In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s
The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.
To do it on an embedded video, use the “start” parameter. Note that start takes seconds as a parameter, not minutes and seconds. For example, to start an embedded video 31 minutes and 8 seconds into a video, 31*60+8 = 1868 seconds, so you would use this code:
<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>
and it would look like this:
That’s all there is to it. 
Credit:
Start an embedded YouTube video at a certain timestamp
Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info. Go to
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
and tell us about the site that appears to be employing link spam. Be sure to include the word “linkspam” (all one word, all lower-case) in the textarea (the last field in the form).
If that’s too hard to remember, you can also use the shortcut
which will pre-populate the text area field to say “linkspam” in it. Note: to use these forms, you must sign in with a Google account. We’re moving away from using the anonymous spam report form.
Thanks in advance for any data you’d like to send our way!
The rest is here:
Calling for link spam reports
Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, a couple engineers in our search quality group, just did a nice post about improving Arabic language searches:
Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we’ll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the “correct” query.
There’s a few nice things about this post besides the direct improvement on Arabic language searches. For one, this post joins other recent posts that pull back a little bit of the curtain on the 400+ ranking changes that we make every year. I hope that we keep doing these posts.
Another nice thing is that the post talks about the impact of the improvement (10% of Arabic language queries are affected by this change). For the recent blog post about how Google uses synonyms in ranking, Steven Baker mentioned that “synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.” I like giving a rough idea of a change’s impact. The vast majority of Google’s 400+ annual ranking changes affect a much smaller percentage of queries, so don’t get the wrong idea that every improvement to our ranking algorithms affects a large percentage of searches. One last nice thing is that this change again shows the value of historical search data to improve search quality. I know that few users care about that, but it’s good to point out.
Anyway, I like to point out when Google blogs about these internal changes to our scoring algorithms, because people always want to know more about how Google works.
See more here:
Improving Arabic searches and talking more about ranking
Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes in the executives page at another search engine.
Check out the blog post, but it’s easy to use: just add any url to Google Reader.
Original post:
Keep an eye on changing pages
If you followed @googlewmc on Twitter you would already know about this, but I recently recreated my “State of the Index” talk from PubCon in November 2009. Here’s the video of the talk below:
And here are the slides if you’d like to follow along:
The talk is almost half an hour, so I hope you enjoy it and learn something new!
Here is the original post:
PubCon 2009 talk: State of the Index