Category Archives: Google

Google Phone Coming Next Month

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The Android Guys are reporting on the design of the Google Phone from T Mobile and it’s looking pretty impressive.  They also link to a spec sheet showing the phone will have a sizeable screen, pull out keyboard, 3 megapixel camera, and more.

I’m glad to have been correct to suggest the phone would make it out before next year and expect this to be a very popular 2008 Christmas Gift, even if the pricing is higher than I expect which is $150-$250 or perhaps even less to undercut the Apple iPhone market.

This earlier-than-announced launch is probably very bad news for Sprint’s instinct and other smartphones, as it is likely that we’ll see the smartphones of choice become either Apple or Android based phones.

Google Dance 2008

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The Google Dance Google Party at the Googleplex was great as usual, with excellent buffet BBQ, the most prized T-shirts in the business, and a lot more. Having trouble with Flickr uploader so I can’t put up all the photos I took yet but this really is a great event. It was fun this year to attend with my college bound son Ben and 4th one with my great pal John though I had to keep reminding Ben that Google is not your typical corporate environment, even in his chosen field of computer science. Of course he’s got four years to go and a lot’s going to happen in that time, though if the extravagance of the party and healthy conference booth attendance are any indication Google’s going to be the big player for some time.

Google Dance 2008
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

SES San Jose Exhibit Hall Opens

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SES San Jose Exhibit Hall Opens

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

The SES San Jose search conference hosts dozens of providers of internet business services who exhibit on two of the conferences four days. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft are all here as are many search optimization firm, search analytics appications, and even some consumer focused websites.

SES San Jose Countdown

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In terms of internet search the really big and influential conference is – without a doubt – SES San Jose.

WebmasterWorld Pubcon and the new SMX Conference series by Danny Sullivan (who more than anybody was the architect of the SES empire) offer similar content, SES remains the key conference venue for search marketing professionals.

I’ll be live blogging the conference and I’ll even try to get a few real time pix out from Tuesday night’s Google Party hosted at the GooglePlex.   In many ways the “Google Dance” is the highlight of the search year, when Google hosts conference attendees (including folks who just sign up for free exhibit passes), as well as tons of Google employees.    The food is great and it’s hard to beat free beer, ice cream, sno cones, and candy but the real highlight is chatting with Google search engineers who with a few exceptions like the amazing Matt Cutts, … don’t seem to get out much.

Advertising Targeting – or creepy harassment?

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Here’s a thoughful observations from YieldBuild after attending the the OMMA conference.    The issue is whether you can do too much targeting of your advertising and scare folks away by being “creepy”.

Although we’ve only begun to scratch this surface I suspect that it’ll be dependent a lot more on the individual than on the targeting mechanism.   For example I don’t really mind Google “reading my titles” and offering relevant ads to me as I read my email, though for some this is clearly a major invasion of privacy.   (What?  You didn’t realize Google is reading all your titles and possible your content, though I’d guess they dont’t do that for liability reasons alone)

YouTube lawsuits now top YouTube’s total valuation

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When Google bought Youtube for 1.6 billion last year they effectively allocated $400 million of the purchase price towards lawsuits they felt were coming down the pike.   Although both the purchase price and that extraordinary “copyright payoff” of 400 million seemed extraordinary at the time, Eric Schmidt and the Google boys may be wishing they’d allocated a few more bucks to stave off the copyright violation bandwagon, which today solidly topped YouTube’s 1.6 billion price by about 179 million dollars.

Viacom is suing Google for a billion already, and today Mediaset joined the fun with a 500 million Euro ($779 million US) lawsuit.     Interestingly, Mediaset is controlled by a company owned by Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Burlusconi, so the case will likely become fairly high profile in Europe.

So, assuming YouTube is worth the $1.6 billion Google ponied up for the big show, they’ve got to be more than a little concerned that the legal onslaught has only just begun but already is approaching 2 billion.   Obviously neither Viacom or Mediaset expects a full payout but you can be sure many, many others will follow for two important reasons:

1)  Google’s got the money. Deep pockets are a *very* attractive stylin’ feature these days and despite some stock price setbacks Google is still sitting pretty pretty in terms of cash and revenue prospects.

2)  Videos don’t got the money. Monetizing video remains one of the most problematic features of the online world, and it’s becoming clear that no “magic bullet” is out there.   I’ve written for some time that video will not monetize well and I think the jury (that would be millions of us out there in online land) is almost in with the verdict that video simpy will not pay distributors nearly as well or serve advertisers nearly as well as pay per click which remains the most lucrative and effective form of online advertising – probably of any paid advertising for that matter.

Cuil Search – what am I missing about all that they are missing?

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TechCrunch and others are waxing almost poetically about the new Cuil search engines, designed by ex Googlers to compete with the mother ship.    But after a few scattershot queries I’m just not feeling the power of Cuil.    It still is failing to find itself for what seems like an obvious query of “Cuil Search Engine”, and for the query “computers” I’d expect a bit more than this among Cuil’s claimed inventory of 121 billion web pages:

We didn’t find any results for “computers”

Some reasons might be…

  • a typo. Please check your spelling.
  • your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
  • too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.

Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

Obviously Cuil is missing a LOT of stuff, so what am I missing here?

Update:  I’m still waiting to be impressed, but have learned that Cuil’s architecture is such that if some of the servers go down you can get empty results as I did last night.   Now, ‘Computers’ does turn up relevant results.

Knol Knows Ranking

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Google’s new knol project features articles on any topic by anybody who cares to call themselves an expert.   The concept is really intriguing as it relates to bringing higher authority information online that will be vetted both by the author and by the community at large.

Search marketing guru Aaron Wall is one of the sharpest fellows in the SEO business and he’s been testing knol and has concerns about the results both in terms of outranking original material and copyright.

Aaron on knol

The SMX search folks – I think it was Danny Sullivan – have also been testing knol and also are suggesting knol material is ranking very well.     Google says they are not giving their own site preferential treatment, but I’m guessing what they mean is that they are applying the same rules to knol as other sites.    If, for example, those rules that are *applied equally to all sites* happen to include a high value for incoming links from Google sites or other knol pages, the knol content effectively has a big advantage, technically without any special treatment.

In terms of search strategy I think the rule here is to …. write some knol page for topics of interest to you or topics for which you want to improve your rank.      I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference  – SES San Jose.

Later:  Time to check out this knol thing by creating some content myself.    Here are listings I created for:

Beijing, China |     Blogs and Blogging

Extremism in the defense of the algorithm is no vice?

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WordPress surfing led me to another interesting sob story from a penalized webmaster and my reply got so long it deserved to become a post:

Marshall Sponder wrote:

Take Know More Media’s case – you have 100+ blogs and 2+ years of content – that’s easy, 30,000 to 50,000 blog posts and Google, with just one or two paid links that pass PageRank, is going to throw the entire blog network out of it’s index over that?

Yep, it appears that’s it – that’s the reason.  But is it fair?  No.
Strictly from a users point of view I think it is very hard to justify technical penalties on good content.    Few users know or care what “hidden text” is, so if a mom and pop webmaster uses this tactic and Google deletes the otherwise informative, relevant website it is hard to argue that users are served well.    Even if a black hat SEO created a site filled with illegal tricks but also full of highly relevant quality content I think Google’s case against including that site is weak.  As a user I want  *quality content* and I don’t care about the site’s technical construction.    Where Google is simply banning sites for using spammy tactics I’d agree with Marshall that to be faithful to user centricism they really have to take it a step further and look at the content they are excluding.   Even if the content contains paid linking and other violations if it unique, quality content Google cannot exclude it without violating their stated “prime directive” of providing the best for the users.

However, Google has to manage about one trillion URLs, so obviously they need shortcuts in ranking and one of them is a page from AZ Senator Barry Goldwater’s playbook when – many years ago – he tried to justify an escalation of the Vietnam war, perhaps to nuclear level.   Google’s coin of the famous Goldwater phrase would be: “Extremism in the defense of the algorithm is no vice”.

I don’t think penalties are generally *fair* or *user friendly*, but I’m willing to concede they may be necessary for Google to function as profitably as they do since it would take a lot of human intervention to help every mom and pop determine what’s wrong with their sites.

However, I feel Google continues to fail in their obligation to communicate more effectively with penalized sites although I think they are s-l-o-w-l-y  catching on to the fact that most webmasters of penalized sites remain unclear as to why the site has been penalized or downranked.    Removal offers you a shot at “reinclusion” and (very rarely) possible webmaster tools staff feedback.   Downranking is algorithmic and Google will not generally offer any advice to help downranked sites.     In this case you generally want to re-read the webmaster guidelines and experiment with different approaches in an effort to boost rankings.

My view is that as many thin content database sites have flowed online Google is holding online material to a higher standard of quality, especially if it’s at a new website.    This helps explain why you can find well ranked pages that are inferior to pages at a new website.

There is a solution to all of this in my opinion, which is for Google to include a lot more community input and feedback into the process than they currently appear to do.    I’d guess the recent discussions to aquire DIGG may have been in part to gain more community feedback tools and data.     Historically Google has been brilliant at using algorithms to determine ranking and advertising, but has fallen short of brilliance in their ruthlessness in dealing with website practices they don’t like, leaving a lot of collateral damage – especially related to sites involved in “paid linking” and variations on that complex theme.

At SES San Jose 2009 I’ll hope to get to ask Matt Cutts more about this in person.   Matt is Google’s top spam cop and always very open to conversations about ranking and search.    In fact the best event of the conference is the Google Party where engineers are on hand to discuss search related issues – including complex ranking technicalities that are sometimes brought to Google’s attention as part of the search conference circuit.

Microsoft BrowseRank to compete with Google PageRank

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CNET profiles a new paper showcasing a Microsoft effort to enhance search by looking at *user behavior* as well as the old standby standards that all the major search engines use such as links in to the page, the content of the page, titles of the page, and several others.

Google’s initial brilliance was recognizing that the link relationships on the web gave you great insight into the best websites. Google correctly noted that sites with many links to them, especially for a particular keyword, were more likely to match a users interest for that keyword. Although many factors have been included in Google ranking for years, pagerank was arguably the most important breakthrough. Initially the system tried to be an online analogy to academic citation. Google’s Larry Page reasoned that websites with more incoming links would tend to be better, and that those incoming links themselves should also be weighted according to the importance of the site from which they came.

The system started to show severe signs of wear as search marketeers as well as mom and pop businesses began to “game” the pagerank system, creating spurious incoming links from bogus sites and buying links from high rank websites.

Enter Microsoft “BrowseRank”, which will arguably be harder to game because it will monitor the behavior of millions of users, looking for relationships between sites, pages, length of time on page, and more. It’s a good idea of course but arguably it is Google that has *by far* the best data set to manage this type of approach. So even if Microsoft’s system starts to deliver results superior to Google’s one can expect Google to kick their own efforts into gear.

As with all search innovation the users shoud be the big winners. Search remains good but not great, and competition in this space will only serve to make everybody better….right?