Free Technology Newsletter - From The Desk of Alan K'necht

July 7, 2004

In this issue:

Product Reviews
Fuji Paper for Inkjet Printers - some surprising results
What's Happening at K'nechtology
A three part series on optimizing your web site for search engines
In The News
- MS launches Beta of it's new search engine
- Search Engine Statistics - by country

Product Reviews

Fuji Photo Paper for InkJet Photo Printers

Do you own a digital camera and a photo quality printer? Ever wonder if the paper you're using in the printer really matters? Well I did and I did the research.

First I asked at a couple of local office/computer supply centers and they all told me no, just use a photo quality inkjet paper and you're fine. Of course if the office supply store happened to have a house brand, they always pointed me to that product as a way of saving money.

I looked-up that same question on various printer manufactures' web sites. And as expected they told me always use their brand of paper for best results.

I then searched the web and found a couple of studies and articles. The studies and articles that seemed reliable, all said there was a small difference and went on to explain why. With my background in traditional printing all the reviews made sense to me. I'll now try to explain why in plain English. Different papers (type and brand) absorb and hold out ink (known as "ink holdout") at different rates depending on the ink. Well different inkjet manufactures use different inks in their brand name cartridges. So of course the quality of the image will vary between papers when used on different printers.

So I loaded up my HP Photosmart 7150 printer with HP brand paper, Kodak Paper, Staples house brand and Fuji's new Photo InkJet Paper especially designed for HP printers. I then printed the same image on all papers and my wife and I compared the results. We both ranked the results the same. It's important to point out that the results were only noticeably different if all the pictures were placed next to each other. Both of us thought even the worst of the batch was good until we saw it next to the best of the batch.

The worse results came from the Staples house brand, next was Kodak and then HP and Fuji were virtually tied for results (it depended on who you asked). What's important to note is that if I didn't have anything to compare it to, Staples house brand would have given an acceptable result. While the results on the Kodak paper were excellent, the colours and the general feeling that you're looking at an actual photo (vs. a printout) was just that much better on the remaining two papers. The big difference between the HP and Fuji paper was price. Fuji is less expensive.

So what paper am I buying now? Fuji paper gives the best results at a very competitive price.

Please note, Fuji offers its paper for a variety of other printers as well and is available at vendors everywhere.

What's Happening at K'nechtology?

At K'nechtology we are continuing to expand our search engine optimization service and keep adding clients. For those interested in this subject, I've recently published two of a three part series about search engine optimization on Digital Web Magazine. The three parts are:

Part 1 - Organic or Paid Marketing

In this article I examine the pros and cons of both traditional paid marketing and organic word-of-mouth marketing for web sites.

Part 2 - Search Engine Optimization and Non-HTML Sites

I explore the problems of using Flash, PDFs, audio files and rich media and how to resolve each one for optimum indexing of your website by the leading search engines.

Part 3 - Optimizing HTML - A brief Overview (Scheduled for July 26).

Here I provide the basics of tuning a traditional HTML driven site for maximum exposure for keywords and keyword phrases in leading search engines.

In The News

Microsoft Launches It's Own Search Engine

While many of you may have searched on the MSN home page, you may not have known that Microsoft was using a third party search engine. For the past couple of years, MS has invested millions in developing a search engine of their own to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Google. Last week they gave the world a first peak at it with the release of the beta site.

I took a look at it and so far I haven't been too impressed. The site is slow (but that is to be expected on a beta site, especially with the world waiting to try it out), but what is worse are the results. On most search terms, the top ranking sites were sites that obviously were spamming the search engine and the others were frequently not relevant to the topic. It looks like they have a long way to go.

The MS search engine bot has been a busy beaver making its rounds on a regular basis to most of my clients' sites. So I expect a lot of improvement over the next few months as MS gets ready to make the new search engine available to the whole world.

Check out the beta site at: http://techpreview.search.msn.com/

Search Engine Statistics

For those of you who are interested in user surfing habits around the world, you may want to take a few minutes and read a multi-country analysis that revealed that the United Kingdom has a more developed online search market than France, Germany, the U.S. and Canada. In April, the average U.K. search engine user conducted 41.8 searches, the highest usage level of the five countries analyzed. Canada was a close second, with just under 40 searches per search engine user, while U.S., French and German users conducted between 31 and 35 searches per month.

Read the article - http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=464

Closing Thoughts

For more information on any of the topics or products referenced, please feel free to contact K'nechtology Inc. directly. Just to remind you that my services and the services of K'nechtology Inc. are always available to help you with your technology strategies, search engine optimization, IT project management, Internet/web development needs and software reviews. Subscribe to future newsletters or find links to previous newsletters, columns and product reviews at news.knechtology.com