Google.com may harm your computer – Malware warning on the most popular search engine

Well, not really, but apparently something went very wrong in the Googleplex or in some of the Google datacenters today, since searching for absolutely anything warned the users that the specific site they want to visit may harm their computer.

Oddly enough, if we did a search for Google.com, below the first result the message “This site may harm your computer.” was displayed. Again, even for Google.

So, as the first picture on the left shows we did a search for Google.com. The omnipresent message in the results saying that clicking the link back to the Google homepage will harm your computer was not working. It pointed to a help article which should have described what the “This site may harm your computer.” message means. The only issue was that the server wasn’t responding, so clicking these links was pointless.

But clicking on a result was not! We were taken to Google’s malware warning page which meticulously told us that the page http://www.google.com will harm our computer. See second picture picture.

Now the big question: Will Google harm your computer? It’s a ridiculous question. It will not, Google doesn’t harm your computer. This is an issue on their end which most likely will be fixed as soon as possible.

It’s still odd, though…

DefiThis un-minified Javascript and code explanation

We published a while ago a small WordPress plugin which enables the users to look up words in a specific database, by highlighting with the mouse the word they want to look up then following a link to an administrator set online database (like Google Definition service or Dictionary.com) which will do the rest of the job.

Worthless to say that this plugin is based on JavaScript in almost 80%, the rest is a bit of PHP which hooks the Javascript code to the WordPress engine and a bit of CSS to style the plugin.

A few words about our coding style: we almost always minify the code made by us. This means that we run a code through a compressor software which strips the unnecessary white spaces and other characters. This applies to both Javascript and CSS. This is not meant to obfuscate the code, but to preserve the bandwidth.
It’s also good to know that we never use longwinded function names or variables. It’s likely that you will never see in code released by us function or variable names like:

function this_is_a_cool_function_used_for_nothing(){
}
/*or variable like*/
var this_is_a_useless_variable = '';


Instead, we use function and variable names like this:

function c_D(){
}
/*or variable like*/
var A = '';


The explanation for this habit is that long variable and function names only eats up unnecessary bandwidth, which we don’t like, and javascript understands both forms of declaration.

If you want to understand the functions we use, you may want to know that each function name is an abbreviation. For example the R_D() function is used for Rendering Defithis, the c() function is used for Centering the widget, aph() for fixing Alpha transparency in Internet Explorer, and so on.

So, as requested by Fernando Ramirez, here’s the unminified javascript code from Defithis. Unobfuscated version does not exist since we believe it’s not obfuscated. Follow this link to the script: http://devoracles.com/examples/defithis.js

If you need explanation regarding anything from within the code, feel free to ask. We listen and will answer.

An Introduction To Online Advertising

This is a guest post by Andrew Wise of WiseStartupBlog, the blog that teaches you how to startup and sell online businesses.

So you’ve got a site, you’ve got visitors, now you need to know what to do to start making money on your site. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, so it’s important to soak up as much knowledge as possible as you try to learn how to monetize your website.

The Basics of Online Advertising

Everything revolves around 3 general dynamics, cost per click (CPC), cost per action (CPA), and cost per milli / cost per thousand (CPM).

For CPC, you are getting paid everytime someone clicks on one of your links. For CPA, you are getting paid everytime someone clicks on one of your clicks and completes an action (most likely buying something or signing up). For CPM, you are getting paid everytime someone sees the ad. It’s based on a 1,000 metric, so you have to show 1,000 ads to get paid for a single CPM.

Which Is Best For My Site?

CPA has the highest payouts, but it’s also the hardest to get good conversions on. Generally, if you have a moderate level of traffic, your best bet is to start with CPC. The most common CPC network is Adsense, and there are countless articles you should read, here are 2 to get you started:

Simple Tips To Help You Earn More Money From Adsense
My top 5 tips for increasing adsense earnings (without increasing traffic)

For those of you who are blessed to have more than 2,000 uniques per day, your cash cow is the CPM model. You can attempt to sell the ads directly, but a good way to get started is to run advertising networks.

The ad networks supply you an ad, and pay you to display the ad. The ad networks themselves strike contracts with advertisers for massive advertising purchases, and through buying in bulk, the advertiser gets a good deal, and then the ad network splits the revenue with their publisher sites (you).

Obviously since ad networks are reselling the ads, you are going to get a less amount than if you sold the ads directly, but the ad networks have relationships and bargaining power to get the big brands advertising on your site, so it’s a good relationship.

I’ve compiled the highest paying CPM ad networks for 2009 and this should give you a good idea which networks would be a good fit for an integration in your site.

One thing to note, if you are using the lesser-quality ad networks, you are going to get a lot more of the flashing, blinking, distracting, zwinky ads, so it’s important to work with an ad network that matches the level of content on your site.

Introduction to Online Advertising

Hopefully this was a good introductory course for those of you new to online advertising, and for more tips and tricks, make sure to visit my blog at WiseStartupBlog.com

Google Cash Review and Why Google Cash is a scam?

A while ago we published an article regarding the Google Cash Cow Scam but even now, every once in a while we get an email explaining how a user or in unfortunate case the author of the email was practically scammed by purchasing a quite expensive e-book, Google Cash by name which promised its user that it will help earn huge money fast. Better said a small fortune lightning fast.

The above promise is suspicious from the very beginning: other than the stock-market, real estate and illegal businesses, do you know about any activity, explained in the form of a relatively short book which can bring you a stunning $33.000 per month? Because this is what the author of the Google Cash, Chris Carpenter states: buy his e-book and you get rich in no time.

So why is Google Cash a Scam?

This is system can’t work as promised because of many things, listing some of the most obvious and important:

• The Google Cash system is about affiliate marketing taken to extreme. The affiliate marketing nowadays is almost dying because the financial crisis.
• It explains how to create AdWords ads in a way that is forbidden by the AdWords Terms of service. Nowadays you can’t use hop-urls to fool the users who click on the ads
• The Google Cash e-book states you will earn cash through Google, without a website. This would be OK, if you would be allowed to use hop-urls, but you are not
• This e-book also explains that you will use keywords for advertising on the search network of Google and for which you will pay only a few cents per click. While this sounds good, advertising on the search network is the most expensive option in AdWords and finding keywords which cost only a few cents per click is improbable
• The Google Cash explains you how to get started in a less than 15 minutes. The problem is that creating the ad plus the time frame in which the ads will appear on the Search network is way more

Is Chris Carpenter a liar and the Google Cash a scam? He is not a liar, we wouldn’t be so harsh with him because a few years ago the system he describes could work fine, but the truth is that today, when the World is struggling with a so called Financial Crisis — which evolved in an economical crisis, — and Google updated the AdWords engine many times since the book was published, the Google Cash is outdated and is a system which is designed to specifically fail on the current market.

Can you make fast and big money with Google Cash? The chance is extremely low.

Need a proof regarding Google Cash is a scam? This image is taken from the websites which advertises and sells the Google Cash e-book and related products.

If you look closely, then you shall observe that: 1. This ClickBank report is from 2006. At the time of this post is 2009. A lot of things change in 3 years. 2. Look at the report date period again: 2006-04-01 through 2006-04-15. Now look at the bottom of the image: Current ClickBank Date: 2006-04-10, so basically either the ClickBank system was so smart that it predicted the sales for 5 days in advance, or, and this is more plausible, the image is faked.

Have a second opinion? Post it below in the comments section!

Cleaning up unnecessary linebreaks in Dreamweaver

I think most of the developers who invested in Dreamweaver encountered at least once situation when, unexpectedly the code was filled up with empty lines. Removing each one manually is easy, but not if the code is tens of thousands of lines long.

So, there has to be a better way to clean up the code, an automation or macro maybe.

And there is. What we will do is to search with a regular expression for multiple blank lines then replace each with “\n” aka one single line.

So here are the steps you have to follow:

1. From the Edit menu choose Find and Replace, or press Ctrl+F
2. The Find in field and the Search fields should be Current Document respectively Source Code
3. Check the Use Regular Expression box
4. In the Find box copy paste the following regular expression [\r\n]{2,}
5. Lastly, in the Replace field type \n and press Replace all

As a little help, here’s a screen-shot how the search box should look like:

Hope this info will help you as it helped me.

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