Several years ago, I tried proposing to Google that they should incorporate accessibility analysis into their search rankings. Their (eventual) reply was, not interested.

I’ve just heard the BBC’s In Touch program, which deals with issues affecting blind and partially-sighted people. Today we had a lengthy interview, with a blind Indian engineer working at Google on exactly that problem. He explained that the accessibility-enhanced search will as first priority select the best/most relevant pages by google’s standard closely-guarded-secret algorithms, but then order those results to ensure that the highest-placed results are accessible.

He even gave some technical details of how the accessibility assessment works. The perennial subject of alt attributes was mentioned (without details on how they assess them), but more interestingly, he referred to well-structured pages, and clearly uses HTML heading markup as a criterion.

It’s all happening very quietly, but it’s gratifying to those of us who have been banging on about this for years. Of course, it would’ve been far better if they’d used Site Valet (customised as necessary to integrate with their systems) for this analysis.

El Reg Reports that youtube has struck its first deal with a performing rights society, presumably involving royalties. So every youtube entry becomes a numbers game with potential money.

I expect that means we’ll see a great new wave of spam involving YouTube URLs, making another one for the spam filters. The only hint of good news is that google may be well-equipped to penalise spammers, if its deal(s) allow that. But from an end-user point of view, that doesn’t mean less spam, just another long battle.

Bah, Humbug.

My dad ‘phoned this morning, as he usually does on a Sunday. Somehow, the conversation got on to namesakes. I know there’s another Nick Kew on the web: he shows up on a google images search (which will also give you a lot of false hits for me).

Anyway, I switched the search to look for namesakes of my dad, and found a few. Then returned to google’s normal web search and found more. That’s a definite contrast: a google search on my own name turns up a page of just me.

So I wondered: how far can one dominate google’s results for one’s own name? Well, I just tried it, and the first 73 pages are either by me, or third-parties who reference me by name. The first competition is at position #74, where the reference is “… take Nick to Kew Gardens …”. That’s not me, and I’ve never been to the gardens.

Of course, it’s of no commercial value: anyone using the search term knows exactly what they want, and they’ll find it whether or not it’s me. But I wonder how much the “come top in …” con-artists would charge for that