For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

Source: Webmaster Central Blog

Regular viewers will be aware of my dislike for IE6.  It’s not an unjustified or “jump on the band-wagon” dislike, it’s just pure disappointment with it’s interpretation of how XHTML/CSS should be parsed and displayed.  I’ve mentioned that I have nothing against IE in general, and in fairness, Microsoft’s more recent efforts, namely IE8, have been a vast improvement.

However, there are still some poor ole soles out there, or even businesses that haven’t updated their browser to a more secure, feature rich web browser such as Firefox.  And it’s for that reason, I can highly recommend JavaScript IE6-Upgrade-Warning, that gracefully displays a message to those poor people who are behind with the times.  The popup recommends that the user update their browser to view the content of the web site.

It’s a simply JS, and requires just one line of code on each page, and the more savvy amoungst you will automatically be thinking “include“.

So, if you’re a web site desgin/developer, and are still concerned that some of your audience might be IE6 users, get yourself over to Google Code and get yourselve kitted out with IE6-Upgrade-Warning.