Some recent good news for search engine optimisers and flash designers is that Adobe have been working on making Flash more search engine friendly and are working with Google to make the idea of indexed flash sites and files a reality. This will be a great improvment as Flash is such a great webmaster weapon but suffers from not being very search friendly.

Itis a great move by Adobe, who have opened up their postscript, font standards and pdf format to allow for technical improvements search side, which should make the job of optimising Flash files for Google a whole lot easier.

The International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing saw Google Research Engineers presenting a paper on PageRank for Google Images to improve search results for images available through Google Images.

Googles new system promises improved image results through the use or VisualRank, the benefits being a reduction of duplicate image content, image spam or inappropriate images.

Better start optimising your site images for this, I’ve heard many do already, though I’m unsure as to how much genuine traffic actually comes from Google Images, something to find out.

Google has been announced as the worlds top brand, for 3 years in a row! Beating Microsoft and Apple to the throne was never going to be easy, yet Google’s sway over internet users has seen them listed #1 in the top 100 most powerful global brands. The value of the Google brand grew 30 percent since the last report to pass the $86 billion mark. Microsoft came in at third place with a brand value of $70.9 billion. Even though Google dominates the web, it’s still nice to think that 2 university students started Google for it to become the worlds number one brand, quite an achievement I think you’ll  agree. unless your names is Mr Gates… I bet he’s not happy about it at all! I  suppose we’ll see some more movement on the microsoft/yahoo merger coming forth soon.

First picked up by Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land, Google are now showing whois results in their listed results. Although not officially announced by Google or Domain Tools, the new feature is another time saving tool for webmasters. I myself use domain tools regularly, and the new google feature will help speed up the process of finding out who owns and administers a specified domain name.

To us Google’s new domain whois feature, simply type in ‘whois’ a space followed by your domain name. ie ‘whois barrieadams.com’.

See it in action here: http://www.google.com/search?&q=whois+barrieadams.com

Everyone knows Lego, and it seems that the Google have been a fan for some time. Check out their original Google storage server and you will see what I mean! Well, to celebrate 50 years of the Lego brick, Google have added a neat lego logo to the site today.

See Google getting creative with Lego! And if you like that you might like to see the archive of Google holiday logos. Here is one of my faves from 2005.