurrecting Dead Backlinks
• Panda 2.5 Weather Report: To Panic or Not to Panic?
• Early October SEO Shakeups at Google
• Why Article Spinning Has Spun its Last Spin
• Panda Talk
• Panda 2.2 – Don’t Poke the Panda
• Stats Show Slow Recovery from Panda
• Have You Fallen Post-Panda and Can’t Get Up?
• Survive Post-Panda By Writing Awesome Content
• Dr. Nick’s Post-Panda Prescription
• 14 Days Later – Post-Panda UK
• Panda Puts “Hit” on ciao.co.uk
• Don’t Panic!…Panda’s UK SERP Attack
• Panda Spanks eHow
• Google says: "Release the Panda"
• Return of the Panda
• Something Panda This Way Comes…
• After the Panda-mic
• Farmer Update & Panda-monium

Amazing findings: carved book landscapes

Montreal based artist Guy Laramée has some outstanding work both in painting and book carving among other various disciplines and, as he states in his website, his work focuses mainly on the concept of spirituality and the consciousness of being. His pieces are really interesting and if you dig up a bit into his work you can find yourself admiring beautiful, almost ethereal landscapes that can put you in this state of mind he presents through his work.

But this time I’d like to refer to his carved book landscapes which are sort of dug up sculptures he carves from bound books with such amazing detail that can leave you speechless. Whether you know of his conceptual background or not, this breathtaking works of art are an amazing tribute to all landscapes you could imagine. His inspiration varies from wild landscapes (very Lord of the Rings locations look if I might say) to zen gardens and even the Great Wall of China. But enough words, here are the pictures:

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Pixellogo template review: Logo-2473

Today’s logo review features Logo-2473, one of our newly released logo templates. This logo design has a retro looking style with its font picks that combine old school chunky type with a sign style font that has a nice flow to it. The retro character of this logo is due its little details, such as the little stars and striped line at the bottom. The types chosen are very bold and they go well with the pint’s design, that has also a combination of bright shades of orange and completes the logo template with its bold strokes and simple shape.

It’s definitely a cute design, very modern and in the lines of the retro style trend for which it would be perfect for a new bar or a re-branding of one. The round shape that surrounds the design encloses the whole logo template to give it a more finished look. It would look great on badges, signs or even coasters. With this logo template you can also choose to get the business card, and here you can find more logo templates in this style.

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Awesome type: topographic alphabet

We’ve seen already some examples of 3D typographies which are digital based. The folks at Synoptic Office have brought up the concept of 3D type to another level. In their website they have 2 beautiful examples of different applications of type, the most eye-catching one being the project Alphabet Topography, which as the name states, consists of embossed letters in different levels, as in the topographic maquettes. The result is an abstract looking typeface that can only be fully seen at a certain angle and plays with the various heights of each letter.

Their next project that I want to mention plays with the same concept of the curved lines that give the illusion of volume. They called it Swell: A Typeface. Basically it consists of a bunch of straight lines that are distorted in curves for this ‘swell’ effect. Pretty brilliant if I might say, and maybe also a wink to the Joy Division fans out there?

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Great design review: Daniel Siim Studio

Daniel Siim is a danish graphic designer and student that works at his homonymous studio. His work varies from branding to editorial work, but what really caught my attention today is his work for his school’s branding project. The simplicity of his work and attention to little details is what separates his work from the average. As himself describes this project:

As part of a branding workshop I was asked to pitch a new identity for the merging schools which clearly signals the spirit and the values of the new organisation. The solution also had to include the need of individual profiles and different educational directions of the three schools.

The result is four minor logos (one for the organisation and one for each of the three schools) which combined creates a merging logo. A display typeface was also developed.

Here are some pictures of this project that really lives up to the nordic design style with its subtle details and clean cut overall look:

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How To Get Rid Of Your Old Mobile Phone

Trying to get rid of your old mobile phone and do not know what to do?  If you want to sell your old mobile phone, I have a great suggestion for you.  Visit Sellmymobile.com and sell mobile phone.  You can sell your old mobile and get up to £400! They also compare more phone buyers than anyone else. The good thing is you are guaranteed to get the most money for your mobile! Here is what you can do on this website:

• You can search for your mobile phone: Use their search box at the top of the page to search for your phone
• Select the best deal: They compare the prices from ALL the top phone buyers so you get the best deal
• Post your phone for free: Choose which recycler to sell your phone to then post your phone to them
• Get your cash in days: You should sit back and wait for your cash and vouchers.

If you are looking to sell your mobile phone this is definetely the right place. It will probably take less time than trying to sell your mobile phone via other websites or through your friends. Visit Sellmymobile.com and get rid of your old mobile phone now!

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