Category Archives: Google

Little companies get the big talent? Auren says yes, but he’s wrong.

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Auren Hoffman of Rapleaf has a provocative post about how startups are sucking up the smartest people, leaving the Yahoos and Googles to fend for the second class talent. Based on my internet aquaintances and conference experiences I’d have to say he’s wrong about this. Google and Yahoo and other big company folks are among the brightest I meet anywhere. Many seem too young to have developed the wisdom that helps see big pictures, but that applies to the startup people I meet as well.

Google is especially agressive about plucking people from PhD programs before they even have a chance to think about alternative work and it looks to me that events like Yahoo’s Hack Day and liberal “start your own company” policies help keep the talent flowing in the direction of the big companies.

I should add that I think a lot of brilliant folks are doing startups, and this is a great thing.  My point is that company choice is based more on individual preferences (entrepreneurial mind vs stable mind … and yes I mean that literally).

I wrote over at Auren’s:

I’ll be more convinced of this when I go to internet conferences and the startup people are more impressive than the big company folks. I’m still *very* impressed with the depth of talent at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, especially in the cutting edge areas. Also, many big companies have liberal rules about starting your own project under the company umbrella, which minimizes personal risk but preserves the chance at home run profits (I think you could build an interesting big company around this single notion).

I’m guessing if you did a study you’d find that the company choice for top candidates is more a function of individual preference than company size (e.g. the entrepreneurial-risk-taker vs the stable-income-and-fat-pension person.

Yahoo beats Google at something other than … sports.

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Google is closing down it’s answers feature which has been very inferior in performance compared to Yahoo’s and was missing the point in Web 2-point-0.

Hey, I pointed this difference out about one year ago.   This is actually a very interesting example of how Yahoo is more 2.0 friendly and better at bringing people into the computer equation, and helps disprove Matt Cutts’ recent, mildly back-handed compliment suggesting that Yahoo is only better in sports.

More important is that it’s a small indicator of how the battle lines are getting drawn in what may be the most significant, fun, and interesting corporate battle in the history of commerce.   Who you gonna call . com?    Yahoo as community builder, Google as search behemoth, Microsoft as “where o where did our monopoly go?!”   Who will rule the net?    There’s room for many players so it could even be a combination or companies yet to be invented.

So, how about a price spike in Yahoo stock, which seems to happen with GOOG every time that Google farts.

Hey Wall Street!  Yahoo!!!  Look!  Hey!

Disclaimer:   I own some Yahoo Stock and have some old Google puts that will expire soon, worthless.
Serves me right for betting against brilliance, though I still think Google is priced using an irrational exhuberance stock picking algorithm and Yahoo is … undervalued.

Blogs – why listen to the man when you can listen to the guy sticking it to the man?

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Jeremy, over at one of the very best non-official blogs, is noting the challenges of corporate blogging which has been exploding thanks in no small part to the blog evangelizing efforts of another great non-official blogger Robert Scoble.

This reminded me of a nice talk I had with Google’s Adam at Pubcon where I was telling him that I’d rather read his own personal blog where he often has very thoughtful posts, or read Matt Cutts, than read the Google company line at the corporate blog.

Ideally I’d like to see Adam talk about Google stuff from his own perspective, as Jeremy has done so effectively over the years at Yahoo and Matt sometimes does at his blog. Corporate suits should take note of the amazing reservoir of credibility Jeremy, and a handful of other unofficial folks, have created with their frank, honest and introspective styles.

I’m still pretty much a corporate blog bigot, feeling that a large company blogs generally suffer from the items Jeremy notes PLUS the fact that usually it is very low level folks in charge of the blog and they simply can’t afford to rock the boat.

A notable exception is Bob Parsons over at Godaddy. I suppose his blog might be considered personal more than corporate, but this is my point. He’s wonderfully honest and insightful discussing Godaddy because nobody can kick his ass. He can write about the man without fear because he IS the man. His series about strategizing and running 2005 Superbowl TV ads was one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read about big ticket advertising.

So I’ll take Jeremy and Adam’s advice and check out the corporate blogs again, but I’m guessing I won’t be reading the man when I can read the guy who is at least willing to stick it to the man.

Google’s Grim

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Following up on the Lancet Study I found more examples of how Google’s Adwords mistakes / regular listings can be somewhat odd and grim. The search was “Iraq Deaths”

[Google] Sponsored Links
Iraq Deaths
Looking for Iraq Deaths?
Find exactly what you want today.
http://www.eBay.com

Internet for US Soldiers
Satellite Internet access available
in US bases Iraq and Afghanistan
http://www.satellite-provider.pl/

Google’s “Best Bets” party = Meet the Engineers

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Another eventful day here at WMW wraps up with the Google party. I’m afraid it’s going to be mobbed with some 1600 in attendance here, but the New Orleans Google party was the highlight of that WebmasterWorld conference.

And for all those fans I can say for sure that Matt Cutts has entered the building. He just flew in from California.

Pubcon Las Vegas – Duplicate Content Session with Google and Yahoo

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OK, I lost power and couldn’t blog the beginning of the session which is wrapping up but I’ll try to get a link to the simply excellent presentation by Tim Converse at Yahoo which detailed many aspects of the Duplicate Content issue. This is probably a major problem for Travel site Online Highways despite a huge investment in editing over the years. We still have lots of thin content pages and this appears it could be all or part of our problems ranking at Google and (very recently) Yahoo.

Amanda Watlington, Bill Slawski had good presentations and Brian White of Google also gave a PPT with similar but less detailed coverage. Brian did indicate that the info presented by Tim was in line with Google’s thinking about this complex topic that IMHO affects a growing percentage of the web’s total pages, and kills off many inappropriately. It was suggested that the ideal is thought of as a single page, removing all the duplicate content. [I’d argue that queries are too vague to define things this specifically, and often the “best” site will have hundreds of “similar” pages that are best left to user’s choice. Unfortunately this approach would be too spammable so I think lots of collateral damage ensues.]

RE: Citation tag – sounded like Brian and Tim hadn’t even heard of this tag, so I’m now skeptical it’ll help remove duplication penalties for a site that had been scraped heavily.

Wow – It was just suggested by Tim that in some cases it’s best to start a new site if you’ve been penalized, but first he said to clean up the site and then get it reviewed.   This is the first “official” recognition I’ve seen for the idea that a URL can be so poisoned it must be abandoned.

Great session – Kudos to Tim for a super helpful PPT and other presenters for tackling this complex topic so well.

Pubcon – ad optimizing session

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Jenstar is giving a great talk about the importance of testing, saying it can impact the publishing bottom line by as much as 10x current earnings. YPN vs Adsense –

Most of her testing uses the custom channels at Adsense.

Sometimes borders work better than borderless. Hyperlink blue” is generally the best link color. Second is the same color as other links on page. Try image ads enabled as test. Mix ads up to avoid “banner blindness”. AVOID right upper corner = low conversion.

I missed lots of good info here her blog is great for this stuff.

Cody Sims from Yahoo – What motivates publishers to publish? 4 things:
Lifestyle, Community Aspect, Technology enthusiastics, The “game” of publishing.

Measure of success = maximizing revenue and increasing traffic = same as Yahoo’s own goals.

Article text on the page is the most important in terms of contextual matching. Robots choke on i frames, flash, etc.

About.com as one of the best optimized environments on the web = high signal to noise ratio.

Do’s: Write the way a user thinks. Creates relevant content and ad matching.
Optimize key areas. Keep tags relevant to content.
LIMIT low content pages.
Don’t use unnecessary code.
Limit page to one or two topics.
Walk in the advertiser’s shoes – “would I want my ad here?”
Integrate keywords into URL structure. Permalinks>using IDs in links.
Strong keywords in anchor text.

www.ypnblog.com

Tom from Google: Shift in Media Consumption= opportunity. Approaching 40% of time online which will shift more ad money online soon.
Adsense: 76% reach via adsense publishers. 110 monthly page views per user
—Missed some of this —

Jay from ContextWeb, now 25th largest ad supported property online. Venture backed by same firm that brought Overture to market. Like Federated, looking to better match ads and publishers than can be done by the big players. Decision making engine works on the fly. Keyword sensing plus category taxonomy disambiguates the search. (got that?).

Google is NOT real time, but Context Web is. Dynamic content is therefore better targeted by Context Web. (the Samsonite Suitcase ad at Suitcase murderer story problem)

Quigo‘s introduced by Yaron Galai as another “cream vs milk” advertising optimizer.  I missed his very interesting slide suggesting how crappy publishers are effectively subsidized by current pricing models – hope to ask about that later.   I met Yaron in Boston I think and was really impressed by Quigo, but soured on it after talking with somebody else at SES San Jose who had a negative sort of pitch.  Probably a case where the founder’s a better salesman than the salesman.

Google vs Microsoft reveals a pitiful MS

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Today’s Tech headlines:

Google Aquires JotSpot

Google shares ad wealth with videographers 

Microsoft has a new image on their boxed software 

Who’d have thunk just a few years ago that so many would be pitying Microsoft as the “has been” of computing innovation?     Sorry, but Ms. Dewey is just not going to head off Google, MS guys.

Obivous -ly

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Evan, a founder of blogger which was sold to Google, has returned big VC cash to investors in his ODEO music project and started a new company called Obvious Corporation.

This statement about why he’s changing course is a very articulate vision of the new web economy. As he suggests the new web is getting more uncertain and experimental every day. I think success will increasingly follow biological evolutionary form and be more a function of experimentation, following niche specialization, and lucky survival much more than following textbook approaches.

Go Google Yourself!

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Ha – Tech bloggers seem to leave a lot of global tragedies unnoticed, but whatever you do don’t get ARROGANT about being the big gorilla of search.   This Google post, to me, does not cross any lines but it sure has caused an outcry from bloggers who think Google’s getting pretty dang arrogant to dictate english usage in this fashion while slapping Yahoo in the face.
Although this is a small thing, one wonders if Google is teetering near that fateful “tipping point” where it crosses from a darling of search to a sort of Darth Vader of search – powerful and effective but constantly under suspicion.

Yikes, even Battelle is swearing about this!