As a company that makes a living of Search Engine Optimisation and studies the search engines we've noticed something interesting recently.

Along with webmasters, Google have been mentioning the importance of breadcrumbs on websites for a while now. The logic being that it helps people to get to areas, of a site, quicker and navigate around websites with ease, in a logical order. It also benefits search engines by showing them a hierarchy of pages.

Web site speed is becoming a major issue now a days, with Google now taking web speed into account with its search algorithm. Now though, the 2009 Christmas results are slowly being released and we see some interesting results and trends forming.

As present the average American is spending $1,050 a year on the Internet, shopping. Now here's the interesting bit.

For years the Internet was an un-social place. People used it for buying products with out talking to comapanies and people would have email accounts in which they'd wait 5 days for their friend to reply to them. This has all changed however.

As we all know the horrific Haiti disaster has been published highly recently asking for donations and even political figures such as Bill Clinton have been visiting the area trying to encourage support, dissolve the potential dangers and raise much needed funds. But is everyone focusing on that or making money?

Sadly Facebook last weekend was being used for, frankly, terrible crimes. Users across the popular social network have been setting up groups raising thousands of pounds, saying it's going towards Haiti. But it hasn't. Instead users were setting up the groups because money would be paid to the group owner, thus meaning a quick (immoral) buck could be made.

It takes a lot to surprise us, here at Media Street, so we were extremely impressed, embarrassed and interested when the site got hacked on Monday the 18/01/2010 at 16:40.

To most people and companies, this could have been a scary experience and a costly mistake. However, luckily, we were prepared and with in minutes of the attempted 'hack' we had repaired the site and stopped the culprit. However, it was not to be laughed at. Instead we must learn from it.