Although I’m a Firefox user, last week’s update was not a big deal for me.

Why?

I’ve had access to Twitter’s search engine and Twitter’s “who to follow” database from my Firefox search box for a long time. In fact, I have had access to many search engines, library catalogs, database lookups, and other searchable databases I use a lot, want to demo, or use often.

Plus, I decide what search tools to add, remove, and how to order the resources I select.

How do I do it?

No, I don’t use Mycroft extensions and I’m not a developer so this does not involve any coding.

Say hello to a new, free Firefox add-on called “Add to Search Bar”.

With this free tool I’m able to quickly and easily add most search tools to my search bar without having to code or download anything but the add-on itself, and I only had to do that once.

Adding any search tool to your Firefox search bar takes only a few clicks and is completed in a matter of seconds.

Let’s say you want to add the Search Engine Land database of archived posts to your search bar.

Here’s the entire process that should take you only a few seconds.

1. Install the Add-On (you’ll only need to do this once).

2. Head to a SEL page and look for the search box on the site.

2. Select the search box.

3. Right-click in the box and the select “Add to Search Bar” from the drop-down menu

4. Next, approve the addition. You can also rename the search resource, add a keyword (or single letter) to trigger the search from the navigation toolbar, and even change the icon.

5. Click save

6. That’s it, you’re done, and Search Engine Land (or whatever you’ve named it) should now be located in your search bar.

How fast and easy was that? By the way, when you select the search bar you’ll spot “Manage Search Engines” at the bottom of the drop down.

Selecting this option allows you to reorder and remove search tools from the search bar. You’re also able to assign a letter or keyword so you can run the search from the navigation bar.

For example, when I want to search for Search Engine Land posts about AdSense or AdWords, I would type [SEL AdWords OR AdSense] directly into the address bar and click enter.

Firefox developer Malte Kraus (aka Dr. Evil), deserves the credit for not only creating this tool but for continuing to tweak the code to make the add-on more stable and ready to go.

If you like Add to Search Bar, you might also want to take a look at another add-on from Kraus named Organize Search Engines. It lets you add separators and folders to your search bar search engines.

Taking a few minutes perhaps once or twice a week to review and build your collection of go to search tools can pay off both in saving time and getting you the best results possible.

Vertical search companies might also want to suggest this resource to their users as a way to get their search tool into the search bar of users.

Finally, iOS users might want to take a look at something similar (in terms of personalization and ease of use) with a $.99 app that we’ve been testing (so far, so good) named Search Ninja. More about this app soon.

The new toolbar, which is graphically more pleasing to look at than a conventional toolbar, enables users to get lots of different types of information via drop-down windows: news, weather, maps, multiple email accounts, movies, games and so on — in addition to search.

Users can obtain and interact with their Facebook feeds, for example, without going to the site. In this way it sort of borrows from Bing’s philosophy of enabling users to quickly get to information or complete tasks without having to click through or down a level to another site.

These content modules effectively operate like browser tabs and diminish the need (for some) to have 15 tabs open simultaneously.

For regular Bing users as well as non-users it’s a useful tool — so to speak. Unfortunately there’s no Mac version and it only works with IE (7 or later). On a Windows machine you need Windows 7; Windows Vista; Windows XP with Service Pack (SP) 3.

Weitz said that 12 percent of all searches happen through toolbars. However he was unaware of the precise number of Bing searches in particular happening via toolbars. Microsoft has used computer hardware OEM-toolbar distribution deals in the past as a cornerstone of its new customer acquisition strategy for Bing.

We didn’t get visibility on whether Bing toolbar users are more engaged and loyal than other types of Bing users. I would assume they are however. Bing also captures valuable clickstream data from toolbars (if permitted by users).

And now for the unpleasant part where I allude to the Google-Bing “copygate” controversy. Those who wish to revisit the claims and responses can click the links below. Now back to Bing; if I were a regular PC user I would definitely install the Bing Bar and use it. Unfortunately, however, my primary computer is a Mac.

As a final thought, someone at Microsoft ought to either buy or sponsor a local Seattle watering hole and get the owner to rename it . . . you guessed it: the “Bing Bar.”

For related stories on this across the web, see here on Techmeme. Also see below for past stories related to this topic from Search Engine Land.

Related Entries:

• Colbert: “Hiybbprqag Is A Word Meaning You Got Served”
• Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
• Bing Admits Using Customer Search Data, Says Google Pulled ‘Spy-Novelesque Stunt’
• Bing: ‘We Do Not Copy Results. Period.’
• Google On Toolbar: We Don’t Use Bing’s Searches
• Microsoft Releases New MSN Toolbar, Now Powered By Bing
• Microsoft Launches A New Loyalty Program: Bing Rewards

Is Facebook’s third largest advertiser really a site that tries to trick people into switching to Bing? Apparently not. Still, Bing’s not happy with the tactics and is ending its relationship with the publisher.

The site, Make-My-Baby.com, now appears to have gone down. But earlier today, it was suggesting that people needed a plug-in to use it — one that would install a toolbar and change their search provider and home page to Bing. The site had allowed people to create baby characters.

Not Facebook’s 3rd Biggest Advertiser

An Ad Age article suggests that Make-My-Baby is Facebook’s third largest advertiser, based on a comScore report. But comScore tells me this isn’t so.

“Make-my-baby was not one of the top advertisers on Facebook,” emailed spokesperson Andrew Lipsman.

Postscript (2:40ET): Facebook also tells me that Make My Baby isn’t an advertiser at all. From an email that spokesperson Brandon McCormick sent:

Not only is make-my-baby.com not one of our largest advertisers, they are not an advertiser at all.  In fact, their practices are against our ad policies and would be rejected as a result.  This is true whether they tried to run ads with us or an affiliate did.

Postscript (3:00 ET): I’ve now got a copy of the comScore report. It looks at total display ad impressions for the “social networking” category in the third quarter of last year. That category includes buys on MySpace and Facebook (and according to comScore, a few smaller social networking sites).

Make-My-Baby.com is indeed the number three on this list, which means it is the third biggest SOCIAL NETWORKING advertiser according to comScore but not necessarily the third biggest Facebook advertiser (nor did Ad Age explicitly say this). Most ad impressions in this category apparently come from Facebook, but in this case, apparently its MySpace buys that were putting Make-My-Baby tops, given Facebook is denying this company advertised at all. But I’m checking on that.

Bing Affiliate Outed By Google

The Ad Age article caught the attention of the head of Google’s search spam fighting team — and unofficial defender of all things Google — Matt Cutts. Cutts did a post noting that the Make-My-Baby site had terms that required a switch to Bing:

If make-my-baby.com is Facebook’s 3rd biggest advertiser, I wonder how many people are installing this software without reading the fine print that says “Installing the toolbar includes managing the browser default search settings and setting your homepage to bing.com” ?

Read Write Web picked up on Cutts’ post, spreading the news about the tricky move. From there, it attracted further attention on the news aggregator Techmeme.

Tricky Switch

Actually, you didn’t have to drill into the fine print of the site’s terms and conditions page to learn this. When you’d first visit the site, you’d get a big “Plugin Required” message as shown above [picture from Read Write Web, as the original site is now down]. Directly below that was a message that explained that a toolbar would be installed and implying that your search provider and home page would be switched to Bing.

Still, to me, it was a pretty tricky move. There was no easy way to “exit out” from having the plugin installed other than to close the page itself. It’s likely plenty of people installed the toolbar when they might not have wanted to — and were switched to Bing.

Bing Fires Affiliate, Er, Publisher

I asked Bing about the affiliate. It commented:

Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their products to customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices that are in conflict with Bing’s principles and are addressing them directly with this affiliate partner.

It’s not clear if the affiliate will be dropped entirely. The specific landing page people were switched to, http://mmb.bingstart.com, continues to operate with a “ZUGO” code that stands for what appears to be Make-My-Baby’s parent company. That suggests the affiliate may still be earning for searches.

Postscript (2:15 ET): Bing has now sent an updated statement:

Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers.   That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and principles put in place by Bing.  As a result, the relationship with this publisher will be terminated.

I’ve bolded the key change. Rather than “address” issues, Bing is now terminating the relationship. Bing also says the company wasn’t an affiliate but rather “a publisher who has a relationship with one of our distribution partners.”

I’m assuming this means that Make-My-Baby was a distribution partner for the Zugo toolbar and that Bing will retain a relationship with Zugo but has effectively told Zugo to fire Make-My-Baby.

Bing declined to answer how long it has been running this type of affiliate program, how it solicits people to be in it (is there a self-serve option?) or how much it pays.

Postscript (5:25 ET): OK, I have some more answers from Bing. Make-My-Baby was an affiliate of Zugo. I asked how Bing could directly fire a Zugo affiliate and was given a non-answer:

In any Bing distribution program, there are guidelines that must be followed to ensure a positive experience for customers.  We were made aware of a particular publisher who was not in compliance with those guidelines, and that publisher is no longer part of this program.

The actual answer remains that Bing probably cannot “fire” a Zugo affiliate but rather can tell Zugo that one of its affiliates is violating Bing’s distribution requirements to pressure Zugo to act.

As for Zugo, Iwas told it is not an affiliate but rather distribution partner. What’s the difference? Bing said:

It’s really a distinction without a difference.

Bing also confirmed that it continues to have a relationship with Zugo. That also means that all the people who had their pages changed by Make-My-Baby will continue to get redirected to the benefit of both Zugo and Bing, as best I can tell, despite the fact that they were obtained in a way that Bing disagrees with.

Bing: Google Did It Too!

When Bing emailed me with info for the 5:25ET postscript I integrated above, it also said:

No one, including Google who also uses distribution channels like OurBabyMaker.com, wants to have their brand associated with a negative customer experience.

Hmm. OK, I’ll bite. I headed over to that site:

Its not run by Google. It is run by IAC, which has distribution deals with Google, especially through toolbars that it owns.

Installing the software instantly caused my anti-virus software to jump in and scream that it wouldn’t let me install it. I’m not inclined to test it more. But if I had, I get the impression I’d have ended up with the Smiley Central toolbar or some variant, which may have shifted my defaults over to Ask (complete with Google ads) or perhaps to Google. I’m checking with Google on this.

Ben Edelman — who has consulted for Microsoft in the past and is involved in a lawsuit against Google — has documented some of the changes that the IAC toolbar has done on the past (see here and here)

Bing & Buying Traffic

Bing has tried a variety of things to attract searchers to its search engine, most recently, Bing Rewards — which gives credits that can be redeemed for prizes. SearchPerks was an earlier incarnation of that. Cashback gave discounts on purchases.

Of course, Bing is not alone in trying to buy search traffic. Google has done plenty of distribution deals itself. In fact, like many search engines back in the late 1990s, Google even ran its own affiliate program that paid $0.03 for each search an affiliate generated.

Ah, but Google never tricked anyone into changing their defaults! Sure, nothing like what the Bing affiliate above was doing comes immediately to mind, though I’m sure there were similar examples that didn’t get wide attention. But then again, Google — which preaches about how everything should be “open” and that people should have choice — is hardly squeaky clean when it comes to generating search traffic.

Google & Buying Traffic

Google & Dell’s Revenue-Generating URL Error Pages Drawing Fire covers a deal — now ended — with Dell that caused some people to wonder why they’d end up on ad-filled pages powered by Google, when entering an incorrect URL.

Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! covers how Google has long been the default search engine on Firefox — no need to “trick” anyone into this, since Google bought that distribution, despite arguing that the EU should force Microsoft to make people choose in Internet Explorer. Bing is finally being allowed as a choice on Firefox after years of being blocked — and then, not until Firefox 4 (see Firefox 4 To Add Bing As Search Option).

Enough With The Switching

None of this excuses what the Bing affiliate was doing. Ideally, I’d like to see both Bing and Google come together on a common site where people could go and easily detect if their search provider or home page has been changed in a way they don’t like — and easily fix that. Both companies have fought directly and through proxies to change user settings. I’ve had my fill of emails from people confused about what happened to them, when this type of switch happens.

I am not exactly sure what all the new features are but as you can see, the MSN butterfly is now being placed inline with the Bing logo:

Social voting: then

Social news sites rely on the community to downvote or bury spammy content, and while the community does a good job, it’s not always enough to keep an organized promotion effort from succeeding. Traditionally, organized social community members have voted on each others’ content to get enough votes to promote to the front page. While there are measures in place to prevent organized efforts, like enforced Terms of Service rules, natural behavior recognition, reciprocal voting pattern observation, etc., it hasn’t been enough. Thus, social media sites have looked for another solution to help them with their epidemic.

Users heavily involved in social media are constantly being pinged all day long from other users in solicitation for a vote on the content they are trying to promote. Frequently, social media users “blind vote” without even viewing the content. Social news sites caught on and established a behavioral metric of content click through to make the vote weight heavier towards the promotion of that content. Social users then just started clicking through and leaving quickly before they voted.

Social voting: now

Recently, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit have all released options for their users to shorten their URLs to share with their friends. These shortened URLs frame the content below a bar at the top of the page. The bars allow users to vote on the content and explore related content if desired.

StumbleUpon’s Su.pr URL shortened bar

Reddit’s short URL bar

Reddit’s FireFox Socialite bar

Digg’s URL shortened bar

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think there’s a deeper reason StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Digg have all recently released URL shorteners and framed bars for their content. We now are approaching a new era in the world of social voting and organized promotion. An era of measuring user engagement on content to analyze natural behavior in order to determine if the vote for that content, from the social media user, is genuine or artificial.

Framed content allows social news sites to move beyond the click-through to measure behavioral metrics.  Now social news sites can analyze:

• How long a user was on the site
• If the user scrolled below the fold
• If the user interacted with media objects like Flash or video
• What the average time spent on the site was
• If the content intrigued the user to explore further within the site
• What the user clicks on, copies, bookmarks, prints, etc.
• How many visitors came to the URL and didn’t vote

This opens up gaming to a whole new level. Now social users need to have their voter rings either engage more heavily in their content or emulate fake user-behavior. This is a new level of cat and mouse that gamers will be playing with social news sites. Personally, I always engage in the content, and no longer blind vote, to prevent my social profiles to be viewed as natural and not part of a voting “favor” ring.

For the social communities, this is a great step in the right direction. The analytics should help filter out a lot of the garbage that enters the frontpage of many social media sites. Time will tell how if social news sites are actually analyzing and utilizing this data correctly in their benefit.

Your sites are being framed

As of now, the Diggbar shows only to those Digg users that are signed in and haven’t opted out of the Diggbar. I’m sure if Digg had it their way everyone would use the framed content. However, they caught a lot of flack from webmasters for doing so. There are some fundamental issues with these frames that have upset webmasters. Social frames:

• Prevent canonical URL bookmarking
• Prevent canonical URL sharing
• Prevent cross-pollination on social sites (for example, you can’t Stumble the canonical URL upon visiting a framed Digg URL)

There is a solution. Add this code to the top of your pages or install this WordPress plugin. However, some webmasters are happy because there are benefits from shorteners like Su.pr. Su.pr, by StumbleUpon, allows statistical analytics of your users and encourages them to checkout other popular content on your site. Ultimately, it’s up to you which route you want to take.

To be fair to Microsoft, IE6 is very old and Microsoft is already up to version 8. I emailed Microsoft about the issue and they confirmed the bug. A Microsoft representative sent me the following statement:

We’re aware of the issue with IE6 and Bing and are investigating a solution. This issue is not impacting IE7 or IE8 users. We respect user choice on search providers in IE and all browsers, and designed IE to enable that choice. We will provide an update soon on this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience it has caused. In the meantime, we encourage customers to upgrade to IE8 here. Alternatively, Firefox users can install the add-in for Bing here.

Controlling the browser is a big deal for influencing search market share. So this bug is fairly serious, being that many novice internet users still use IE6.

Postscript: Microsoft emailed me again at 2:45am on June 3, 2009 to inform me the issue is now resolved with IE6. The issue was server side, so the fix was able to be pushed out remotely to all infected browsers.

With the new implementation scheduled for next week, only those who are logged into Digg will see the DiggBar. So if you click on a DiggBar URL from Twitter, you won’t see the DiggBar unless you’ve already been to Digg and have a logged in status. Just having a Digg cookie won’t be enough, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose told me when we talked about the new implementation yesterday. A Digg user must be logged in for a DiggBar to show. Logged in users can also opt-out of seeing the DiggBar.

Those who are NOT logged in will simply be redirected to the destination page, via a 301 permanent redirect. This will include search engines that follow those links. Digg’s been in touch with Google’s Matt Cutts on the change, which I’ve confirmed. The consensus is that Google will register DiggBar links as 301 redirects.

Overall, this change is a good thing. It means that link credit will flow to the destination site, rather than being kept by Digg itself.

There remains the separate issue of framing, how that was unpopular in the past and remains so in many quarters given the recent resurgence. Yesterday, it was pointed out by Michael Gray how Kevin Rose himself wasn’t pleased to find his own content being framed. So why do this to others, I asked him.

Kevin’s response was that he felt the Truveo experience was different. He wasn’t a logged in user there, so wasn’t expecting that type of display. He also didn’t like that it was an all-panel framing — that his content was completely surrounded by all four sides, in a frame.

I have mixed feelings. Showing a frame to only logged-in users seems like a fair compromise. There’s no doubt that for some Digg users, the framebar is useful. It’s also easier for them to use than downloading a separate toolbar (though Kevin said Digg still plans to improve and promote its toolbar).

On the other hand, I still hate frames. I also really worry that this will just cause other services to do the same. Imagine if Google decided that it should put up a Google framebar for anyone logged into one of its services? I still think the internet would explode in fury over such a move. But Digg’s compromise would give Google the cover to do so — as it would give cover to Yahoo or Microsoft, and as it now extends cover to Facebook that already does framing.

I wish Digg had made the tough decision to drop the framebar entirely, so that pressure could then be applied to Facebook and StumbleUpon and others to drop theirs. But the compromise does seem a good one, as long as it doesn’t end up opening the gates for more framing. Certainly sites that object can continue to run framebusting scripts, as we do here. That solves the frame issue for them, and the other change deals with the link credit issue that was developing.

For more about the DiggBar, framebusting, 301 redirection and other issues, see these two past articles from me that go into them in much more depth:

• The Growth Of Framebars & Kevin Rose On The DiggBar
• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?

For more, see discussion on Techmeme.

For those unfamiliar with the DiggBar, it allows people to create a short URL that’s useful in services like Twitter. Anyone clicking on a shortened URL made through Digg gets to a page with a DiggBar at the top. For example, here’s how it looks for a post I recently did on my personal blog about newspapers and concerns over Google:

The red arrow points at one feature, how the DiggBar allows anyone to vote on the page they’re viewing. There are other handy features, such as the ability to see any comments people have made at Digg about the page:

There’s no doubt that if you use Digg a lot, you’ll probably love the DiggBar. But the bar does two things that aren’t making some people (including me) very happy. It doesn’t pass along link credit, and it frames web content.

Link Credit Issues

Last week, my URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? article went into depth about how various URL shorteners work. A key issue is whether these shorteners tells search engines to credit the destination URLs they point at. Those issues what’s called a “301 redirect” do this correctly (my What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters article covers more about link credit issues and why it is important to search rankings).

The DiggBar does not do a 301 redirect (nor can it, as this would prevent the DiggBar from showing at all). If you shorten a page using DiggBar service, then Twitter the short URL you receive, any links that Google or other search engines find via that short URL will send credit to Digg, not to the destination page you shortened.

A sidenote here. Twitter automatically puts a “nofollow attribute” on any links that people tweet. That’s a method to tell search engines that the links shouldn’t be counted as “votes” as part of their ranking processes. However, tweets often appear off the Twitter.com domain. In some of these places, the nofollow attribute (or tag) doesn’t get used. So tweeted links can get counted by search engines, and it remains important that URL shorteners pass along credit to the destination pages.

Digg had a blog post out yesterday explaining that they had done some things they believed would stem concerns about link credit not flowing properly. SEO expert Greg Boser dissected that post, finding it didn’t hold up. I also looked at it today and found problems:

1) Using the noindex tag prevents the pages that Digg makes with shortened URLs from being spidered by Google and other search engines, but that does not solve the issue of them still accumulating all the link credit rather than this going to the destination URL. Also, so far despite using noindex, some of these pages are getting listed in Google. Here’s another example of this. (Looking at the source code, that page lacked a noindex tag an a canonical tag. It seems like originally, the DiggBar didn’t add these tags. Now that they are present, it will take search engines a few days to weeks to catch-up).

2) Using the canonical tag as a form of redirection doesn’t work, because that tag is still treated as a “hint” by search engines rather than an must obey instruction. It also doesn’t work across different domains (IE, Digg.com can’t point at content off Digg.com’s own domain and use the tag to tell the search engines anything).3) The “source URL” solution Digg discusses doesn’t solve anything. What this means is that if you’re on the Digg home page, stories are listed there from across the web. For example, here’s a popular one right now from the Daily Telegraph:

http://digg.com/d1oOii

Digg uses a short URL to point you at that story, which in turn brings the DiggBar up on the top of the page. However, if you can’t run JavaScript (as search engines operate), then you get the long “source URL” like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/evolution/5131017/Egg-collected-by-Charles-Darwin-found-at-Cambridge-University-after-200-years.html

Digg’s thought was that by showing the long “source” URL to search engines, then the long URL ultimately will get all the link credit. However, there are plenty of places where the short URL will be found across the web by search engines because it is listed with regular HTML, rather than through JavaScript.

Framing Issues

Back in the late 1990s, framing was a big issue. For those unfamiliar, frames allow a web site to pull in content from other web sites into their own pages. It was much loathed for a variety of reasons. It often led to bad user experience. It caused serious issues for search engines, making it difficult for them to spider content properly. Some felt it was a copyright violation — that the site doing the framing was effectively copying their material without permission.

Framing largely disappeared for all of these issues. But now it’s coming back, and Digg’s use with the DiggBar may have been the tipping point.

Last October, StumbleUpon added framing of sites, so that anyone starting a browsing experience from StumbleUpon’s home page gets a framebar like this, as the red arrow points at:

Back in December, Facebook added its own framing of content through a framebar that appears when you click on posted links from within the service. Again, the red arrow points to an example that you can see for yourself here:

Ask.com started framing search results in February. The red arrow below points to the framebar, which appears when you click from Ask search results to a web page that’s listed, like this:

Ask used to do this when it first started out back in the 90s, then dropped framing apparently because so many sites moved away from that model. Now with harder economic times, it apparently finds value in trying to take over the top part of your browser window.

Of course, Google also frames web sites with its Google Image Search service. I believe it has operated this way years and years ago from when image search first started:

There was actually a lawsuit over this, which Google won. Despite that, this might be a good time for Google to reconsider the framing it does.

Also, if Google were ever to frame web sites when you click to them from search results in the way Ask does, the web would almost certain erupt in anger. I don’t think this will happen, of course — but if it’s not something we’d allow Google to do, it’s not something we should be allowing any sites to do.

Framebars Versus Toolbars

Clearly Digg didn’t start the new wave of framing, but it certainly has taken much more heat than Facebook or StumbleUpon over it. I think it’s the combination of URL shortening with framing that’s tipped people over the edge. That mixed framing with the popularity Twitter, where most people these days seem to be using URL shorteners. I think it creates worry that there will be no stopping framing or framebars now.

I feel for services like Digg and Facebook and StumbleUpon. The framebars they’ve created are useful and certainly easier than having users install toolbars for their browsers. But they remain frames, and they bring with them all the negatives about frames that we had in the past.

I’d hope that perhaps there’s an industry move to develop some standards around framebars. For example, if they’re going to be used, perhaps they are less intrusive to a publisher if shown at the bottom of a browser window, rather than at the top. Perhaps there’s also a way to ensure that the URL showing in the browser window remains that of the “source” site with the framebar also displayed (it’s been a long time since I played with frames, so I’m not sure this can be done).

Other ideas might include developing a standard script that publishers can use if they want to break frame code but also inform visitors from a particular site (such as Digg or Facebook) that they can get similar functionality using software toolbars. Perhaps pop-up toolbars in a separate window could work, though there are issues with pop-up blockers.

I don’t know the right answer. Personally, I think the easiest thing would be for everyone to just say no to frames. If you want your dedicated users to have toolbar-like functionality, then have them install an actual toolbar, not a framebar.

Kevin Rose On DiggBar

How’s Digg viewing the uproar? “It’s been a crazy learning experience for us,” Rose said. “We want to follow best practices.”

Rose explained that initially, Digg wanted simply to do a toolbar to help their most active users more easily Digg content or comment on it.

“We wondered what can we create that allows people to go visit that site with a single click and still get a Digg experience. That was kind of the idea behind creating the bar in the first place,” he said.

More as an afterthought, when seeing how popular it was to shorten URLs on Twitter, Digg added on a shortening aspect to the DiggBar.

“The goal in creating this wasn’t, ‘Let’s be the universal URL shortener.’ It was ‘Let’s make a tool that can enhance the experience for Digg users’.”

Rose said someone at Digg did speak with a software engineer at Google, as mentioned in their blog post, about the best way to pass along credit to Google — but he didn’t know who that was. Fair to say, they’ll get the straight scoop shortly, as Rose is now set to speak to Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts and who also closely watches over webmaster issues.

As for the DiggBar’s future itself, Rose said the company is taking in all the feedback to determine what’s the next best step.

“I want to make it known by all means that we’re sitting down and thinking about this stuff and trying to come up with solutions that work for anyone,” he said.

What’s A Webmaster To Do?

While Digg reexamines the DiggBar, there are webmasters who will remain concerned. My original article on URL shorteners has code you can use to block framebars. Wikipedia has a page about this, too, and you can see John Gruber’s code here. By the way, we actually had that code on our site before the DiggBar came out, just as a general best practice of breaking frames.

Of course, if you like the idea that people can more easily Digg (or Stumble or Facebook) your content, then you might not have an issue with using the frames.

I’d still recommend that if you’re wanting to shorten URLs for your own sites, use a service that’s primarily built for that and which does 301 redirect.

The features include:

• Yahoo Search Assist search suggestions
• View search results in one click, within the application
• Site summaries load before the web site itself loads
• Yahoo News results (if applicable)
• Personalized search results based on your search history
• Search history shows you your search logs
• Clear results by shaking your phone

So I had time to play with this iPhone app and I had some questions. I cannot change my default search provider from Yahoo. The reason I love Inquisitor for Safari is that it lets me plug in my search providers and very advanced search operators that I use often. When I asked Yahoo about changing the provider, they told me “consumers can only use Yahoo.” A Yahoo spokeswoman added, “We made that decision because we wanted to ensure the best experience for our mobile consumers– speed on mobile is a critical issue and we can go to the yahoo web results faster via BOSS as we don’t need to parse results. Using other providers reduces the speed on the mobile app.”

Outside of that, they me take you through a screen by screen of Inquisitor for the iPhone.

When you load up Inquisitor on your iPhone for the first time, you will see this screen:

As you type in the search box, search suggestions begin to show up. This is powered by Yahoo’s Search Assist:

You can click on a result or hit search at the bottom of the screen. Here are the search results, which I assume are provided by Yahoo Search:

If you scroll down to the bottom of those search results, you will see search suggestions:

Clicking on a search result will first show a snippet of what the page is about at the bottom, while it loads the page at the top:

Once the page loads, the snippet disappears:

There is a back and forward button and a refresh button on the bottom (it seems to use the built in Safari controls within the application). Plus you can email or visit that page directly in Safari mobile:

Closing the application and opening it again or shaking the phone will take you back to a page with your search history and a search box:

Here is a screen capture of the settings area for Inquisitor. To access this page, you go to the iPhone’s home screen, click on the gray “Settings” icon and scroll down and click on Inquisitor.

Here you can control if you want to have the application auto correct your searches, change your country, control the number of results you see, turn on or off search history and safe search and control if you want the shake to clear the results.

Overall, this is a very nifty search tool for the iPhone. However, I do wish there were more settings to control the search preferences, like the desktop alternative.

Note: We covered Google’s iPhone Mobile Search app three times here, including:

• Using Google Mobile App On My iPhone
• Video: Google Mobile iPhone App With Voice Recognition Now Available
• Activate The “Bells and Whistles” On Google’s iPhone Mobile App

Here is a screen capture: