Yeah, That's a Favicon
Content Here's new Favicon
Marketing Vox has an article describing Google's plan to show favicons in search result listings (thanks AJ Kohn for the link!). For the uninitiated, favicons are those little pictures that sometimes appear to the left of the URL in your browser's address bar. This is an interesting departure from Google's text-only policy on search results and it gives webmasters a new way to distinguish their websites. For now, Google is only going to do this on site specific searches (like when you type "java web content management site:www.contenthere.net"). Google's sparse style could get very busy looking when cluttered with 10 little pictures per page. Speaking of ugly, does anyone like Google's new favicon?
Creating a favicon is easy. All you need to do is make a square image and then use a site like HTML-Kit to generate the favicon.ico file. Put it in your web root and then you are done. A little side benefit is that you won't see any more of those warning messages in your web logs saying it can't find the favicon.ico file.