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Niall Kennedy's Weblog

Tracking how syndication and emerging new businesses are changing life on the Web.

Google search referer changesApril 14

Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header. Google announced the new gateway page on its Google Analytics blog, giving webmasters a few days to prepare for the change.

What is changing?

The Referer path for Google search results will change from /search to /url. It is still not clear which URL parameters from the search page will be passed through the gateway. The search term, q, is still preserved inside the sample URL provided by the Google Analytics blog.

Before http://www.google[.sld].tld/search After http://www.google[.sld].tld/url

Scripts, plugins, and helpers replying on a set Referer path for content highlighting or targeting will need to adjust their code as Google's change spreads throughout their data centers worldwide.

Why the change?

Google is likely making this change to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream. Gateway URLs dependably capture click data and

Facebook's photo storage rewriteApril 5

This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month (500 GB per day!). Jason Sobel, a former NetApp engineer, led Facebook's effort to design a more cost-effective and high-performance storage system for their unique needs. Robert Johnson, Facebook's Director of Engineering, mentioned the new storage system rollout in a Computerworld interview last week. Most of what we know about Haystack comes from a Stanford ACM presentation by Jason Sobel in June 2008. Haystack will allow Facebook to operate i

Facebook's growing infrastructure spendMarch 29

On Thursday BusinessWeek reported Facebook is seeking new financing for its data center operation growth in 2009. Facebook continues to add new members and their associated content at an extremely fast pace, with most new growth coming from international markets. Facebook needs to expand its abilities to serve these markets by bolstering current infrastructure offerings and cutting latency to its members through new international points of presence. In this post I will take a deeper look at Facebook's current computing infrastructure and related expenses and examine likely new areas of investment in 2009.

Facebook members

Facebook currently has over 160 million members in its top 30 markets. Facebook enjoys a 24% market penetration across all 30 countries, including complete domination in Chile and Turkey, where 76% and 66% of all Internet users are members of Facebook. Facebook member numbers are taken from Facebook.com; total Internet users for each country is as reported by the CIA World Factbook.

CountryFacebookInternet%United States54,739,960223,000,00024.55%United Kingdom17,308,040

Create enhanced results on Yahoo! and Facebook with Share markupMarch 16

Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and ease the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this post I will cover the major categories of enhanced share types -- audio, images, video, news, blogs, games, documents, and multimedia -- and walk through how site owners can stand out on shareable platforms. Yahoo! and Facebook are just the first two platforms to collaborate on this effort. Expect more announcements from a variety of activity stream and URL share providers in the future.

Why add special markup?

Shared pages and search results contain, at a minimum, a title and a description extracted from your site's <head>. You can enhance your search and share capabilities by explicitly specifying a thumbnail image or playback data you

Measuring efficiency in the cloudMarch 15

In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings? I shared a few ideas on green clouds at last week's Ignite at ETech.

Marginal resources at a marginal cost

At the most basic level cloud computing is a marginal measure of resource consumption across processor time, memory use, disk use, and bandwidth consumption. Cloud consumption meters are much more precise, measuring every process and its dependent system APIs. Was