Google's search engine is a fantastic tool, and there still seem to be no effective competitors. Unfortunately, however, Google have been making quite a few changes which have hugely affected the relevance of results, and often leads to needing to enter a second search.

This post details some of the tips users can use to try and reduce this, including minor changes you can make to Chrome/Chromium and Firefox to allow searching through the inbuilt search bars to be less irritating!

Google recently unveiled their next batch of new services, including a technique called pre-rendering. The idea being that when a Chrome user runs a websearch on Google, the first few links will be automatically loaded in the background for instant display should the user choose to view it.

For those operating websites, this has a number of huge disadvantages. Firstly, those who monitor how many times their pages have been viewed (“hits”) are going to find their statistics are heavily skewed. A basic hit counter will not know the difference between an actual page-view and a pre-rendered page.

This could, of course, be very misleading when trying to identify which pages on your site regularly attract visitors.