Google announced in a blog post that search rankings will take the speed a site loads into account seeing that web users’ attention span is getting shorter and shorter.

With the speed of broadband, which most of us urban web users are connected to, you wouldn’t think that a mere few seconds wouldn’t make much of a difference, unless the web server is down or is lagging too much. But Google thinks otherwise. Apparently, this has been in action for a couple of weeks already.

Yet, when I make searches on Google, which is my default search engine, I still come across web pages on the top ten search results to be unable to load and that is pretty frustrating. I mean, most of us don’t expect that to happen to large websites that are able to rank that high on the search results, right?

Anyway, seeing how people are getting shorter and shorter attention spans, it is wise not to write longish blog posts. Who would read till the end?

My friend is new to Google Sites, previously known as Google Pages, and is quite impressed with its features and she said that she is very happy that she could easily create a website from its What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get format.

I believe most of us web savvy people have already played around with Google Sites but have found it, although easy, rather limited. Sure, a website goes up in less than five minutes but if you are looking for a professional online image, google hosting would not be able to provide that. Besides, you would only be stuck with a sub-domain.

For people who are serious in setting up an independent, feature-rich website, whether personal or commercial in nature, I always suggest buying a web hosting package that usually comes with a free domain name. Most of these packages are very economical now unlike a few years ago, and mostly provide unlimited bandwidth and disk space, which means you can create as many web pages as you like and drive as much traffic to your website as possible without fear of crashing the server.

One of the most asked questions is which web host to go with. I say it’s not a problem going with any top ten web host.

*** This post has been sponsored.

One of things that I like using Google search is the surprise doodles that sometimes appear on its homepage. Google loads the fastest too among all the other search engines but the doodles give it a personality.

Over the past five days, Google has been honouring Danish fairy tale children’s author, Hans Christian Andersen, with its very own set of doodles. Normally, Google would only honour someone with one doodle, unless it’s an event like Summer and Winter Olympics.

With Hans Christian Andersen, who would have celebrated his 205th birthday on 2nd April, Google has five doodles for him, each depicting one of his famous children’s fairy tales.

By the way, Google will be unveiling a new homepage design for its search engine soon. I understand that some users are already seeing the new design while some others will have to wait a little longer. In any case, I hope that the new homepage will loads just as fast as it did previously.

When web users in China couldn’t access Google, they thought that the Chinese Government had blocked off the search engine completely. Well, Google reports that it’s only technical error that has caused this problem and is looking for a way to fix it. Meanwhile, users are redirected to Google sites in Hong Kong.

I think this is good news to web users in China. Sometimes things happen way too many times that we always assume the worst. If the Chinese government is going to leave Google alone, it means that web users in China will be able to receive uncensored news on the web readily at their finger tips.

Users of Google in China are reporting that although they are able to access the website of Google, standard searches are not working as normal. It seems that China has once again disabled Google services in the mainland. Google also reported that its mobile services in China have also been blocked partially.

Google moved its search engine to an uncensored website out of Hong Kong recently and it caused displeasure with the authorities in China but whether this is the cause of the Great Firewall of China has yet to be confirmed by Google themselves.

Well, whatever the problem is, let’s hope that it is ironed out as soon as possible since the people who are losing out are internet users in China!

Gmail has a new feature that would send us an alert if it is detected that our Gmail has been accessed in another geographical location. Of course, this isn’t exactly accurate and it doesn’t replaces that best practices of online security that all of us netizens have to observe the best we could but I think it is good to be alerted if our Gmail account is logged in from another location that may trigger this account.

If it really is logged in by an authorized user, then it is fine and could be just dismissed. However, if the alert pops up that shows that it has been logged in from another city, for example, and if it has really been compromised, we could just changed the password to the account, provided the hacker hasn’t changed to password before the owner has! Still, an alert is better than none.