Google and the death of privacy

Posted by Jeremy L. Knauff | December 13th, 2009

A lot has changed since Google first started gobbling up market share from some of the most established search engines. Today, the tables have turned and Google is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, doing everything in their power to prevent erosion of their market share.

They do have a unique advantage, though; the massive amounts of data that they collect through the many services that they offer. And much to the dismay of privacy advocates everywhere, they are leveraging this more and more every day.

If you’ve ever used searched for something using Google, they have that search stored away in their massive data centers, along with a history of any sites that you visited as a result. Do you use their handy toolbar or browser? Did you know that allows them to monitor every single thing you…

Fight back against hackers!

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | March 24th, 2009

Anyone who’s had a website for more than a few days has probably had their site hacked at least once. Aside from the obvious annoyances, this can actually hurt your organic ranking and bring your website traffic to a screeching halt.

The good news is that Donna Fontenot has come up with a pretty solid solution that notifies you when any files on your server are modified in any way. Her tool won’t stop hackers, but it will notify you if they change any of your files so that you can fix the problem before it has any impact on you.

I highly recommend that you download and install MonitorHackdFiles and if you can, help her spread the word about it too.

Microsoft bids $45 billion for Yahoo!

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | February 1st, 2008

Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! on Friday, which could make both companies a slightly more competitive against Google than they currently are. While combining the two companies in any capacity would certainly shake things up a bit, chances are that it wouldn’t have a significant impact initially, because collectively, they would still only hold a little less than 30% of the market share, while Google dominates with over 65%.

Avoid Network Solutions like the plague!

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | January 9th, 2008

It’s recently come to my attention that Network Solutions is engaging is some pretty unethical business practice, and they’re using your time and work to profit from it! It works like this. You visit Network Solutions to see if a domain name that you’re interested in buying is available, and as luck would have it, the name you want is. So you’re about to register it but you then find out that there are companies like Go Daddy who offer the exact same product at about one third of the price, so you hop over to their website to buy the domain, only to find out that it’s no longer available. Why? Because when you entered the domain search at Network Solutions, they registered it for themselves so that you would be forced to…

Web 2.0 links

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | August 15th, 2007

Here is a rather extensive list of web 2.0 links. Some of these applications or services can be used to help grow your business, some can be used to make daily tasks easier and some, well, some are just useless.