Why has Search not got Better??

According to Dave Winer it is because of a thing called "strategy tax" (I think it could also be called cannibalism).

Basically Google gets most of its revenue from people clicking on ads. They are more likely to click on ads if the organic results do not provide what they are looking for. This means that better results equals less revenue!

This tactic will only work until another search engine provides better results, and becomes popular. It makes one wonder if Google has worked out how to provide significantly better results, but is sitting on them...

Maps of New Orleans Updated

Until a few days ago, the Google Maps images of New Orleans showed it as a total mess. Now recent images are up, reflecting the reality of the rebuilding of this city. They have asked for the old images to be archived.

A Google Phone After All?

LG Electronics said on Wednesday that it has signed a contract with Internet giant Google to build a line of mobile phones with built-in Google services. The phones will allow users to easily access Google's Internet search, maps and email services while on the go. They will also be able to snap photos with a built-in camera and upload them to Blogger.com, a blog site operated by Google.

The phones will feature a Google icon to allow email access with a single click, LG said. The first Google phone will be available next month in North America, Europe and Asia. More than 10 models should be out by the end of this year.

I guess the question is, does it need to be manufatured by Google to be called a Google phone? Do I use a PC, or a Windows PC?

Now #2 most visited after Microsoft

Microsoft & Yahoo have always had a big advantage thanks to their popular web mail services. Now Google has leap-frogged Yahoo to become the #2 most visited web site, because either

- Gmail has taken off
- All those beta apps really add up
- Google search has become more popular
- All of the above

ComScore's figures show that Google's site traffic rose by 9.1% to 475.7 million visitors while Yahoo's traffic rose just 5.2% bringing its tally to 475.3 million visitors. Microsoft still held on to a 26 million visitor advantage at 501.7 million.

Google Apps down 3 times in 30 days

It's a bit embarrassing, and also a sign of the times. Basically any online app is prone to outages occasionally, and people need to make sure that nothing they do is reliant on 100% uptime - they need to have alternate strategies in place, like saving content offline and having software that can use it... The Google story is here

No Phone, says Google

“We’re not doing a mobile phone, I’d like to find something that is broader, rather than do yet another mobile device,” Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, told Bloomberg.

What Google is developing is mobile phone software. This makes sense, because then they can be link the Microsoft of mobile phones...

Blogger upgraded

Now you can:

- limit who reads your site by entering email addresses
- create your own templates easily
- add photos without knowing HTML

More...

Google Could Lose $2.1 Billion

If Google Adwords advertisers were to use the skills SEM experts, it is estimated they would spend much less, hence the attention-grabbing headline.

If 70% of Google's advertisers could do just as well spending 30% less, that would reduce Google's $10 billion-plus annual revenue by $2.1 billion.

Of course the really is that few will change their habits, because they are happy with how things are now.

MSN Live Search up from 8 to 9 percent

The probable cause for MSN's rise in search market share is the release of Vista, which conveniently comes bundled with IE7, which conveniently has MSN Live as the default search engine.

Either the FCC will need to give Microsoft another rap on the knuckles, or Google will just have to come out with their own OS!

3/4 of Blogspot sites are spam

Frequent searchers might already be aware of this, but now it has made the headlines:

Three out of every four unique Blogspot.com URLs that appeared in the top 50 results for commercial queries were spam, the study said. Blogspot is the hosting site for Google's blogging service.

Discussion here.

Google Reporting Anchor Text Phrases

Google Webmaster Central has announced a new feature - you can see what link phrases were clicked on to get to your site. This is a minor but welcomed improvement over just keywords, because knowing the order of the keywords (ie forming a phrase) helps optimize your site & linking strategies accordingly.

IMHO too many same-worded incoming links can look like something inorganic going on, and Google might think you are gaming their system.

More at SEL

It's Risky Business to sue Google

A federal judge has ordered a parenting Web site to compensate Google for certain legal fees resulting from a lawsuit that accused the search giant of discriminating in its search rankings.

In a written order dated Friday, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose sided with Google in two of its three arguments that KinderStart, a directory and search engine focused on parenting information, should face monetary sanctions on the grounds that its allegations were "frivolous." The court plans to determine the amount of the fees after receiving a report from Google identifying its costs.

It would be reasonable to presume that Google's costs are very high, and that KinderStart could lose more from this case than they did from a drop in search rankings!

Plus Box launched in search results

It has been appearing now and then for quite some time, and now it is here to stay - a welcome addition to Google's search results.

Whenever you see the plus box icon - - click on it to see the additional rich data expand below the original search result. With Plus Box, you'll get a visual snapshot of related information, so it is faster and easier to find exactly what you're looking for.

Right now it works for stocks and maps. For example, a search for "Apple" brings up the little plus sign & "Stock quote for AAPL". Click on the plus sign, see some stock info about Apple.

ComCast: Google Doesn't Pay Enough

ComCast are courting MSN as their search provider, because they believe that Google take too much of the revenue share.

IMHO most businesses who decide on these matters choose Google because although Google takes a bigger share of the pie, the pie is much bigger to begin with - because Google have more advertisers paying more dollars for more ads. Only when MSN and Yahoo increase their share of the search market will they be able to fully compete.

Although I feel they should be more than happy making $70M a year, ComCast want $100M from search revenue. More of their gripes are at WSJ

Title Field Changed - now shows Ad Group

For those who use the back button...

We're not really supposed to use the back button in AdWords, but I do quite a bit.

Now Google has changed the HTML title of the page, so I can see which ad group belongs to which page, when looking at my browser's list of pages last visited.

Minor, but welcomed!

Google on Duplicate Content

Two official sources of info:

1. White paper "Methods and apparatus for estimating similarity (PDF)" - that outlines a patented method.

2. Video - that in part tells us "There isn't really a duplicate content penalty ,but you will be under the filter radar when it comes to them crawling your site, and the indexing."

iTunes - sales dropping

As told at Australian Web News, Apple's iTunes seems to be running out of customers - sales have dropped 65% since January 2006. This is a perfect time for Google to offer the world of muscial information to us for less than 99c a track!

Patent for search results

From patent search to patented search results, Google sure are busy.

Of course patenting everything Google does is sound business sense for them, but for page design? Isn't covering your logo and name enough?

Makes me feel like patenting my great brainwave of banner along the top of the page, menu down the left, two blocks of AdSense and some content inbetween. And some navigational links like "contact us" along the bottom. Then sue anyone who copies my design. Plain silly.

Data to be anonymized in a year or so

Why on earth would Google's PR department think they should tell us this?

...said it is taking steps to anonymise, or obscure details, after 18 to 24 months on the surfing habits of tens of millions of web users that could potentially be used to identify individuals.

The company collects information on web searches, such as the keyword queries, internet addresses and "cookies" used by websites and advertisers, to track web surfing habits.

Google plans to implement the policy within the next year, it said.

So your anonymity is totally assured, except for the little matter of any web surfing you have done in the last couple of years...

Matt Cutts on Next-Generation Search

It's very refreshing to see in-depth, thoughtful answers from Matt Cutts when he is interviewed - not all secretive and cagey like Google as a whole.

If we can believe that the full extent of Google's plans on next-generation searching are already known - personalized, vertical, Google Base - I think their talent and cash are not performing very well. If personalization is the future, why not make the future happen now? As long as it is an option within an option (sign in to Google, turn on personalization), and still experimental, they are just treading water.

Why not launch it under a different brand name?

For all their previous verve, I feel they are starting to become overly cautious, like other major corporations.

Belgian "War of the Worlds"

Just like that famous radio broadcast by Orson Wells, Belgians had 30 mins of TV news alerting them to the Dutch-speaking half of the country declaring independence, before they let it be known it was fictional...

Heads will roll, and will go down as one of the all-time greatest "gotchas" in history :)

Viacom to YouTube: we want $1 Billion

The media giant claims that more than 160,000 of its videos have been posted on YouTube and that they have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. “YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google,” said Viacom in a statement.

This is quite a bit more than the "in case we get sued" stash of cash Google put aside. Of course if Viacom win, more suits will follow. Most commentators predicted this from the get-go, so perhaps the Google hubris has got in the way of rational decision-making?

Mt Hitler - how did that end up on Google Earth?

[The] mayor of Bad Toelz, south of Munich, said the peak near the Bavarian town had been known as Mount Hitler for a short time during the Third Reich but had been given back its original name of Heigelkopf after World War II."

Google's response:

Google Germany spokesman Stefan Keuchel said the Hitler name had appeared due to a "technical accident."

Look like some neo-Nazi employed by Google (either that or a teenage prankster) will be getting the boot.

The Trouble with having such a Big Site

I would've thought that, having retired Google Answers, a staff member would have searched all not Google Answers pages for the word "answers" and removed any reference to it...

...They missed the Google Alerts Sign-in page:

Why sign in with a Google Account?

With a Google Account you can:

• Create Alerts without email verification
• Change how often an alert is emailed
• Access other Google products like Answers, Google Groups and more!

Google Click Fraud ISN'T 0.02%

Deliberately confusing perhaps, the 0.02% figure is the number of clicks investigated by Google (at the behest of an AdWords customer) and found to fraudulent, as a percentage of all clicks in the entire AdWords system.

The vast majority of AdWords customers would never suspect click fraud or contact Google about it. The only real way to discover the click fraud rate would be for Google to take 100,000 random "valid" clicks from their system and check them one by one. My guess is that 2% might be more accurate. More here

Google billionaires remain on $1 salary

That's for the 3rd year in a row. Not only does it saves the company a few dollars, but it adds to their massive pile of PR releases....

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have limited their salaries to a $1. It's a sacrifice that they can afford because they have gotten rich off their large stakes in Google, whose stock price has more than quintupled from its initial offering price of $85 in August 2004.

Page and Brin are each worth about $14 billion while Schmidt's fortune stands at $5 billion, according to Forbes magazine's annual ranking of the nation's wealthiest people.

Click Fraud: Less Than 2%

Straight from Google, via Andy Beal... although "invalid" and "fradulent" clicks are perhaps occuring at a rate of 9-10%, most are picked up by Google and never make it into someone's Adwords reports. Those that get through, that advertisers using appropriate click fraud monitoring could discover, are less than 2%.

I would guess that the figure not mentioned is that x% of advertisers are actually suffering higher rates - especially those whose ads show via the AdSense network, and are already paying high costs per click. I reckon perhaps 2-5% of advertisers fit into this category, and their rate of click fraud could be has high as 20%.

Yahoo doesn't care about the user

That's a pretty simplistic statement, but many former Yahoo staff believe this to be true, and consequently the primary difference between the Yahoo that is treading water and the Google that is surging ahead:

The main problem at Yahoo! is that, long ago, they stopped caring about the user.

They care about Ads, and think that revenue will come from showing more Ads to the user at the same time (more banners) and forget that if they had more users they wouldn't need to put more banners and that more banners means less users.

They care about the development process, creating zillions of internal tools to give a better environment to the developers forgetting that all those tools are already available (most of them for free) and that developers could focus more in delivering good software for their users instead of themselves.