I tried digging into the issue a bit today but it’s not very obvious (to me, at least) how to quickly fix or rewrite my commands. Yet’ it’s something I use on a daily basis and hence need them fully functional. I know some of you have adopted these commands as well and will probably suffer just the same without them so here goes an alternative fix that will let you use the commands for now.

When you update Ubiquity to version 0.1.9, it offers to download Ubiquity 0.5 which is the newest release. Either do not do it or if you have downloaded and installed Ubiquity 0.5, go to Settings (in your Ubiquity window, type “help” or  type “about:ubiquity” in your Firefox address line, then click “Settings” in the Ubiquity help page), scroll down to Language Settings and uncheck the checkbox “Use Parser 2″. Restart your Firefox and you’re all set.

Compete.com lists the following sites as top sites by traffic volume:

1      google.com
2     yahoo.com
3     live.com
4     facebook.com
5     msn.com
6     ebay.com
7     youtube.com
8     wikipedia.org
9     amazon.com
10     microsoft.com

Quantcast.com lists pretty much the same sites though in slightly different order, save for Amazon that goes missing in its list and MySpace appearing instead:

Alexa’s Top Sites list has only 2 entries for Microsoft’s sites instead of 3 like the other two sources. Two new entries also appear – Blogger.com and the Chinese search engine Baidu:

Here’s the list of features Alexa had added:

• Demographics – provides a demographic breakdown for virtually any site, including gender, age, education and more
• Clickstream – shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site
• Search Traffic – shows how much traffic a site gets from search engines

Nothing really new and all those other services are offering it all already but if they want to play like the big boys, they can’t skip it all.

But just how much of a fail for Alexa to have its official blog on Blogspot? Come on people are you Google or something?

People have come up with a way around Yahoo’s redirects to Site Explorer – all you ahve to do is add “-site:” to your linkdomain: query and you end up seeing the same old search results without being redirected. This hack has even been implemented in the SearchStatus Firefox plugin for a while – but in the recent update, they switched it back to Site Explorer for some reason. Don’t know about you, but I personally find it not so cool and I know of otehr people who’d rather have the old fashioned search results link in their shortcuts as well. So I’ve been thinking about writing a Ubiquity command to fix this problem for a while now but kinda never got around to it.

Today though, one of my lads has once again complained to me about SearchStatus sending him over to Site Explorer and I said, ok then, let me sit down and make you a Ubiquity command to use with regular search results.

The resulting command for checking Yahoo! backlinks of a site without getting redirected to Site Explorer is in my Ubiquity feed – feel free to use it and enjoy!

Well not any longer! I was really happy when I spotted this bit in Twitter’s search results:

This is only possible in Twitter Search so far but I do think this is a great leap forward – after all Twitter HAS to become more user friendly if it wants a bigger piece of the search pie.

Infact I find this feature so useful that I decided it was worth my while to make a Ubiquity command for Twitter search – grab your updated feed along with my other Ubiquity custom commands if you’re not yet subscribed for it to auto-renew.

In the meantime, when have you last taken a look at it? Not only is it a blog search engine now, but it also searches the social media such as Twitter and MySpace, and what’s more, has a Friendfeed-like live updating “Big Buzz” page accumulating the search results from all the different sources as they happen (according to Steve Rubel, added this January). This functionality is very handy if you run those ego-searches or want to see what others say about your company.

However, the history of Icerocket’s claims to become a new Google is a long one. Launched by Mark Cuban back in 2004, it has been viewing itself as “an alternative to Google and Yahoo” since its early days. In the company’s Crunchbase profile Google is listed as one of its competitors. In 2006, though, Cuban must have lost his faith in his startup and sold it. Icerocket got relaunched in 2007 and has been steadily adding features since then – despite the fact that Wikipedia does not find it notable enough. According to both Quantcast and Compete, its traffic keeps growing – although it is still far from the user base of Technorati, Facebook or Twitter.

Too bad. Unlike Twitter which is the tool for the egocentric ones out there more than a search tool, Icerocket looks really usable. I thought I’d even support it a bit by creating four new Ubiquity commands for Icerocket’s different searches – at least those I can see myself using. Enjoy!

One thing that I found out is that Twitter memes develop faster than blog memes or memes in any other media. A bright example of such memes would be the Follow Friday – people tag other people who they would recommend to follow. (Fantomaster has follow-fridayed me, thanks mate, appreciated)

I have also witnessed a heated rant from SugarRae during which she and Lisa Barone have come up with another sorta meme, “bloggers are the puppies of the Internet”

So I thought, why not launch my own meme? Considering that it’s St. Patrick’s day today, let’s follow everyone who says “follow me I’m #irish” – Twitter kind of “Kiss me I’m Irish”. Please help spread this one and happy St. Pat’s day folks!

For those of you wondering what I read, here is my shared feed. I am still in the process of adding blog feeds to it so if I forgot any one of you ping me and remind me about your blogs!

While in the process of adding my feeds, I have come across something funny:

It appears that Matt Cutts has not one, not two but even three feeds! Talk about diluting a brand!

Well so, it didn’t take me long to want to create some such commands! First of all, I wanted to have a command that would check WHOIS using DomainTools and couldn’t find anything among existing commands – that’s how I wrote my first custom command. Later on as I was doing my own stuff, I came across other things that I wanted to make into Ubiquity commands – so far, I got 3 of them and planning to add more soon for other SEO related actions. I thought other SEOs would also benefit from these commands so I made them publicly available. Everybody interested can get my Ubiquity SEO commands here.  Watch that page as I will be adding more commands as I come up with them!