The MFA sites are those sites or blogs that are fully loaded with AdSense Ads instead of contents. The owners of these MFA sites will advertise on Google Adwords to look for sites to place their lower-cost ads and in exchange they hope to gain much higher return ads on their sites.

For example, they get on AdWords and place an ad on your site with very low CPC, lets say less than $0.10. And when a user clicks on these ads on your site, the user will then be directed to the MFA sites which carry much higher CPC ads. And the MFA sites make much more money than you do.

And some more some of these MFA sites are having low CTR (Click Thru Rate) as they do not show ads that are so relevant to your site’s contents. Therefore users tend to click less on those ads on your site.

In order to gain much higher CTR and also CPC to maximize your AdSense income, you can make use of the AdSense competitive ad filter in your AdSense account. Login into your AdSense account, and on AdSense Setup menu, you’ll then find the Competitive Ad Filter. And there is a text box which allows you to enter up to 200 sites that you wanna filter out.

Of course, it’ll be hard for you to manually trace those low CPC or CTR or MFA ads. But, thanks to AdsBlackList.com, which it scans your site and generates a list of 200 sites to let you add into your competitive ad filter.

To generate the list, you must first sign up for an account with AdsBlackList.com. After that, sign into your account. But you may find it’s hard to get started as the menu of the AdsBlackList.com seems to be not-so understandable to most users. But I give you an easy steps here where to get your 200 sites.

Just click on the side menu, “My Account”, you’ll find “Add New Domain” on top, which is not so obviously shown. Click on “Add New Domain”, and key in your website or blog that you wanna have AdsBlackList.com to generate the 200 sites for you. You must provide the site’s URL, title and description. After submitting the site, you;ll then be redirected back to the account main page.

You can then proceed to “Generate Filter List” to generate the 200 sites. Drag and drop the available domains to the box “Keywords from selected domain”. Be sure to click the boxes MFA and low CPC, then click on “submit” to generate a list of 200 sites that provide low CPC/CTR ads on your website. And then copy the 200 sites into your AdSense’s competitive ad filter. It takes a couple of hours for AdSense to take effect. Then wait and see, you shall see some improvements of your CTR or CPC in the next couple of days, and shall be making more money then! By SmartBorneo.com

Meaning that doing so, they won’t have to host those images, and they’re stealing bandwidths from you. But you have a choice to control from being hot linked by others just to save some of your bandwidths. Or you’re simply pissed off as those original images that you’ve created by your own have simply been copied and pasted over. And they’ve even stolen the originality of your content.

To prevent from hot linking, you’ll just need to add some codes to your .htaccess, such as the following codes which I wanna prevent the four domains to hot link to my images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?wordpress\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

The users will get redirected to my PHP page /images/sorrynothotlinking.php which I build using PHP function imagecreatefromjpeg() to output an image that shows the “No Hot Linking” messages. You’ll probably could make it to point to another image file with either a .gif or .jpg extension. But I’ve found somehow the redirection will keep looping as it seems to have confused the webserver. So, I’ve then made a PHP script to do so.

By the way, in the occasion you wanna block all others from hot linking to your images except with few domains that you wanna allow, (lets say mysite1.com and mysite2.com as follows), you can add the following codes to your .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite1\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

Please note that if you only allow a few domains to be able to hot link to your images and block all the rest, will prevent those images to show up on email clients as well. As you’ll have lots of readers to subscribe your blog feed via FeedBlitz which delivers blog feed via emails. When they open up the feeds on the email clients they’ll see the “No Hot Link” images on each post and this is ugly.

The best way is to use method 1, just to block those sites or blogs or those you dislike which you’ve discovered that they hot link to you.

The RushmoreDrive search engine is claimed to be a black Google, which also claims Google is too white. As white or brighter color is deemed to consume more energy on a CRT monitor? No, it’s about the black men don’t like to use Google, which is meant more for the white and Google has been accused of returning results that alienate the rest of the population.

RushmoreDrive was launched by Johnny C. Taylor, in April, which is made to return search results that target more to the black community. Yeah, RushmoreDrive has made it more relevant search results to black. Such as the black people search for “Whitney” mostly mean they’re looking for Whitney Houston. But if you perform the search for “Whitney” you’ll get the first result on Google is Whitney Museum of Art, followed by Whitney Bank, and then only either the 3rd or the 4th is Whitney Houston.

But RushmoreDrive does it differently, it returns search results favorable to the black. Searching for Whitney definitely returns “Whitney Houston” first and always return stuff that Black people like! (The search for “Whitney” on RushmoreDrive is promoted to the first position on the first page of search results, whereas Whitney Museum of Art and Whitney Bank have been demoted to 2nd and 3rd respectively.) The RushMoreDrive search engine is named after the North Carolina street where its offices are. Great for the black!

via [latimesblogs]

We want better search results? I personally feel that Google does the best, with its very simple user interface, and search results are highly relevant, although many claim that Google’s search results are now floated with blog posts. Google determines the position of a search result by the website’s or the page’s pagerank. And pagerank is determined by how many incoming links to a website or web page. Yeah, it’s reasonable that the search result shows higher position if that website or web page has more incoming links, which stand for the genuity, originality and higher relevancy of what the user searches. But due to recent years, many people are making spamming links, some spamming pages can be made with high pagerank too, before it’s been detected by the big G.

Well, we’re not to talk about how big G does it. It’s done pretty nice since its launch back in 1998. We’re here to talk about the Cuil (pronounced as “cool”), a search engine that was launched by an ex Google scientist. Yeah, this search engine seems to have their own search index database. As when I perform a search, it shows very low similarity to search results provided by any of the big three. Meaning it shouldn’t be a wrapper of any of these three. The search results are organized in a 3-column manner, which the left most two columns are showing the returned search results. And the right column occasionally lists some relevant categories for the user to explore more.

The “Explore By Category” shows some funs, when you have your mouse over, which will expand the categories for you to further click each of them. Personally, I don’t like the way it organizes its search results. According to CNET, Cuil had a bad launch, which was complained with glitches and weird, incomplete, missing search results. According to CNET’s talk with Cuil VP of communications Vince Sollitto about the launch issues. CEO Tom Costello was “busy putting out fires,” Sollitto said.

Sollitto said there were two issues affecting Cuil search quality currently. First, he said, “We are trying to give people different results.” Cuil is pitched as an alternative to traditional search engines, and users should not expect the results to be the same.

Personally, I’m same with the rest, I ain’t like how it organizes the search results. Yeah, I know, we properly shall appreciate that they’ve been striving to provide better and different search results. Look, when I searched for “USB Magic Jack“, and I clicked on the one of the returned results, it showed me PAGE NOT FOUND! It sucks. Although PAGE NOT FOUND is not to blame Curl, it shall be the responsibility of the website itself. But I think, Curl somehow must have intelligence built-in to detect and not to show a search result that points to a page which returns the code 404!

More bad talk about Cuil is found here. It says Cuil sucks!

The sorting of content also depends on the local relevancy. It offers advanced search and setting of your own preference such as how many search result to return in a page, enable safe search, language selection and open search result in a new browser window. These are some of the common preferences that have been offered by the big search engines such as Google.

Each search result gives a preview option, when clicked, it’ll load the page in a small iframe. Somehow, I find this unnecessary.

Talking about the option that allows user to open a new browser window when the search result is clicked, AskAlexia.com seems to have no option for this. They do it differently, which each search result will open to a new browser window by default. But almost all other search engines will open on the same windows, unless you’ve chosen to open in a new browser window. But AskAlexia ajax search does it by default opening search result in a new browser window and gives no option for that. I think they shall make some improvements for this. But they’re forgiven since they’re still in the BETA version.

Check out the New Zealand search engine, here the Searchii, Found via AskAlexia blog search

It all depends how you market your search engine. The Internet advertising is kinda like endless market, which has more rooms for expansion. Scour is another search engine which is also a wrapper, and it’s built with its wrappers over the big three, which the searched results are aggregated from the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN, just in case you ain’t know).

Furthermore search result allows members to comment. So you can judge on a search result more precisely from those comments. The Scour also offers a money making opportunity to the public who use the Scour search engine. Their money model is as follows:

* You get 1 point when you make a search on Scour,
* Every comment you write about the particular search result gives you 2 points,
* You can invite a friend to Scour, and earn points for these invites,
* 25% of points that are made by the people invited by you are also added to your account.
* Also the installation of Scour toolbar gives you points.

Once you’ve accumulated 6,500 points, you can then redeem for a 25$ Visa Gift Card. So it all depends how hard you work searching on Scour. If you could search Scour for 6,500 times a day, meaning that you’d get a $25 worth Visa Gift card everyday. Toolbars for IE and Firefox are available and they’ll have a version with widgets.

While searching it seems to work like AJAX manner, as what Ask Alexia search engine does having a spinner being loaded. But the returned search results are having the most, three pages only. And it seems to have loaded all these three pages at once. As navigating to the next page loads extremely fast! About AskAlexia, their homepage is a girly gadget blog, but today, I’ve spotted a search bar for pointing to the web, image, video, news, music and blog searches is available on the top of the homepage. Check it out at Ask Alexia

via [technospot]

From my understanding the Tybit search engine shouldn’t have their own indexes database, which they work like others which is only a wrapper of the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN). As when you perform a search on tybit, it shows very close searched results to the big three. Nowadays, even the three are getting closer to each other.

One thing is good is Tybit offers search affiliates, which you can sign up at Tybit website to become an affiliate, if you’ve got a website. You’ll need to paste really simple code on your website to turn it into your own Tybit-powered search engine. Whenever people search on your search engine, and they click on those adverts listed at the right-hand side (similar to Google adwords), you’ll then get paid.

I’ve learned about Tybit as I read it from the magazine World Opportunity. It says that Tybit can let you earn about $140 a day if you have a website that has about 1,000 unique visitors per day. And if you have more of course, you’ll make more than that. Imagine, $140 per day, you’ll get about $140 x 30 = $4,200 per month.

Besides Tybit, if you’re looking for another interesting search engine, Ask Alexia might be worth looking. It’s an ajax-based search engine, that shows no page reload or refresh when you perform your searches on it. It offers 6 searches for the time being, which are, web, image, video, news, music and blog. And having various controls for different searches, such as filtering for different formats of documents, image types, video types, and music searches by song title, artist and album name etc. But it’s somehow still under BETA version. It looks like it’s also a wrapper of Yahoo and the blog search could be a wrapper of Technorati as it offers filtering for authority.

They call themselves condotel, which I guess the word is combined from the two words condominium and hotel. On the website, the facilities of the Likas square hotel is not bad. If you’re to visit Sabah, and to drop by Kota Kinabalu, which is the capital of the state of Sabah, you shall consider staying in this hotel.

The Likas Square hotel offers luxury concept of hotel apartment. All suites are elegantly decorated with most of the suites facing the scenic Likas Bay and Mount Kinabalu. Each suite features a living room, spacious dining area, fully equipped kitchen, all with individually controlled air-conditioning, colour television and telephone with international direct dial facilities, refrigerator, minibar, coffee and tea making facilities. Strategically located, and under the same roof with a 60 shops business center, Likas Square offers ‘ The Luxury Of Space’……..

If you’re one who always wanna hook up to the Internet, the Likas Square condotel also offers WiFi connections, but with a pretty reasonable price.

Similar to Netvibes, Pageflakes allows you to have your own account and then login to personalize your own home page that contains only the content that you’re interested. Such as you can pull those video and image contents, news and blog feeds that you like and create with your own personalized home page. Of course, besides the mentioned one, these days, there are many of such service even Google has its own, the iGoogle which works similar and also Yahoo has the MyYahoo.

Pageflake seems to have pretty poor response from the Internet users, which in March they managed to pull only about a total of 50K unique visitors from the U.S. But its rival Netvibes got about 1.4 millions in March. And now Pageflake, due to poor response, is going to die and has been officially acquired by Brad Greenspan’s Live Universe. Something like Pageflake for sure is hard to survive in the Internet, which shouldn’t be high in demand unless you’re one of the pioneer ones. Furthermore big portals are offering similar services, so most people will cling on the big ones which they will manage to use other services on one single web portal.

Parade.com is the website published by Parade magazine. Parade magazine is kind of famous in the States, which is distributed by more than 400 Sunday newspapers, including the The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, New York Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times / Post Intelligencer and The Washington Post.

The pretty hot search for the parade.com could be due to this website publishes a lot for American’s favorite topics centering around celebrities, games etc. According to Alexa, parade.com has been online since Dec, 1994. It’s a good online news source that was taken out of the Sunday paper and into your browser.