Bing vs. Google, free UX books, and the secret to happiness – Monday July 19th Roundup

We’re on a role with the roundup this month. Must be all the sun making all us pale skinned blog writers stay inside for fear of sunburn and skin cancer.

Great stuff from all over the internet this week, the complete Bing vs. Google SEO analysis to neat tricks to get enhanced information out of Google Analytics, to free UX books, to the secret of happiness. Great stuff all around.

• We start on a different foot than usual: an article by GetElastic on permission based email marketing.
• The Fire Horse Trail has made their entire SEO analysis of Bing vs. Google available for download.

• Part SEO, part technology: SEO by the Sea reports on a 2005 Google Patent that’s rather interesting: tracking cursor movement on a page to analyze search ranking potential, advertising placement, etc. It sounds less like something that will become a ranking factor (it wont) but I’d love to see it as a report in Google Analytics.
• Smashing has an incredibly long article on using CSS3 media queries to create mobile sites.  This actually looks like an incredibly easy way to convert sites for mobile use.

• Immeria has started alpha testing gaAddons v2.0, a collection of enhancements for GA that tracks outbound links, downloads, email links, and more.
• Luna Metrics has found a strange GA trick. Apparently you can view by page title as a pirmary dimension and page title as a secondary IF you use a URL parameter in GA. It looks pretty simple actually, only requiring that you paste “&segkey=request_uri|page_title” into the URL bar.

• This is pretty old, and I may have posted it before, but Barry Schwartz post on choice, option paralysis, and the secret of happiness, is one of those videos everyone should see, UX designers or not.
• And as an extra treat this week I have not one, but two UX books that you can read for free online.
  • Search User Interfaces by Marti A. Hearst
  • Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell

• This week I came across Rapportive, a plugin for Chrome (and possibly Firefox) which modifies gmail. It adds a right hand bar to your gmail which searches social networks to provide you with whatever information it can about whomever you’re emailing. Kinda scary, kinda cool.
• From the beautifully simplistic getfinch.com: The Creativity Trigger. A rambling thought on gaining inspiration by not looking at other designs online. His thoughts have some merit. I’d point out that when you look at a lot of great design, (say the Nike swoosh) you find that they were influenced by design taken from another medium (like Nike at Ephesus).