By : Nidhi Gupta

MediaWiki is the PHP-based wiki engine which runs all of the Wikis on Wikia. It is a free software package developed for web-based multilingual free content encyclopedias like – Wikipedia and other wikis. MediaWiki was originally developed for Wikipedia. It is developed using MediaZilla. Later on, this took an important role in other projects of Wikimedia Foundation. Some of them are – Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikimedia Download area.

MediaWiki is usable on both large and small sites, though some aspects of configuration may seem overcomplicated because MediaWiki is primarily targeted as an in-house tool for Wikipedia. It is designed to handle heavy websites containing library-like document collections, and supports user uploads of images/sounds, multilingual content, TOC auto generation, ISBN links, etc. Moreover, it keeps track of changes, so users can receive notifications, view differences and revert to edits. This system has many other features and can easily be extended.

Difference between webpage and wikitext

Wikitext is the textual content that is displayed in the edit box (text editor) and does not support all features of a webpage. It has been observed that HTML tags support comments, but in general, comments are not found in web pages. You can easily add comments to display information in the wikitext. However, wikitext lacks some features like – images, time and date of last edit, image description page, and values of the variables.

MediaWiki is a free server based software package that is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Users can easily run this software on a large server farm to manage the contents of any website.

How does MediaWiki work?

When you want to edit a page and then submit it MediaWiki writes it to the database. However, the previous versions of that page’s content are kept in the database to avoid spamming or vandalism. MediaWiki also manages images and multimedia files stored in the file system. If the wikis are large with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

A new study argues that Dogpile gives a better user experience than Google.

J.D. Power has published a study that seems to indicate that Dogpile performs better than Google as regards “consumer satisfaction”. According to the J.D. Power and Associates, for a second consecutive year, Dogpile ranks highest among search engines in satisfying residential Internet service subscribers with primary search.

Dog ahead of the pack

Dogpile improves by 14 points since 2006 to earn a score of 818 on a 1,000-point scale. Dogpile performs particularly well among Internet service subscribers in all three factors that determine overall satisfaction (listed in order of importance): functionality, ease of use and results. Google follows Dogpile in the rankings with a score of 794, while Ask.com follows Google, earning a score of 784.

“Dogpile continues to differentiate itself from its competition in two key ways,” says Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications research at J.D. Power and Associates. “First, Dogpile’s meta search capabilities provide a one-stop search experience for Internet users by aggregating the results of many of the major search engines simultaneously. Secondly, users report that they are particularly satisfied with the limits that Dogpile places on the amount of paid advertising that accompanies search results.

Hmm! Is it correct to say this?

Mixing paid and organic results

It is certainly true that Dogpile has a simplistic and easy to read interface (as does Google), but if users report that they are particularly satisfied with the limited amount of advertising, it must be because they are unable to differentiate between paid and regular organic results.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

If you are working in Search Engine Marketing , you need to have several inevitable tools that offers a great help and assistance. Here follows a list of some very important tools that every Search Engine Marketer is required to have in his kit.

XML Sitemaps Generator: The XML Sitemap Generator crawls through all levels of your site to generate an XML sitemap. It also gives you a running count of pages, provides a text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can import straight into your site. The online version of the generator is free for sites of less than 500 pages. It can be set up to automatically index your site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and Yahoo when done.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is free web-based site metrics/analytics software hosted by Google. After you insert tracking code on all desired pages of your site, Google collects data regarding visitor activity and then you are able to log into an Analytics interface and view site activity and produce reports.

Backlinkwatch.com: Type your URL into Backlink Watch and get complete detailed information about the quality and quantity of backward links pointing to your website. It will show you anchor text, Google Toolbar PageRank, total outbound links on that page and nofollow flag for each of your inbound links available.

Jim Boykin’s tools: A collection of 17 free SEO tools developed by Jim Boykin and his staff, including a cache analyzer, Backlink checker, keyword density tool and multiple inbound and outbound link checking tools.

Google Webmaster Central: Google Webmaster Central is Google’s one-stop shop for webmaster resources. It contains answers to common questions about Google crawling and indexing and guidelines for webmasters to follow when publishing their content. It also provides statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting.

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