How many times have you been in a conversation with someone and been wondering about something?

I'll sit with friends at lunch and we'll be discussing some topic. Usually sports. There's always a question. Where'd that guy go to school? Who beat that guy's record? When was the last time that team went to the Super Bowl?

As adults in our mid-thirties, we have still not become accustomed to the idea of having access to the wealth of all human knowledge in our pockets. We will sit and argue (politely) about something when someone says, "Well, why don't we just ask Google?"

There's no need to wonder anymore - we have the answers in our smartphones, which are constantly connected and seeking out that information, important or not, that we desire.

I think if we took the same idea with Scripture then we'd be much better Christians. Instead of arguing pointlessly about an issue, we need to ask, "Why don't we just ask God's Word about that?"

We may have access the wealth of knowledge in our pockets, but we have access to God in our Bibles. We need to be looking to the Bible for answers to life's most important questions, not to Google.

I love Android so much. I love the customization, the widgets, and the different phone and tablet designs. I love the fact that Google has phenomenally improved the OS since I used it first over three years ago. I love the leaps and bounds that Google has made to connect Android and make their services available very easily on the platform. 

I didn't love it enough, apparently, for it to be on my everyday phone though. 

I had another flirtation with Android last week. My almost 2 year old iPhone 5 was biting the dust. After the things I've put it through, I'm surprised it lasted that long. So I went looking for another phone and thought (again) that I could finally make the big move to Android. I got the new HTC One M8. 

And I chickened out. 

Oh, it wasn't because I didn't love it. Because I did, as I stated before. I blame three reasons for me not being able to have anything but an iPhone as my device:

1) I'm finally old and don't like change. Even if that change is good, I still want what I'm familiar with. I've been an iOS user since before it was called iOS. I bought the 1st-gen iPhone 4 months after it was released. At this point, I don't think I can change. If that sounds like I'm being a crotchety old man, then so be it. 

2) It just doesn't feel right. I know, I know, what the heck does that mean? This reason closely ties with number 1. The texting app, moving back and forth between apps, the design of the OS - it just doesn't feel right for someone who uses their phone all day. It's not as fluid. It's not as quick. And I need quick. 

3) I'm really tied to a few apps. Drafts is the prime example. (If you haven't discovered Drafts, I'm going to spotlight it in an upcoming episode of Ministry Bits later this month.) Long story short, Drafts allows me to do everything on my phone. It is one app that replaces or prevents me from having to open 20 others. It makes me think less about what I have to do, and lets me put my text (whether that's an idea or a calendar appointment) wherever I want it to go. It's fantastic. It takes a while to set up and you kinda have to be a geek to do it, but once you get your workflow going on Drafts, there's no stopping what you can do just from your iPhone. 

Another app I love is Tweetbot. There's really nothing like it on Android. If you're a Twitter user and you use it, you know what I'm talking about. Instacast and Paper are ones you can't find on Android either. 

There were plenty of things to love about the HTC One (M8). It has a phenomenal camera, the design is top-notch, and the screen is great. If it were running iOS I would have bought it yesterday. With iOS 7, the HTC One M8 would be the 

If you're an Android user, I highly recommend the new HTC One, dubbed the M8. Check out MKBHD's review on Youtube and you'll want to buy this thing today (video below). 

How my site appears in Google search rankings after having my domain for just over a year. 

For bloggers, ministers, youth ministers, and others involved in church internet ministries, you may not think very much about optimizing your app, website or blog with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). How do you become #1 in Google Search? While I don't understand completely all the ins and outs of SEO, there are some very easy and free things you can do to drastically improve your search rankings on Google or any other engine. But first, we need to understand how SEO works. 

If you don't understand the complex code and "crawling" that Google does to index every internet site on the web, you're not alone. According to some, Google's search algorithms can change on a daily basis. They are constantly tweaking and improving their first product. (Some of you may just remember when Google was only a search engine.)

There are a wide variety of factors that make your site better and easier for search engines to index. The three most influential are time, changes, and metadata. 

Time

One thing you may not know is that time is a very important factor in SEO. How long has your domain (your .com) been active? Months? Years? This affects search index. What about how long you've had certain keywords or metadata for the search engines to "crawl" your site? That also affects the indexing. Know this: indexing your site takes time, sometimes up to 90 days or more. So if you have a big blog or project you want to get off the ground, give it at least 3 months to show up in Google results. You can also research what your blog or site will be called and be sure not to name it something that is really popular. I would recommend Googling every possible name for your new site or blog until you find one that will be easily found on a search engine from anywhere in the world. "Chad Landman" is a fairly uncommon name and works well for me to call my blog that. If your name is John Smith, that might not work. 

Changes

How often does your site change? Is it a blog format where it is ever-changing, or a static page that usually doesn't change? Something you may not also know is that changing the *look* of your site usually does not affect indexing. Pictures are indexed by search engines, but any text on them is not (this is changing every day, however). Text is huge for indexing, which is why blogs have become so popular. At the same time, *too many* changes can affect your index ranking as well. 

Metadata

Metadata is just a fancy word for the information contained in your site headers. What that means is that any site, whether you use Squarespace, Wordpress, or straight HTML has header tags in the code of every page. Here's an example:

<head>
  <meta name="description" content="ChadL.co :: Chad Landman">
<meta name="keywords" content="Chad, Landman, Chad Landman, Youth Ministry, Ministry, Christianity, Tech, Apple, iOS, Star Trek">
<meta name="author" content="Chad Landman">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>

Now, you could pay to have your name first in Google, but I wouldn't recommend that for two reasons: 1) it's expensive and sometimes based upon how many clicks you get, and if you get a lot of clicks, you have to fork over a lot. 2) Studies have shown that paid-for "Sponsored Links" are skipped right over by about 9 out of 10 users. Why? I don't know. Many people think they're advertisements, partially because they are. Google says that you'll be seeing less and less of these ads as a result.

An example of a "paid" advertisement in Google Search results. 

Now, if I had an HTML site, I would manually put this information into my header code. But since I'm on a platform like Squarespace, they do it for me. I had to fill out some title and description stuff, as well as every blog post I write has some keywords attached to it, but other than that, I don't have to do anything. 

If you use Wordpress, I would recommend the excellent All-in-One SEO Plugin. 

One last thing to note is that the way search is done on the backend is constantly changing for everyone. Google will change its algorithms, Yahoo will change this, Apple will change that, and so on. SEO is something that needs to be monitored and maintained, not set and forgotten about. 

Whatever platform you use, make sure you have a Title, Description, and keywords attached to your site. You could start seeing results pretty soon with good metadata on your site or blog. 

People are being very critical of Google right now, and some of their decisions that they see going against the 'Open Web' policy. Laurent Eschenauer:​

We are developers, and hacking the future is what we do best. So, time to wake up and start building alternatives.

Laurent is writing to Google's dropping support for XMPP in Hangouts and eventually RSS in Chrome and SMTP ​in Gmail. 

 ​He's right though - there are plenty of developers out there with plenty of great ideas, better ideas than Google. We need to remember that Google talks a good talk but in the end, they are a company out to make money. And we are not Google's customers, we are the product.