I snapped this photo while having a quick dinner at the Fernwood Inn before an event at the Belfry Theatre. It’s the lower-right corner of a TV set showing Monday Night Football. As far as I could figure, there was no sound issuing from the TV:
Interface designers never fail to surprise me in the ways they can screw up. What do you suppose ‘1/2 Mute’ means? Because, as it happens, mute means ’speechless’. So you really can’t be half-mute, can you?
I’m reminded of a story about a decade old, which I recount with affection, not mockery. My aunt come over to our house. She’d just arrived, and turned to notice our TV. “Oh,” she said, “there’s a mute on the screen.” In fact, the TV had been muted, and was displaying ‘MUTE’ in the lower-right corner.
An a related note, I tried to search for a URL for the Fernwood Inn. Claiming that I was headed for the Fernwood Inn, Google pointed me to an Australian fitness centre. The following screenshot illustrates the unusual error:
A client recently asked me how they could get their site to show up like this in search results (that’s not my client, just an example I found):
The answer is disappointingly vague. From Google’s help system:
The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.
At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
I also found this discussion about Sitelinks. It indicates that they have nothing to do with your site’s popularity or traffic.
If it were more important, I’d go do an exhaustive analysis of sites with Sitelinks in the search results, and figure out what makes them tick. I believe the Sitelinks only show up when you search for the domain itself (here’s an alternative example for the screenshot above, without Sitelinks), so those searchers are very, very likely to click the first result, Sitelinks or not.
