Tag Archives: Google

Google Social Search Wiki Launches

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Today’s tech blogOsphere buzz is about Google’s new wiki search feature that allows users to rank their own results.     This appears to me to be a splendid idea although I agree with some who say it won’t get used much.

However, for those who use this it may eventually allow a kind of search ranking we have never seen, where user defined preferences trump the mysterious algorithmic magic mistakes, gradually giving the user a great set of results well optimized to their needs.

I’d suggest that “perfect individualized search” may only require two basic steps – the first is a *discovery* part where you surface content relevant to your particular query and then plow through that manually to determine which sites best fit your needs.   Google does a pretty good job of facilitating that right now. However a second piece would allow you to build on those “personally filtered” results in various ways – some as simple as just listing them in rough order of relevance to you as Google is now doing.

Is this a good Google idea?    Yes!     Will anybody much use this?   Nope, because our habits as humans don’t incline us to be this organized.     I had a great conversation a few days ago with the developer of Reuters Calais semantic search – a brilliant tool designed to surface relevancy and meaning from massive document archives.    We were noting how difficult is is to simply break the habit of using Google search, even when it’s not the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.

Funny primates we !

Google Blog reports on the new search wiki

Oregon Coast Bird Watching

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This post falls squarely in the “SEO Experiments” category. We’ve had an informative but “plain jane” Oregon Coast website up for some time based on Oregon Coast magazine which is published by Northwest Travel Magazines.

The site has historically ranked poorly for “Oregon Coast” and related terms, probably in part because we had never done much to optimize it for search engines, and (I think) partly because quite ironically Google now struggles to properly optimize websites that have extensive internal cross linking. Ironic because extensive linking was a cornerstone of early web quality but fell out of ranking fashion as Google sought to kill off auto-generated websites that used that technique to boost their pagerank and thereby their Google rank for optimized query terms. This became a spam signal because it is so easy to create large database driven websites, but in the case of many sites it is also a good *quality signal* because the site may be very info rich, covering basically every mile of the Oregon Coast Highway 101 in good, objective detail. Google recognizes they’ve created a lot of collateral damage in this way but frankly they have not done much to fix the problem, basically feeling that there is enough “good content” that ranks well. This is wrong and unfortunate, and in travel it has led to a lot of mediocre results when better search would give detailed blog and website references to pages spawned, for example, by people who live in the place getting described and have extensive insider detail.

One part of the optimization has been to rename the site OregonCoastTravel.net and 301 redirect the old pages at 101MilebyMile.com to the new name, hoping to rank better for “Oregon Coast” and “Oregon Coast Travel” as we should.

I’m linking here to the Oregon Coast birding page because it is a straggler that has been 301 redirected to OregonCoastTravel.net but remains listed by Google at the old site. Also, it is an excellent resource page for that topic of Oregon Coast Birding. I want to see how fast this page will now be correctly reindexed.

Obama and McCain click ads throttled by Google?

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This just in from the Google click advertising confusion department.   It appears Google is severely throttling the number of clicks they allow to  publishers  for the key terms “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”.  I don’t understand why they’d do this unless perhaps it relates to election advertising laws?    That does not make sense to me because it seems we would have heard about this, so my second thought was that they might have agreements with the campaigns for exclusivity but … I’m not seeing Obama or McCain PPC ads on Google.
I was playing around with the costs to bid and run keyword campaigns for “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”, surprised to see that Google does not appear to be running those terms or terms like “vote”.
Using a cost per click maximum of $100.00 and a daily budget of $250,000.00 I should get a huge count for those terms, yet the Google predictor only shows I’d get about 102-128 clicks per day for Obama and 118-149 for McCain at an average costs just above a dollar per click.
Not that is not 118 *thousand* which might make sense, that is a paltry hundred and change clicks at a cost of about 100 per day.   Why wouldn’t Google allow a bigger campaign?

Google: Typosquatting for dollars. 32,000,000 of them

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Google is helping to monetize interenet search misspellings, a technique that is estimated to make them 32-50 million per year.   It has also brought them a lawsuit from Edelman, the massive advertising consultancy who has no less than Wal-Mart as a client.

The technique involved is called “typosquatting” and is simply web publishers taking advantage of the many internet mispellings and mishits on keyboards to place advertising for terms like “computors” or “Girmany” or “uPhone” (where the user has accidentally hit the u instead of the i)

A study estimated that monetizing these domains via adsense ads (Google’s revenue share ad service) puts an extra 32-50 million to Google’s bottom line.

I don’t find this objectionable but not clear on the details of the Edelman lawsuit.  I’m guessing they want Google to direct people to the best sites for those terms and not charge rather than send the user to an intermediate site.

Silicon Alley Insider reports

Google Phone Coming … Today

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The widely anticipated debut of the Google Smart Phone is today.   The phone will be made my HTC, sold by TMobile, and run by Android the open source operating system.    Offering free email service to all subscribers, It appears Google and Tmobile are going after the blackberry market more than iPhone which sounds like a clever plan to me.    Apple users are very loyal and very unlikely to move away from their beloved iPhones.    Blackberry and Treo users will be looking closely at the new phone and I think in many cases happy to move to a better phone (me certainly included as a Treo user).

More from PC Magazine, including some Google Phone pictures

Matt Cutts from Google

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Matt Cutts at the Google Dance
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

It’s always great to get a chance to talk to Matt Cutts at search conferences though I didn’t have any good complicated search questions to bug him about this year. Matt is one of the early Google folks and arguably the most knowledgeable search expert in the world since he’s one of the few people who knows the Google algorithm inside out. Matt’s actually listed on the key Google search patent.

Today I noticed that Matt’s post about Google Chrome is near the top at Techmeme after some early reports suggested Google was going to nab all the info people created via use of the Chrome browser. Although I do not worry about Google stealing the content I create using their tools I was surprised in the discussion at Matt’s blog to see how people probably do not understand how much of your data from searches, emails, and other online tools is analyzed by search engines, ISPs, and probably at least a few government agencies. I wrote over there:

Well, I’m sure folks like Marshall knew that Google was not out to steal content. What people should be as concerned about is how the Chrome datastream will be processed now and over time, and how open will it be to examination by companies for advertising purposes ? Personally I’m OK with that but I think many people are not, and the lack of transparency in this area bothers me.

Somebody even suggested I was foolish to think they’d use Chrome data to target advertising, to which I replied:

Josh – you are naive to assume Google does so little with the search term data they explicitly say they have the right to collect. In Gmail, for example, some portion of your header is read by Google (probably just the title and not the content) so that ads can be targeted to you on those topics. Google Toolbar collects a lot of information and my understanding this helps target PPC advertisements though I’m not sure about that. As i noted I’m personally OK with this level of snooping, but I believe Google should make it much clearer what they do with the data they collect and probably also have options so users can delete any information they created – including their search streams – as they see fit.

SES San Jose – click fraud session

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The intro talk by Tom Cuthbert is listing click fraud numbers that, at over 16% for overall and over 25% for content PPC, are dramatically higher than the few percent normally cited by Google. I’m anxious to hear Shuman’s take on this. Excellent slides…. will try to link them up later.

Erin Sheedy-Owen from Yahoo on catching fraudulent clicks. “We err on the side of the advertiser”. You’ll see these in your logs but won’t be charged for them.

Outright fraud vs Low converting vs unwanted clicks. 12-15% of the clicks are filtered and advertiser not charged. Large recent rise in bot fraud. (this was also noted by Cuthbert).

Yahoo goal is to respond to click fraud reports from advertisers within 10 days. Erin’s making the case that advertiser feedback is very important.

Waiting for Internet Advertising Bureau guidelines.

Deborah from Outrider, a Search Marketing agency managing 1.3 billion in search advertising.   [wow – wouldn’t this be approaching 10% of the market if it is annual? – I’m skeptical of this number’s relevance – maybe this is over a long period of time, though still….an impressive data set].

Client opinions vary from huge concern to little.

ClickForensics is their click fraud application.   Interesting – she just mentioned parked domains as a click fraud issue.  Traffic from a highly relevant parked domain name would probably be good.

Matt Greitzer from Razorfish: They manage 300 million per year in paid clicks.

Virtuous cycle of quality clicks [hmmm — IMHO the optimal revenue model for Google and Yahoo is probably not optimal for advertisers.
I don’t think folks understand this well yet and for agencies overbids are money in the bank too, but standards are coming too slowly because search profits will go down as standards go up.   That said, I have a lot of faith in the next speaker’s sincerity ]

Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google:

Google’s Proactive approach:   Filters – automated.  Invalid click reports available to check these out.    Less than 10% filtered this way.

Offline analyis – leads to credits to account.    Click quality adjustments.  Statistical anamolies.

Finally, reactive approach involves investigation and report.  Very, very tiny.  <.02% handled this way.

[yikes – so why were Cuthbert’s numbers so much higher?]

Smart pricing:  Google gets same ROI by adjusting cost per click according to conversion metrics – ie lower performing publishers command less PPC. [But how do they measure the conversions?]

Google Placement reports and other performanc metrics allow you to track your own campaigns with great precision.

Google competes on basis of ROI, so their incentive is to keep it high and kill fraud.

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

Measuring Success in a 2.0 World

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Avinash Kaushik from Google and Market Motive: Get on the train or get run over. Relevant metrics are changing dramatically and are an essential part of your online strategy. RSS as the key blog metric, because this is the ultimate permission marketing environment where you push content out to your readers.

Jim Sterne: Web and search metrics are changing the game from reporting to analysis to promotions to “hearts and minds” marketing.

Mathew Baily had the most entertaining yet relevant presentation I’ve seen in some time – probably not as helpful as case studies but brilliant! Analytics and Star Trek: 1.0 analytics endless cycle of mundane reporting. This runs you down. You want 2.0 analytics! Star trek death conversion rate? = 14% mortality, mostly among red shirted actors. Need more context which is where story-driven analytics comes in to answer the detailed questions. Ask questions – best human tool.

Marshall Sponder of Monster.com:

http://www.webmetricsguru.com
http://www.theanalyticsguru.com

Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
How do you know if you’ve been successful with search engines and your website in general? You can check your “rank” at search engines for particular keywords, analyze log files to see the actual terms people used to reach your website, or make the ultimate jump and “close the loop” by measuring sales conversions and ROI. This panel explores both classic and cutting-edge techniques to measure success, what statistics you should really care about, ways to be more strategically focused, and how to drive increased revenue for your business.

Moderator:
Speakers: