When Google announced the Panda update, I thought “oh good it’ll get rid of a lot of those spammers”. However, this is not the case. Panda has made web 2.0 spamming more prevalent and successful than ever. Sure, article marketing may not be as successful but services that feature social bookmarking and creating random BS blogs on places like Squidoo, Hubpages, and other web 2.0 places as well as spamming social media sites and creating linkwheels more effective than before. In this regard, Panda has totally failed at its original purpose. I see many new sites with very little content spam their way up to the top of search results for decently competitive keywords. All it takes is creating a few linkwheels and blog accounts at social media blogging places and posting everywhere on internet forums. Perhaps Google will address this issue in subsequent updates of Panda, but perhaps they won’t. Maybe its all part of their plan. Google might like all the fuss that their rankings and this new social media blogging phenomenon has brought to them. It sucks for the quality of their search rankings but it does generate much publicity for the search engine and keeps webmasters focused on Google. Having an industry based on trying to SEO your search engine and using either blackhat or whitehat methods may actually be good for business so Google may want to keep these “loopholes” up for self-interest. I hope they don’t, but it could very well be the case.
After hearing person after person bitch about IE(whatever version you own), I still think its the most stable browser out there, at least the latest version. Why? Because for me, it crashes less than Firefox or Chrome. I’m talking about fresh installs without any extensions. If you just use the clean installs, then I would say Firefox crashes the most(or just jams up your computer because of memory leaks), Chrome is next(a lot of the times because it sucks at handling flash), and IE actually crashes the least. The reason IE seems to crash the most for many people is because they install way too many crappy toolbars and don’t realize it. There aren’t as many for Firefox and not nearly as many for chrome. The less toolbars you have, the less likely your browser is going to jam and crash. I think if people just left IE alone and didn’t install install all those yahoo/win prize money/whatever the hell toolbars, they would learn that IE is actually a really good browser. I haven’t really rested Safari and Opera that much but I have used them before. From my somewhat brief experience with those browsers, I was not impressed. For now I use IE and Chrome as my main two browsers.