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Logo #6 is more subtle and will probably look better in situ but in the final analysis it will also depend on the overall color scheme of the page.
- Michael
Sorry, but I think, that every version looks like it’s made in the early nineties. Why don’t you call a designer to do that?
Hi Danny,
First of all I like to wish you all the best with SearchEngineLand. I’ll be watching you just like I’m used to at SearchEngineWatch, Daggle and the Daily SearchCast, which I all appreciate and like a lot!
I prefer logo nr. 4, because of the simplicity. The other logos are more ’screaming’ and ‘in your face’, but if that’s what you want… it works!
Take care,
Regards,
Eduard Blacquière
ps. When will SES come to The Netherlands? ;-)
I’d go for #6, with just a thicker white border for the text. Good luck, Danny!
Danny- all look great. Maybe it’s my aspiration to be at a fairground, but the wheel in logos 2 through 4 look like ferris wheels to me.
I am sure a case can be made for why this is an appropriate metaphor for search engine news, nonetheless…
My preference is #6. It appears clean, simple and stylish. Good luck with the new site!
Sorry, I don’t like none of these ones!
Jean-Marie
I think the green and blue cogs make it look like you work for Bruce Clay :-) http://www.bruceclay.com/ – The cogs are more prominent on their site when they aren’t doing the thanksgiving branding.
I like how in 2, 3 and 4 the gears look a bit like rolling hills. This goes good with Land in the site name. #3 looks to much like Seobook and I hope I voted for the right one as the radio buttons are hard to tell which they are associated with when just looking at the middle choices.
I like four – it looks the most modern
To keep things simple, I would choose #6. But it is difficult to say without seeing the color scheme of the site.
I prefer the web 2.0 colors and layout on #1, keeping the two “search” and “engine” together makes for a more appropriate logo, in my opinion.
And hi Danny, it was really great meeting you at Pubcon, I can’t wait until you get this site up and running!
I’m not super crazy about any of them, but if i had to pick it would be #4 because it stands out the best font-wise.
#3. I like the green/blue colors, and the rest seemed to either lose the “Land” part or didn’t have the green/blue combo.
Danny,
Good luck on this new site. I’m sure it will be successful if you’re running the show. Great job on the Daily Searchcast as it keeps me up to date on the myriad of search engine changes and improvements.
I think logo #4 is the cleanest and most simple of them all.
Regards,
Craig Cassata
I really like #3 for the following reasons:
I like having the word “land” a bit bigger and on the same level as “search engine”. Otherwise, it looks like it’s just thrown in there because it needs to be.
Going with the “land” theme, I like the two circles in #2-4 because to me they look like mountains in the distance or something.
I also like #6, but it’s got far too much blue. I suppose it would look okay depending on what the rest of the site will look like.
Good luck! Can’t wait for launch.
I would toss out 1,2 and 4, because the “LAND” looks like it was tacked on as an afterthought.
Of the remaining logos, #6 is the strongest, but I miss the green. I’d go with #6, changing the light blue of the inner gear and the word “land” to the green used in the other logos.
You also might add just a tiny bit of space between the two lines of text, I’m not sure I like the ascender on the lowercase “d” touching the bottom of the “h”.
I am surprised that so far the winning Logo is #3. This proves my theory that I wrote about in my blog … people think that CUTE sells. It doesn’t!
#3 is cute. Has 2 thingies on top, but it doesn’t stick and it’s not simple. Remember the “KISS”? They phrase it “Keep it simple sweetheart” but in reality when this thing was created years ago it would say … “Keep it simple, stupid”. Anyway.
I voted for #6 (if I had to choose one). I don’t know about the colors though. Light blue? Greenish? Green reminds me of Aaron Wall’s blog.
Danny, I am sure you have good “branding” people who are knowledgeable about this. My only suggestion is … don’t try to make it look “cute”. People like it when they see it, but they don’t remember it 5 minutes later. Also … remember, it has to look good in print as well.
Try viewing it in Black and White also.
I think logo 6 is the only contender. Your logos are very Web 2.0. Perhaps the name should be changed to http://serchngn.la.nd?
I prefer the streamlined flow of #6. Plus it would be the easiest to build into an integrated design layout.
I’ve closed comments now that the voting has ended.
Barry that was an excellent post, you rock!
Just kidding, testing out the comment system. Seems to work.
Hi Barry, Danny and all,
I am looking forward to reading all the great search news here and the grand opening!
Good luck with your debut (like you guys need luck)!
martin
Looking forward to this new venture guys – best of luck and I’ll see some of you next week in Chicago.
Duane Forrester
…sometime poster at SEW, new presenter at SES, mod at SEF, SEMPO In-House Committee Co-Chair…and dog person.
Hi Barry,
Good luck with the new site. I’m glad to hear that you’re part of the search engine land crew.
Best wishes,
Gareth
Barry,
I am amazed how many subscribers there are for this site on Bloglines (344) already.
Why can’t my blog have that kind of readership? :)
I love these types of posts, nice job!
Hey Barry!
Bummed to be missing SES Chicago :-( but glad to see the new land being settled. Looking forward to it.
The latest citizen.
Scott
I knew that the team could not wait until December 11 to start posting. Best of luck and we’ll see you all in Chicago.
Hey Barry!
I am glad that you guys started this blog. I can see now how to make a succesfull blog from the beginning ;)
After writing about this just 2 days ago on my blog it’s nice to see a follow up interview. Thanks for pointing it out Barry.
Danny, thanks for posting this. Too often I’m just a security blanket for webmasters–nice to have around, but not really necessary. :)
I’m excited that we’ve got so many different Googlers who do a great job on communication, but we should be trying to get even more.
Thanks for this. I try to read all I can on mobile marketing.
You guys weren’t kidding when you said Dec. 1. What is that, 7 posts in the last 2 hours. Geesh, y’all are dedicated. ;)
I’m excited to have a new SEO resource with such respectable names behind it…
Barry -
Congrats on the first post and much success!
Hopefully the snow in Chicago stops before next week!
Chris
Interesting, thanks for the warning. AdWords Editor has been a boon companion to our media buyers but the only other surprise they’ve discovered is a hidden maximum of 40 characters in a URL field somewhere (can’t remember the exact field, sorry). Direct AdWords access has no such limit.
They give scholarships for field hockey? Can I get one for underwater basket weaving too? LOL, just giving Maile a hard time. Dig the wig!
Barry, Danny, and the Crew,
Congratulations on the launch! The anticipation has been killing me. :-)
- JonnyT
Great post!
Thanks for introducing us to Google’s web search starting lineup!
Waiting for the Formal Launch!!!!!!!
I have to admit that I had a bit of a crush on Amanda at San Jose. mmm… never post comments on blogs after a Friday night down the pub.
Nice work on the site and great post by the way. It is nice to know that we have alternatives to Matt to go to for answers. And hey… even better when they look like these gals – humminah humminah! Sorry about that but boys will be boys!
6am? I didn’t know the internet still worked at 6am! I’ll have to make sure that the rest of the SER crew drag you out to at least a few parties next week ;)
Good luck mate,
Rob
I wonder if they’ll offer an opt-in service to triangulate the location of a mobile and automatically use it as the starting point for directions?
I should probably not make suggestions before December 11, but it would be neat to see the number of comments on the frontpage too, so you can quickly scan if there’s (new) activity.
Keep it up!
You got it, Philipp — done. Actually, Barry was telling me to do it earlier today, but I just didn’t have time to put it up. All set now.
Great post! I was there when Matt Cutts was being swarmed and have to say I didn’t even realize Vanessa Fox was just on the other side. I don’t know Vanessa and by no means do I think I’m in any position to judge her but when I asked her some questions at the “Site Structure for Crawlability” session she seemed too busy (and no one was swarming her). The reason I’m posting this is to clarify that not everyone “swarming” Matt are “Cuttlets”/groupies but people just trying to gain some clarity on search engines. “Search” is a pretty big industry isn’t it Danny? To be honest, I saw you sitting there next to Matt and can’t believe I didn’t take that opportunity to ask you some questions. I’m new to search and that was the first conference I’d been to so I didn’t want to take the risk of possibly wasting my time with someone who may not have the same charisma as Matt. I’m not implying that you (or Vanessa) are less willing to answer questions. I’m just not going to miss out speaking to someone I know will.
One major problem is that the ‘answers’ are almost always very predictable and ’safe’.
The redundant themes have been reiterated virtually every SEO blog or forum.
No one is going to share hi-tech algo secrets because of fear of Google’s legal staff.
The Google speakers highlighted above are t basically Evangelists, marketing or Tools oriented specialists.
REAL insight can be attained directly from the Search Quality Engineers (those who create and give the go ahead to program new SERPs algos) – But, they are just not that gregarious, or too insulated from the public. :-?
Thanks for the heads upon that, its only helping the team drive harder on our mobile marketing campaign.
By the way, thanks for letting us be a part of your world, you certainly know whats going on.
Crash
This post is just one of the reasons I’m really looking forward to search engine land.
Hey there!
Yes a great set of posts BUT I thought somebody better cheer on the other “male” googlers seeing as how many are going google gah gah ovah da ladies! ha! Anyway not to worry up here in Muskoka in northern Ontario Canada we appreciate one and all :)). On a more serious note this site is going to be great for folks like me. Travelling to these SEO gatherings is just not possible but your site and the googlin tools and help will fill the void. Good Luck and many thanks for all I have learned from you now and in the future.
Just for the record, Simon mentioned also “They then went on to give us a credit for that day on all clicks during the affected time (about $200)”.
Hi!
I am not suprised at all.
Once there was an odd situation on my account at Google AdWords – ads where not displaing. I’ve checked every possibility – my settings where 100% ok. So I asked Google to give me back my money (by filling a form). It was 5 months ago. Since then no response, no money.
I think what we need is some sort of tie in, maybe a bunch of t-shirts that say “I’m here with Matt Cutts”
It’s a shame that Barry’s contest contest is over, otherwise he could have tied it in with this post, and done a “first person to get pictures of themselves with the 8 alternatives to Matt Cutts” contest (presumably while holding a rustybrick sign or some such thing)
great lecture … way more enjoyable than reading his papers about authorities and hubs.
~baba
http://battellemedia.com/searchmob/story/Father-Search-Engine-Link-Technology-Gets-Nobel-Equivalent-Math-Award/
He was just recently awarded what many consider to be the Nobel Equivalent to Mathematics
Hi!
It’s not about the topic…
I have to say that Barry is doing a great job here trying to keep SEL up to date.
I suppose that Danny and rest of the team are working on new design right now… or are they already gone to SES Chicago?
Matt will not be there.
Waiting for Dec.11.
We are actually all at SES Chicago right now. Hence, the slower coverage of search topics. I will have a ton of headlines go up tonight…
I agree with you, Greg, both on the power of this city search and the complexity. It certainly looks useful, but I wonder how many non-power users (all the people who don’t get the reviewer’s guide) will take the time to discover all those features.
Congrats on the launch of the blog, all of you!
Excellent commentary by Matt on how hacking and spamming can cross over and affect the SERPs but does it give an answer to how to stop abuse of other peoples’ sites when it is (indirectly) the algorithms in place that may lead people to undertake social and sometimes criminal abuse of other peoples’ sites ?
Great post! Nice to meet some of the other Googlers. With the growing number of Cuttletts it is hard to get an answer from the man. Now we have some other people to look to.
If people who follow Matt Cutts around are called Cuttletts what are we going to call us poor guys who follow Amanda around – Campers? Of course Vanessa is an easy one to come up with – Fox Hounds but what about Maile Ohye, hers might be a little tougher, how about Ohye’s Oi vey’s? Sorry Google guys but I don’t have any for you.
as a Chinese IT professional, I prefer Google.
Baidu did something disgraceful, I believe it has official background. If google want to beat baidu, it needs more cooperation with local government.
It is true that the SES in Paris didn’t attracted much audience (I was there as a speaker).
Two big reasons IMHO :
- The pricing. We have several event of this type in France that are cheaper and provide the same quality of information (it is often the same people speaking at SES and other conferences)
- The communication. : Truely it sucked. SES Paris were organized late and didn’t communicate.
I am pretty sure that with a better communication strategy and an adapted pricing it could have attracted much more people.
What is unforgivable is the policy or banning the ENTIRE site.
It is bad enough that a hacked Web site owner may have lost income and Public Relations karma by those who do not know what happened.
But, must Google make matters worst by banning ALL the OTHER UnHACKED PAGES. At least there stands a possibility that potential customers could enter the site via those pages from Search Engines.
Many Web site owners do not daily check their homepages or other pages throughout their sites. So they could be completely unaware of what has happened. And even if Google sends them an email, an unsavy, non-geek WEb site owner may just disregard it as a sales pitch or junk mail without even reading it.
There was also concerns expressed in the topic about Doorway pages causing banning.
Under some circumstances, Doorway pages may be a productive SEO strategy, and quite necessary and practical if done in a limited way.
Hello
The SEM and SEO market increase in France and Paris.
I suppose: the crowd was at offices to work about ;-)…. except me (one afternoon to speak about The Long Tail) and some of my competitors which were the most represented at SES Paris.
The crowd will be back when 1 or 2 specifications of Sebastien Billard will match a good public relations.
David
Congrats Danny – see you in Seattle!
Chris
PS> Let me guess – it will be raining…
I’m sure SMX will be a success, congrats Danny!
Do you plan on doing shows in Europe?
I’m in one of the EU countries who’s citizens need a visa to get into the US, so going there for a show would be very big hassle.
Bravo Danny!
This is just what the industry needed! I can’t wait to see the line-up!
Has anyone told those advertisers that some of the sites with the lowest quality scores convert the best?
Congratulations Danny. I am sure that the Search Marketing Expo will be an immediate success. I will see you in Seattle.
I hearby nominate Neil Patel to head the audience group.
Terry Semel provides more details into this change in his post tonight on the Yodel Anecdotal blog: Taking Yahoo! forward, calling this a move into Yahoo’s “Third Phase.”
He notes there that CFO Sue Decker will become the head of the new Advertiser & Publisher Group, and provides an answer to the question that I’ve been wondering since I read Danny’s post earlier today, in reference to what has become known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto:
Hi,I hereby nominate Neil Patel to head the audience group.Thank you.
Very excited about the new conference! I agree with Eric that it will be an immediate sucess. Best of luck to all.
Cooperation is one possible angle, else possibly Micheal had never done anything illegal or Googles lawyers could not prove that it was illegal. Either way, in the context of the Pay Per Click ad market this is now a serious problem, Google might just have invalidated the model entirely and set a precedent making future litigation impossible.
What about china.. ?
Who have you got to cut the red tape on the 11th ?
I’m not surprised about the Yahoo Buzz patent. The Yahoo Buzzlog is surprisingly good about keeping up with the latest buzz and changes in search behavior. It makes sense that they would patent such technology.
I’ve been using this last week and I really like it a lot. It’s a much smaller headache to use and most importantly for Yahoo, it makes it easier for me to spend my money with them, so it should boost their outlook. If anything Panama couldn’t make it any harder to spend money with Yahoo could it?
On a massively large site, you still want to measure traffic and click throughs to see how people are using your site. The Yahoo patent takes that one step further in trying to learn from user interaction what people find interesting, and any trends in those interests.
I hadn’t tied the Buzzlog to this effort, but I think that you’re right, and I probably should have. :)
Is it me or does this make Google sound like Spain or Great Britain in colonial times. They are expanding their empire to take over Africa via Portugal. Next they will take over the West Indies via the clever use of flags err I mean “signals”.
THIS is a great idea – but NOT for the reasons Google intended!
This homepage should come with tracking Stats, if it does not already. This would afford webmasters an opportunity to analyze JUST that one site for suspiscious click fraud activity.
Like most people who are using either their homepage with a added URL parameter or a seperate directory – it still makes digging through Server side stats or log files a chore.
Imagine havine ONE advanced doorway page – that you could isolate and analyze to your hearts’ content. AND, change PAGES ON A PER CAMPAIGN BASIS!!
Hopefully, Google will see the potential in developing and allowing more advanced Web page design feature in this project. And hopefully, Yahoo and MSN will follow the lead
While I would much rather use Google Maps, having a native client on my Windows Mobile phone is leading me in the direction of Live here. The client looks nice, and I’m sure it’s faster than the Google client.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve heard! I think I’m gonna have to make a trip out to the Emerald City in June! :P
I think it might have worked because I saw people following Adam around like little Cuttlets on numerous occasions. I guess they are Lasniks…
Hi I am pleased to be able to inform you that your new website can now be found by the users of the New Zealand based http://www.linknz.co.nz search engine and also within our web directory located over at http://www.linkoz.co.nz
We have had a busy day in he search engine world, tonight we tried the new CHACHA.com search engine and indexed them whilst online chatting to an operator of the search engine.
They could then search our engine and find there own search engine, that is quick I would say.
Grin..
All the best
Dave Andrews
From the http://www.linknz.co.nz search engine.
I built a similar thing at my site mad4mobilephones.com (not related to madfortoys.com).
It searches the top 50 mobile phone sites according to Alexa.
http://www.mad4mobilephones.com/search.php
…a topic I avoided on purpose…
Chicken! bawk, bawk! ;)
That topic, I think was blown out for no reason.
It can be used in so many cases.
Maybe I did not read it carefully enough, but I am not blind, I saw the 100s of blogs post on it.
Honestly, I thought it was not such a big deal. Of course the title made it look huge, but when it came down to the technical aspects of how (not the why), it is not a huge deal, IMO.
> Tough one, no?
No, I don’t think so. It’s the same as always – the engines say one thing, we do another :)
> a story about Google funding terrorism (a topic I avoided on purpose),
Berry, I am sorry to say but you are totally missing the point if you think terrorism was the center of that story. It was, and is, about serious click fraud and lack of trancparancy. Yes, terrorism was mentioned ONCE durrin the press conference because it was brought up by AIT that Jim Hedger interviewed but the main focus is click fraud. Is that topic to sensitive for you too? :) … chicken hehe
Hey, the site got all pretty! I like what you’ve done with the place. Nice layout. :)
Mikkel, as you know I addressed the invalid clicks issue in “Watching a story, part II”. The company in question didn’t set up their ad campaigns to exclude clicks from US/Canada. That puts the invalid clicks allegations in a different light as well.
Ok, I missed the point. Happens to me all the time.
The specific guideline for doing paid reviews or paid links is to make sure that your links don’t affect search engines. You can do that via a nofollow attribute on your links, or an internal redirect which goes through a page which is robot.txt’ed out, or several other methods.
HotPads.com has a similar integration with Wikipedia on its housing search maps. We also have other area information including demographic, political, and housing data along with heat maps. Kind of ineresting. Though…I gues you cannot take a virtual vacation on HotPads.
Here is an uber long link to San Jose, CA. http://hotpads.com/map/index.htm?&plv5=37.3629,-121.904036,e,-1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,6000,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,37.4313931506849,37.2944068493151,-121.589061380711,-122.219010619289,City,1,1,1,1,1112904211,0,City,1,f,-1,
Congratulations on the official launch of Search Engine Land!
Douglas Pope (cofounder of hotpads)
I think a lot of the witch hunt for paid listings can be forgotten. Why not just apply the relevancy parameter to this. Do people who go out and get links from other sites by whatever means have differences?
I do think the people giving the links have a little responsibility but at the end of the day when a site has a link to their brother’s site about sports news and they are a site not related to that you guys generally just decrease the impact of the link. But to start a witch hunt through the web is not very realistic and the scope pushes you to dramatically decrease your page build or profits since the human eyes you would need to pay would be quite substantial.
Or you have the situation like ODP or what is now surfacing at Digg and the other social networks.
Matt, that is just your totally undocumented claim. AIT claims different and provide documentation to back it up.
Also, this is not the first time out-of-region clicks has been documented. It happens, and it apparently happens a lot. I’ve seen it personally on compaigns that was perfectly set up. The fact is, Google is NOT hanling this the way they should and is has to change – like it or not.
Also, out of reion clicks is not the only click fraud in this case and you know that.
And finally, as has been pointed oput by many, Googles way of responding to clients on this issue is childish, to say the least. Did you ever had to call customer support, Matt? I guess not :)
I’m planning to revisit the story. I haven’t posted on it not to avoid it but simply because it was complicated, and I didn’t want to dive in until I had time to better understand all that’s going on.
I still say to try to get targetted traffic, the rest will work itself out. If I can get a bunch of traffic from an on-topic blog by throwing a few dollars their way, then it’s a good link. How the search engines treat the link, well, I’ll leave that up to them. Seems to me they’ve got enough on their plate than to worry about paid blog posts.
Totaly understand that, Danny. Very resonable :)
Looks great! Only thing i don’t like is the white border around the sponsors… Doesn’t seem to blend in right… Good luck on working on the site, I trust you and your partners will keep the already high levels of the last week :)
That’s one of the longest blog rolls I have ever seen. :)
Looks great Danny and friends. Your news has been filling up my Google Reader since day one.
I also noticed that monster blogroll earlier and had to have a little fun with it in a post I made.
I can’t wait to see SEL evolve into another Sullivan powerhouse. Cheers!
Good to see the finalised design. Looks great. Love the logo. It’s great to be in right at the beginning of what will turn out to be one of the very top search resources. Cheers Danny.
Congrats.. The new look is very nice and easy to view. Looking forward to alot of good things to come from this new site so don’t let us down.
Pressure is on.. go go go..
The name is kinda growing on me now. I was not a huge fan. But it is kinda growing on me, since the content is so great (kidding).
Looks fantastic! Will there be a forum in addition to the blog?
Keep up the great work!
Brian M
I like the name Search Engine Land — it’s a friendly and easy to remember name. Lovely design, too. Congrats on the move!
Congrats!
You have assembled a great staff of professionals. No worries about the name, it sticks. The design is good, nice and clean.
Keep up the good work, I hope to see you all in June in Seattle.
Could out of region clicks have anything to do with bogus PTR records? I get Quebec entries all the time for people in Ontario because their ISP has poorly configured PTR info (or backhauls their traffic to an out of region IP).
Another ACRONYM for SEOs to use in Blogs
First ‘SEW’ (not THIS SEW)…now, ‘SEL’
Welcome for the OTHER SEW
Congrats Danny et. al!
I’m a lurker on most SEO/SEM sites but wanted to let you know how excited I am to have a new venue to learn from!
Keep up the great work!
~Carrie
That is quite a news line-up. If you are going to do this everyday you are amazing. I am going to have to read stuff for hours because of you :)
Thanks, I have been looking forward to your site and it looks great.
Search engine functionality and Human rights?
This is a really wonderful search engine thank you for bringing it to my attention.
I want to highlight something that will some and may amuse others. One of the frustrating things about working in the international humanitarian field is finding jobs, there are always jobs (they usually are 3 month to one year contracts), but they were scattered all about the web and often you would find or hear about the perfect job after you have committed to another.
This search engine changes that.
In human rights, there aren’t “jobs” there are “vacancies”. This is the first term I put in the engine and the results are spectacular. A full and complete listing of jobs from every big name. This is really good stuff.
If anyone is curious about what jobs are out there (even if you are just daydreaming) use this search engine and put the word “vacancies” in.
Amazing.
Oops, above I wrote…
“I want to highlight something that will some and may amuse others.”
I meant…
I want to highlight something that will help some and may amuse others.
There has to be some significant correlation between …THE AMOUNT OF TIME, spent on a landing page, and the liklihood of it being click fraud, especially if there was no navigation to other links within a site.
There are a number of sophisticated trackers that display both the exact time spent – in seconds – for every visitor/ per visit – as well as the navigation paths they took within the site, as well as to external links (if there were any)
Webmasters could use their own cumulative statistics when confronting Google with their suspiscions.
Matt, can you give me the URL of the help page or Google documentation that provides this guidance?
Congrats on the launch!! Love the colors and the logo :) LMK when SEL starts having a vistors visa program ;-)
The new design is looking good – best of luck with the new venture.
MG
Nice clean theme.
Looking forward to visiting often and learning a lot.
Cheers :)
Good Luck! The fresh start looks promising!
And here I was thinking Matt might be debunking SEO rumours… should have known…
Looking great, excited to see what you lot can produce to wonder the SEO community.
Very interesting, yet somewhat unsuprising. A ex-CIA agent is claiming Google took seed money during their startup. Full article here: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/061206seedmoney.htm
Great right up Danny.
> Techdirt said it “seems bizarre to think that the best way to determine dangerous people is to do a simple Google search.”
I think it’s even more bizzare to think just how much sensitive material people leave on webservers totally unprotected
How much for open a showing for the new ideas. I have a idea for updated protocol for sitemaps. Sitebase Protocol. Thank you for you advice.
How’s that for some duplicate content!
Congratulations and great to see the site fully operational. Now I’m looking forward to solving ALL my SEO issues thanks to the fine team you have assembled for the new site.
Also, may I be the first? to put in a vote for a Stonehenge SEO Conference next spring.
Congratulations to Danny, Chris, Barry and all the gang. Am looking forward to continue seeing my gurus!
Best of luck!
Bonnie Fernald Fontayne
The Fontayne Group – Florida
http://www.fontayne.com
A very “dark” logo considering the original painting. Wonder if this took more convincing than usual in the Googleplex.
What?!?! You mean the special logo isn’t in honor of MY birthday? :P
Anyone remember that brilliant Simpsons episode where Homer imagines himself going to the museum and playing Foosball against Michaelangelo’s “David” (whom he beats), then asks who’s next and Munch’s “screamer” yells “meeeee!!!!”
It’s sad, because I loved that painting and the significance of it (or of them, since Munch did a few versions), but now all I can think of is Homer playing Foosball… Stupid pop culture infiltrating the whole stupid world… :(
Looks like Bruce Clay is getting in on this whole custom holiday logo thing too :)
http://www.bruceclay.com/
There is a possibility that the so-called, increased safety of the SERPs were due to the concentrated effort of Search Engines to rid their SERPs of sites using Black hat SEO techniques.
Which may have had an effect of making the overall database more safe.
One can assume a correlatation between Black hat SEO and spam sites.
Also, since many of the Search Engines appear to be demoting sites that have not attained a certain Trust Rank or Quality Backlinks, this may also be a factor
Perhaps users or competitors also complained about sites in the TOP 30 they chose to ‘out’ for bad techniques. Search Engines have been inviting replies in their SERPs.
But since AOL is using Google’s SERPs, it is odd that there would be that degree of differences between their rankings.
Ask uses ‘Expert Rank’ – so perhaps there is a possiblity that even valuable sites may have to resort to questionable tactics to remain free and competative.
Since the ‘Net is international, why not explain
what the Eastern Time means (from GMT/UTC)
and summer or winter if that means anything to
countries closer to 0 latitude.
This should be interesting and it looks good in
Blynx browser too.
Also appropriate since the painting was recovered a few months ago, after a two-year “Search”…
(I completely missed the news of its recovery in August; I guess the theft was a much bigger story than the return – or I wasn’t paying attention.)
two year “search” he he nice tie in
(I didn’t know about the theft or the recovery – I am really out of it)
I searched for “danny sullivan” out of curiosity on my site (a made a “ask google” thing that uses co-op to only search official google sources)
Danny you are mentioned alot even from the official google sources… funny
IMO, this is “much ado about nothing” unless copyright or patent laws have been broken. Rather than “finger pointing” why doesn’t everybody realize that “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery”. An analogy can be made to Lexus copying many stying cues from Mercedes over the years, and Merecedes copying the softer leather interior cues from Lexus many years back.
What a better search world it would be if all the search engines had smaller “competitive egos”, and greater cooperative mindsets to more quickly achieve greater relevant SERP results based on user intent.
Greetings,
There is even a better deal:
Use code DM-2-1106 on http://www.StartadCenter.com/GetClicks to receive $200 credit. As usual – Terms & Conditions apply.
Yahoo using the old and tired AJAX excuse, the most interesting part of this was for me… the realization of how ajax really will change these figures and how such metrics will be measured in the age of ajax instead of unique visitors and page views it will be unique visitors and … er… information requests?
Hey everyone, I just wanted to post a small correction here:
“Update/Correction: Our ad is actually running in 27 newspapers, not 78. The ad is running 78 times but in most cases is running the same newspaper on a number of consecutive dates.”
I’ll see about getting a pdf of the ad up a little later today.
>Promotional credit good only to residents in the 50 United States and Washington, D.C.
That’s not particularly international of them. I guess I’ll have to wait until they decide to promote MSN ads to the rest of the internet.
Thanks Jeremy, I fixed the entry. Also, please let us know when the PDF is live and if spot the ads in any paper, thank you!
Google has yet to indicate that they have actually investigated the technology that was developed to generate click-fraud en masse. So far, all they’ve been able to show us is that they don’t know or won’t disclose what they know about how click-management networks operate despite the fact that the technology has been described and referred to on the Internet for yeats.
To lay this issue to rest, Google needs to show that they can detect a click-management network using a diverse set of servers at differnt NOCs, cycling through random IP addresses.
But if they do that, then the click-managers will know that they have left a footprint and they’ll make adjustments to their technology.
Google needs to find a better way to address advertiser concerns about click-fraud, not the least of which includes a better way of managing their AdSense network. A rising number of complaints from people who claim they did not click on their own links but were kicked out of the network for doing so implies there are either a lot of liars out there or that Google is doing worse at policing the issue than they believe.
I’ve got a post examining implications of this move – I’m wodnering at the various effects on Google’s stock issues and related options ramifications.
Hi Danny, OTOH, Google does make public the total number & percentage of detected invalid clicks, broken down by ad group. This is available manually by running a report in the reports section of the AdWords interface. I’ve seen this ranging from 10% to over 70%. The point is, those are clicks Google is saying it detected but for one reason or another did not charge you for.
Granted, this doesn’t go the next step towards breaking down how many of the invalid clicks were deemed to be click fraud “with intent” etc., but it is something.
Watching this conversation was the best part of SES San Jose. Tough questions on click fraud, and strong final statements.
I’m shocked and in complete disbelief of Google’s recent claim that, after filtering, just 2% of total clicks are fraudulent. I would like to hear what percent of Google’s revenue this 2% of click spam receives and am in favor of Google publishing post it’s refunds each month.
Perhaps it would be more believable to post *too* much information; and, it would be a great follow-up act to the forward thinking (CYA) manuever of providing Spam amounts to advertisers to thwart questions to Google about being idle on click fraud.
I, for one, would enjoy knowing all clicks, spam clicks, revenues, payouts, chargebacks and refunds that Google records and is booking. And I would like to know the keywords, referring domains and IP addresses of the spammers — including those found by the automatic filter AND from “requested investigations.”
Then, I expect Google to stand by it’s data and unapolegetically ban these sites and IP addresses from affecting the campaign. Further, in addition to refunds, keyword CPC should be lowered to the minimum for these keywords. Then I might be slightly more satisfied with Google’s fight to end click fraud.
Google spokespersons are obviously telling us the clicks (and, therefore, refunds and chargebacks?) will be as insignificant as the % of spam clicks. Reducing the clicks will have nominal effect on their traffic; so, Google should also be as casual on losing the revenue that these clicks generate.
I can’t download this show from WWR, are they having bandwidth issues?
With SES Chicago last week and still digging out from being backed up this week, I forgot all about adding SEL to my blog roll but have just given you some link love.
I know you are an old hat at this stuff Danny but if I could give you any advice it would be to just let it happen. Meaning, do not do any form of link development. You have plenty of natural buzz to gain this “trust” (that people believe in) in weeks rather than months or years.
I would love to be you, you can just focus on your work and not fight for attention like most of us are required to do to get anywhere out here.
Please do not also fall prey to lame “10 ten” type posts or I will throw rocks at your blog! ;-0
You are one of the sites in my free personal study of search, thank you, you can’t learn any of this in college.
Thanks for sharing your stats, I certainly hope that you are able to continue doing it as it will be very interesting seeing them evolve over time.
It is interesting to see ask.com sending you more search hits than yahoo. This could be because you have been talking about the new ask city product and people are more likely to be searching for commentary about that using the ask.com search engine? Do you think that is the case or is it just that ask is quicker on the uptake for new sites perhaps?
It would be interesting to see this data broken down by services and retail, and then data for shopping search. I believe that would show some interesting spikes.
The shopping comparison sites I think are fraught with bait-and-switch logic at rates much higher than those shown above. They send an XML feed to the comparo engine fully intending to redirect shoppers to alternative products. I have seen it myself at least 4-5 times while shopping for the holidays.
It is great that you will stat info monthly, this will interest many and provide a good reason for visitors to return to your site.
The Stats are valuable for ANOTHER REASON – this offers an insight into the comparison of just how accurate COMPETE & ALEXA are (especially since there is a STRONG bias towards tech sites)
Please consider getting the free or paid versions of Sitemeter. Many top bloggers are doing it, and it gives a continuous insight into their stats.
Also the analyzing the search terms will give insight into how Google ranks sites – and how they develop Trust Rank and PageRank
since this is the Title of the blog-it will be interesting to watch how long it takes to rank for these terms (searchenginewatch is doing great for SEARCH ENGINES)
Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
____________________________
HERE are the stats for the top technorati bloggers compiled from Free versions of Sitemeter
http://seoptimization.blog.com/1221628/
I don’t suppose you’ve got the user IDs who made those searches? ;)
That was a very thorough post, impressive. Answers is truly a success. No doubt about it, I am really impressed with it and have a level -(water bottle)- four. I have used it alot and it has really introduce the idea of web human interconnectivity to alot of people who would not have other wise be interacting with others on the web. They pulled it well.
Congratulations on the new site – good domain names are easy to remember, regardless of weight. Good luck!
Barry,
I’m going to hold off on posting the ad until after the first of the year. It has a unique tracking url and if I publish that it will skew the stats and I won’t be able to get a clear picture of how the ad really performed.
the evil kanevil youtube lawsuit should be received by the Google office by noon today. he he
“Some bigger advertisers especially like the idea that Google can help them track the effectiveness of not only ads on the Web but in traditional media.”
From what I’ve seen in the newspaper tests they don’t help you track anything, they just act as the middle man and save you the legwork of contacting the papers yourself. Tracking is left up to you…
Maybe it’s different with audio.
The low search traffic data looks like a prime example of the Google Sandbox. Just wait and see. Search will drive you’re statistics later on much more than feed readers. Although they are a trustworthy audience, they can never generate the traffic for a site like this as search will.
Hi Danny,
Think its great that you are sharing your stats, give all us folk that are cutting our teeth a real insight in to how it can be done when you know what you are doing.
Would be amazingly cool if you shared what you where doing to get the top spots of the keywords you where chasing and watch the stats evolve over the months, that would really have me hooked in and find it very interesting and invaluable.
I wonder if it has anything to do with their WorldWind project (which was really neat until Google Earth came along :-))…
How long until we have live satellite imagery?
Great update Phil. Eurekster already had a high quality vertical search platform. The community element is a nice addition.
“Detected click fraud” and REAL click fraud may or may not be two entirely different things. Google and others could have lots of reasons to downplay the issue at hand – just as third party anti-click-fraud service providers will probably have a vested interest in blowing it up beyond proportion.
However, all that Google currently seems to be prepared to do is to keep autoreferencing their own (arguably strongly biased) take – and yes, these are mere word games and guesses. But then, so is downsizing “perceived click fraud” down to 0.2% based on vague, eminently deniable insinuations by the one party primarily affected.
The only viable solution to this connundrum would be to implement trusted third party check up technology and certificationl, similar to what the offline publishing business has been doing for years to support their advertising rate cards, etc.
Anything less will only qualify for self-serving superstition …
I think it is an example of how some other companies are succeeding where google sometimes fails, user friendliness. By making Swicki easy to use and simple looking new users are reaching out to use it, people who may not have before.
Swicki is a community thing – Co-op is an indutry thing
Yahoo Answers is a community thing – Google answers is.. er… well you know.
Google might want to make their products (which are usually very good) more welcoming to the new internet user and the vibrant community as a whole.
Certainly very thorough, as with most things, its probably going to be a while before it settles down as Bill has said, however for people like us mmay be a useful little tool to keep an eye on
Yes that quite a “pitch” but worded pretty cautiously.
“One thing that can help your images be returned for results in Google Image search is opting in to enhanced image search in webmaster tools”
They forgot to add 20 more things they don’t tell marketers that they look at to rank paid ads as well as determine what to charge the advertiser.
I want to let folks know that in Portland, Oregon, we have an organization similar to Internet Marketers of New York. Check out the Search Engine Marketers of Portland website at http://www.semportland.com . Please pardon our temporary website…we’re going to launch our permanent site shortly.
Thanks for sharing Todd.
For anyone in the Dallas/Fort Worth area we have the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association. The website is http://www.dfwsem.org
When I saw this article in the first raw in daily search news, I was quite surprised.
Maybe It’s because I am Korean who is very into the area. I haven’t seen many articles about Korea,one of biggest internet world. So,I am exited and that’s why I decided to leave my comment for the first time.
About the article above, I would call the company Overture korea instead of Yahoo korea.
Yahoo is the parent company of overture, but it’s not exatly same. Specially in korea
overture used to contract with amost all search engine(I don’t know how it worked out). It has a cool feature that you simply pay for overture but you can see your ad through almost all portal sites whom overture contract. When the title came to me first, I thought they would do some services together. But they’re not.
I don’t really like that kinds of headlines which try to draw people’s attention.-_-;
Anyway, I’d like to finish to tell you keep watching korean’s movement. Koreans are fast doers, I was told Korean potals thrive on introducing new features with web 2.0.
I hope I could join some of them ^-^.
Onion!!(hi&bye in korean, sound like this for forigners ^-^;;;)
Barry, you might want to check your title there. Firefox still seems to be on version 2.0: Mozilla Fierfox.
I feel your pain there Danny. The media gravitates towards things that are easy to explain and/or emotional.
Articles about things like national debt, arcane science issues and indeed anthing having to do with explaining data and information gathering usually get shortchanged.
I think that might change around the time radio shows pictures as you like to put it. ;)
Maybe web designers will start actually using text for a business address instead of having that address hidden to search engines in images.
Hi Greg-
I would make one correction to the above otherwise excellant summary (thanks) and that would be to say that the Google Organic Onebox Local results rely heavily on the star ranking but not exclusively.
I could use someone with some statistics background to help me better understand the data so if you find anyone send them along :)
Mike
Oh and since this research focused exclusively on restaurants it is very likely that Google Organic Onebox weights different factors depending on the market…more research needed here.
Mike
I’ve been having a blast with this as I do an article on it for the local business rag. As I did, I put together a little holiday piece I’d like to call…
The 12 Patents of Christmas
(wait until you see how we get the partridge in the Pair Tree)
I’d rather see Yahoo buy it, to be honest, they seem to have been better at creating working social communities the last few years…
Anyone read the ODP license?
http://www.dmoz.org/license.html
The license says anyone can use the data for free, Google already does, and can modify it and redistribute it as long as you give ODP attribution.
Yahoo already has a directory that hasn’t been tainted by all the ODP editor bias so it wouldn’t make sense for them to waste a penny on it, especially since ODP data is free.
If Google did acquire it, they should just take the data and dump the current editors and command structure as it simply doesn’t work.
However, why would anyone pay for what is completely free unless they just wanted to rebrand it as their own without attribution?
Attribution is CHEAP, acquisition is EXPENSIVE, so any company can virtually take over the project as long as they give attribution and follow the license without spending a red cent.
Thanks for sharing these stats Danny. It’s great to see what a powerhouse can do from the very start.
Keep it up.
“ODP’s data has apparently been lost…” Are you kidding me? Just enter your favorite search term into MSN, pick whichever ODP scraper site that ranks number one, scrape it, replace URL http://www.my-dmoz-clone- for-my-keyword.com with dmoz.org, and “presto”, the ODP data is back.
For obvious reason, this can’t be the problem. There are probably more copies of ODP data floating around the web than any other set of data ever produced.
A funny detail on Adsense and Live.com that might interest you:
Adsense ads take referrers from search queries into account to determine the ads they serve.
They do so for Google (of course), Yahoo, MSN and Ask, but so far the Adsense team seems to have forgotten about live.com… See:
http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2006/12/17/livecom-tragically-forgotten-by-adsense-engineers/
DMOZ could reinvent itself into a very low price, high quality directory – just to cover maintanance expenses.
However, the theme of seeking unique content would have to be replaced with the goal of seeking very high quality content.
Perhaps, even developing a consumer rating systems for the business listings.
The buyer would have to be convinced in the potential ROI of this acquisition
This is welcome news – it’s about time!
My next qustion would be: WHICH Yahoo are we opting out of? Because, for example, the same site many be listed in several different categories/Yahoos. I’m assuming all of them, but I’d like to know for sure.
Ian
While I can see how some people might want directory-specific tags, I would prefer that all the search engines supported a single, generic tag that excludes all directory descriptions.
Personally, I don’t think there is any point in Google acquiring it. The quality of the existing data is poor, and the bias problems that have shaped it are well known.
I would think that Google would start from scratch, if they wanted to replace what they currently have from ODP, rather than using it as a starting place. It would be cheaper, and easier for them. The current structure of DMOZ would simply hamper them.
Question for the audience: When was the last time you used ODP (or the Google directory) to find something?”
Interesting to note that under Current Events, the politician tracking chart is based on a misspelling of Hillary Clinton (”Hilary Clinton”). Intentional? Not?
The social meter lets you chose what a websites user ranking for a category must be equal to or more than. Only websites that match your criteria will be shown.
“to have domains registered through GoDanny”? What are you folks up to at SELand? LOL.
Anyone else find Google’s top 10 searches for 2006 a little strange; or at least different as compared with Yahoo and MSN?
Yahoo and MSN both have Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton in their top 10 searches. Google doesn’t have any of these ladies?!
Can we say that Googles users are a little more highbrow than that of Yahoo and MSN?
And hats off to Pam Anderson. Did she do anything in 2006? Yet, still in the top 10!!
Excellent Danny – top post on SEL yet..
Exchanged Links Are Bad BUT I Say Ignore This: You can pretty much ignore this since it’s so badly defined as to what they are that you’re likely going to worry about the wrong thing.
MSN SERPs reflects their an anti-reciprocal link policy …. so, perhaps it IS something to worry about.
The reason being no one knows if Google is slowly introducing a similar algo into their serps.
The algo could detect and compare the amount of a site’s LINKS to its BACKLINKS from the same domains. then apply some sort of neutering algo.
And just in case someone is engaging in Three way links to avoid this, an advanced algo level could look for LINK NEIGHBORHOODS.
Also, since automatic link exchanges are frowned upon – dynamic urls that end in php or asp could also be devalued or send red flags if a sites has many backlinks from them.
So for now, non recip, human reviewed directories, with static URLs could be the safest option (see the link in the username)
Have Good Content: Because it will naturally attract good links.
That – unfortunately – is not always true nor valid.
No matter how good content is – THERE HAS TO BE A WAY FOR PEOPLE TO DISCOVER IT EASILY!!
ADDITONALLY, not everyone comes under the ‘good content’ umbrella. Many small bu$inesses are just putting up a business web site or ecommerce sites that explain their products or services. They just want some business, they are not interested in becoming the next Micro$oft. They have every right to have a share of potential, relevant customers – and they should not be forced to use PPCs as their only hope.
The fact is, few users are using Local search, and in a Web world, you can shop online to anywhere!
What incentive is there for the high ‘trustranked’ Nytimes or Digg or Fortune of MSN MONEY to do a story or link to a tiny, nothing ecommerce Website??????
If they issued PR releases, how many news services would pick it up and run with it????? LOL
PrWeb use to be the hope for the small business, but now Google has discounted their link love ablilites.
Search Engines MUST acknowlege the root causes and stop this denial. Whenever millions of’Basically GOOD’ people worldwide are doing the same behaviour – it means a VOID exists! Millions or people are not going to collectively change their behaviour or repress their ambitions. That is just life.
Man, Yahoo seems to be bleeding folks these days. Still, I strangely don’t feel a lack of confidence in them that I would if this were another large company in another industry.
If, say, all the GM execs finally (wisely) decided to jump ship, it would be the end of General Motors for sure.
In the search world, however, we seem to be more environmentally friendly in that we recycle talent. Someone leaves a post, new talent fills the spot while the person leaving goes onto a new niche/opportunity.
Best fo luck to Tim, …and Yahoo.
Chalk this one up as another attempt by Google to drive click prices back up. Obviously the AdSense network quality has been steadily decreasing and ROI continues to plummet for advertisers, but perhaps if Google didn’t just accept anyone who signed up for a blogger account these quality issues wouldn’t be out there as much. Then again, AdSense is by no means the most efficient revenue model for most websites, so perhaps this will drive more webmasters to use more creative and efficient advertising. We’ll see.
10 million referrals is a drop in the bucket in an industry that supposedly generates 4 billion searches a month.
It would be helpful if they published a profile of their user base (which verticals are represented, which countries).
These numbers are no more useful than Alexa or Compete’s numbers.
Thanks Danny,
Our user base is growing steadily, and represents sites ranging from SME’s to Fortune 500’s. We have and it continues to grow.
Michael – 10M referrals is a drop in the bucket in comparison to ~4B searches a month. We published them as many users have asked us what the numbers look like, as they wanted to compare their data against the norm which we are seeing.
Please feel free to sign up your site, and become a users. There’s a lot of useful and unique reports available.
With regards to profiles, users are in over 100 countries, but most are in North America, the U.K. France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. – We ask users to self classify their sites on registration, within major classifications, and multiple sub categories. Every major classification is populated, as are over 90% of sub-categories.
I commented over on your post, Barry, but yup: this is new. As always, we experiment with ways to help users, including query refinement. Any new feature has a high bar to meet before we turn it on 100%; we don’t want features that crowd the page but don’t really help users.
Not everyone realizes that you can drag and drop to reorder the destinations. Google will automatically update your route on the map when you drag/drop.
Hi Friends.
I have a client who has some troubles with his Local Search Results. I submitted the addresses and url and got verified thru phone from Google. But the problem is it shows a wrong URL, which has nothing to do with the business. The url is http://www.sarasotamassageschool.com
If i do a search for sarasota school of massage therapy it gives the right address but wrong URL. I spoke to Matt Cutts in Pub con and I did get an email from Google referring to Matt Cutts reference. It is very unusal problem and Google team did respond to me. I send them an email back. Lets see how it goes, at the meantime if any one knows anything please let me know and appreciate your great work. Thank you
Suresh
It will be interesting to see how long Google will take to address this.
I can’t speak highly enough for the clean design and improved usability. Unfortunately, I’m still frustrated by the lack of appropriate categorization. Why is there a category for Apple? Sure, it is popular but then why not Tivo, Motorola, or HP? Can they not better organize “Web” content?
SEObrien, the way Digg categorizes stories is not perfect, but I actually think they are doing a good job. Granted they have the category Apple and not Tivo, but if you look at what people submit, those stories usually fit nicely into those categories. If they start adding more categories it will make the site bloated a lot less usable.
I’ve had no luck with it. Tells me I need javascript enabled (which I do) when using Firefox, and tells me I need to change my screen resoloution when I tried with IE and I don’t fancy squinting.
As an advertiser, I left the content network long ago thanks to tricks like this. I’ve seen some very “effective” use of images to generate clicks. Most recently, I noticed a recipe site putting very nice images of food on above a row of ads – it was very easy to assume the link would lead to a recipe matching that item.
Quotes from my a post i just published:
http://www.seo4fun.com/blog/2006/12/19/wmw-google-bashing-over-reciprocal-links.html
“A reciprocal link can just be coincidental, an exchanged one denotes some deliberation, and it’s the deliberate targeting of the PR algo through linkage that the blogpost is all about.” — Glengara, WMW
Also, an Adam Lasnik quote:
The key here is, indeed, moderation :). If, say, 90% of your backlinks are reciprocal, that’s probably not going to improve how our algorithms view your site. Or worse, if 90% of your backlinks are reciprocal and not likely to be of interest to your user.
But exchanging links here and there — *especially* when
done with clear editorial judgement (e.g., you’re not just
accepting dozens of link exchanges willy-nilly) — that’s
not the sort of thing Google looks down upon.
wow..,beautiful search enginee, good design, i like this site.it’s really more helpful for kids. it has
different tags and search button.Here i am giving one site namely http://www.wonderwhizkids.com/Community/Community.html From this site children will learn.
While I appreciate your reply, I’m afraid it wasn’t informative enough. But thank you anyway. I’ll pass.
4 out of 5 information industry professionals have had no training on how to use the advanced search functions? Is that an issue with the search engines’ promotion or does it signify a short-coming of the intuitive capabilities of the general population?
Perhaps something in-between?
Considering that it just asked me to enable cookies and Javascript (both are enabled), I’m not very impressed at all.
Arguably only one of the groups mentioned is a “Professional
Well done on the first Digg.
Off topic: I really hate the urls in SE Land. What does 061220-075717.php signify?
The site is great and this is my only minor complaint.
Patrick
Here is the detailed graph of the Digg effect courtesy of DiggTrends
duggtrends.com/PlotGraph.aspx?
id=e1716c37-5777-48fc-9735-d512851d2272&t=null
But SearchEngineland was relatively lucky…
OMG: how would you like to have been in THIS Guy’s shoes yesterday :LOL
digg.com/tech_news/Digg_Unveils_New
_Features_Kevin_s_Blog_Post_Explains_with_Video
Awesome, all zeitgeist and ‘top search terms’ sounds very ‘weird’ to me … nice post :P
URLs are the date and time, YYMMDD-HHMMSS. There’s a very good reason to do this, protects you from moving to a new server. See Movable Type & Rebuild Safe URLs.
Danny,
I agree that they’re filtering these results. I’ve often thought these reports didn’t ring true; however, I’m a little skeptical of Google Trends data being used to prove this.
I’ve done some comparisons of Google Trends data on some key phrases I’m very familiar with and have found the Trends data to be very inaccurate. Specifically, Trends was reporting a reduction in searches since 1994 where I’ve seen significant increases in searches since 1994. Do you have any thoughts on this?
-David
Danny, I think the difference is market share for “search referrals” versus “total searches performed”. They are different, but that doesn’t explain the relative differences in market share.
My own blog traffic breaks down like this; 69.5% from Google, 1% Yahoo, 1% MSN, 10% links from other bloggers, and 18% links from my own blog to other posts.
My guess is you are all right (You, Hitwise, ComScore)but the definitions and parameters are different. I wrote a blog today on my findings http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/12/googles_true_ma.html
Can you give me some examples of this? And I assume you mean 2004? Google wasn’t running in 1994 :)
I cannot comment on this specific case, but other court cases I have read about were supplied with information retrieved from the violators’ own computers.
Simply clearing your cache, cookies, and history doesn’t completely eliminate the trail of places you have been to. I haven’t looked at the way FireFox works, but I know that Internet Explorer (up through IE 6.0 — have not looked at 7.0) maintains a secondary layer of browser cache files that, in some cases, are virtually impossible to remove without a disk wipe.
That may simply be an unintended feature or perhaps there was some issue with the disk I examined and the files were corrupted.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Since all sites are not relevant to all queries, there is a disconnect between site owner data and search engine data.
If, out of 1,000 searches run on engine X, 200 are about “danny sullivan”, your statistics on SearchEngineLand will only reflect some value about the 200 queries for “danny sullivan”, not the 1,000 queries overall.
If engine X has a 10% search market share, “danny sullivan” may still only be a popular query on engine X, and it may grab only 50 out of 1,000 queries on engine Y.
Engines X and Y undoubtedly have some audience overlap, but their audiences also have unique profiles, and those profiles include different interest trends.
You just don’t have enough data to make a valid analysis.
Mike, I pretty much already said that people might disagree in using Search Engine Land as a sole basis of anything. That’s why I mentioned that I’ve seen the same at Search Engine Watch over years, why I’ve seen the same thing at Daggle, why I’ve heard many other site owners say this, as well has having seen stats from traffic collection services say it. But hey — you run a site. Most of your traffic from Google?
Danny, the “Calendar” tip is also new (as far as we know). However, Google did something similar before for some time already when you searched for e.g. “image”, but without any icon to the tip. You’ll get this:
“Tip: Looking for pictures? Try Google Images”
I was figuring you had loads of traffic already with most SEW readers converting to SEL?
This confirms something I’ve been noticing over the past few months. We run a wholesale web site, and I’ve been noticing a decline in our Yahoo referalls over the past year. Even though our rankings for our key terms are better in Yahoo then they are in Google, my organic traffic for December is 59% Google and only 11% Yahoo. Interestingly MSN is 22%.
Danny
I have wondered about the stats that show Google’s market share at 50% or even 60%. As an SEM professional, the only thing that really matters is the share of REVENUE delivered by each engine.
I aggregated data for a couple of different clients across Google, Yahoo and MSN for May, 2006:
Google produced around 74% of revenue, Yahoo 20%, MSN 6%.
While this is certainly not a statistically significant sample or a broad cross section of the internet, these revenue figures are much closer to the Hitwise and Enquisite numbers reporting referrals to commerce sites.
It doesn’t really avoid the debate of ‘Google advertising on Google’ when they still advertise even with the ‘tip’ hard coded into results.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=blog&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
So thats 3 spots they have on that SERP…
Related Search is a great feature – the users love it. We find on the site search that we run that about 25% of people use it. We typically show related searches at the top and the bottom.
The other benefit Google will see is that it will increase their revenue from the paid search results.
Danny – Digg probably sent you a lot more traffic than that through “direct referrals” from people clicking the link through the RSS feeds. That said, 7,200 is relatively low for a Digging – maybe due to seasonality or the interest level of Diggers or something else.
We see between 8-12,000 uniques on average over 24 hours from a Digg mention.
Looks kinda like AlltheWeb’s Livesearch interface…
All my votes go to Search Engine Roundtable!
Danny, if you’re talking about Xenite.Org, most of my traffic comes from non-search sources. If you’re talking about my new SEO blog, most of my traffic comes from non-search sources. If you’re talking about my other, older (non-SEO) blog, Google accounts for about 56% of the traffic (according to Google Analytics, about which I have expressed reservations that don’t need to be revisited).
Among the search engine referrals, Google probably sends my sites the most traffic. I get so many referrals from various Google, MSN, and Yahoo! properties that adding them all up is pretty tedious. Just looking at the top few referrer listings for both domains, Google seems to send more traffic then either Yahoo! or MSN. MSN sends almost as much traffic as Yahoo!
Google does not appear to account for anywhere near 80% of all search-related traffic, but I would put their referrals above 60%.
I see very different traffic patterns for my various domains based on topicality.
One possible way to resolve this to the COMBINE THEM ALL – Then take the Average.
Although on the surface, this might appear to be a copout….another way of looking at this tactic would be ‘WISDOM OF THE CROWD’
One possibility of why Google far excells on the example sites mentioned, would be the relative complexity of the keywords people might have used to find the sites -
RELATIVE COMPLEXITY…RELATIVE COMPLEXITY!!
Look at the so called 2006 top search terms from the major search engines.
Does anyone REALLY doubt that gaining access to precious statistics from those sites that come up #1 or #2 for such searches as:
Britney Spears,
Pam Anderson,
S*X,
P*rn
etc….would show a different graph??
It really is possible that the Extremely Common, Extremely Popular Simple terms are what are giving the other search engines a bigger piece of the graph.
Google users – overall – may search with more complex terms and are apt to search more frequently, and go to page 2 SERPs.
It would be fascinating to discover how many searches: Yahoo, MSN and Google – actually get for the term GOOGLE….
Using the Overture keyword Tool:
You’d have to think it’s a big cash investment to scan all these books. Why should google invest the money to do it and then share the end results with microsoft, yahoo, and the oca?
A detailed analysis report on the subject. Good job Danny :~).
D Sarathy.
RankQuest
People who are patronizing SEO, are probably doing so because of their inability to get consistant high rankings for competative queries.
Any who Google has the option of JUST searching the PPCs as exclusive listings. The overall results are relevant but mediocre.
It is now impossible for a spam site to get a decent ranking for any reasonably moderately popular query on any of the major search engines.
Collectively, the top 20 on the majors are as spam free as they have been since their beginnings.
One could disagree with their relevance prorities – but no one could point to any spam making it that far and staying.
One downside to all of this, is the plight of the new sites or the small businesses to compete visibly – and therefore – have no other option but to use PPCs or get a Yahoo directory listing.
Another downside to this is that for certain popular searches, Google is now showing Reference sites in the SERPs; it has then become more efficient to excusively search PPCs for commerical sites.
Sergey did justify this bias by stating that
they felt people searching for competive terms were seeking information as opposed to shopping.
Jeremy, you seriously rock!
I think I can understand a bit why Google would cut their SOAP API.
1. Paring down of services – they got rid of Google Answers for the same reason. I am sure that the thousands of SEO tools out there which used the Google API probably cost them a bit in terms of bandwidth and hardware.
2. Index Security – We know that Google resists the idea of people manipulating their SERPS. In their view, they are providing the best results without pesky SEOs coming in and throwing them off. Well, the SOAP API allowed great freedom programmatically, allowing thousands of SEO tools to use the listings for competitive intelligence. I am sure that Google considers it to be in their best interest to make the life of an SEO difficult at best, and disabling the SOAP API has virtually neutered a large number of the tools that newer SEOs depends on for research.
hehe good idea Danny. Womder if those MattPasses could be transferable. They’d be up on eBay pretty quick I think…
I love the Mattpass idea! But, I’m not sure Matt would agree…
After all – he would get stuck with all the extra work…
Nobody would think that a 1000 piece puzzle is rocket science, but very few people have the kind of time or patience to put one together. SEO is similar to putting together a puzzle, but instead of 1000 pieces that can be put together by site, they must be put together by knowledge. The knowledge is out there and attainable, but not many people have the time or patience to do it. changing oil in a car isn’t rocket science, nor is tiling a floor, but I do neither of those because I don’t have (nor want) the knowledge, I’d rather pay someone else who does. To me, both of those things ARE rocket science for that very reason.
SEO is a lot of work and requires a lot of time to do it and do it right. Those that don’t respect that prove that they really know nothing about it at all.
Perhaps it might be better to kidnap Matt, tie him up, and stuff him in a closet. Then sell MattPasses to allow people in for 5 minute interrogation sessions…
This observation is especially important in highly competitive markets. You can’t launch a new web site and expect to win on highly competitive terms out of the box.
But if you have tons of content on your site, and it’s designed to pull in long tail terms, you can get lots and lots of traffic while you are building your campaigns to rank for the more competitive terms.
Pays the bills!
I like this, although I’m not sure it should have to be Matt’s image they use. Why not cycle through several Googlers’ images? That would help take some of the pressure off Matt.
You may not want people to diss SEO, but the SEO community does a horrible job of explaining and promoting itself. Today we’re still wrangling with the issue of ethics, making us look like a gang of tin men.
The extortion campaign currently being conducted against Ted Leonsis for control of his name space (look at the paid ads running under that query) is a perfect example of just how low some people in the community are willing to stoop.
I think SEO is in for a year or more of being beaten up on by all sorts of pundits.
It’s probably an ass-kicking that is long overdue.
This is especially important after you’ve been in the market for some time and have gained a lot of trust. Long tail terms are much easier to rank highly for and can bring in much more traffic than you would expect. In one of my campaigns, long tail terms account for around 55% of all searches, and the conversion rates are much higher.
MattPasses – Good as cash but twice as fast!
Sounds like a winner to me!
Looks a lot like images next to ads if you ask me;-)
Happy holidays!
Danny correctly surmises that I nowhere have equated SEO practitioners in general with SEO spammers. Quite the contrary; SEO practitioners, for the most part are NOT SEO spammers.
However, some SEOs or the salespeople working for SEO firms sell SEO as a way to get a site to the top of he listings and never ask (or mention) that the marketer’s site will actually have to be both relevant and respected (based on links) to stay there.
On the other hand, as Danny points out some sites don’t get the rankings they deserve based on the quality of their content and their reputations. These marketers should absolutely either learn SEO, or hire a professional. Those seeking to learn SEO have several options, including all the usual conferences plus the upcoming Search Marketing Expo. Courses and training are also available from the DMA, SEMPO (coming soon), as well as several other organizations.
As to the relevance creep of paid listings over organic, this may take years, but the economic drivers are in place and the transition will occur in the fringes first (local search where a searcher does not specify city/location is already much more relevant for paid listings most of the time). Marketers are being pushed by all engines, to use more exact match, make landing pages more relevant (to increase conversion and quality scores), and make the titles and descriptions highly relevant. Economic friction slows this process down for the low volume terms. Both SEOs and paid search enthusiasts are mining the tail, but the paid search enthusiasts will have to remain relevant as soon as the competition joins them in the tail.
The search engines have two very strong incentives, one is to push to make the paid listings more relevant so they can monetize their traffic better, the other is to keep the organic listings as relevant as possible or risk losing their audience. That means the engine’s anti-spam teams are working heard to make sure that only ethical SEO works, long term. Instead of testing SEO/PPC relevance for Danny, let’s instead look at the keyword SEO. http://www.google.com/search?q=seo Results are mixed ;-)
The next few years are going to be very interesting.
My two cents -
I’ve said before, and will say again, it’s not possible to determine reciprocal link “intent” with 100% accuracy by algorithm alone. Cannot be done. Never will. I’ll argue this point to my grave. But you can get pretty darn close.
Thus an engine, once it comes across a pair of recips, needs only to look for what I call “signals of intent”. An engine cannot penalize a site based the existence of a recip. That’d be just plain insane. There’s lots of valid reasons why reciprocal links exist. It’s all about intent folks. And intent can be determined with a little algorithmic foraging. Not perfect, but it can be done. And it is.
Of more concern to me is the potential for unintended consequences.
For example, if Small Company in Idaho makes national news and gets a link to their site from CNN.com, isn’t it pretty logical that the owners of Small Idaho Company would mention this on their site like…
“Read about us at CNN.com”
and then link to the CNN.com page that mentioned them? Of course they would. And in so doing, they just created a reciprocal link between themselves and CNN.com.
So would Small Idaho Company have been better off algorithmically to not even mention the CNN site on their site so as to not raise the reciprocal suspicion ? Now that IS whacked.
I have many recips on my site because I spotted coverage of my site and a link to my site on those sites and I wanted to tell my sites readers about them. It’s for trust, branding, credibility. Like this one
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20001115/21032.html
If Inc. magazine writes about me and links to my site, wouldn’t it be nuts if I didn’t link to that Inc. page so my site’s reader’s can see this cool publicity?
My intent with this link is 100% NOT algorithmically driven/motivated, but the moment I linked back to Inc.com I turned that Inc.com link to me into a reciprocal link, potentially making that Inc.com link to my site less trustworthy. I’ve hurt my site.
Google has their hands full. Recips are the backbone of the web since before engines ever showed up. But Google must look for “signals of intent” before they ignore or penalize.
Eric Ward
Ms. Matt virtual entity – Brilliant!
So, the rumors that he’s actually been sending one of his two Matt CuttClones to the conferences are false?
I’m very pleased to see that Google are doing ethnographic studies, and proper usability testing. I really is a pain that the people making this products are not the typical users of them. I run into this all the time in my job, a computer person in an academic library, because I am not a librarian or (to any significant level) a library user. I constantly have to consult or at least try to think from a different perspective.
We did some usability testing on some Institutional Repository solutions here recently and I was surprised at the number of usability issues that are so clearly identified with them. If you (I mean you in the general sense, not = Bill Slawski) have never done a usability study before, I recommend it even if just so that you can see the kinds of things and ‘average’ user struggles with… I think you will be surprised.
Hi James,
I was pretty encouraged by the thoroughness, and thoughtfulness that went into Dan Russell’s (and Google’s) approach to trying to make sense of the information they were receiving from users, and that they were so concerned about collecting a wide range of information involving different methods.
I didn’t highlight some of the issues that they came across, but one of the more interesting ones was their discovery that most people don’t understand the minus search operator “-” as something that you use to exclude certain words from results. The more common real world approach to it is that it acts like an indication of something you want to specifically include (sort of like an indication of a suffix). The example they gave was:
wheat free -recipes
Someone was trying to use that set of terms to find allergy free recipes which didn’t use wheat products. A lot of other searchers were using that minus operator in a similar way.
We just introduced a new search engine which clusters the Google search results with popular head and long tail as query refinements (www.useAPI.com). You can read a press release here http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/12/prweb492586.htm?tag=search+engine
Have you gave it a try?
Let’s see. Two MattPasses per domain… 100 million domains… multiply and carry the one, okay.
Uh oh.
“I’m not sure it should have to be Matt’s image they use. Why not cycle through several Googlers’ images?”
Agreed, I was thinking that you could have different Googlers kick in at different points. That’s also sort of what I was hinting at about using the videos. But I still think Matt would make the best mascot. Alternatively, you could have a choice of male or female guide, maybe have Matt and Vanessa Fox be your choices.
Matt, understood on the number of domains possibly being an issue. That’s why I said it might have to be account based. And that still might not be a solution, if you had a lot of people set up a bunch of accounts. But it would be fun to experiment with. Maybe it could be tied to how long you’ve had a sitemaps account, size of domain, how recent the site launch is, etc.
BTW:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/better-understanding-of-your-site.html
Here is a related Webmaster blog post released by Google, that touches on this very same matter
While I wasn’t surprised to see Kevin Lee defend his partner’s position, I was surprised to see a member of the board of SEMPO appear to resort to “Donald Trump vs. Rosie O’Donnell “attack hook” (Todd Malicoat’s appropriate keyword evaluation) tactics. The producers of the “View” love the “ratings bait”, but I don’t think that prospective advertisers get a “warm and fuzzy” feeling from reading this kind of overall negative clutter when they are trying to decide where to invest their limited marketing budgets.
My opinion is that Kevin fails to see that the “economic drivers” are in place for organic too, as prices for both SEO and PPC go up. Why, because marketers will have to learn more quickly that quality conversions and ROI are king for both, and not just clicks. The bottom line is if the organic results don’t continue to grow in relevancy, the PPC ads will get viewed, clicked on, and converted less for that “lag behind” SE, as well as for the PPC service companies and their clients. The “trust factor” will always be with the organic results, IMO. The consumer end-user is ultimately “in control” as the president of the ANA recently said. Those analytic results will eventually control the advertiser-marketers.
Kevin is now being more diplomatic in explaining his position better, but I can’t help taking away from all this an analogy of “Tupac SEO vs. Notorious Did-it
Digg is doomed. There is a large collection of dislike accumulating here: http://www.digghater.com/
Yes, one of my clients brought this to my attention a few days ago, and we’ve been watching it ever since.
It definitely looks like an update is in progress…
I find it a struggle to not go overboard with long tail versus big terms. My failings have sometimes been related to this, and concentrating on long tail terms more proportionately than they should be.
This is good timing. Yesterday, I wrote an article in my blog about exactly this issue, though from a different viewpoint:
http://mcanerin.blogspot.com/2006/12/china-msn-yahoo-and-ebay-give-up-is.html
Based on the my analysis then, I fully expected this, and I believe it’s also the wrong direction.
Ian
I am the owner of seonewsblog.com and I’ve contacted digg with nothing in return. I don’t know why they keep saying I spammed when I had about ten stories in there.
Thank You
What I find most dissapointing in all of this is that the leaders of a major agency in the search engine marketing industry would be so reckless about attacking another area of the industry. The industry does not need this. The industry needs unity not public fighting. What the industry needs is debate on how to raise the profesional standards in the industry not industry ‘leaders’ taking cheap shots at any one sector that they do not provide services in. I too have a lot of respect for Kevin Lee I never heard of David Pasternack until this incident but in my opinion this is very careless and insensitive.
More confusing and in this case inaccurate information being served up to the already completely confused consumers of search not good not good at all.
Why would squidoo be banned? They are run by various people with different agendas. Is it bad blood with Seth?
These “Top Search Terms Of The Year” are not really the top or most popular but the most trendy search terms of the year. They come and go!
After the last questions of a holiday update, I prepared for this by asking around. Google hasn’t launched any major scoring/algorithms updates recently, so any changes you see are normal operation.
I’ll post this on SER too.
I haven’t seen any changes, but something tells me Google is going to roll out an update in January.
I think we all hit a threshold where we start thinking this stuff is simple, but Danny you hit the nail on the head. All it takes is a few meetings / conferences to realize that we have a lot of knowledge that is just *snap* at our fingertips. But we have confidence in that info because many of us have been researching / testing for a while.
With that said, I recently spoke with a company who has been burned by 3 SEO companies and were out there looking for a new one. One firm told them cold fusion couldn’t be optimized, the other mentioned something about needing at least a page rank 5 to compete for terms.
It just shocks me at the amount of know it alls who run SEO (or sell it) who don’t know squat, hurting the industry as a whole. I can’t wait for a shakeout. ARGHHH!!!! I find myself educating so many people I can’t even work with just to hopefully keep them from getting snowed by BS SEO companies.
Rant over, Danny thanks for the defense, well done.
My site skattertech.com has been blocked from digg for about 6months now. I have contacted digg, but no response what so ever regarding this issue. I expected it to be unblocked after a short period of time but no change.
conspiracy? this was frontpaged earlier today..
here you have a loong digg UNCENSORED forum:
http://digg.commongate.com/forum
Nice catch Barry. Google just can’t get it right in China no matter what they do. They made a smart move getting Kai Fu Lee from Microsoft, although they had to go to court on that one. Then Google started stumbling. They changed their name to Gu Ge which went over like a lead balloon, got sued by their and most recently lost the vp or co president Johnny Chou. It will be interesting to see how they make up ground, but I don’t see it happening.
Recently, our Google search engine result positions for some of the keywords were moving up. Thought it was due to some algo change. Good to know that we are progressing.
Hey, matt, are you still there?
Barry, maybe this is a bit off topic but on the subject of testing … it seems that Google is using a feedback form to gather information from shoppers who have converted to a sale as a result of a Google paid ad.
I blogged about this today here.
http://www.bizmord.com/Blog/archives/203
Don’t know if you or any of the readers of search engineland have seen this so … heads up.
They have been doing that for a really long time. See http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/06/matt_cutts_anno.html
They then just changed the form last week, see http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007042.html
Why not just post your Google questions on Yahoo Answers? Oh!! Ouch. I just search Yahoo Answers and there are people asking about Google search, indexing, AdSense, GoogleBase, general SEO.
I think that what you’re referring to is for AdSense ads. We don’t run adsense. We pay $6 per click :-) for these visits. After they convert they now see a feedback form link from Google.
Oh, that is this then…
https://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=9675&topic=61
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=9672
Seems like it is from before 06/2005
I clearly missed that. It’s just that even though the code has been there for a long time, this feedback thing couldn’t have been there more than 2 weeks ago as we look at this regularly.
Anyway … thank you Rusty
What about the Matt Cutts is Inigo, Patron Saint of Webmasters?
Frankly, this would (as they say) creep me out.
First, they’re checking to see if you have a Hotmail account. Next, they’re checking (I assume) your cookies to see wherever *else* you’ve been. Does this only happen with Internet Explorer, or any and every browser you use? And for how long and where are they tracking your “interests”?
I can see this backfiring, though. Say you search for something in a way that indicates that you’re interested in buying. Maybe you’re not; maybe you were doing it for a friend or relative. Yet, everywhere you go after that, the pages are plastered with ads for the same types of items. Not to mention that credibility and trustworthiness are vital issues when addressing consumers, who may now feel they’re being watched surreptitiously and/or hounded by virtual salesmen.
It’s the same problem that I think localization can bring: you search for something in an area, and, ever after, your search results are limited to that area, as happened to me once at Yahoo.
Only the cookie-reading, account-checking cyberstalking by marketeers is creepier. I can see the value in proferring ads of interest to consumers, but I suspect they may be treading the line between helpful salesmanship and too-obvious intrusive tracking.
http://www.mywebgrocer.com/ is used by my local supermarket and it works perfectly. highly suggested. i don’t have any affiliation to them either.
Search engines currently have the ability to observe what visitors do on their site, what they click, how long they spend before backbuttoning…
I like the concept behind this idea but let’s say that this new search engine is strongly embraced by the current folks who love wikipedia… that is not, in my opinion, a good cross-section of web users and therefore the results would be strongly biased towards a certain type of person.
The “flavor” of this type of search engine would be strongly determined by its roots and its exposure – much as the major search engines yield different results based upon their algo – which again are flavored by the ideas of the people who design them.
So, we could end up with algo flavors such as “link pop”, “trust juice” and “page content”…. and community flavors such as “erudite”, “geek”, “liberal”, “hillbilly” and “righteous”.
Some folks might really like these community flavors. I might use them myself when I want reinforcement or a good chuckle. But where do I go when I want unbiased and accurate?
Hey, where’s the favicon for SEL? Inquiring minds want to see an icon! :)
How is that related to this post?
Danny is on vacation, Ill ask him to make one…
this is scary! u don’t update ur website, u get hacked… had a bad experience twice with PHPNuke for the same reason!
Sweet! I’ll have to make a site about atkins spears anderson cars aids!
One thing google could beat baidu on is relevance and quality: baidu puts paid results in the searches, which leads to distrust. Google is always adamant about having “these results are sponsored” everywhere their ads reach.
Phil, will this be available in the US?
The botom of my water bottle from Yahoo had this written on a sticker adhered to the bottom -
“California Proposition 65 Warning – All drinkware with colored decoration on the exterior contain lead. Lead compounds and/or Cadium are known to the state of California to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive Harm
Glad I got the picture frame from Google as I loathe the iPod. After listening to my wife complain about iTunes and having to reformat her iPod a time or two, I’ll stick with my Zen micro and Yahoo Music thank you very much!
I’ll give them credit, the shuffled inscription is cute.
Interesting concept – how do they manage to keep up to date with all the deferent supermarkets products? price comparison sites such as http://www.shopping.com and http://www.cubalaya.co.uk use data feeds – are these provided by the supermarkets?
One of our new website as started to rank in top 10 for most if not all of our target keywords ( fairly competitive niche) some 3 to 4 weeks ago. For us it was logically an index update. Dont’ know if its an algo update.
Yep, I’m overdue to get the favicon going. Hang in there, Matt!
Phil, although I live in the Netherlands I would really like to check out this site but apparently this site doesn’t accept a dutch postcode. Can you give me one?
I have been using Digg since its first incarnation (although I only recently became a registered user) and this latest version is the easiest to use and navigate. The redesign team did a fantastic job of keeping what was great about the old versions, incorporating new elements, and giving it an updated look. This update is not merely cosmetic.
Neil, as much as I respect your site, and advice, I agree with SEObrien, Apple as a category is inappropriate. As a former Apple user, I know how phenomenal Apple products can be, and how desperate their users are to promote this fact. Despite the enthusiastic users and the number of posts, Apple as a category does not make hierarchical sense! :p
Hey Barry -
You made the list at #73 too!
Barely. ;-)
This may explain why I keep getting run-time errors at Google Blogsearch. I’ve started using Ask’s Blogsearch more often the past week or so because Google just bombs out.
While TrueLocal has always offered this feature (powered by Agendize) for advertisers, look for this feature to appear on all TrueLocal listings in Q1…
Thanks for the tip – the review was very interesting and I provided some stats on the sites mentioned on the Hitwise blog.
Truthiness, Google, and the American way.
Google lawyers are fuming I am sure.
Well the Google legal team needs something to do before the anti-trust case happens. I mean, Google’s “don’t be evil” motto is about as trustworthy as Microsoft was a decade ago. Sure, they haven’t reached a true monopoly yet and they aren’t abusing their power yet…but it’s getting closer each year. All Google needs to do is to get a bit pushier with the Google Pack and it’s other less than stellar non-search junk and it will be well on its way to some fun Microsoft-style anti-trust litigation.
If such litigation doesn’t happen, well then something is going to happen to shake up Google. It happens to every company. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, Microsoft got anti-trusted, and Google is going to get…who knows? No matter what, in the next few years something like that is bound to happen. It always does.
Thanks for bringing this to SearchEngineLand and for the quick link update! I may have missed this patent had you not made the effort to share and so this is a helpful post.
_____________________________________________
This patent is basically an advanced branch of CONCEPT SEARCHING (remember EXCITE) – and fundamentally, is already being used to some extent is some legal search applications.
However, it is possible, that classic sites like this:
cuiwww.unige.ch/meta-index.html
(which, for years, until recently, has been in the top 20 on Google for the term SEARCH ENGINES) would be seen as spammy.
There will also be false positives with this method, only because of aggressive SEOing or extremely information-packed homepages. Or the aggressive use of synonyms or acronyms to cover all basis. Also, those who write in a taxonomy style (just using keywords without stop words) will suffer!!!!!!!
However, if this method is used in balance with link popularity and popularity links, it would be worth evaluating the SERPs.
But it must be remembered that, the new priority of search engines ALGOs – analyzing the anchor text/ back links from high trust ranked sites, makes it now nearly impossible for those honeypot sites to get high on the SERPs.
Most searchers do not use complex search terms – so many no longer get spam sites to the degree they would have gotten a few years ago,
And for those who do use complex terms, usually reference sites come up first. Poor sites usually remain near the bottom 900 – 1000 end of the serps
if Google does buy into this, the so-called bad phrases sites might go into the supplimental listings.
The Overture keyword tool and KeywordDiscovery can still be used to confirm basic hunches about what search terms are still reigning.
One EXTREMELY INTRIGUING experiment would be:
1- Do a search on Google & Yahoo for the top 20 searches everyone assumes would REALLY reflect the true top queries…
2- Contact each of the top 3 listings on the organic SERPs, and those on the SPONSOR above them…
3- Do whatever it takes to get their 2006 cumulative stats for the year, (or just for one week if that is all you can get)
4- Compare and chart the Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask keyword referrals.
This would be helpful in revealing the true amount of Search engine popularity traffic – but also, an insight into how much traffic those keywords bring.
Their stats must be phenominal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Very interesting. Of not is the fact that Eurekster is based in Christchurch. They have been one of the pioneers in developing vertical search platforms, and their Chief Scientist, told me when we interviewed him that they were doing more than 500,000 searches per day.
Of course, there are other technology oriented companies in New Zealand, but this is the one search related one that I know about.
Great post, but shouldn’t the headline say “defending” rather than “depending”? Or is that one of those fancy terms you scientists use? :-)
Danny I just found this via the SEO feed from Google News. Pretty quick to be in there already. Nice one. :)
“digging a hole even deeper for himself”. That is exactly what I was thinking. I’m glad you wrote a post about this Danny so I now I don’t need to. :)
As much as I respect Kevin, I think his attempt to veil SEM elitism within the “rocket science” theme is an insult to the intelligence of the people reading it. But then, maybe that’s the point.
Danny, using Sussie’s widely voice complaints as an example of how SEO is rocket science (and I’ll firmly come in on the side of it’s NOT rocket science) hurts your cause considerably. She’s been offered plenty of good free advice and took none of it.
Nor does her site even have so much as an HTML site map, so she has not followed the advice on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Most practicing SEOs today don’t go very far beyond a handful of principles anyway. It works for them well enough to keep their clients happy, so why devote more words to a topic that isn’t relevant to reality?
SEO has been declared dead many times. So what?
“PhraseRank” is a bad label to pin on this donkey, in my opinion. “PhraseMetric Filtration” might work better, but I doubt it has the buzz or zing value that SEOs will want to use. Given that so many SEOs now wrongly apply “TrustRank” (a Yahoo!-coined phrase) to Google’s trust filtering, and “Latent Semantic Indexing” to Google’s non-semantic indexing, it’s almost certain they’l adopt the erroneous PhraseRank (after all, this is not rocket science — it’s just SEO).
Still, I propose that we open the floor for nominations for more accurate labels to describe what these patents portend.
Here are a few suggestions to kick off the list:
“Latent Phrasic Symbology”
“InterPhrase Pseudo-Semantic Analysis”
“PostPhrasal Spam Syndrome”
“PhraseGraphic Filtering”
“PhraseToponymy”
“Phrase-based Filtering”
“Phrase Index Scoring”
“Phrase: Got Spam?”
What??? I thought google had 400,000 backup servers?
Hey, search engines web, that unige.ch page would be considered a sitemap with 242 links.
I guess no more spamming yahoo message boards.
Oh poo! We all make mistakes, nothing is perfect and even the mailman loses the mail at times…
My answer open two accounts and bounce them around to get your email.
David
Great Google will end up ruling the world.
I’m still trying to get my brain around YSM a job that can be done with G in 5 minutes…..
It’s funny the choices of sites they picked for Question Answer services. Why didn’t anybody mention FunAdvice.com?
Fact: more than 11K members (when we checked, we’re 4x the size of Yedda)
12,00 questions
26,000 answers
(about double Yedda, and more than 10 times the size of Oyogi)
Yes, we have categorization for questions, a community, and several features that are unique of any site in the QA space. However, despite being online & growing since March, 2003, surveys tend to miss us. The sites reviewed were all featured on TechCrunch ;) Is that the final arbiter of all things relevant.
Honestly, I expect people to do better research, if they’re reviewing the top sites in a niche.
In both quantcast & compete, FunAdvice is bigger than 2 of the sites on your list, and only smaller than Yedda in Alexa…which, as we all know, is very inaccurate when it comes to smaller sites, and only really significant when your site is in the top 500 or so.
Best,
Jeremy
Danny-You hit the nail on the head here. Sometimes I begin to talk about SEO and suddenly, friends and colleagues who are not anywhere near the web business- eyes glaze over. I used to be an ‘in house’ person who studied a lot and went to conventions to learn SEO-yes you can learn it, it’s not rocket science, but the amount of info is overwhelming. It takes time, energy and several conventions to really learn how do do this properly and efficiently. SEOs cut to the chase for many companies who do not have full time webmasters or web teams.
Top Image Searches:Jessica Simpson… May be:)
I am using Ask.com to find specific information and always curious about the answers FeaturePics.com Authors (it is our site) provide for questions from this seach engine.
http://www.featurepics.com/Editorial/ask.aspx –
it is what Ask.com is asking, and what FeaturePics Authors are answering.
May be not 100% correct answers, but no nonsense, everything to the point…
On a more serious note, let me resurrect the ancient concept of “power keyword optimization” (which I neither coined nor had any part in defining or popularizing). The old PKO concept could be summed thusly (with respect to the KEYWORDS meta tag):
Given that you may want to optimize for “michael martinez”, “michael martinez blows”, and “blows me down”, you could define a meta tag value of “michael martinez blows me down” and it would cover all those ideas.
So, I propose we refer to the coming swarm of hyperoptimization techniques as “Search Phrase Operation”.
Or SPO.
You could then have Search Phrase Optimization Techniques (SPOTs), Search Phrase Over Optimization Networks (SPOONs), Search Phrase Optimization Keyword Engines (SPOKEs), and Search Phrase Optimization Indexing Lexicons (SPOILs).
SPOTs, SPOONs, SPOKEs, and SPOILs will soon become the popular SEO buzzwords, displacing “quality links”, “relevant backlinks”, and “my pages are highly optimized with a PR of 7 but they don’t appear in Google”.
I think many people would argue that this rolling drop in rankings has affected far more than the independent adult industry. I am seeing complaints and concerns in all forums.
But if they still had 1/3 of the datacenters left to go in October, with 1-2 months left on the rollout, that last 1-2 months rollout would coincide with what many people are reporting.
The weekend of November 18-19 marked the start of the continuous flood of complaints at Google across multiple blogs and forums. I don’t believe there has been a week since that weekend where the activity died down.
Nice through writeup. Certainly wasn’t a conspiracy, but there was a lot of movement for a “non update”
And so we’re clear Google wants us to believe they are clever enough to spot linking schemes, and text links that have been paid for, but aren’t smart enough to figure out pages with the same meta data may actually have different internal content …
Danny:
I didn’t delete your post. It was, as you considered, caught in the spam filter, and I have now “released” it. My spam filter currently has 6,000 posts in it so forgive me for not catching it earlier.
I have already responded to the majority of your points on Blogoscoped, but I will repost my comments here momentarily.
I’m dismayed that you’re holding my post up as an example of losing balance, because I spent plenty of time thinking about the issue before writing on it, and I’ve spent the last 48 hours debating the finer points of it. I’ve changed many aspects of my position in response to fair criticism, as you can see from the comments on my blog.
Like you, I am weary of people who judge before thinking, but you do the same thing here many times. You assume that I inherently approve of everything Firefox-related, even though I am not a employee of Mozilla and do not control its business dealings. Where have I ever said, for instance, that I support the Google $1 promotion? Furthermore, you assume that I never credit Google for the things it does right. But I do that all the time. It is *because* I’m so impressed with Google that I was taken aback by this feature. And it’s because I want to see them improve that I wrote about it.
I am just as annoyed by the knee-jerk “Google is evil” stories of late as you are, but nowhere have I called them “evil”; you are attacking something that is larger than my post. If you’re going to wish for perspective and balance, I’d ask that you practice it yourself, and I will try harder to do the same as well.
Blake
As promised, here’s what I posted in response to you on Blogoscoped:
Danny:
> And I’m sure the next time Google does a promo for Firefox, Blake will be screaming that maybe it should have been Opera that gets the pitch, because maybe it crashes less, does less memory bloat,
I find it unfortunate that you seem to believe everyone on the planet is only looking out for #1. I support Opera, link to it in my sidebar, and will gladly begin recommending it to my own parents the day I feel it is better for them.
I have nothing to do with the Google Firefox promos but I will begin “screaming” about them if that’s what it takes to demonstrate to you that I’m not a hypocrite.
> Blake might not feel they are best in class, but Google likely disagrees.
My issue is that Google *does* agree, judging from its own search results.
> But seriously, how about Blake puts his money where his mouth is. Why isn’t Live Search a default in Firefox? Why isn’t Ask there?
I would love for them to be there and was just thinking about that last night. I don’t control the Firefox project but I will pitch the idea publicly.
> It’s kind of sad that I’ve had so much trust and faith in Firefox as an open source community driven browser that makes decisions apparently on who is willing to pay the most to be a default.
We chose Google long before anyone had ever heard of Firefox because we believed it offered the best service for our users. You can see this in the earliest builds of the product, back when it was still called Phoenix.
The revenue deal came much later, and as you can imagine, most search engines would offer similar incentives today. So as with every other default in Firefox, this one is decided based on what serves users best.
> If I were on the Firefox team, I wouldn’t be celebrating that the product is apparently so bad that they had to cut a partnership with Google to pay people up to $1 to generate downloads of it.
Please stop assuming that “the Firefox team” is a single-celled organism. I don’t assume that everyone at Google shares the same opinion.
> But you can spin the same accusations about Google back at Firefox, and it doesn’t look so pretty.
Then we need to fix that, don’t we? Does that somehow detract from my post on Google? I’d be happy to do a follow-up post on the shortcomings of Firefox.
To address something else you said:
> Blake notes that Microsoft and Yahoo both do self-promotion, but he somehow thinks it’s Google that should be put on fire. I disagree. They all should be put up on fire.
I agree completely (although I only said Yahoo; I hadn’t seen the Microsoft “google” example you supplied). You might see my brushing off competitors’ behavior as an unfair attack on Google, but I see it as an affirmation of all that Google has done right. Microsoft and Yahoo have earned so little of my trust and loyalty that their transgressions neither surprise nor matter to me. Google has impressed me for years, and that’s why this matters to me.
My blog isn’t a chronicle of all that’s wrong in the world, but–like any blog–a chronicle of what matters to me.
Blake
Thanks much for your comments, Blake. They’re very appreciated. And apologies I didn’t see you’d responded over at Google Blogoscoped.
I don’t think you inherently approve of the Firefox deals. I’m highlighting those as an example of another well trusted product that in some quarters has lost trust because of promotional deals.
Poking at Google on its promo stuff just naturally raises why it’s not bad for Firefox to do similar things, especially given your closeness with the product by reputation and development. It does leave you open to accusations of being hypocritical.
You don’t have to scream about them, but they weren’t addressed at all. As I said, that feels like an big omission. Firefox is one of the few thinks I can think of that comes close to having the trust and support that many give to Google.
Correct, you didn’t call Google an “evil” product pusher, so I apologize for using that particular word. Product pushing, sure — and clearly concern over a lack of trust that this might bring. That’s a real lack of trust, regardless of the debate. You’ve lost trust with them over this. That’s undeniable, despite what I or others might think. Others agree with you as well, and that has to be respected. It definitely has to be considered by Google.
I definitely don’t assume that everyone at Firefox is the same. I also totally know that you’ll have people at Google who completely agree with your view about the tips and be glad someone externally is speaking about them. They’ll want that type of ammunition to push for changes. I wasn’t kidding about saying I have respect for these charges being aired in general and by you in particular, at the end of my post. I do. Things like this help keep Google, and any company, honest and on track.
As for perspective, I do generally try to aim for that and appreciate you do the same. I’m sorry you didn’t feel it was there in this post, but I’ll also try harder on that front.
SEO isn’t rocket science – but most things in life aren’t. Changing the oil in my car isn’t rocket science, but it’s something that I don’t have the time to do. Painting the exterior of my home is not rocket science, I could do it, but I would rather hire it out to a professional. After tearing my ACL I hired a physical therapist to aid in the rehabilitation of my knee. The exercises the PT put me through didn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with, but it did help the results of my knee.
Search engine optimization, like anything else, can be learned by anyone who is willing to put forth the time and effort to learn and then do it. There are many things we choose to learn and then do on our own and then there are many other things that we decide are worth hiring someone else, someone to do the job that we simply choose not to.
Tonight I think I will order a pizza, I don’t feel like cooking…
Danny:
Thanks for the response.
> It does leave you open to accusations of being hypocritical.
Agreed, I can’t help that. But research, or even asking me directly, would help defuse those accusations before they’re lobbed at me.
> As I said, that feels like an big omission.
Honestly, if I felt like the Firefox promos were analogous, I would have repudiated them as well. As I said elsewhere, I almost wish Google were advertising Firefox on “browser” so people would believe that this isn’t about self-interest. But as I said in my post, I do believe that Google’s front page ads are different, and since the Firefox ads (not the $1 progra) currently fall in that category, I haven’t taken issue with them. Whether or not they’re two different things is certainly debatable, but I don’t think I presented the tips issue unfairly.
> I’m sorry you didn’t feel it was there in this post, but I’ll also try harder on that front.
I would appreciate if you could remove or clarify the suggestion that I may have decided not to air your comment, and perhaps insert an update indicating that I’ve responded in the comments.
Thanks for listening.
Blake
Hi Search Engines WEB,
You wouldn’t say that these patents might be influenced by something like the Graham Spencer penned System and method for accelerated query evaluation of very large full-text databases, which allows for phrase-based indexing within a separate cache? Probably a coincidence that Graham Spencer now works for Google, but kind of fun to see.
You’re having too much fun, Michael, trying to hone in on the creation of new buzzwords for the industry. It’s hard enough that folks might think that the “page” in pagerank has something to do with “pages” instead of being taken from it’s inventor’s name.
> But research, or even asking me directly, would help defuse those accusations before they’re lobbed at me.
I was sort of doing that with my comments on your blogs, asking about this. But I really didn’t mean them as accusations against you personally but as issues that should be addressed about Firefox in general. As for the research, I’ve covered that Google has deals in place that give it presence in Firefox, along with the ways that Firefox gets promoted by Google. Absolutely, I can believe that Firefox wouldn’t do deals if Google wasn’t a good search engine. But there’s still the deals.
> But as I said in my post, I do believe that Google’s front page ads are different
Like I said, I personally don’t see the tips on the search results as bad. But that’s my personal opinion. The debate is good in that way. I’ve seen some people say they’d like them at the bottom. Some people think they don’t belong on the results at all. Perhaps the best thing to say is that Google clearly stepped them up and perhaps they should have had a discussion on a sensitive topic like this. But maybe they didn’t really realize it would be that sensitive. They do now :)
> I would appreciate if you could remove or clarify the suggestion that I may have decided not to air your comment, and perhaps insert an update indicating that I’ve responded in the comments.
Done!
I have some further thoughts in a follow-up post:
Google, Sex, Blogs, and really determining Pornography vs. Erotica
My *speculation* as to what happened, is that Google’s anti-spam algorithm got set a little too aggressively in terms of what sites are considered porn-spam, but the key element in affecting certain blogs was *linking*, not *language*.
Wow–that’s a really deep look, right down to the link that mentions that back in 2003, Nutch was getting funding from Overture, a Google competitor that was eventually bought by Yahoo.
I’m glad that someone finally asked about the fact that [tampa hotels] is really rather clean, with lots of variety: several specific hotels, several overview sites, and local search results and a Plusbox map.
I respect Jimmy’s opinion that he’d rather have “hubs” with reviews of hotels rather than the hotels themselves. The pendulum hasn’t always swung in that direction though. I remember when a different search engine (now absorbed by someone else, and named for a Gaelic word) was making the rounds talking about the query “grocery stores” and how their search engine returned individual grocery stores instead of directories or hubs that listed grocery stores. At the time, Google leaned more toward returning overview/hub sites, but we had the ability to change that. So that’s something that existing search engines can adjust if they think users prefer a different mix; I know because we’ve changed that balance in the past.
SEO 101 is easy to learn: build a spider-friendly site, build “good content”, and advertise.
Executing SEO, on the other hand, is a never-ending rat-race against competitors who may rack up hundreds of new inbounds a day. Your job as an SEO is never done because there is no finish line.
It wouldn’t be hard for spammers to beat this filter by throwing varying degrees of related phrases – eventually something will stick. Also, by having a few test pages up, spammers will be able to detect when this filter is toned down or cranked up, and adjust accordingly.
I see both of these postings from these partners about SEO nothing more than an attempt to gain some SEO/SMO exposure in the market. I believe anybody who reads these already know the facts and how SEO can not be simplified into a one-time event. Maybe Did-it partners have agreed on creating a viral campaign to bring-in some natural traffic. :)
I’d be curious to hear more about maps market share. Back in May, Hitwise published some figures:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/google_yahoo_and_msn_property.html
that said Google Maps had 7.5% market share. That was also around the time that the “Google can succeed in search, but doesn’t do as well in other areas” meme started.
Maybe this is another AJAX issue? Does anyone have access to recent Hitwise market share estimates for mapping sites? I’d be curious to see how they compare with Nielsen/NetRatings.
Good points. I think sometimes the battle against spam is an incremental one, in which the gains aren’t going to be measured in defeating it completely, overnight. Rather, it’s demise might be by making the cost of spamming computationally more expensive, and more difficult.
Regardless, it potentially has a number of other benefits in addition to acting as a spam filter, and it doesn’t replace existing indexing and relevancy methods, but rather adds a layer on top of them.
Interesting!
Would like to see how they will juggle user trust with user intervention. However, I am all for letting users tailor entries as with Wikipedia. Seems to be a source everyone trusts.
One thing many other open-source projects haven’t had is the marketing muscle to build a user-base and get donated development. Wikia has much more of this than many other efforts.
While Wikia may be underestimating the resources required, I also think they have more resources available than most other open-source projects who have attempted the task.
Plus, one of their sleeper strengths is they’ve developed an amazing ability to neutralize criticism of quality control failures. That also sets them apart from many other projects.
So while I’m usually skeptical too, they do have some decent answers to the obvious question of why they have a chance of succeeding when so many others have failed.
The mistake trail begins with Dave’s initial assertion that slow revenue growth for SEO firms has something to do with the complexity of SEO. It likely has a lot more to do with the marketing of SEO – clients pouring millions into paid search don’t understand even the basics of the organic side – they don’t know why to spend big money on SEO or what they’ll get if they do. If Kevin’s post forces SEO’s to better explain what they do and its value then he just may have done the industry an unintentional favor.
I’ve taken a shot in this post pointing out that while basic optimization is easy, great results are definitely not. If marketers don’t understand the value and poential of SEO they’ll continue to stick exclusively with the very easy to understand paid side.
Good write up, but quick question.
You said:
“I’d lose the part in bold. Having that same text in the same place on every page could — could! — be hurting the site under a new ranking system. If I were to change it, I’m make sure the title in its place was richly descriptive, maybe:”
So that means breadcrumbs are no longer acceptable?
Thanks.
YES, I was looking for this info for many days. But to be very frank I have doubts if Search Wikia will really beat google.
Also its open-source project needs a lot of resources, hope wikia is knowing what all it requires.
Anyway, thanks for publicizing the talk. Lets see what happen.
Danny, great suggestion for webmaster central, there is also some suggestions being made for the webmaster help Google group here…
How to improve Google webmaster Help forum
Thank goodness that is over! The arrows in the responses looked intense!
Good article!
Even if they won’t make it to dethrone Google then the *VERY* possitive message I can read between the lines is that they plan on using Lucene and Nutch (and Hadoop could follow in a few minutes, right? :-). As a Nutch/Lucene/Hadoop hobyist I can’t loudly call Bravo! (providing they will contribute their code back to Apache repository). Then the real winner can be an open-source community.
“I guess no more spamming yahoo message boards.”
LOL. Ain’t that the truth. Wading through all the postal fodder, to find even one meaningful comment was near impossible. All Yahoo did here was empty the trash, and clean up some much needed disk space, imo. Smart move.
Thank you, Andrew.
Some of these are difficult to find, like this one from Google. The title wasn’t really helpful (Electronic content classification ), and I hadn’t heard of the authors before. It’s the kind of information, though, that maybe they should share more openly – it might get more people to design their sites better for mobile.
Thanks for the link Danny!
If possible, WikiPedia should make its ongoing detailed stats, public. It would be interesting if Wales would consider it ASAP.
The stats that are currently available are generalized.
This is exceptionally important because Wikipedia is now on page one or page two for many competative terms in Google and Yahoo.
( including moving to #1 for the term:
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION )
This would offer a unique opportunity to analyze what percentages of traffic each of the top search engines bring – and also how much approximate traffic competative keywords bring.
Also a cummulative Overview for 2006 would be interesting
The December Google Friends Newsletter also sheds light on the surprising Bebo ranking…
“+ Google Zeitgeist 2006 +
These days, all the major search engines send out a year-end list: what were the most popular search queries of the year? Scads of magazines, TV shows, newspapers, and blogs pick up on this theme also, either by picking their own or reporting on what the big sites and search engines say. It’’s a real staple of year-end coverage to revisit the biggest celebrity names, trends and oddities that characterize the year just ending. Rather than tell you the most-frequently-searched words — many of which are constants throughout the year — we like to contrast which search terms grew significantly this year over last year. As a result our main lists enumerate queries about social networking sites (MySpace, Bebo), significant world news (Hezbollah, North Korea, Darfur), scandals (Duke lacrosse, page), and lots more. What’s all mean? We think it gets interesting to look over periods longer than a single year, and that’s what Google Trends aims to do. (It’s also fun to compare the top lists for years past and ask, where are they now?) However much significance you give to year-end lists, December is an excellent time to look back. We hope you enjoy the view.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2006.html ”
-Bill
Just three days ago I wrote to Matt Cutts:
“I’m no expert, but it’s hard for me to image what sort of algorithm would be able to distinguish the highly entertaining, very intelligent, but often utterly filthy Pretty Dumb Things (apparently still in the Google penalty box) from run-of-the-mill sites that use similar language in similar quantities, and even in similar, but tremendously less artful ways.”
So you can imagine how amused I am to see that human-powered search is the topic of the day.
Thankfully, PTD appears to be out of the Google penalty box. Unfortunately Comstock Films is back in. As of this morning, sites featuring photos of women felatiating dogs and copulating with horses are out-ranking (out ranking by pages) Comstock Films on google searchs for ‘couples porn’. (We make award-winning films about the intimate aspects of couples in longterm relationships.)
At this point I’m thinking this is neither a bug, nor an anti-sex bias at Google. I think explanation is that the googlebot is one kinky mo’fo’!
I find this whole argument so amusing. It’s SEO snobbery at it’s finest. Of course SEO is rocket science to many, many people. To those of us who’ve been plugging away at it for over 10 years, it’s child’s play. It’s all about perspective. Why do you think I started a SEO agony aunt column? I get the same questions from people who are totally clueless about search engine marketing. It’s not a crime. But when you claim to be an SEO expert and then moan about the “uneducated masses” or fail to educate your client about the process, you are propogating SEO myth and legend. That’s the worst kind of SEO snobbery, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen quite a few SEO commentators making snide comments about the lack of complexity within our SEO courses at Search Engine College, but that is the whole point! We deliberately dumb-down the entire SEO process down to the most basic level so that anyone can understand it, grasp it and integrate it quickly. Most people don’t want to become rocket scientists, they just want their sites to be found.
If Search Wikia can even produce usable results ( as in not chuck full of spam or outdated sites) they’ll gain an almost immediate following. Since Google has become so large and powerful, it’s attracted a large amount of criticism rising solely out of the fear of the power and control Google posses over the online market and the world economy.
Just loosing your rankings on a few prime keywords can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars and due to the closed nature of Google’s algorithms it’s inevitable someone will claim Google to be manipulating things “unfairly” or more accurately “un-ideally” for the user. This belief will directly lead to a huge following of users who will support search wiki and use it as a replacement for google even if it produces inferior results.
Search wiki doesn’t have to produce a product superior or even on pare with Google. It just has to give the perpetrators of open source philosophy what they want: to feel like they’re positively contributing to their search experience and that they (collectively ofcourse) have control and assurances over the fairness of the results.
And I say “hell yeah.” Chaos refines order (eventually) and competition yields innovation.
An example “in stream” ads can be found over at GoogleVideo here -
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-274981837129821058&q=the+domino+effect+eepy
Yet the “in stream” advert doesn’t seem covered on YouTube as yet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vk4_2xboOE
It’s an interesting project, something similar to what we’re already doing at Bessed (http://www.bessed.com). However, unlike what it sounds Wales may be up to, we’re using paid editors and have built our site on WordPress to give visitors a say on search results (via comments) without completely giving up the keys to the castle.
Our issue is scalability–how much can humans really cover in terms of the billions of searches possible? In Wikiasari’s case (or whatever Wales’ final search site is called), there is the challenge of getting volunteers to work on a search engine that is for-profit, something very different than working on the non-profit Wikipedia. It’s fun to voluntarily add to the Wikipedia entry for The Oak Ridge Boys or Carl Sagan—is it fun to voluntarily gather a list of landscaping companies in Springfield, Illinois, as you’d expect would be necessary for a new human-powered engine? (Again, this is part of why Bessed uses paid editors; no one wants to do boring stuff for free.)
I’m glad to see human-powered search in the news, though; it gives me a chance to blow Bessed’s horn and invite Webmasters to submit their sites.
WOW – what a first month Danny! Looking forward to January and beyond…
GOOGLE should NOT be referred to as if it is a monolithic, one dimension organism acting in unison.
There may be elements about some of the company’s official actions that may be unacceptable to some, but considering some of the charitble actions, such as: Google org, the homepage links to Katrina and Tsunami charities – it illustrates that the company is made up of individuals who bear responsibilities for different aspects of the company policies and directions.
The few critical examples listed in the topic, should be taken in context of a ten year history of a complex worldwide business.
Can anyone who decides to judge Google based on the above examples – assure the world that THEY would have been able to do a better job of running a company for the past ten years?
No one else has been or is able to create an alternative to Google. So, society has to accept the fact that it is extremely easy to criticize imperfections, but often much harder to create something less imperfect than what they are criticizing. ♨
The bottom line is that society has chosen to use Google – no one forces anyone to type G-O-O-G-L-E into their browser.
If people are SO-O-O offended by Google’s imperfections, who is stopping them from typing; M-S-N or Y-A-H-O-O, and settling for less relevant SERPs
Google became the number one search engine by providing the most relevant, unbiased search results, while using the motto “do no evil”. I think they seriously need to think about the impact adding Blogger or calendar tips into the SERPs will have to their reputation and maybe concentrate on growing by following the same methods which have already provided them with so much success.
As soon as users start to feel that they’re not being provided with the best possible service they’ll turn to another site which can.
Patent of no patent, Google had already aggressively phrasing in their de-duplication Algos as of about two years ago.
Most SEOs noticed it when the many directories using DMOZ data began disappearing, and Websites that owned much of their link popularity success to their DMOZ listings – began a sudden, sharp drop in the SERPs (some even virtually disappeared)
The second phrase of Google’s de-duplication process appeared to drop or severly punish OBVIOUS links pages, and dropping links directories that were OBVIOUS duplications of automatic link uploading pages.
Also, around that time, certain high profile automatic link exchange Web sites were banned.
One very high profile one actually made a public acknowlegement to their customers and eventually changed their domain – thus starting all over because even after changing their strategies – stayed permanantly at a PR0.
I don’t believe Google are even close to losing favour with the public as they’re so embedded in global consciousness as the search engine of choice.
Even bad press is good press. As stated, they’ve reached a critical mass where it would be very hard to avoid breaking a few eggs. I know this kind of mentality lets other companies get away with a lot worse but hopefully they will stick to their non evil intentions. It’s good to have sites like Google Watch available so we can keep an eye on what’s going down.
I’m looking forward to some of these ‘Web 3.0′ start-ups who aim to be the next Google.
While this persepctive is arguable, I suspect that the motivation for discontinuing the SOAP API is practical rather than commercial or technical.
Scraping, by its very nature is far more bandwidth and resourse greedy than quering the API. Those currently using the API have in the past scraped, and will more than likely return to doing so in the absense of a functional SOAP API. Google knows this and thus this renders both the bandwith and commercial argument for this move as less stable.
From a practical perspective, the API has is recent months returned increasingly different results to the SERPs… so much so that they are useless. Due to the new datacentre architecture, it is reasonable to speculate that the API is now redundant…
Would it be rude to speculate as to what Matt “would
….how about Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail??? Have they dropped any?
GMail for me is way better (IMO) as it gives me less PrOn to delete everyday.
After two years of working with Nutch 0.7 and 0.8, I’d have to strongly agree with Danny’s comment about how easy it is to underestimate the level of effort required to do a good job of regularly crawling lots of pages, filtering out spam, and quickly serving up high quality results.
Many of the problems require technical solutions – e.g. you want the hit summarizer to ignore sidebars. Not ridiculously to do, but it’s one of countless small programming tasks that *somebody* has to define/code/test.
So when I read posts on the wikia mailing list about P2P vs. centralized search, the semantic web, etc. I have to laugh. Those aren’t the things that make or break you, it’s fixing the 1000 little problems that constantly show up.
I have to notice that Google or anything Google related are dominated the first edition of Search Month! It is estimated to be over 80 % of its reviews. Does this percentage reflex the obsession of the search world? I wonder!
Don’t forget the recent and abrupt closing of Google Answers and the very rude discontinuation of support for their Search SOAP API (prompting the release of the EvilAPI).
I for one am starting my new year Google free.
Google is not evil. None of the things you mention are evil, with the exception of scanning books without permission. Certainly it’s not “evil” for a company to promote its own products on its own website. (Though it’s questionable not to label a promotion as an ad when it looks like editorial content.)
The issue is more that people are starting to discover that Google is in competition with the Internet and has the goal of appropriating a bigger percentage of the value created by all other sites.
What is the “fair” percentage of the value of other people’s work that should go to search engines? Hard to say, but it seems that more and more companies feel that they would like to keep some for themselves.
I discussed this issue a year ago in my column Search Engines as Leeches on the Web.
Anytime a company gets big and approaches a monopoly (and does actions to encourage that), they are called “evil”. The reason why this question is asked more of Google is that they claim to not “be evil”.
Evil is all about intent. How can we measure intent? All we have are the results of business decisions. I find it hard to believe that all of their business decisions are based on altruism over providing shareholder value.
Why is this tipping point different from all other tipping points? Because this one is a pun. Google is promoting products under the label, “Tip.”
I take it as clever headline writing, no more.
Is it evil? C’mon. Google has made a preposterous fetish of hiding most of its products where only persistent geeks would think to look.
Lately, they’re stepping out. Good for them.
If the products are great, then making them easier to find will increase the goodness in the world. If the products stink, then making them easier to find will hasten their rejection by the market.
“You might want to try this…” is a far cry from bundling and tying.
somehow I’m reminded of the long-running comic in the pages of Mad Magazine, “Spy vs. Spy” but I don’t recall either character applying for a patent for their counter-measures, even when vanquishing their foe in the final frame.
Ken, is that where Krugle the code search engine gets its name–from your last name? I wondered about that. :)
Yup, I remember talking about navbars and boilerplate and their impact on snippets way back a few years ago. There really is a lot of little things to get right for a search engine. :)
I’ve been waiting for someone to call out these ridiculous top search term lists. I’ve found them all to be heavily massaged. For example, I believe “Google” is the top search term at both MSN/Live & Yahoo, but they won’t admit to it. And those of us who have access to Nielsen, ComScore or Hitwise data know that these lists should probably include sex-related terms.
I don’t mind them massaging the data, I just want them to admit that these lists have been heavily edited.
Danny you are correct.
Ask.com offers Zoom related search, contextually based search suggestions (and often related names). More here. Zoom related search can not only serve to help with narrowing and expanding a query but can also, in some cases, serve as a knowledge discovery tool.
Ask also offers other types of disambiguation tools. Here are a few examples:
+ Rock Concerts New York City.
Here, at the top of the results page, you see material from AskCity. Note the disambiguation pull-down boxes providing the searcher options to narrow to a specific borough of NYC.
+ Zip Codes, Springfield
Springfield, MA is listed first but directly below it, a pull-down menu listing other cities and towns named Springfield in the U.S. is seen on the page. Area code Columbus does the same type of thing.
+ A search for MSFT asks the searcher do you want information about Microsoft or the latest stock quote.
+ A search for Rocky. First, you’re prompted if you want information on Rocky, the movie. Then, if selected, you’ll find info on the latest Rocky release (Rocky Balboa) and you’ll also see a pull-down menu to go directly to info about Rocky 1 – Rocky 5.
+ Of course, a search for Miami, FL provides a “Smart Answer” with direct links to various types of info directly at the top of the page.
http://www.ask.com/web?q=miami%20fl&o=0&l=dir
+ The new prototype/beta, AskX, offers even more info on a results page in a three column format. Here’s a search for Chicago. Everything from the local time to information about the band. Same type of thing when you search Boston.
+ Btw, if you like this concept, WikiWax from Sufwax offers the same type of thing using dynamically generated suggestions from the Wikipedia’s subject headings.
+ Clusty’s dynamically generated clusters can also serve as both as a tool to narrow and focus or as an info discovery vehicle. You can also see various type of clusters with their Clustermed service.
http://www.clustermed.info
What tactics did Kudzu use to get the 20,000 SMBs to
register?
David, you made me curious. I dug around for a few minutes and found this:
http://news.com.com/Hotmail+users+missing+old+email,+address+books/2100-1023_3-241926.html
“Some Microsoft Hotmail users unable to check their email since last week got an unwelcome surprise today when they finally gained access to their accounts. Although their new mail was intact, their personal folders, address book entries and saved mail had been deleted. ….
The company says the problem with one of Hotmail’s servers affects less than one-half of 1 percent of its 67 million users.”
Let’s see, 0.005*67M = 335,000 users, if my math is right. So I’d still feel relatively more safe with Gmail even despite this. I’m sure that the team is also looking at ways to try to keep even this much from happening again.
Good chronology. Looking back on these, it’s interesting how many of these tipping points influenced the company going forward. Scientology/DMCA brought us towards more disclosure, Deja brought us towards incorporating outside feedback, etc.
Is Google evil? Probably not. But is Google becoming the next Microsoft? Probably. No one can deny Google’s success as a search engine and its success period. But Google is becoming a child-king that does what it wants and feels little obligation to respond to you, to me, or to anyone. As Google slowly sells out and corrupts itself, we can and should use other search engines. Only then will Google perhaps realize it is better to respond than ignore. With so much money coming in and so many groveling at their feet, Google has got to feel a little monolithic somewhere–just like Microsoft does.
Until the technology and ability to setup a campaign, track conversions, and modify your website for SEM becomes more common place, small businesses will need a local sales force to “convert” into PPC advertisers in any great number. You would be amazed at how many small businesses I’ve worked with who barley even understand the most rudimentary elements involved in SEO / SEM, yet alone are in any shape to be success in setting up their own PPC campaign. Most small business websites don’t even have a strong call to action and wouldn’t convert the traffic anyways. If you deal with mostly tech companies you’ll get spoiled by having somewhat educated customers. Go ahead and call your local insurance agent/hotel/used car dealer/ restaurant/merchant/boutique/hair dresser/insert small business here and you’d be surprised at the number of individuals completely naive of basic internet technology. Their salvation lies in “do this for me”, because they’re in no shape to do it themselves, plus many of them are already overworked in their current occupations.
Execellent list of links, I wish I had time to go through most of them. I hope to write something in my blog that makes your list.
I can’t see the content identification system being a success detorrent for piracy for any length of time. I’m surprised they don’t use a portion of their revenue to employ a large cheap labor force of content moderators. This could be outsourced and with the aid of advanced tools extremely effective, even for a site as large as Youtube.
I remember the earlier days of search (back when infospace was still around) and it was common to end up at a spammy adult site on lower competition search terms. I’m so glad algorithms have improved.
There is a certain amount of risk with any web based mail, but in general the benefits almost always out weight the costs.
He’s a celebrity, leaving something that made you famous and wealthy seems very improbable to me, unless he gets the entrepreneur bug. Can you image Matt leaving to head up a smaller web 2.0 startup? The press and blog reaction alone would give that company enough exposure to make them a household name.
Greg – great article about small business. As a small business marketing manager using paid search I can say that not only did I not have a salesperson introduce me to paid search, but I couldn’t even get any live support until recently (after I started spending more). Many small businesses need to search this out themselves to stay in the game and compete.
Following up. I poured through Hitwise data on the major engines and came up with a list of what are most likely the actual top 10 search terms of 2006. You can view the list here:
Actual Top 10 Search Terms of 2006
I based it on 12 months of data, weighted by search engine share of total searches performed. Once you see the list, you’ll understand why they massage the data.
Pretty sure the 6th one is in Irvine, CA.
I’ve seen various listings for a YouTube / Google Audio/Radio sales rep at that location on a few job boards.
As Ken mentions, there are scores of minor engineering tasks involved in maintaining a search engine, but that’s the more tractable part. The trickier part is maintaining high quality results. The major search engines all employ people to evaluate search results and use these to train their search algorithms. This is an expensive process, with no open-source starting points. It is typically blind: evaluators are presented unranked results from unknown search engines and asked to indicate which are relevant to the query, a query that the user did not submit. It seems unlikely that volunteers will be interested in this task. And it is very different from Wikipedia. Raising a volunteer army for search quality is a research task. An interesting one, and one that I’m glad to see someone attack.
I just tried Google’s self-service adword program, with results taht were some sort of mix of Kafka, Dada, and Ionesco.
“In 1997, Jonathan T. Taplin, a veteran film and television producer, stood up at a cable industry convention and asserted that in the future all movies would be distributed over the Internet. He recalls being laughed out of the room.”
Someone should find the transcript of his speech. It’s very likely he prior art-ed himself.
Ha, nice first post. Really nice find!
A couple more of Google as Evil tipping points:
- Jan 2004: AdSense for Domains
From saying “focus on the user and the rest will follow”, to making money from users’ typos, many times misleading them to a different site.
- Oct 2005: Web Clips @ gmail
This is the first time in a google property that the content and the advertisement is not physically separated but displayed in the same space in the page.
I’ve probably reviewed over a thousand resumes and cover letters to apply for an online/offline advertising sales rep position I was offering. IMO, no matter how smart the person is that puts together the 300 question survey, no matter how good the algorithm is at spitting out the “perfect candidate”, nothing replaces three face to face interviews done in three different places, combined with a sixth sense that the interviewer has gained after many years of interviewing.
Of course that’s only if you want quality vs. quantity. If you want both, it takes time, research, and face to face interviewing talent.
YouTube has been advertising their ad sales jobs on Craig’s List here in Dallas this week.
Wonder what their quality score is. :)
It is interesting that Search Engine Land isn’t using tagging extensively.
Google seem to place a very high emphasis on pages that seem to be related to tagging. This could be related to using tagging within LSI.
Hi,
Good post..I see the trends in Vertical markets rising and this type of tagging can be beneficial. This is a great way to incorporate del.icio.us tags into Google CoOp CSE example Here
Thanks,
Tom
Why does Google collect so many resume it never acts on? It’s is part of some other data collection project?
David: Good question. With all of the supposed “evil” acts going on at the ‘plex lately, who knows where that resume might end up. Has anyone seen Google’s privacy policy as it pertains to resume submissions?
Very interesting idea!
Interesting article; and I like it when academics write articles that validate our gut feelings!
But why not build a “tagsology”? A system that lightly integrates tagging with a behind-the-scenes ontology? Don’t touch people’s tags, but have some meta-data that’ll help search engines map concepts together.
This patent seems to sound like the shingles conversation that was started a few months back. Relating to how a Shingle or in this case a Sketch can be viewed as similar or duplicative. Interesting concept makes it very difficult to scrape and succeed any longer.
Great write up!
I like that application, yoparts. Thanks. It would be great to have a custom search engine which used the posts and pages that I bookmarked in del.icio.us.
Great point, Chris. My most recent post here is about a presentation Susan Dumais made at Yahoo last month. She discusses the value of personal tags on top of indexed information.
Interesting point about tagging here at Search Engine Land, Andy. How would that best be implemented? We have a growing category system, but that isn’t the same thing.
Jen,
Now all Big 4 are on Google. Hard to complete these 4 in ad position for search.
You chose to publish on Typepad, whereas I can really only give extensive advice on Wordpress.
Basic tagging that most people use links through to Technorati etc. It is not ideal for search engine purposes but better than nothing.
I am not sure what is available for Typepad for internal tagging. For Wordpress you can use plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior that create internal tag pages.
Easy solution – switch to Wordpress ;) – I am sure that isn’t what you wanted to hear though – maybe there are Typepad specific solutions that don’t give Technorati all your link equity and traffic.
Blake Ross noticed last night. He and I were talking about it here:
http://www.blakeross.com/2007/01/03/google-removes-tips/
Nice find Matt.
funny. i just noticed earlier today on my myspace page, right above the google search bar was a banner ad for live.com search.
nude blogging must stop ;)
No need to share any more :D
Not to rain on the parade, but what marketer is ever going to say something like “No, I wouldn’t hire him”?
Especially while he still works at Google!
I wouldn’t hire him. How could I possibly work with someone who knows more about the way Google does things than any SEO on the planet? The conversations would consist of:
Matt, does Google do X?”
“Michael, my non-disclosure runs out in 3 years but even then I would not want to ruin the results of what I feel is the best search engine in the universe.”
“Matt, I don’t want to ruin the results. I want to improve them.”
“For yourself.”
“And your point is?”
I can’t have fun. ;-)
I really enjoyed Shoe’s post…
All of these SEO companies can make the offers to pay Matt these really high salaries but I think I can safely say that the gambling and or porn industries would easily top any offer. What do you say Matt wanna job with some perks? I promise the wife need know nothing ;)
I have one for sale if anyone is interested.
50,000 docs version bought March last year and selling for a song – well low price anyway.
Reason for sale is I just don’t need it for the use I had planned.
Hardly used. Immaculate condition
Great for small company
David
704.947.8048
Were I able to afford it YES! Business would get better for sure.
Why leave Google though? I’m gradually getting through the cool wearables at the Google Store – nice products
John Furrier also offered Matt a job on his blog.
“Matt: as the CEO of PodTech there is a job here for you :-) – Just drop me an email. The Cutts Show would be a winner!”
Thanks for the info, I just used it to update a listing – Yahoo gives you a very quick form to fill out, but it’s lacking some of the information I would like to add to my listing.
I just noticed that Search Engine Land got a new favicon. Is this design final, isn’t it?
Congrats to all on the list (it must have been fun to write that you are one of the best bloggers, Barry!)
But dammit, I just finished added 2 dozen new RSS feeds to my reader on January 2, and now I notice a few more in this list I had missed.
I have no choice but to add them now – you guys are killing me. How’m I supposed to get any work done with all this reading and learning goin’ on? ;)
Ian
I doubt that Matt would “work” for anyone after this. He may work WITH some people, but frankly the rules will be more or less his.
$250K certainly wouldn’t do it, let’s be honest with ourselves :)
Raising volunteer forces for this task is indeed an interesting challenge – but the idea is not really new. One possible way to do it has already been found and realized: ODP´s volunteer editors have scanned the web for quality content since 1998, and the result of our work is Open Content – freely available for everybody who needs a large amount of human-reviewed data, be it as initial input for a new search tool, or for a rather long list of other purposes, from enriching results to ranking and quality control.
As the Nutch documentation explicitly refers to the ODP RDF dump, I guess I don´t have to go into details what advantages this might have for an Open Source search engine – you probably know a lot more about it than I do ;-)
If you are looking into methods to measure quality and other properties of search engines without human testers, you might find the following papers interesting:
- Random Sampling from a Search Engine’s Corpus by Ziv Bar Yossef, Maxim Gurevich (via SEO by the Sea which has additional links).
- Using Titles and Category Names from Editor-driven Taxonomies for Automatic Evaluation by S. Beitzel, E. Jensen, A. Chowdhury, D. Grossman.
Excellent list of SEO/SEM Blogs. I added a few new ones to my read list. It’s a good thing I can speed read effectively.
Perhaps, part 2 of the column, published Friday will continue to clarify. Interestingly, I used similar analogies about professions that thrive without a need to maintain “rocket science” status. As to what prompted Dave’s initial article, he is very involved in client conversations and has been hearing over and over of SEMs charging for annual retainers, and only working for first month or two to do the basics then sitting back and waiting for the changes to have a material impact on rankings (or not). Both the SEMPO and Marketing Sherpa studies indicate that the industry is getting an image problem. Over-Charge and Under-Deliver. Clearly some SEOs charge fairly and deliver their services as promised, but take a moment and call ten active online marekters you know and ask if they have any SEO war-stories. You may be shocked at what you hear from at least some marketers I was.
Hi Barry,
I have looked at a most of my clients’ Yahoo! Local listings and see the “Edit This Listing” link directly under the business rating for most, but not for one of my clients in New Orleans. Do you think this is being made available to select listings?
Thanks – great blog and great resource!
~Carrie
How are your gmail referrals occurring?
Hi Danny -
What a great wrap up on a terrific first month!
Wanted to share that though we are planning to release a more flexible date selector for analyzing feed stats, you can access the month of December by exporting your stats. Under the Feed Stats section of the ‘analyze’ tab, click either Excel or CSV and you can then isolate the data for December.
Happy New Year, and keep in touch.
–Rick Klau
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
rickk@feedburner.com
Great points made about penetrating the small biz market! The engines (particularly Google) have made it fairly easy to get online and set up a campaign (assuming a biz has a site already, that’s a challenge to begin with – many smb sites are just “brochureware” sites with no good conversion action as has already been noted by Solomon Rothman.) But I would take this article and the comments a step further – what do smb’s who actually get their PPC campaigns set up, do after that? Many, with no idea of budget management to ROI or CPA goals, just bid to position and get hosed on spending tons of budget on clicks, with little to no results. So the battle for these smb’s with regard to search marketing is actually two-fold – get them on line with search, and then help them efficiently manage their own campaigns.
Awesome! I also tried several Q&A services to get a high level definition of “sentiment analysis” over the past weeks, including LinkedIn. Answer services are sort of a hybrid between algo search and human-run directories with a different user interaction model where you can ask plain English questions and get plain English answers. What I really like is that answers come from people, somewhat along the path of Wikipedia, although the set of info retrieved is made of more diverse answers rather than one by consensus. it seems that answering services do better for sophisticated queries in the form of plain English questions than do 2.1 keywords typed in a traditional search box. Most volunteering to answer questions do care (or is it the miles?), include subjective in nature opinions and often provide “tone” clues turning Answers databases into wonderful data sets to mine, extract and make sense of “sentiments”.
Overall, LinkedIn did pretty well … by a long shot. Makes sense, my network is made up of people that i) care about Sentiment Analysis … if anybody does, and ii) care about me, … not, or to some extent … say, just a tinny bit more than a total stranger. Answers are as good as the people you ask the questions from, right? Well, LinkedIn is all about people you know and just released an Answer service with a really nice, intuitive, minimalist and simple Answers results page.
-arnaud
Hi Danny,
One important factor you didn’t mention is the fact that Chris only joined later in the month. Meanwhile he kept potential visitors interested in SEW, who didn’t make the switch to SEL yet.
Another point is that in my opinion the quality of SEW has dwindled since you, and some of your collegeas have left SEW. When other SEW readers start noticing this as well, the future looks bright for this blog.
Success, and keeping on posting these really interesting pieces.
After my initial browse – the Q & A section looks good, I’m putting it on my list of things to try out / manipulate / enjoy. Thanks for the news.
Danny, it’s kind of humourous to me that you linked to my post about this; I was severely chastised on my Wikipedia User talk:Caydel page for writing that post:
I was also chastised by ju66l3r for another matter when I used a little sarcasm in an entry in the talk page discussing Barry Schwartz’s page which is also up for discussion:
It sounds to me that the Wikipedia editor culture is starting to go the way of that of DMOZ – editors closing in on themselves in dictatorial role.
Nice post, Danny!
I’ve added my “keep” to the article deletion discussion. So far there’s only 1 “delete” against 9 “keep”, possibly some sparked by your article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Matt_Cutts
I have no idea how I got a TypeKey account. Anyway the reason I wanted to comment is that wikipedia is clueless. It is funny that Google is probably their biggest referrer and they don’t think one of the top 3 most famous people at Google is not important.
Wikipedia is rife with misinformation and biased content. It’s best if the SEO community just tune it out.
I would also suggest people check out Barry Schwartz’s AfD page, and contribute notability mentions
Philipp, unfortunately it is not a vote. Certain standards for notability have to be met for the article to survive it’s AfD stage.
Hopefully it will survive – people have contributed a variety of news mentions to it!
It’s funny that Matt, Barry & Mike Grehan are being considered for Wikipedia deletion while the Doug Heil page seems to be immune from such scrutiny.
This is encouraging news, but I think there’s still a lot of grey fudge around the issue. Does this mean Google AdWords will now free up all that lovely inventory it’s sitting on due to the trademark issue? We can but hope.
I can’t see it happening though until the law is clarified and tested a bit further. It’s a step in the right direction though. :)
great post danny.
after reading your post, i also added my .02 to the wikipedia discussion.
seems like there appears to be some anti-search (anti-SEO? ) bias among some of the wikipedia editors… not to mention some microserf who has a bone to pick with google.
Need more non blog citations?
“Matt Cutts, the Google engineer who designed SafeSearch” – a mainstream press article from 2004 http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5198125.html
“….the developer of Google’s SafeSearch filter, Matt Cutts, also know as “porn cookie guy”: “Cutts got his moniker by giving out his wife’s tempting homemade cookies to Googlers who help him find unwanted porn.” http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/reviews/2005-11-13-google-book_x.htm
This blog might consider adding public stats, that could be accessed by visitors anytime.
It is awesome how fast this trend has taken off among top bloggers
http://seoptimization.blog.com/1221628/
But more important than number of visitors, are quality of visitors!
One would presume that this blog attracts an overall more well educated, middle management professional or web savy consultant in the marketing and advertising fields.
The loyal visitors are much more valuable,than the Digg or Boing Boing visitors who clicked because of some luring title with the word SEX in it, and who many never come back, until the next sensational title.
Based on the most popular search terms listed – with the exception of ‘top google searches 2006′ – even those do not appear to be the most learned of professionals.
And hopefully, people who are putting in SEARCHENGINELAND as a * search term * , are doing so for a good reason (duh).
Those returning visitors, using direct navigation, are a highly desirable, sophisticated group – splendid for any marketing Website to have.
They are the Creme’ de la Creme’ of this readership.
It would be more intriguing to show the stats from the specific geographic locations that send the most vistors.
Which would allow one to generalize about the Overall education level and income of the most loyal segment based on census data.
Compiling a list of the most intelligent search queries, along with the average time spent on the site by those visitors, and whether those visitors actually returned – would be the ultimate benchmark on the success of the blog in attracting the potential movers and shakers in this industry.
a-hem, cough-cough
Hmm… seems pretty anecdotal…
Prices have definitely risen in some verticals, especially retail.
But in 2007, the aggregate numbers once again’ll tell the story.
If “advertisers” (across the board) are cutting their spend, eventually that will have to be reflected in GOOG’s quarterly financials.
Time’ll tell. In the end, it’s so granular that it’s hard to go by a couple of verticals.
And then there are those crazy spends on things like $50 million stadium naming rights, as Godin pointed out in a recent post (Prudential). Take half of that wasted budget and apply it to search, and suddenly $10/click doesn’t seem out of line, given the at least measurable payback as compared with the glitz spends.
Microserf!?! I now count Dave McClure as one of the only people who has *actually* read that Douglas Coupland book… (I sure haven’t)…
Danny, can we chalk up this excess energy to the “got back from vacation” concept? :)
It gets even funnier when the teens who run the show start upping the ante and talking about “hurting your chances” by “canvassing”… well thank you professors!
Wikipedia is great most of the time, but as usual, when things unravel I go back to the professionalism concept. Lack of accountability/visibility and standards eventually bites you in the butt and turns some parts of the enterprise into a “Lords of the Flies” type situation :)
Link drop referring to ancient history:
http://www.traffick.com/story.asp?StoryID=51
Question for Caydel: do these snarky editors reveal names, ages, professions, biographical info, that type of thing? Or do you just get initials and obfuscation? It’s unraveling, IMHO. And you said it. It’s doing so in a way very similar to ODP’s personality-driven petty tyrannies.
Things are turning in an interesting direction. Obviously, due to their “definitiveness,” Wikipedia results are showing up huge in SERP’s. One friend mentioned today that “What’s really hurt About.com is Wikipedia.” In the sense that About guide pages are now much less prominent in SERP’s than Wikipedia because Wikipedia is the new “definitive du jour,” that’s true. I wonder when that will begin to swing back.
>Question for Caydel: do these snarky editors reveal names, ages, professions, biographical info, that type of thing? Or do you just get initials and obfuscation?
I don’t know too much about them but their usernames and what few details they choose to make available to the wider community on their talk pages.
Personally, I would like to see Wikipedia move to a more accountable structure – still allow editing by the masses, but make editors create verified account, and make their name and bio details available to the world…
Remember that this is a US ruling, not an international one. This is very much in line with current US and Canadian attitudes of fair dealing with trademarks, but very much at odds with the French and other jurisdictions.
But if you are restricting your geo-targeting to the US, then this is good news.
Ian
So far, it seems to me that this system is working – clueless person suggests a change, then the more knowledgeable masses chime in to correct said cluelessness.
The real test now of Wikipedia’s system is whether cluelessness or public knowledge wins the round.
IMO, if Matt’s entry can’t survive this challenge, then it has no business being there, assuming that the system is fair.
I’ve no doubt he belongs there, and that a sufficient case has been made, so the result will be a pretty clear indication of whether wikipedia is working or has begun it’s decline.
It’s not about Matt, it’s about the system. Does it work, or doesn’t it?
Ian
Belated congrats on officially going live! :)
“Wow, do I understand this right? Of the things Wikipedia is going to centrally depend on what The Man — in the form of primarily mainstream media (that’s who publishes those magazine articles, books and TV documentaries) — decides is notable.”
Yes, you understand right. One of the dirty little secrets of Wikipedia is how much it runs on telling outsiders that they can validate themselves in an outsider culture by slavishly aping the forms of insiders (that’s hard to parse, but it does make sense). It’s basically the same love/hate relationship bloggers have with the MSM – a counter-culture which craves the acceptance and approval of the dominant culture.
Anyway, I don’t think any of the people up for deletion have to worry. They have sufficient mainstream notability, it just requires some work to put it together to satisfy the doubters.
[Sigh, since this is The Net, let me make clear I'm using that phrase "secret" above in a literary sense and not as a literal description of secrecy. It's secret as in little-known, not as in NSA]
Great summary Danny, just goes to show that so-called authority sites that are community written are not nearly as authoritative as individuals who really know what they are talking about.
Even though it is marketed for Blogs – it makes an additional excellent Web 2.0 tracker for Web sites and Directories!
What is unique about MyBlogLogs is the ability to track OUTClicks and keepss talley of how many visitors have clicked on any particular link daily…(handy, if you have EXTERNAL links)
Since this type of technology only attracts savy Geeks, the community feature offers an insightful option for potential networking with like-minded techies.
Sitemeter also provides an OutCLicks feature – but – it does not have the community feature.
In fact – MyBlogLog along the New SNAP thumbnail Previews – seems to add an entirely new dimension to the limited blog design technology.
Perhaps Sitemeter could also be added here to compliment the MyBlogLog?
Wikipedia is a unique community with different norms than SearchEngineLand or Threadwatch. The Matt Cutts article was flawed because it wasn’t properly referenced. Somebody came along and challenged the article, and a bunch of editors got involved to make the article better.
We also patched up Barry Schwartz and Mike Grehan. The consensus for all three articles is now keep. In his defense, the editor you flame roasted, ju66l3r, was acting in good faith. After the articles were improved, he joined the consensus to keep them.
Remember, people who aren’t involved in SEO have no idea about all these people. When creating a new article editors must reference sources to establish notability.
My impression of Wikipedia is the opposite of yours.
What a fantastic article! In my little niche I’m finding that the wiki editors who have been watching a page for sometime, are getting quite proprietorial and dictatorial about what goes into the page – even when they actually simply don’t know very much about the topic. The fact that they are the ‘editor’ of the page is a rather egotistical and self-awarded role, and there’s just a *teensy* bit of possessiveness too. It used to use the wiki quite a lot, now not so much…
and as for Matt Cutts being notable – George Bush’s official page has 11,800 inlinks (top listing in both G and Y! for the term george bush – broad match), and here’s is his wiki listing http:// en . wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush …
Matt’s blog has more than 100,000 inlinks… but he apparently isn’t worthy of a page – despite the fact that in the online community millions of people have read his blog, know of him, and know exactly what he does… I’m still not sure exactly what it is Mr Bush does… not having a go at him or anything – but Matt’s pretty clear about what he does, and why, and he has big time pull online, and as he is ostensibly in control (at least partly) of over 4 billion websites show-or-no-show status on the web, and has the ability to bring down sites and destroy online business – or build it – I would say that’s pretty BIG pull.. but the wiki chappie reckons he’s not notable… *snort*
Thanks, JE. Glad to know it worked out OK.
As for roasting the editor, I debated that and honestly figured he had it coming. The stuff I dug up? A search on Google brings that stuff up. If the article wasn’t properly sourced, as I said, rather than a debate on killing it, some basic research should be done first. It wasn’t hard to find this material.
I did see his comment that he was disappointed I didn’t just add the material myself. Why would I do that? I’m not going to waste my time adding to a page that someone else might decide the next day to rip apart according to rules and a culture that frankly is anything but transparent.
I mean, it’s difficult to know how the article was “nominated” in the first place. Then who exactly inspired the debate to kill it. And now that the vote has gone as it should, who made that vote? I mean, we were told it’s not a voting thing but that there’s a discussion, then I gather editors all make it happen. Where?
Wikipedia makes a lot about how open it is, but as an outsider, all I can say is that it feels very closed and difficult to know. It’s riddled with acronyms and insider talk. I actually felt the comment about the ODP was pretty close to the mark.
I really do like Wikipedia as a resource. I use it all the time and find it remarkable at how helpful it is. But as I said, then you get something like this, and you just lose faith in it.
Danny, in Wikipedia’s defense, they don’t have a PR department. They don’t have Matt Cutts either. Nor can they afford to fly people to speak at conferences.
I didn’t say the editor didn’t deserve flame roasting on your blog. He should have used the {{notability}} or {{unreferenced}} maintenance tags to draw attention to the article for the purpose of improving it, rather than nominating it for deletion.
Google Adwords isn’t very transparent either, and you need a lot of specific knowledge to run a successful campaign. The SEO community doesn’t know nearly as much about Wikipedia as they should.
The decision to keep the article was made by me. I looked at the comments and saw that there was a clear consensus, so I closed the debate. That’s how Wikipedia works, all volunteer driven.
It’s natural that you wouldn’t want to contribute to Wikipedia directly, because you have other opportunities. As an authority in the field, your comments are frequently original thought. Keep in mind that Wikipedia is not a place to publish original thought and research. It’s a place to gather thoughts that have already been published elsewhere. That’s the value on an encyclopedia, bringing together information that’s spread all over the place to form a concise overview of a topic. Once you have published, Wikipedia editors can then cite your work as a reliable source. Does that make sense?
-Jonathan
Mea Culpa. I was the one who wrote the Matt Cutts Wikipedia entry (User:MParaz). Here’s why. If only I had a chance to clean it up before the call for deletion came out.
Great post Jen. Here’s my own list of 25 blog marketing tips from last June.
One addition I would suggest is to make it easy for readers of the blog to share posts via social bookmark links. del.icio.us, digg, netscape and reddit are good for most blogs.
Hello, Mr. Sullivan.
If you have an account at Wikipedia and would like to discuss the questions that you raise concerning how Wikipedia operates openly to the benefit of all users, then I’d be glad to show you around on the site. Just add a new note to my User Talk page by clicking the link to “Start a new talk topic” near the top and I’d gladly point you to the pertinent pages.
As for some basics that you bring up in your most recent comment:
1) Anyone can and should in good faith create an article for deletion (AfD) discussion for any article that they have concluded does not meet the guidelines of the encyclopedia.
2) It is a 3-step process (tag the article, give your reasoning on the appropriate page for AfD discussions, add the article title to a daily log of discussions).
3) Anyone else is then able to add their conclusions as to the fitness of the article for the encyclopedia and either reinforce or refute the original nomination (or even blaze a new path in the discussion such as deletion for an entirely different reasoning). All of this takes place on that discussion page setup in the second step of the AfD nomination (and is readily linked from the article’s page). Some people will look through the AfD log (setup in step 3) to contribute to any or all of the current discussions in order to help improve the encyclopedia.
4) After a minimum of 5 days (and a minimum of community feedback or else the discussion will be relisted), a closing independent administrator will read through the discussion and determine the best course of action. This isn’t final, there is a process for review of administrative decisions and the deletion process can always be restarted for an article (although the first discussion is not lost and frequently a “kept” article would really need a novel argument for deletion or to have heavily degraded in order to be deleted on future nominations).
Finally, the system isn’t perfect. Some might feel that I jumped the gun on this nomination. It wasn’t my first nomination nor was it the first nomination that resulted in a kept article (although every article I have nominated that resulted in being kept was substantially improved before the end of the AfD discussion to the benefit of the encyclopedia). Others may consider certain subjects to be notable even though consensus found that the article should be deleted. In most cases, an article can easily be reestablished and hopefully its new incarnation will meet the criteria according to consensus. In one case, I rescued an article that was deleted due to copyright violations and reestablished it and it may soon be listed as a Good Article (due to meeting certain criteria for good writing, sourcing, and encyclopedic nature).
I disagree with your assessment of Wikipedia’s openness. I joined the site meaningfully in June 2006 without any information on acronyms, etc. and I now have over 1000 article edits and 3000 total edits across all of the different areas of the website from maintenance and vandalism prevention to article improvement, template discussion, and even policy discussion. The learning curve is not so steep and there is always someone (admin as well as just another editor) available to help clear up any issues with procedure or etiquette. I didn’t do anything special other than take a bit of interest in improving the encyclopedia for everyone (including those like yourself who simply choose to use it for DIY help or topical information and not edit to this point). In my patrolling of new pages and recent edits, I see new editors all of the time who share that same interest and when I go back to only June and revisit some of my old conversations with editors newer than me, I find that their latest contributions are on par with what I’m also now able to accomplish to help the project overall. This all suggests to me that Wikipedia is as open as it can be in its current form (and becoming more open and inviting all the time…some of the recent additions from more involved community members and the WikiMedia software developers make it even easier to get started and see how to contribute).
I would liken it to an open door in a glass wall. It wouldn’t be much of a door without any sort of wall to pass through, but it is open and the other side is hardly a darkened room. You certainly don’t have to enter and you can easily observe and comment from the side you’re currently on, but it’s also not so hard to step in and look around to see what it looks like without the glass between you and the room.
As I began, you or other commenters here are welcome to ask me about getting started on the website if you’d like to improve the encyclopedia. That’s about as open as I can make it for you. Sorry for the length of the comment, but I wanted to address some of your comments and concerns and I’m not sure that I’ll be returning to maintain any sort of dialogue here. Take care.
–Karl
I just thought I’d point to an interesting find by Marion Jensen. He found out that a Wikipedia article he was reading was an exact copy (with no citation) from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and then: “How many other Wikipedia articles have ‘borrowed from’ the 1911 work? In a quick and dirty study, I pulled five random articles from the 1911 Britannica, and a Google search showed exact matches for three of them in Wikipedia.”
Just wonder where that might fit into your conversation here…
Oh, link for the above is here:
http://www.computers.net/2007/01/encyclopedia_br.html
Well, look at that. I guess my page dodged the “not notable” bullet too.
What and odd and amusing experience. I need to write that up someday, including the on-air public radio interview that almost happened as a result.
Great post. I would also suggest 2 other tactics:
1. Registering your blog on Technorati and ensuring it gets pinged with new posts. It’s the leading search engine for blogs and can drive a substantial amount of traffic. It also serves as a scoreboard of sorts by tracking how many blogs have “voted” for you with a link.
2. Managing your blogroll strategically. You’ll need to link to major blogs to be credible, but it’s acceptable to broker link-for-link trades with smaller ones (assuming they’re relevant and useful to your readers). Use Technorati to find the “small fish” and drop them an email.
Good luck!
- adverlicio.us | online advertising archive
Great post!
I use WordPress and in most of the WP themes,
post titles are set to h4. You can easily change it to h1 by modifying theloop.php file.
OK this probably was a stupid act of these wikipedia admins, and articles like this might help preserve those pages, but please people, get to know WP’s culture a bit more…. You can do a lot more good by inviting a few friendly admins like A. B. to give their opinion (as I did), then throwing your own opinion in from an account that has done hardly anything on WP. It’s a trust thing :)
Hi Bill,
Nice post, as usual. Anyway, even if I know you’ll have to translate my post, what do you think a similarity engine could do in this case :
http://adscriptum.blogspot.com/2007/01/10-tips-for-writing-profit-producing-ad.html
and how to find the original author ?
Jean-Marie
Hi Jean-Marie,
Thanks. If I understand correctly, your question is more about which page might appear in search results when a search engine has determined that pages are duplicates or are very similar.
The best description of how a search engine might behave when filtering out pages to be shown to a searcher is in a patent application from Microsoft – System and method for optimizing search results through equivalent results collapsing.
I wrote about it at SEO by the Sea, and I’m not going to duplicate that here, so I’ll just point to it – Microsoft Explains Duplicate Content Results Filtering. Chances are very good that what Microsoft describes there is very similar to what Google and Yahoo are doing when deciding which pages to show.
I don’t think that it makes a difference whether Google is using a similarity engine, as described in this patent, or one of the shingles methods from their other patents, or a phrase-based indexing method to identify duplicates, or some other method. Regardless of what method is being used to identify duplicates, the decision of which pages to show is likely independent of that.
Hi Bill,
“If I understand correctly, your question is more about which page might appear in search results when a search engine has determined that pages are duplicates or are very similar.”
Yes and no. In this case, maybe it’s more about plagiarism than duplicate content, and I guess no similarity engine nor algorithm will be able to determine who is the original author (so the one and only result the search engine should show in SERPs), but a human validator.
I think just this solution would be trully healthy for the Web ecosystem.
Jean-Marie
Very helpful Jen.
Here’s a thought for B2B. Just because you are using blogging software and techniques, doesn’t mean you have to call it a “blog”. In B2B it helps to think of it as a newsroom, pressroom or anything else businesslike and make the user feel s/he is looking at something suitably “professional”. If you are doing that though.
Dixon.
These stats are impressive:
Those visitors coming from Google NEWs add an entirely new dimension to the visitor pool.
People searching on the Organic Search Engines for GOOGLE are a world apart from those searching on Google News for GOOGLE….
These are highly prized vistors for any marketing news blog to have.
Surprising, YAHOO NEWS was not mentioned, (they also provide a quality source)
To further analyze the stats, it should be noted whether these were unique visitors (who never knew about SearchEngineLand) or people who chose to search BEFORE coming here.
If in fact, these were ‘uniques’, this was potentially even more valuable – especially if they keep returning.
The stumbleUpon visitors,also add an entirely new dimension, they apparently are academic-geek oriented, and are sophisticated and learned – as a whole.
As I commented there:
Disclaimer: I-Am-Not-A-Lawyer. That being said:
1) Of course public domain works can be used commercially – many publishers sell copies of Shakespeare’s plays, or Greek drama, which are in the public domain.
2) As I parse it (IANAL! IANAL!), the initial material is a *request*, not a legal restriction.
3) It is indeed phrased in a way that it might be mistaken for a terms-of-service contract. Whether this is intentional or not, is unclear.
4) The big legal problem is not copyright, but *contract* (”of adhesion”).
Current US law is tending towards the view that a contract can take away
rights which you would have under copyright law. But it’s a murky area.
However, if Google said, “this is a public domain book, but in consideration
for us giving you this copy, you agree BY CONTRACT to the following
restrictions …”, there’s an argument that *is* enforceable.
Isn’t this just a good way of Google monetising trademark searches more? Brand searches are huge – it must be frustrating for the Googlers to see all that empty inventory.
So this kills two birds with one stone:
1, Outsource all those pesky trademark problems to the trademark owners instead and let them do as they please. As well as helping with the lawsuits, you don’t need as many people at Google to do this. I understand that the backlog to process trademark issues is now a few months.
2, Start making money again. Okay, so a ‘transaction fee’ isn’t as nice as keeping all the revenue, but it’s better than nothing, which is what Google are getting on a lot of trademark searches. A small transaction fee on millions of trademark clicks a day is still a lot of money.
Great info. I have often wondered about the ramifications of using feedburner’s urls. I didn’t think it would be that easy to change, so I just never bothered.
I have a podcast as well as a few blogs that I will change.
Wow. Great post. Thanks for this.
Matt Martone, JobSearchMarketing.com
I love this list, but there is one thing that you mention that you don’t seem to be implementing.
24) Use a Good URL Structure
Don’t use “permalinks
Nice video on CNN today about Google…Melissa Meyer is on there.
Scott
Yahoo’s guidelines for trademark are certainly easier to understand and work with as an advertiser.
To use your example- I should be able to buy the keyword Marriott and display the word Marriott if my landing page has something to do with Marriott. Trademark owners and users should benefit from that simple model.
One of the trickier things about Trademark law is that, without clear guidance on what is infringement and what is not, Trademark owners are compelled to protect their Trademarks or risk losing them to public domain. We’re all in desperate need of legal clarification.
Clarity would also limit the practice of trademark owners forcing other advertisers out of the marketplace simply to lower their per click costs.
Very interesting, I’ve added this in the comments.
So, it is legal for me to republish this, Google emphasizes, but I’ve escalated this into the select group of Google experts — like you Danny — to find out about that. But how is average Google-searcher Joe gonna understand what he can do with these books? Which brings us to a second question: why is Google creating this netiquette? To me, the proper netiquette for works in the public domain is “you can read, remix, republish, commercially or non-commercially, personal or public, any of the content you find in this book”, and Google can go ahead and include their additional “we’d appreciate your (voluntary) link back to Google Books if you do”.
Legal discussion of the general topic:
http://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/?p=460
http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2005/07/photography-and-copyright-continued.html
Philipp, I read the Google text “Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians.” plus the “We also ask that you” part and definitely took it as a request, not an obligation. There was already an official response, but I happened to be in a meeting with a Book Search person this morning, so I asked there as well. This is definitely an etiquette request, not some contract or legal obligation.
It’s funny that every time Google announces something that’s done largely for the public good, someone comes out and frets over turning the venture into a “commercial” enterprise.
Seems to me Sergey and Larry just like doing stuff like this. And if they sell ads for astronomy mags and telescopes and such along with it, what’s wrong with that?
Good tip. Best of both worlds I guess.
You can also create a mobile widget for the sidebar of your blog. Users enter their phone number and start receiving text message alerts on their phone with a short synopsis every time you update your blog. It keeps your readers coming back – great tool. You can make these widgets for free here: open.4info.net
-Nick
I agree – it’s also making my Google Alerts (one of which is set to my name/site) almost totally useless.
Fix it, guys. It’s ruining your other services.
Ian
Well of course another tip is to comment on other blog posts where you think they’ve brought out some useful insights. Thanks for doing this. :)
This all just doesn’t make sense from a retailer’s point of view. Google has just disallowed our use of the term ‘Levis’ in our online ads. We are a retailer that has been selling Levis (along with many other clothing brands) for over 40 years, and for the last six years on the internet. We have a contract with Levis to promote and sell their product. We pay Levis for their product with the express purpose of selling it at the retail level. This is all very simple and very common.
Buying an ad on Google to promote the brand name products we sell is no different from buying an ad in a newspaper. How are we to do business if Google (or the newspaper) prevents us from lawfully advertising our products?
And why should Google pay a fee to the brand holder? Is that asked of any other advertising media? No. In fact, it’s usually the opposite — the brand owner pays us, in co-op advertising, to promote their product that we sell.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it all seems a bit of an over reaction by Google. Everyone benefits from legitimate advertising of brand named goods – including the trademark owner. It’s always been done this way.
We are in no way being deceptive – we are simply promoting a product that we are licensed to sell by the manufacturer.
Is seems that Google is throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
Ha, I can’t believe you emigrated to the UK from Sunny California Danny. What tempted you over? Was it the weather? The delightful cuisine? or the love a beautiful woman? =P
I run legitimate people search site – SearchBug ( http://www.searchbug.com/ ). We have been online for more then 10 years.
I subscribe for Google alerts for “searchbug” keyword and I am getting daily messages with about 10 to 15 new “people search” spam blogs that use our brand name (registred US trademark) in the title or body of the blogs.
Later those blogs start regirecting users to this webiste: people-search.com. Here are some examples:
civazajag.blogspot.com/index.html
bafijixotuh.blogspot.com/index.html
This should stop!
I’ve been waiting for an article like this to come out as I’ve been waaaay too lazy to research and write one myself. Of course, now you’ve added another 20 tasks for my To Do list. But seriously, great stuff Jen!
another option – for those not able to edit their DNS-records – is to http-redirect your original feed-URL to feedburner. wordpress-users may look into this plugin:
http://orderedlist.com/wordpress-plugins/feedburner-plugin/
Actually the Wordpress plugin is a better option for Wordpress users than using MyBrand.
1. Users are registering to a feed that is on the same domain
2. It is as easy to setup as switching on the plugin and giving it the Feedburner feed to redurect to
3. You don’t rely on a future possible feed management company having a similar feature to MyBrand
4. You can decide to manage your own feeds at a later date, and it works immediately
5. oh, it is free – though it is still best to use a Feedburner Pro account if you receive enough traffic to warrant it.
I would however point out that it is highly important to use one of these options. So many blogs have a different URL for their auto-detected , theme included and chicklet icons, thus splitting their readership in multiple directions.
Another problem would be if I saw this new program and decided to register popular search queries as trademarks. Would Google then have to start paying me royalties? How would we decide?
These stats are impressive, and illustrate how versatile Social sites have changed the landscape of the traditional dependancy on Search Engines. :-)
It is a good idea to show the stats daily – both the good days,the bad and the mediocre.
This is a learning experience, so all information is quality information.
But, one major flaw with the stats packages referenced, is they do NOT show the TIME a particular visitor spent on that landing page nor the OUTCLICKS.
Sitemeter DOES do this, which is why it is an alternative worth sharing for true transparancy.
Analyzing the time and the overall ‘average’ time spent, illustrates how entertaining the topics were – and the OUTCLICKS illustrate whether they were intrigued to explore other pages, or if they did a cursory glance and clicked the back button to go back.
(sometimes getting many replies can be a hint, but usually the piece has to be controversial)
Also, it would be intriguing to find out what percentages are returning visitors.
Danny,
What you describe about SEL / Digg is really common, and I guess you’re seeing the other side of it. We had plenty of posts that SEW either covered or linked to in passing, and it nearly ALWAYS outranked our post. In the end, we just comforted ourselves by saying, “well, at least people are getting the info from somewhere, right?”
No, it didn’t make us feel better either… ;-)
This reminds me of the difficulty faced by scholars who work with libraries and museums that make available the public domain photographs in their collections. More than a few institutions take that public domain work back into a kind of private domain, by demanding money and an agreement that limits usage in exchange for making the materials available. Whether this is a way to recover costs or a hijacking of culture is debatable.
Hi Danny,
It would be great to have some way to let Google know that there was a problem, other than leaving posts in forums.
How about a “Contact Us” link in Webmaster tools so we could let them know when we see a problem or don’t understand why our home page has been dropped from the index (that also happened here in the US this week). We can report Spam, or request re-inclusion if our site has violated their guidelines, but there is no place to say, “Help!”
Yes, they would probably be flooded with requests, but it would be better than the convoluted way that information is getting passed around.
I don’t understand how a standard metasearch engine is comment worthy. What was special enough about this one to make a mention here ?
Darn I was going to blog about digg “beating” you on the sex blog thing. I cam across it last night when putting the threadwatch story together.
I’m too interested in this debate but it is, as you point out, very hard to miss. So I’ve read a few posts other than yours (I have ignored most of them).
I think John Tawadros wrote a nice counterpoint over at SEW.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3624467
I think part of the Duplicate Content Freakout is due to the old school SEOs trotting out ‘duplicate content goes into the Supplemental Index’ responses in knee-jerk fashion every time someone complains about their pages going Supplemental.
If people would just stop and do some actual analysis or ask for more information before provding explanations in the SEO forums, the signal-to-noise ratio would improve tremendously.
Even many admins and moderators don’t bother to get enough facts before handing out irrelevant stock answers. So the SEO advisory community is very much to blame for many of the misunderstandings about duplicate content simply because the “experts” are very dismissive of anyone whose content has gone Supplemental.
Cranky is apparently part of or partnered with the EONS Web site, which is now running television advertising to build its membership. It sounds like a social network for the over-50 crowd, many of whom are now key decision-makers in various corporate and government structures.
I wonder how long it will take the marketing community to squelch the signal there?
You are running MyBlogLog on the site and their stats are live as well. They also provide clickable links.
One thing I would like is for them to provide a list sorted by most recent activity, but you can certainly spot traffic coming in as it happens for any larger spike.
The Pro service isn’t that expensive for what it give you, and we all know running an analytics service is a heavy drain on servers.
cRANKy is a web search engine that has been available at http://www.eons.com since the sites launch on July 31st. Earlier this week EONS publsihed some of the query and Compete data and launched cRANKy at http://www.cranky.com. The cRANKy kernel is truly a social ranking relevancy engine. The engine uses the ratings provided by Eons editors, Eons members (who are age 49+) the data collected by Compete, Inc. about where this demographic browses for information on the web, and the algorithmic ranking provided by our web search OEM partner to compute the relevancy ranking of the result set. cRANKy displays the top 4 results on the first page, and then 10 results on subsequent pages. The results are easily distinguishable from sponsored listings, particularly when they include Eons editorial and member reviews.
Take a look at the SERPS now for starts-with-vee-and-rhymes-with-”Niagra”.
How is this reconciled with Matt Cutts’ statement:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-08-03-n29.html
“And the fact is, we don’t really have much in the way to say, this is a link from the ODP, or from .gov, or .edu, to give that some sort of special boost. It’s just those sites tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to them (and reputable people link to them).”
While it may be all coincidence or trends in spamming, it sure looks like .edu sites have TrustRank bonuses.
>CSS Crawling
What I’m interested in is how Google handles text hidden using css for other reasons. Particularly ajax type situations, or people who use CSS/Javascript to show and hide menus…
Otherwise finding hidden text seems like a good idea to me :)
Danny,
SEO is changing, as this is it’s nature. SEO is still relevant, otherwise there would not be such a debate. It is a marketing tool that should be understood, however, it should not be the only focus of a successful marketer. SEO is not the end-all be-all, but it is still as relevant as it ever was. The only difference between now and then, is that manipulation techniques are not as easy to come by. In my opinion, SEO should play an important role in the design, development and maintenance of any website. So, it should become old hat, but put it in your spent bank at your own peril.
Seth Finkelstein wrote: “While it may be all coincidence or trends in spamming, it sure looks like .edu sites have TrustRank bonuses.”
It looks more like people have built up trust in those pages through inbound linkage because the domains themselves have not been lumped in with so-called “bad neighborhoods”.
Trust is a self-managing mechanism. All the search engines can do is pick a standard for measuring trust and apply it. Each standard has some flaws, of course.
BTW — as Danny noted here on SearchEngineLand (and elsewhere), “TrustRank” is a Yahoo! term. Google uses “Trust Filters” (per Matt Cutts on his blog).
I weighed in with my thoughts in a three-part blog post: Part 1, Part II, and Part III.
Nice I did not realise I was a geriatric. When do I get my AARP newsletter.
I wish they had enough search volume for my clients to be worth spending the time to figure out all these great features. Even with very little time spent, I’ve seen high ROIs with MSN/Live/Ms.Dewey/Whatever. Unfortunately the search product seems to be hindered by declining usage (and brand confusion).
I really wish it would work, so I am flying to Seattle for a mini-conference at Microsoft in two weeks, and they are even picking up the hotel bill. Well, they can wine and dine us all they like. If the search engine has no inventory, what’s the point of adCenter?
Hi Danny,
I discovered your radio shows about three months ago now via WebMasterRadio.fm and have become a regular listener and subscriber to your sites’s feeds.
>>What’s your problem?
OK, since you asked…
My problem is I have a site being penalized: (churm.com – full link not added to avoid giving you any kind of penalty) – it’s out of the index. In Google’s WebMaster Tools I receive no message stating that I’m being penalized, perhaps because it’s an affiliate site and Google thinks it’s therefore evil ?
I believe my site adds content by offering RSS feeds for Amazon products and searches – which Amazon does not. Also I believe that because my site offers a more minimal layout than Amazon it is easier for at least some people to use.
But several reinclusion requests sent off over a period of several months have resulted in not a single response back from Google…and a site not found in Google is, these days, a dead site.
Is there anything else I can do, or do I have to just write off the favorite domain in my portfolio as unusable?
Thanks,
Tom
__________________
‘
Perhaps it is the term ‘SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) that is confusing everyone.
Like everything else, the field will evolve as technology evolves.
We could make ‘SEO’ the umbrella term – or- define a NEW hybrid term that reflects the newest tech trends and complete goals. WE DO NOT have to continue using the same term
Were we the first to use it in a marketing sense?
forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=78
If so, perhaps a broader term should have been created – but social sites, personalization, search marketing and Web 2.0 did not exist (widely) when that term was first coined.
However, a couple of years ago, the need for a reinvention was urged….
forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=4718&postcount=9
The GOALS will always still be the same:
* Getting Websites to the attention of likely prospects …..via Search Engine Organics – Sponsor Links, Directories, – and now, Social Sites and viral marketing.
But that effort is now more complex and unveils more options to manipulate.
So, perhaps it IS time for a Name and Concept Change.
One could future topic could be coming up with a new term
Been following the thread on SEW on this, and its a topic that seems to go on on and on.
Superb overview of the market as you see it Danny, with a good smattering of your own viewpoints thrown in.
I have to agree wholeheartedly with a couple of your viewpoints, namely
“As for the reputation problem, I’ve had Jason Calacanis exchanging IMs with me recently — Jason of the “seo is bullshit” line from when I talked with him last month (and hear it here). Jason was hammering at me. All the big companies hate this stuff. They think you’re all slime. You need to dump the name SEO and come up with something new.”
Personally I am finding a lot of companies embracing SEO, and freeing themselves from the cautious approach that seems to have been prevalent in the past. Whilst their is still some work to do, I can’t help thinking that people like yourself spreading the message as you have been can only raise the profile more and more.
Humpf (at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man)
how is a search engine bringing up the rear a “world-class technology company”
Employed any Nobel prizwiners we dont know about ?
IBM, Sandia, Bell Labs and PARC are real exmples hell eaven BT used to do some cuting edge stuff at Disastral Park (when it was BT labs)
RE: “Country-Specific Results & Lost Home Pages”.
I’m glad to learn that Matt Cutts has promised to look into this problem, although his comments so far seem to indicate doubts that it IS a problem. I just want to add confirmation from my own experience in the UK that it comes up frequently. British companies with sites hosted in the UK and with plenty of evidence in site content that describes them as a UK-based or UK-only business who choose the .com domain (rather than co.uk) can be listed in the top ten default results of google.co.uk but not found at all when the same search is performed using the “pages from the UK” option offered by google.co.uk. Companies choosing the co.uk domain for their sites are guaranteed an appropriate ranking in the “pages from the UK” results. Otherwise, however, there is little difference between Google’s default results and its “pages from the UK” results, at least for users located in the UK and it’s hard to understand what purpose is served by offering the two options at all. If the default results offered a ‘world view’ by ignoring the user’s (UK) location and then a (very different) UK-centric view via the “pages from the UK” option, it would make some sense. There is a strong case for making the default results at google.co.uk “pages from the UK” – perhaps with an option to choose a wider-world view as an alternative… in other words reversing the present situation, but at the same time making the results that are not “pages from the UK” more of a real alternative.
Bill, hi again
a bit off-topic, but did you read that : http://www.ificlaims.com/press_release012007a.htm
I’ve seen somewhere than Microsoft is not enough innovative, it doesn’t seem! 1463 patents in 2006, rank 12
J-M
They might be great product innovators, but they are scarcely open to the idea of free competition. If you’re a former employee, you may very well get sued if try to keep working in the same industry.
Searching through the granted patents and published patent applications every week, I do see a lot of patent filings from Microsoft.
Some of them are innovative, and some of them maybe less so. I’m not sure that volume of patent filings by itself is a clear indication of innovation.
But there is some interesting stuff amongst those patent applications.
This is a great list that Lee has come up with. Scanning and researching these various blogs took up way too much time in my work day, but I couldn’t stop.
Chris:
FWIW, a service that offers Free ECN quotes (other services including real-time EXCHANGE quotes are fee-based) is FreeRealTime.com
http://www.freerealtime.com
Registration is required but easy and fast to complete.
They also offer a mobile version:
http://wap.freerealtime.com
The Yahoo! Buzz Index goes way beyond what you see on the public site. Back when I was at Yahoo! we conceived of the product as a marketing dashboard that would give you all types of insight on arguably one of the largest online panels in the world.
The client version (http://buzz.yahoo.com/client/)of the Buzz Index empowers marketers to slice and dice data to find out aggregate information (without personally identifiable information) about who was engaging with a brand, concept, or search term.
It was a lot of fun dreaming up that product when I was at Yahoo! Glad to finally see the patent has been granted.
Subscribed content is ALREADY showing up in search results and the search engines need to take it out. I am sick and tired of clicking on academic access portals that allowed Googlebot in but won’t allow anyone else in who doesn’t have an account.
Hi Michael,
I should probably rewrite that snippet, to reflect that the patent application really isn’t talking about those types of results.
Helpful post, thanks. I second Barry Welford’s tip about participating in comments sections. Douglas Karr recently discovered that 26.13% of visitors to his blog came from sites where he had commented: http://www.douglaskarr.com/2007/01/10/the-long-tail-of-commenting-never-blog-alone. Keep your comments interesting and positive, and folks will click.
Users tend to rate/review things which they have more of an emotional response to, whether it be positive or negative, I think.
Users typically feel more strongly about Movies for instance, and are more likely to rate them than something like Car Inspection businesses.
Restaurants, which engage emotional response through visual sense and through the sense of taste achieve a greater response from Gas Stations, as another example.
Your question on whether users will go rate something at multiple different sites is interesting. I think they’d be more inclined to rate stuff at a site they consider to be the main/authoritative one for the subject matter.
Right on Danny. For those that know- it’s not rocket science. To my new clients and friends who are asking what I do in my new job- the first questions they ask are: “Oh! I never heard of that! How do you do it? I never heard of this field.”
Another tip:
Participate in the comments on your own blog. Eg when you ask your readers to leave good tips (and have them create content for you) like in this post, but don’t seem to care about the users themselves (like ignoring a question as the one from Jennifer Apple). Especially when noted that your own practice is different from what you claim people should do in your post. How trustworthy is the article then? Do you really care about helping people?
Some webdesigners are just as smart when asking me to review their new html or css books on css3.info, i always love it when done right!
One embodiment of the first patent (retrieving an access control list (ACL) associated with the document) remembers me Lighthouse, a concept a bit mysterious ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/leuski00lighthouse.html )?
J-M
Another nice results from this paper:
- Usualy users review first 8 results before repost the query.
- Users who clicks on results 7-10 usualy never views the first result !
How does all this affect the reputation of the overall Search Marketing Industry? Can “A house divided against itself will fall” be applied to any extent here, from the perspective of an “outsider” marketer looking in for the first time at Search Marketing?
Building links is like building business relationships. You can use techniques like direct mail or purchase leads, but the best way to build a business relationship is to engage in the relationship before the business. When there is a win/win approach, why wouldn’t they want to return the favor?
I am just starting out(3 months ago) and have purchased a domain name and had it forwarded to my blog. I should have started the other way around, but didn’t. My question is, is this harmful for the success of the blog going forward? I notice that no traffic data can be pulled from new domain name. Any suggestions?
Awesome post. And I agree with Dixon: ‘blog’ can be a scary word in many areas of the business world, so I’ve suggested ‘newsroom’ or ‘corporate information center’
You also make a good point about design. With the right design scheme, a blog doesn’t have to look like a blogger page.
> I love this list, but there is one thing that you mention that you don’t seem to be implementing. 24) Use a Good URL Structure
Ah, well Jen and I might disagree on the value of having terms in a name. I think it definitely is worth doing if you can, but it’s not crucial.
We don’t use them here because Movable Type doesn’t export them well. Instead, we use a day/time combination that I know allows me to move entries into any blogging system or into a new setup without having to do a lot of redirections.
For more on this, see this on my personal blog, Movable Type & Rebuild Safe URLs
Danny,
Well put!
Don’t forget – creating a buzz about/around you blog is still a very important aspect of blogging and a website, you can do this by sharing with your friends. Don’t be ashamed to market yourself to others.
One of the first Ancestors of Modern Search Engine Optimization
http://www.ericward.com/yahoo.txt
Hmmm… Any chance of sharing your own list of blogs you read? I’d be curious to see what an SEL person reads (that isn’t on Lee Odden’s list).
Well I don’t know what “Three ways” are, but I’m intrigued :) I think my wife may have something to say about that though…
My link strategy is pretty simple for 2007, I plan on buying Google and then having all their results point to my sites…
Or it would be nice If I could get Search Engine Land to link back to me… Not sure which one will be harder?
In discussing the second grapth, you wrote that “the first long line dropping down shows that on average, participants reviewed at least eight results”. This is not correct statement. What we understand is that people go through about eight results on a page without selecting anything before changing their queries. So these eight results are applied only to the case of query change.
Other interesting point is that no data on the result-9 selection. What does this mean?
Hey I was glad to see one of my client’s sites link exchange page within the top 10 results in your Casinos link that pointed to Google.
Eric, Welcome. I am glad that you have joined the ladies and gents here at SEL.
I look forward to your posts.
Hello. I’ve summarized some info about Google SERPs embedded with links to related searches; if you’re willing to take a look, I’ll really appreciate it.
Is it possible that Google is showing links to related searches on pages involving a keyword “borrowed” from Google Zeitgeist or is this keyword taken from the daily American English vocabulary? What do you think?
Eric,
This is yet another reason to read SEL frequently. I do have a couple of questions:
Are you going to be writing this alone?
Are you planning to only write weekly?
I’va also tried and received results based on “art”, “music”, “tv” and “computer”. At first I thought these results were based on auctionable items, but it seems that these are very different and are similar as popular objects of ambiguity.
For instance, computers can relate to laptops, desktops, industrial, history, products, etc. just as tv can be the product, shows, online tv, and more.
Just my 2 cents.
Great article and good comments above. One additional thing – re: #25: “Use great categories”. Do you think people actually browse through categories? I believe that users scan the homepage, read feeds in their reader software, or search. But rarely do they browse the sections on a blog.
The Eye is intuitively attracted to whatever is ATTRACTIVE
The pastel background color placed behind the sponsor links…ATTRACTS
The BOLD that Google adds to urls, Title and Description keywords – that match the keywords of the search queries…ATTRACTS
Also the eye notices KEYWORDS, but may gloss over STOPWORDS in the description – so efficiency is the new norm
Also Capitalization appears to ATTRACT – but too much appears intimidating
The new MAP links added by Google to some listings …ATTRACT
The Local Listings defauting on the top of the Organic SERPS …ATTRACT -
and since they include the phone numbers – they may trigger an action, without even clicking on their sites.
Also the environment someone is in and the amount of competing for attention behavior affect their reactions.
A busy office will trigger a different response from a surfer than a quiet evening at home.
Therefore AOL DEFAULT surfers are different form MSN DEFAULT surfers – AND CERTAINLY are different from Google surfers!
It would be interesting to see a study on how widescreen laptops show less results without scrolling versus an old fashioned CRT screen and the effect this has on searching. In my quick glance, it doesn’t appear that is in this report.
If intrested in what his original wordpress blog looked like you can see it here.
http://www.aaronnimocks.com/hacker.html
My site, (http://www.peoplesearchnews.com) discovered this same issue weeks ago.
We wrote an article which lists several resources for reporting fake blogs. You can read that article here: http://www.peoplesearchnews.com/technology/what-you-can-do-to-stop-fake-blogs/
Also, a group of us has gotten together and reported all of these blogs numerous times. So far, I can see no results from our efforts.
Additionally, the only legitimate update I received was the press release from Searchbug.com, last week.
Lastly, has anyone considered these blogs will affect our domains? I have noticed that most of the links within these blogs are no-follows except for those pointing to “competitors” domains.
I hope this problem is fixed soon.
I am surprised they did not do it sooner. Can’t really blame them for promoting their own services more.
> Google leads with a long-standing article
> I wrote on the topic over at Search Engine
> Watch. Call me biased, but it’s still a
> good resource.
Heh :)
The main problem I see with this site is the “why bother” effect, even if it would be great (which I have to conclude it’s not after reading your review). Why bother bookmarking a secondary engine when a) Wikipedia already appears a lot in Google, when it’s relevant b) I can simply search Google for [wikipedia bla] if I want to find Wikipedia’s article on “bla”. Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia are just closer to the actual user base that may be looking for a Wikipedia search feature, so I don’t see how Wikiseek can compete with them.
I notice on the example query given, local.yahoo.com appears in the 4th position of the results set.
Danny,
On ResourceShelf I’ve compiled a post that offers:
1) A look at Wikiseek. I ran several searches (similar to what you did) and present results of what I found.
2) A bit about WikiWax, a cool tool to help search the main Wikipedia database.
Direct at: http://www.wikiwax.com
3) A brief intro to Intute, a non-commercial web directory based in U.K. In addition to the directory (amazing quality) they also offer a tool called Intute Harvester. It “harvests” and makes searchable pages from the resources included in the directory.
Direct at: http://www.intute.ac.uk/harvester.html
4) Finally, I take a look at how we use Wikipedia content at Ask.com. Often, but not always, as Smart Answers or directly via the “encyclopedia” interface. Disclosure: As you know, I’ve been at Ask.com as Director of Online Info Resources for about a year.
My post can be found here:
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/01/16/lets-talk-wikiseek-and-wazap/
Judging from my experience with IE7, I can see why it hasn’t helped Microsoft. IE7 crashes on me several times a day. I find myself using Firefox more and more since the “upgrade” to IE7.
Unfortunately, there are still some clueless web sites out there that won’t work in Firefox.
Of course, the whole “Live” campaign has been a disaster as well.
The complete and total lack of authority, reliability, and accuracy in Wikipedia’s content makes this so-called search engine a double joke. You cannot take bad, unreliable content and then thrust it upon people as if it is the only content on the Web that matters.
Why on Earth would anyone want to use this tool?
Seems like a move that Microsoft would do. Google should focus on providing users with the best information, not just their information.
Wouldn’t this go against a more overarching concept of network neutrality? And, with that in mind, is it legal for them to “fix” or “payola” searches in a manner that will only benefit them and their clients?
The Search Wikia project is still in the formative stages – as far as I know, the development machines aren’t even live yet (I’ve been participating on the mailing list, and have no more connection than that).
SearchMe is start-up company, which apparently “partnered” to use Wikipedia in Wikiseek.
Stemming is one possibility, though there may be others. Google came out with a number of patent applications that describe query refinements, including spelling corrections, which would also display of a number of pages in results that go with the refinement. Here’s a snippet from one of those:
There’s a method described in those patent applications, of defining a confidence level for different possible refinements above which it would display a refinement and associated results upon the original results page, and below which it would require someone to click upon the refinement to see results that go with it.
I always have mixed feelings when Google pulls this type of thing, and those thoughts tend to go like this, in very quick sequence.
1) Hey! Google has every right to take advantage of their leadership and search dominance!
2) But wait, they are always claiming the high road and press releases always imply strongly they don’t do manual ranking, manual penalties and adjustments when everybody in search knows that they do. Why do they have this hidden double standard that nobody talks about?
3) And wait, they rarely admit mistakes or taking a “less than exemplary” or “whoops, that WAS evil!” apologetic tone. Google you saying you are 100% virtuous?
4) But, but, all the engineers I’ve met to a person are great people, always very sincere in conversations and blogging, always committed to bettering the web even if there’s little in it for Google and sometimes if it’ll hurt Google. Clearly they surpass Yahoo and MSN in terms of self serving stuff.
Hmmmm – I just don’t get Google.
Wow! Here we are expecting the next Google instead we get slapped in the face with a second rate search engine.
Thank you
You gotta like a search engine that uses Google AdSense to monitize the site!
Viva Google!
See no evil
Hear no evil
Do no evil
Link to no evil?
Eyes on the prize, boys. Is this the best user experience, or are we becoming a tad territorial (pardon the terrible pun) about our maps?
I know this is about “networks” but as SEOs defining a difference between AOL and Google is silly. Google powers AOL and in the realm of SEO counting them as seperate may be a mistake. Rank well in Google to get both.
It’s trendy to wear Nike shoes. It’s trendy to have an iPod. And now, these days, it’s trendy to complain about Google.
First, you say “Google’s promoting this new feature right within its main search results”, but then admit that it’s a “OneBox” feature. Maybe you have a different view of what the “main search results” area is, but the OneBox feature isn’t a part of it, neither is the “tips” section. Feel free to analyze the following URL closely:
http://www.google.com/help/interpret.html
The items indicated by “I” (and when applicable, “O”) are search results. It is the only thing guaranteed to come up if a search yields results (with “O” items optionally appearing to group links from the same site). OneBox items don’t show up for every search, nor do tips. But to be fashionable, and join the “Let’s Complain About Google Every Chance We Get Club,” it makes perfect sense to declare OneBox results as “main search results” and then automatically declare that Google is up to no good.
Then, you talk about how completely useless a feature is that lets one filter product search results to only those who accept Google Checkout. Maybe you consider this to be a worthless feature, but this is something I actively look for. I use Google Checkout on a regular basis and it gives me a better shopping experience than always going to some new website such as IBoughtSomeMemoryCardsFromTheStoreAndAmSellingThemOnline.com. I feel more comfortable paying through Google Checkout than by entering credit card information on the first website that happens to show the cheapest price. I have also been burned by buying memory cards and DVDs from eBay that turned out to be counterfeit, and PayPal/eBay did little to resolve the situation. So, I often filter product search results by those who accept Google Checkout, even if it means I pay a couple of dollars more for a $100 item.
You pointed out that this must not be an important feature because it can’t be found on Froogle’s home page, or in the advanced search within Froogle. But you admit that it DOES appear in the SEARCH RESULTS within Froogle. Well, guess what? It doesn’t appear on the home page of Google (unless you’ve personalized it) and it doesn’t appear in the advanced search within Google, but it does appear within the Google OneBox results if you perform a product search. In other words, your mention of the home page or the advanced page was just a senseless argument. I understand your real complaint, more or less, to be that you don’t like how features of Froogle appear in a OneBox in a Google search. Yet, Google has always been doing this. Adding the link was just playing catch-up with a feature that has been in Froogle for quite a while.
Also, regarding OneBox results, linking to competitors until their own product is up-to-speed and then dropping the links to the competitors has always been Google’s method. I don’t see why, after all of these years, it is suddenly becoming a problem. So, yes, I agree… when Google Finance catches up to the competitors, they will likely drop the link to the competing services and show information exclusively from their own Google Finance. How is this a problem? In my opinion, it is very user-centric. Rather than providing NOTHING or something SUB-PAR, they actually send their own users to the competition! It’s on par with Progressive’s (car insurance) philosophy. Then, when they feel they are providing a tool comparable to the competition, there is no longer a need to link to multiple sites. Again, what’s the problem?
If you like using MapQuest, then go to MapQuest and do a search there. Google is simply providing a one-stop search-shop. You can search for a phone number, a movie, a stock ticker, a question, an address, a product, etc, etc… all from one location. And, they are able to provide the answer all in one location. Then, to give even more, they link to one of their own verticals to provide even more detailed information. Seems pretty straight-forward. They likely felt there was a need to store addresses and allow multiple destinations before dropping the links to the other services that had these features. With Google Finance, there are likely other milestones they feel they need to reach before dropping the other links as well.
Then, you say merchants might be “left out” if they don’t use Google Checkout? Well, absolutely, but this has nothing to do with the addition of a link to the Google OneBox result for product searches. Most who click the link are already going to be Google Checkout users who only want to purchase using Google Checkout. So, non-Google-Checkout merchants WILL be left out when Google Checkout users want to shop. The same goes for non-PayPal merchants when PayPal users want to shop. It’s the way the market works with these things. I’m sure brick-and-mortar stores feel “left out” if they don’t accept Visa and MasterCard. Sure thing. It’s what the users want.
Now MAYBE some NON-Google-Checkout users might click that link. Why? Because they’re confused and they’re not sure what the link does, so they just click it? Is this much different than a confused Internet user who fails to click on the first search result and always goes straight to the second link? Uh oh. Maybe SEO companies need to focus on getting us to link NUMBER TWO, instead. I don’t mean to sound negative… I mean this in all honesty. Yes, there are probably those who will click the link, unaware of what the link means. But, in all reality, you can’t design a website for these types of people. You’d end up filling every link and nook and cranny of a website with little question mark icons and helpful hints and tips, making things even more confusing. Heck, Google can’t even provide a “tip” without getting everyone riled up.
All in all, in my opinion this is another useful feature for me. Before, I had to click the link to see the results on Froogle (or choose Froogle first), THEN I had to click the link to see the results from merchants that accept Google Checkout. Now, I get to skip an extra mouse click, which is always beneficial.
I often used Google Blog Search and was rather frustrated that they didn’t have an easy link for it. So, I always typed blogsearch.google.com to visit it. I was glad they added a link to Google News, so I was often a click away. Now, they have added it to the top links, which is even better. They are, slowly but surely, integrating all of their services together, bringing all of the verticals into the feeling of a single roof. I can see this as only being beneficial to the users of Google. Those who are watching Google very closely and trying to find something wrong with every little tweak can find something wrong with just about everything.
Why isn’t anyone complaining loudly about eBay still disallowing Google Checkout, after all of this time. How long before eBay considers Google Checkout a valid payment option? Is eBay just trying to buy time until they can lock people more and more into the PayPal “option”?
How about the fact that IE7 has a search box that you can’t make go away? I have seen many avid users of the Google Toolbar get rid of it simply because they don’t like seeing two different search boxes take up screen real estate and since they couldn’t get rid of IE7’s, they got rid of the Google Toolbar.
Don’t get me wrong… I understand opinions are opinions, and free speech is a wonderful thing. It just seems, at this point, people are complaining louder and louder and more harshly about infinitesimal things. I swear, if George Bush happens to choke on a pretzel again, I would imagine this time around everyone would somehow compare the incident to the fact that he is sending more troops into Iraq.
We all get it, Google isn’t perfect. We all get it, Google sometimes makes changes that aren’t favorable to the user and then promptly reverses these changes when it becomes apparent. We all get it, even Google can succumb to bugs and security issues. Report about it, that’s super. But turning every little new link or link removal into a call for the Google Terrorists to unite and cause another virtual online riot is just getting a bit tiring. It’s what is giving blogs a bad name. Over-exaggerated bias gave newspapers and magazines a bad name, and now this very same tactic is spilling into the online media such as blogs. You can’t find a decent article among the Google and Sony bashing. Maybe if the media (as a whole) started focusing on more positive things in the world, the world would be a more positive place. Let’s not become ignorant and avoid the negative realities, but let’s not be information terrorists and exaggerate every reality into a negative one.
Well, that was my two dollars. ;)
Oh, and what’s with FORCING people to sign up for TypeKey? Why not link to other competing products as well? :D Just kidding. Or, aaaaam I?
Holy cow!
That first comment is longer than the post.
Being slightly contrarian, it might be a good thing if Google does lose some trust. Looking down the road I can’t help but be somewhat fearful of a world dominated by Google. Anything that breaks that domination has to be a good thing IMO.
I see Read/Write are covering Google promoting Checkout on their homepage http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_promotes_checkout.php
Disclosure really is important, I don’t know anyone, who doesn’t work in search or development, other than people I showed, who knows you can add ‘+’ to a query, and there’s nowhere on that google ‘oper labs’ search which tells you or gives you the chance to change it back from opera. If you hit search a few times it does actually give you the oper search results properly.
Who’s going to know that though?
I can’t reproduce this on other searches so perhaps its just a test on a few techies to see how confused people get?
> It’s trendy to wear Nike shoes. It’s trendy to have an iPod. And now, these days, it’s trendy to complain about Google.
You might want to check out the Google: Critics category here, use the drop down in the right hand side. I don’t find it trendy just to complain about them. I actually do a huge amount of defending them. So when I complain, you’d better believe I’m pretty concerned.
> Maybe you have a different view of what the “main search results” area is, but the OneBox feature isn’t a part of it, neither is the “tips” section.
Tips aren’t, as the past article I linked to explains. OneBox is. You’d better believe it is. That OneBox is designed to help you find editorial results that come out of Google’s other vertical services, and down the line it will simply get bigger.
> Then, you talk about how completely useless a feature is that lets one filter product search results to only those who accept Google Checkout.
I never said that at all. I said that on the main search results of Google, there are probably better search filtering options that could be promoted for Froogle, such as four star merchants. I specifically said I had no problem with Google Checkout being a filtering options and actually questioned why Google wasn’t making this easier to do in appropriate areas, such as on the home page of Froogle.
> I feel more comfortable paying through Google Checkout than by entering credit card information on the first website that happens to show the cheapest price.
Perhaps you might feel more comfortable using merchants that offer that trusted Visa guarantee to protect your purchases? Or those using PayPal? Pity you can’t filter to those :)
> In other words, your mention of the home page or the advanced page was just a senseless argument.
No — as I explained, if this is a useful feature, you also include it in places where people can make use of it BEFORE they conduct a search, not after.
> Also, regarding OneBox results, linking to competitors until their own product is up-to-speed and then dropping the links to the competitors has always been Google’s method.
No, actually it has not been. I struggle to think of examples where Google has dropped competitor links. The best I can think of is years and years ago, they dropped links at the bottom of search pages to other search engines.
> So, yes, I agree… when Google Finance catches up to the competitors, they will likely drop the link to the competing services and show information exclusively from their own Google Finance.
It’s like you were so busy getting ready to argue that you didn’t actually read what I wrote. I specifically said I had no problem with them dropping map links if they feel Google Maps was the best product. Makes sense. But that’s on its own. In combination with pushing Checkout, pushing products with Tips, I’m saying Google is clearly undergoing an internal push to be more self-promotional. And they are doing this without any heads-up to those that use them and watch them closely. The tips fiasco shows it can blow up on them. So Google — which I love immensely — really needs to think about better explaining what they are doing and why.
> Then, you say merchants might be “left out” if they don’t use Google Checkout? Well, absolutely, but this has nothing to do with the addition of a link to the Google OneBox result for product searches.
There is a difference between a store promoting its own credit card and a consumer guide pushing its own credit card. Google is not a store. It is designed to be a guide to product on the web, Froogle is. An unbiased guide. When it start offering its own credit card — and pushing people to accept that — it begins to raise obvious questions that it will find it in its self-interest to favor the merchants using that card. And this latest promotion is an example of that.
> Why isn’t anyone complaining loudly about eBay still disallowing Google Checkout, after all of this time.
People have. And eBay looks bad for it. And now Google makes them look less bad :)
> let’s not be information terrorists and exaggerate every reality into a negative one.
I agree. If you’d read that article I said about supporting them on the tips issue, you would have seen me saying the exact same thing.
> Oh, and what’s with FORCING people to sign up for TypeKey?
Spam. It’s an issue, so we use it. Sorry. But thanks for signing up and for your comments!
I had exactly the same thoughts this morning – was checking some of our google base testfeeds (to show a client why we should feed their product’s into base)
Should I get them to sign up for google checkout?
and how does google chekout work for large ticket items – I am just stating work on a medium sided audi dealer (no ones going to pay for a car with google check out)
I had a meeting with one of the Google base product managers ill mail him the link to SEL
This feature may work well somewhere down the road but there are just too many nouns that G just may not understand.
I’d say this is going to have some impact on their market share over time unless Google wants to undertake effort to educate their users about the more advanced search features such as using quotes. How many times will someone keep using Google when they are sure they typed in the correct query – don’t see any results – but are sure their topic is not a figment of their imagination.
Sure, Google will keep all the tech-heads but they aren’t the people clicking on Adwords, either.
I can’t stand company statements that don’t answer the question. All I hear is “blah, blah, blah”
Google had this same problem with secure pages a while back – http://www.prestonwily.com/archives/google-weirdness
It looks like they have since fixed it…
Danny, the tips are back on the home page too, I just wrote a post about it:
http://www.centernetworks.com/looks-like-google-has-brought-the-tips-back
Saying that OneBox is not part of the main search results ignores findings from usability research: average users have no understanding of the different areas of a search result page. Some understand that the “sponsored” links are ads, but that’s as far as it goes.
Google does this. Just search for e.g. [google god trends] to get an example. The first result will be coming from a Google.com location that is not crawlable per robots.txt — the Google Trends result — so Google does the next best thing and (apparently) uses backlink text for the result title. This happens for non-Google.com sites too, of course.
I will be writing the LinkWeek column several times each month.
-ew
Great Post!
Interesting, this is the third post I’ve read today that’s advocating linking out (#17). I’m glad to see that, for so long linking was dictated by pagerank, webmasters were petrified to link to any site that had a lower pr then their own. Good to see that people are realizing that a good site is a good site regardless of what the google toolbar thinks.
Using zip codes within your title and Meta description is not a bad idea as well.
Interesting post. I run a site called Lucky Lester and on this site I offer free football picks for both the NFL and NCAA. This is a true hobby site as the site is not monetized in any way shape or form, we don’t even sell links. The site was put together for the sheer pleasure of talking about football and upon occasion, other sports.
While I know a great deal about SEO I simply do not have the time to apply a full blown SEO campaign to this site. With that said I can tell you that at times my site has been in #1 on yahoo for the search term Free Football Picks. In fact I held that position for weeks at the beginning of the football season. As a person who didn’t really care about the SERPS for this site I wasn’t too concerned when it started to slide from #1 to #3 and so on.
About 6 to 8 weeks ago I noticed that the listing in Yahoo began using the lower case free football picks for the Title/link and after that I watched it slide to its current position of about #66. Now I can tell you that the site isn’t very active in link building and I always switch out the text to my weekly football picks.
Given these linking practices I have to disagree with the assertion that Yahoo is replacing the Title/link due to anchor text. I am not sure why Yahoo is doing this and I hope that they provide some insight into this soon as this practice is certainly making me rethink my position on Yahoo’s effectiveness as a reliable search tool.
A little personal background info on myself; I work as the SEO director for a well known and respected marketing agency that caters to the sports information industry. I have been specializing in the search industry since 1995.
>Tips aren’t, as the past article I linked to explains. OneBox is.
I still disagree on this point. The term “search results”, IMHO, mean the actual “numbered” results that are returned in a specific order based on the sorting and relevance algorithm. The OneBox, although it is designed to aid the searcher, is not one of these results. It is an add-on reference. If you can call the OneBox region as a “search result” then you could call an advertisement a “search result” because advertisements also appear when searches are performed, are designed algorithmically to be relevant to the terms searched, and are meant to aid the searcher with relevant links. I still believe calling the OneBox region part of the “main search results” to be far-reaching.
>I never said that at all.
You said, “Why does this promotion need to be in the main Google search results? What benefit is it providing Google searchers?” Does this not imply that you feel it provides little or no benefit to Google searchers? Maybe not to you, but it does provide a benefit to me. I also rarely pay attention to the number of stars a merchant has mainly because most merchants don’t even have a rating, even ones I have had quite a good experience with. A compromise DID cross my mind, however. What if Google only provided this link for users who are logged in and who actually use Google Checkout? That way, this link would appear to be less of an “advertisement” for Google Checkout and would become more of a “tool” for existing Google Checkout users. Just a thought.
>Or those using PayPal? Pity you can’t filter to those
I’m a little turned off of PayPal at the moment. I bought a memory card from eBay (I know, I know, bad idea) and it turned out to be a counterfeit card. I was able to compare the card itself and its packaging to images shown on the web by those who compare legitimate products to their counterfeits. When I went through the fraud department of eBay, they sent me to PayPal. When I went through the fraud department of PayPal, they told me I had 10 days (I actually only had 6 days because they sent me this notification 4 days late) to fax them verification from a third party that the card was, in fact, counterfeit. (The card, by the way, which claimed to hold 4 GB only held 1 GB as I tested this thoroughly.) No local computer shop or store had ever heard of such a “verification” process, so they couldn’t help me. When I contacted Sony (which the card claimed to be) they said I could mail the card to them and they could verify if it is counterfeit. However, the process would take a couple of weeks. When I asked PayPal for more time, they sent me a canned message that essentially said “We are sorry that our method is inconvenient for you. It is our method and we’re sticking to it.” Two more days passed and they closed the issue. Since the issue is closed, I can’t make a claim against that transaction again. So, essentially, I’m stuck with a bad memory card. There was absolutely no way PayPal (according to their methods) was ever going to help me in that situation. Maybe Google Checkout might not have been much better, but a bad taste is a bad taste, so I’m not particularly happy with PayPal at the moment.
>No — as I explained, if this is a useful feature, you also include it in places where people can make use of it BEFORE they conduct a search, not after.
I don’t know if I agree with that. The advanced search pages, in my opinion, are cumbersome. I would much rather perform a keyword search and click links to further filter my results than to view a bunch of text boxes, check boxes, and/or radio boxes to be able to do this in one step. Sure, it’s only one step, but you’re forced to look at a page worth of options. If Google’s advanced search had this option, or even their home page, I likely wouldn’t bother using it there. In fact, most of my Google searches are done through the Google Toolbar, so I would prefer the links for further filtering to appear on the search results pages. Adding any of these features on the home page would also clutter up the home page unnecessarily.
>I struggle to think of examples where Google has dropped competitor links. The best I can think of is years and years ago, they dropped links at the bottom of search pages to other search engines.
Perhaps this was the example I was thinking of, or maybe I have just seen this coming from a mile away. Doing a search for GOOG or MSFT used to generate a OneBox result that only linked to competitors, because Google didn’t have a finance site at the time. Much later, Google created a finance site of their own. Once the kinks were worked out, Google added Google Finance to these sets of links. It just seems to be the natural course of progression to eventually remove the competing links once you feel your own product fills the need. I imagine this will happen with patents. Searching for “patent 5123123″ links to the government’s patent website. In time, I am sure it will link to Google’s patent website. Besides, linking to competitor’s just raises questions like “Which competitor’s get to be in that spot? Can I get my finance website listed there, as well? Why not? Do you have to pay to get linked from there?”, etc…
>I’m saying Google is clearly undergoing an internal push to be more self-promotional. And they are doing this without any heads-up to those that use them and watch them closely.
I don’t know why they have to let everyone know in advance that they are going to cross promote their products. I’m not quite sure what made the general public the managers of the company. If anything, this push for self-promotion is likely a direct result OF requests by the general public. For YEARS people have been saying on message boards “I wish Google would promote its other products more.” People would talk about how much they love Google Talk, but wish more of their friends used it. Then went on to complain how Google creates great new services, but buries them in places like Google Labs or the “more/even more” links. So, now that Google is actually making an effort to cross-promote their various services, rather than a collective “hurray, finally!” there’s just more criticism. You state that you defend Google a lot, but this is what makes it more frustrating. You defended the “tips” concept, yet are “worried” about the OneBox concept. Yet, a little research would show that the results given in the OneBox (whether for images or products) DO NOT give the “top product” or “top image” results for these subsequent verticals. The OneBox region is, for the most part, a “tip” area that nudges someone into taking a look at a vertical that may be more appropriate for their search term. It makes more of an impact when a Google-defender is suddenly “worried” about the direction Google is taking than when a Google-basher is worried. I don’t mind, so much, that Google took away the “tips” because I am already full aware of Google’s other services. However, if they were to roll back on this latest feature because the community rose up again, I’d be losing a feature that I find to be useful. That’s where my frustration is.
>There is a difference between a store promoting its own credit card and a consumer guide pushing its own credit card.
In my opinion (yeah, I know it’s really humble), Google is not and never has been a “consumer guide”. The INTERNET is a “consumer guide” and Google is a TOOL to be able to more easily navigate the Internet. Google also provides a TOOL to more easily purchase items from the Internet, so it only makes sense they would combine this tool with the tool that makes searching for products to buy easier. And while I enjoy using Froogle, it is not my home page. So, opening a web browser to Google’s home page and then having to perform another click to search Froogle is one step too many. Being able to perform a product search directly on Google and have it give me the OneBox results at the top is useful. Allowing me to view only the results that accept Google Checkout in one more step is even more useful to me.
>Spam. It’s an issue, so we use it. Sorry.
No worries. But, maybe you could provide the option to use multiple different services that would prevent spam, so the users could make a choice. And, if you ever have your own in-house built spam-prevention system, it would be quite worrisome if you “forced” people to use that system, rather than the third party systems out there. (I say this sarcastically.) I think I might see more of a problem with Google promoting Google Checkout (and not PayPal) IF Google Checkout also cost more than PayPal to merchants. However, it costs less all the way around. And, as a consumer, I feel it provides a better service. I can’t easily go to PayPal and see all of my previous purchases and what items I bought. With Google Checkout, I can do this. Also, in a few years, when the amount of items I have purchased grows, I will find it useful to be able to search through past purchases in case I was wondering where I got a particular item. I think the Google Checkout service has more to do with that (giving consumers a way to search through their purchases) than just having an alternative to PayPal. So, I even think this product still falls in line with their goal to make information more accessible and useful.
>But thanks for signing up and for your comments!
You’re welcome! ;)
> I still disagree on this point. The term “search results”, IMHO, mean the actual “numbered” results that are returned in a specific order based on the sorting and relevance algorithm.
Respect your opinion. I just disagree. It’s sort of how Blake Ross saw the tips in the search results and I disagreed they were. These are open to interpretation.
> Does this not imply that you feel it provides little or no benefit to Google searchers?
Little benefit to other options they could show right in the main search results. They’re taking up a line of the page, on a page where they carefully debate anything that goes on it. They’ve decided a Google Checkout line is THAT important to users that it needs to be there? I don’t think it’s that important, even if I appreciate it as a search within the Froogle results themselves.
> I would much rather perform a keyword search and click links to further filter my results than to view a bunch of text boxes, check boxes, and/or radio boxes to be able to do this in one step.
People are different. They should offer both. And maybe make it a preference that you can save, too.
> Much later, Google created a finance site of their own. Once the kinks were worked out, Google added Google Finance to these sets of links. It just seems to be the natural course of progression to eventually remove the competing links once you feel your own product fills the need.
I absolutely agree. When Google Finance launched, a ton of people came down on Google as trying to wipe out the competition. I was one of the relatively few commentators to disagree with that. And if they feel finance is super wonderful, I can see the competitor links going. But Google clearly occupies this special trust situation where people worry about such moves, as the tips thing underscores. So making these type of drops, that’s something they really need to consider announcing and inviting some debate. Moreover, it’s a pretty easy thing to say that if people like the “old style,” they can set it as a preference and bring it back. If no one does that or in tiny numbers, then they are more on solid ground to eventually phase it out entirely.
> I don’t know why they have to let everyone know in advance that they are going to cross promote their products.
Because they cross-promote in areas some people think should be free of any promotion at all. There’s obvious concern about this. They can do whatever they want. But they can also do things in a smarter way.
> The OneBox region is, for the most part, a “tip” area that nudges someone into taking a look at a vertical that may be more appropriate for their search term
For now. The OneBox is the future. Two, three years from now, those product results will dominate the page.
> So, I even think this product still falls in line with their goal to make information more accessible and useful.
And to be clear, I’m not saying Google Checkout is bad, not useful, etc. I’m saying that Google is pushing it big time and there’s some spillage going on that makes people wonder if they’re maintaining the neutral approach they themselves want to take with listings.
I’ve had this same problem also… but with Yahoo PPC. Their support has been most dissapointing thus far. We develop software, such as LPD print servers, IPDS printing, and AS/400 printing tools. When submitted, the above acronyms (AS/400, IPDS, LPD) are capped, but when they are live, Yahoo makes them all lower case, really frustrating as it makes us look unprofessional. In some cases, they’ll capitalize the acronym in the title and go lower case in the description. Sometimes its exactly opposite.
Here is a support email I received a few days ago asking them to please capitalized things in our ads like AS400, IBM, IPDS, etc…
——————
Hello Frank,
Thank you for your feedback regarding the capitalization of specific acronym.
If your business name is trademarked and you would like it capitalized, please let us know. We’ll be happy to submit the information for the adjustment.
In reviewing your inquiry, we typed in AS/400 into a Yahoo! search query and everywhere it was meant to be capitalized, it was listed in capitalized letters.
If you have had a keyword or ad declined due to capilization, please let us know. We’re happy to explain further or assist in getting it resolved, if possible.
Sincerely,
Customer Solutions
Yahoo! Search Marketing
——————
Very dissapointed… I also notice it within our listings exactly how Danny wrote. Whut’s up Yahoo????
Barry, one of your 10 backlinks (http://policy.heritageblogs.org/2006/09/victory_for_swedens_centerrigh.html) does indeed use the anchor text you specified to link to the article you found (http://policy.heritageblogs.org/2006/09/entering_the_era_of_open_gover.html). You apparently only looked at the article body. Scan the page with a FIND function for the anchor text and you’ll find it in the navigation (it’s in the breadcrumb at the top of the page).
The distinction between what Google does (using link anchor text as the title for an uncrawled page) and what Yahoo! is doing (using link anchor text as the title for a crawled page to show relevance to the query) is like night and day.
Yahoo! is “outing” people who are ranking on the basis of link anchor text.
It’s never too late for Yahoo! to pull the fat out of the fire. I’m not saying I expect them to do it, but just because they are no longer on top doesn’t mean they can’t hit the top again.
Despite what they’ve said in the past, I think we all need to realize that at the end of the day, Google is still a corporation. A money-making, self-interested, corporation.
I’m not the least bit surprised that any of these changes to the results page are taking place. Back in the day Google was a search company. It was in their best interest to provide links to other services because they either didn’t have a similar service or had just developed one. Now they do everything. So what benefit does it serve them to link to the competition?
A company can say it conducts business in the best interest of the customer. But they rarely do. Just like any other company, Google’s primary concern is its own stock price and bottom line.
Yes Michael, I said that…
After reading what I wrote, it is not clear, I guess I am still a bit jet lagged.
It is used on Word Case, but represented in lower case at Yahoo. What I meant was that it is not used in all lower case, but the words themselves are used in anchor text in numerous locations within that site (about 4 pages in the domain, to be specific).
I still spell out “Web site” (with a capital ‘W’) even though most people now write “website”.
Maybe I’m the one who is too tired. I see that you wrote “That phrase only shows in upper case” and it completely slipped my notice.
Sorry.
> If you can call the OneBox region as
> a “search result” then you could call
> an advertisement a “search result”
> because advertisements also appear
> when searches are performed
To jump into the conversation: I would indeed call advertisements a search result if they were not disclosed as ads. But they happen to be. (They are called “sponsored links”). The onebox in question is disclosed by Google to be a “product search result”, so it is a type of search result. We both know it’s not what search pros call the “organic result”, but a “onebox” of course.
On a tangential note, this adds to my curiosity when it comes to the specifics of broad matching in AdWords. I shy away from broad matching unless I have metrics that indicate otherwise. Simply because you do not know what decisions, as to relevance, are being made by the AdWords AI.
Count me in the -transparency please- crowd.
-T
“Linkbait” as one word follows the precedent of the related term, “linkrot,” from Jakob Nielsen in 1998.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html
I have 3 daily “must-reads” and Techmeme is one of them. But it’s the only one that I visit *several* times every day… talk about sticky (almost as much as email). Gabe has created something potentially huge here. I would love to do business with him.
Danny
Thanks for the insightful review. However, after spending way more time than I should have looking at eye tracking results, there are some things that should be considered in the analysis. Please see the following post
http://www.outofmygord.com/archive/2007/01/16/Why-No-Golden-Triangle-in-the-Microsoft-Eye-Tracking-Study.aspx
Thank you for spending time with Boxxet and for a fair and thoughtful review.
Yes, you are right, the Colorado Avalanche Boxxet has not been well-trafficked. Our beta base was centered mainly on coasts (friends and family).
So our hope is that a new Boxxet will be at least useful and a moderately well-trafficked Boxxet will start to really shine as user votes and actions start to teach the software how to make better choices for the fans.
Discovery is a big part of our system and we want to (1) show only what is best on the start page of each Boxxet and (2) allow fans who want to see every last story to drill down and get all their content if they want. Your comment on info overload is well taken and we’ll continue to tweak the UI accordingly.
I do appreciate that you understand our goal with Boxxet. I would request that you subscribe to the Avalanche RSS feed and follow that Boxxet. And we would welcome you back in a few months to track our progress.
And some follow up comments for SearcH EngineS Web..
“The Eye is intuitively attracted to whatever is ATTRACTIVE”
Yes and no. Relevancy is more important than physical attractiveness on the SERP. We have a different scanning interaction.
“The pastel background color placed behind the sponsor links…ATTRACTS”
Actually, no. In fact, if too prominent, it can have the opposite effect, setting the results apart as a sidebar and causing banner blindness.
However, I do agree with your other points in your comments. I just wanted to put out these two, based on our research.
To me, the issue comes down to this: can I trust Google like I (we) used to trust Google, or should I trust them like I trust Microsoft?
Once upon a time, the confluence of killer technology, perfect timing, a lofty philosophy, and the invitation to hold them to a higher standard (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/30/googles-tipping-point/ ) gave the world a company that a lot of people really thought (hoped, wished) would be different.
I wonder if this Checkout issue, along with the Tips issue from last month and the resulting concern are syptoms of Google maturing into a (heaven forbid) “regular” company a la MSFT, IBM, [insert your favorite current/former tech giant here], whose overriding interest is, ultimately, their bottom line.
Note that I don’t have a problem with this transformation/evolution — I just want to know. I happily use Microsoft, IBM, etc., solutions everyday, and I’m clear how much I want to trust them. Things get more complex when I don’t know how much to trust something(i.e. should I trust Google like I used to, or should I trust them like I trust Microsoft?)
I hate to point out the obvious, but since the two-word version has about half the amount of competing sites and only slightly fewer searches… which term do you think we’re going to use in the title of our next LINK BAIT posts?
Chris:
Just like to point out that in addition to Yahoo Answers and services similar to it, libraries from around the world offer FREE, 24×7, remotely accessible services where you chat one-on-one with a professional librarian or subject expert. They can not only help you find use material “on” the web but also lead you to fee-based databases that many libraries offer for free without having to visit the library.
In this post,
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/09/05/virtual-reference-for-non-librarians
we talk about several of these services, including national services in Australia and the U.K.
We also discuss expert powered Q&A services that are included in the AskA+ Locator.
http://www.vrd.org/locator/alphalist.shtml
Danny:
Gabe’s sites are also great to browse while on the go, when you have a spare moment or two.
All optimized for mobile.
Mini-Techmeme
http://www.techmeme.com/mini
Mini-memeorandum:
http://www.memeorandum.com/mini
Mini-WeSmirch
http://www.wesmirch.com/mini
One thing I’ve noticed is if you opt for link bait as two words and you have AdSense you’ll likely get fishing related ads.
I was originally using link bait, but found much the same as you Danny that more people use linkbait and since Nick coined the phrase and goes with the single word, linkbait it is.
hehe it can be like “instalment” or “installment” in my spell checker
I actually voted linkbait but now that I looked back and saw the session you named “Link Baiting & Viral Search Success,” I think that the verb needs to be two words because linkbaiting kinda looks stupid…
I have writen my thoughts here:
http://awaw.blogspot.com/2007/01/to-linkbait-or-to-link-bait.html
I don’t think there needs to be an official way to refer to it, overtime usage will tell. I wouldn’t be that surprised if we all started using ‘linkbate’ instead :)
James
I wrote an article on 15 Jan titled ‘The Attention Econom