The geniuses at the Big G have supposedly solved the minor (but very public) problem of GoogleBombs, where "people attempt to cause someone else's site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query" - like "talentless hack".
Lenoir in North Carolina is the location of a proposed $US600 million data centre.
How did tina fey get her scar?
If one instance has been spotted, there could be many instances. Basically, just because it is a sponsored link in Google, it doesn't mean you should trust it in any way. In fact, based in this, you should probably avoid clicking on these ads altogether, unless you are totally confident you have a bullet-proof PC, or until Google addresses this problem:
if you ran a Google search for "BetterBusinessBureau" from April 10 through [today], you'd have stood a one in three chance of seeing a top sponsored link with green link text that read www.bbb.org - just like the real search result. If you clicked that sponsored link, you'd even end up at the regular BBB site as per normal.
But before you got to the bbb.org site, you'd invisibly pass through a malicious site that would try to exploit an Internet Explorer browser hole...
You'd have had no idea that you passed through the poisoned site on your way to the BBB - or that if your PC lacked a critical security patch, the site would have surreptitiously downloaded malware onto your computer meant to steal banking credentials. [Infostealer.Bancos]
If ever there was an admission of algorithm failure it is this, Matt Cutts is asking folk to report sites that provide "paid links" (not any different to what Yahoo Directory provides....):
"Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid link"Ultimately there is no way of "knowing" that a link is paid for, and attempts by Google to try and guess where this is the case could easily fail. It looks like the main flaw in Google's "link voting" basis is starting to become an irritation - Google is unable to judge if a report is fair or deliberately false - Google could never automatically detect paid links unless they were promoted using specific keywords from that site.
The bosses at GOOG probably had their doubts about this from the start, using a "joke" name. Frugal literally means cheapskate (bad move), and sites that try to pass themselves off as Google tend to be named something "oogle".
Google has launched a Chinese Directory that uses AJAX at http://daohang.google.cn/.
Google have kinda apologised, saying:
Several months later, in September 2006, the storm imagery was replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of global data enhancements. We continued to make available the Katrina imagery, and associated overlays such as damage assessments and Red Cross shelters, on a dedicated site (earth.google.com/katrina.html). Our goal throughout has been to produce a global earth database of the best quality...
Microsoft were hoping to buy it, but Google has more verve. Google gets more value out of it, because it gives AdSense access to a huge number of sites, and because Performics is part of the deal, Google is now an affiliate marketer.
If you ever wondered what other folk asked Google, or like me figured there might be answers in the list that I would like to know....
The browser itself has had 80 million downloads, but seeing as it offers nothing more than the latest versions of IE & Firefox, it could run out of steam soon, unless it offers some unique new enhancements...
In the USA, phone users "pay an average of $1.28 a pop for assistance over a regular phone and a whopping $1.57 for each such call via a cell phone." Which is of course ridiculous in this era of information being freely available online. Now Google has stepped in with a free 411 service, which will surely piss off a few phone companies, and maybe, ultimately, cause phone bills to go up to cover the loss of this revenue stream..
Google is a partner in a new space telescope - this might mean that the public could get access to real-time images of the night skies.
David Sarokin seems to be putting in a lot of PR effort, now with an excellent article at FreePint explaining his theories on the demise of Google Answers.
1) Ads along the top of the page now have a yellow background (instead of blue)
Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has been promoting a cool idea: get a free mobile phone if you are willing to watch Google's advertisements. As an extention of those free internet services that went broke a few years ago, Google thinks it can provide a service with physical costs and overheads for free, funded by advertising. Sure, the search engine has physical costs and overheads, but relative to the income they are cheap. Mobile phones and phone calls are not cheap, and it would take a lot of ads to pay for them.
25% of all blog searches are now done at Google, who have replaced Technorati as the leading blog search service. Seemingly this is simply due to Google placing a link to their blog search from their home page, because just 3 months ago it was responsible for just 0.001%!
Labels: blog search
Google has yet to explain why Google Earth is only showing pre-Katrina images, but their reasoning could be that the older pics have a higher resolution, and older resolution photos are better than more recent, lower-res pics.
"Nice" sex blogs, (ie full of good, intelligent, educational content), that used to rank at #1, have been demoted to #50, and not so nice sex sites have taken their place.
Not created by Google - they'd never joke about buying a company! Read it here
Google has "GMail Paper" - a new service for getting hard copies of your emails. Google will post them to you for free, subsidised by ads printed on the back of each page.
This is a new development that some accounts have now been upgraded to - a column that shows the Quality Score of each keyword you are bidding on. If says either 'great', 'OK' or 'poor". Seems a bit redundant - 'poor' keywords are the ones with ridiculous minimum bids attached them, & 'great' or 'OK' will show if you bid above 5 or 10 cents.
According to Google's new policy, if you place images alongside your AdSense ads, and in Google's opinion they are tricking people into clicking on the ad - because they think they are part & parcel of the same thing - you will have to remove them.
