Tag Archives: Google

An Addendum to the Kandinsky Zone Effect

31 Monday Mar 2008

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So I tested the Kandinsky Zone Effect a few weeks ago which tested how quickly Google indexes blog posts (it took less than 10 minutes to get into the general index!).

Now the question is to see if tags matter.  And to do that, I need another term that no one has ever written (and is just one word this time, so it makes the tag simple).  And I’ll use it in the tag alone (not in the body of the post).  Check back soon!

Update 1: So it took less than 10 minutes again for Google to add this latest post to their index, but the tag I used (“miroified”, to follow the theme of modern artists) still does not register any hits.  Now that I’m using the term in the body of the post itself, we’ll see if Google picks it up.

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Sun buys MySQL

16 Wednesday Jan 2008

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Wow, Sun is buying MySQL.

Now, I’ve never been mistaken for a Sun fan.  I wrote about their continued slide into irrelevance when they changed their stock symbol to JAVA (huh?).  That move was panned by everyone, including the most avid Sun-philes.

This move, however, is great for Sun, but does it make any sense for MySQL?  I didn’t even know that MySQL was for sale (though, clearly they were).  I just figured a company that was more… um… relevant would pick them up.

But if you think about it, it didn’t make too much sense for the major players who are picking up companies right now.  Oracle would have loved to do it, but I’m sure MySQL would have balked.  The same goes for Microsoft.  Google would not bother to acquire something as mundane as plumbing.  Yahoo has enough trouble right now, and also is not interested in plumbing.

One interesting option would have been Amazon.  They continue to roll out web services that cater to startups; it would have been impressively bold of them to plop down the cash for the most popular database for startups, too.

But Sun takes it.  It makes sense.  Sun can bring their shiny new toy into the enterprise conversations they’re having with the big IT departments that MySQL wants.

Let’s just hope they don’t screw it up.

Does Google really hate Text Link Ads?

16 Friday Nov 2007

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The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing at Google. Or maybe it does, but it doesn’t care.

www.text-link-ads.com is doing just fine, thank you very much.  Visit their site.  Despite all the buzz lately about how text link ads will invalidate search rankings, kick your dog, and destroy the universe, the site still has a healthy Pagerank of 7.  Shouldn’t Google be penalizing them?

OK, I know what you’re thinking: the site itself isn’t doing anything wrong. It doesn’t have any text links on its own site so technically it’s not violating the rules of the road. Even though every one of their customers and every one of their clients is violating Google’s rules, they’re still technically on the right side of the law.  And Pagerank is probably a fully automated score and Google doesn’t want to tweak it by hand.

OK, fine. But search for text link ads at Google.  The first two paid results are for the company itself.  That means Text Link Ads is paying Google for that placement and the purchase was approved by an AdWords sales rep.  The marketing copy on the site even touts improved organic search engine rankings as the primary benefit of buying text link ads.

“Sorry, guys, everything you do is wrong, but feel free to buy ads from us anyway.”

If Google wants to discourage paying for/selling text links, shouldn’t they stop promoting the company that’s leading that charge?

Google resetting Pagerank?

01 Thursday Nov 2007

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I was sent this yesterday.

It says that Google has plans to roll out some significant changes to their ranking and ad system.

1. Get rid of Pagerank and replace it with Visitor Rank, where users with the Google Toolbar can thumbs up/thumbs down the site they’re on.

I can definitely see them getting rid of Pagerank. They really don’t want webmasters to focus on Pagerank and they want to discourage text link vendors. Why not bury bury Pagerank altogether?

Visitor Rank also makes sense as an ingredient in the hodge-podge that makes up a sites rankings.  Could be gamed, of course, but take the data with a grain of salt and it could prove very useful.

2. Confirmation click for AdSense

In theory, the visitor would have to click on a confirmation button after their first click on AdSense.  What? Two clicks to reach an advertiser?  When the company is still contending that click fraud isn’t a real problem?  This is really, really unlikely.  Advertisers don’t want their potential customers to have any friction.  This won’t happen.

3. Stop reporting of back links

Like the hiding of Pagerank, hiding back links also makes some sense. It’s valuable for webmasters to be able to find who’s linking to them, but for the SEO savvy, it’s used to help them build links to make them more attractive to Google, not to users.  Anyway, I think it’s possible they may do this, but not a slam dunk.

4. Replace “nofollow” with “dofollow”

This would require that links be tagged with “dofollow” or the search engine won’t follow it at all.  Now, that is just plain ridiculous.  If the blog post had sketchy credibility with me before, it lost it all on that one.  Google would throw out 99.999% of the links in the world and require everyone to retag their links?  That’s just silly.

I’d bet the post is a list of possible things that Google has considered, or a wish list of the engineer the blogger is citing (if there is one), or even a wish list of the blogger himself.  I just can’t believe that it’s a list of things that Google is launching in the near future, though the discussion is interesting…

Testing the Kandinsky Zone Effect

26 Wednesday Sep 2007

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What is the Kandinsky Zone Effect?

I ask myself that question all the time.

Actually, it’s really just a test.  I’m testing to see how long it takes blogsearch.google.com, technorati, etc. to pick up my a posting with a phrase that I really doubt anyone has ever written about before.

I’m also testing to see how long it takes to get into the regular Google search index after it gets into their blog index.

Stay tuned for results…

Update: Wow.  In less than 10 minutes, this post is viewable in the regular Google search index (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Kandinsky+Zone). That’s amazing spidering and indexing speed by Google.  On top of that, that’s a truly unfair advantage blogs have over regular webpages.

Next, I’m going to try it with a new blog that is not yet in the index…

Ramblings of a Short Man: Clothing edition

17 Sunday Dec 2006

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I’m a short man.  I’m sure you probably guessed that if you’ve read the title of my blog.  (Of course, the number of people who are reading my blog who don’t actually know me undoubtedly smaller than the number of “how’s the weather up there?” comments I’ve ever heard.)  I’m 5′-3″, 135 lbs (when it’s not holiday season).  Justin can palm my head.

This post is right up my alley. In it, Kathy Sierra is complaining that free T-shirts often suck because the sizes are all wrong.

Luckily, at least the shirts I get are the right gender, but the sizes are always screwed up.  For instance, I won a couple T-shirts in TopCoder competitions (one from Google Jam and one from the TCO).  The TCO sent me this hideous lavender/purple XL T-shirt with no less than 8 LARGE corporate logos all over it.  The stupid thing is TopCoder has pictures of its members on its site (optionally, of course), but a quick sample will tell you the vast majority are not XL guys.  I mean, c’mon, isn’t the stereotypical nerd a super skinny guy with bad hair, broken glasses, and a perpetually runny nose?  I think I fit that perfectly.

Kudos to Google, BTW; they actually asked me what size I was and sent me a very nice shirt that I still wear.  I couldn’t even give away that purple disaster.

And it doesn’t stop at free stuff: ever try to buy a suit off the rack if you’re 5′-3″?  I wear a 36 Short jacket, which typically leaves me with options of 3 different shades of tweed or a sports coat made out of wicker, paper mache, and empty toner cartridges.

Sure, I’m at the short end of the gradient, so it may not be worth supporting me, but this last one is just stupid.  I’ve been to many stores that put their jeans in cubbies along a big wall.  And of course, they store them in size order, from smallest (waist & inseam) to largest, from top to bottom?  Huh?  That’s just stupid.

But hey, I’m not really complaining.  I can cross my legs in coach.  Heh heh.

Wha? Craigslist evil?

13 Wednesday Dec 2006

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I love Craigslist.  It rocks.  I gave away an old George Foreman grill to a good home last week.  I even gave away what must be the most hideous crystal picture frame you can possibly imagine (well, you probably can’t even imagine it).  I buy stuff, I sell stuff.  It’s much easier than ebay.

And Kevin Burton is accusing them of being evil because they don’t want to sell ads?

C’mon, you’re kidding right?  Evil?

I remember thinking that it was crazy that making money was considered evil, and I thought that was still the prevailing opinion of the blogosphere.  Google doesn’t want to be evil, whatever that means, and everytime they try to make money in a different way, people jump up and down about them going back on their promise to not be evil.

That was whack already.  Now Craigslist is evil for not accepting money?

Look, Google isn’t evil.  Craigslist isn’t evil.  Even Microsoft isn’t evil.  They do what they do within the realms of mostly reasonable business ethics. I happen to agree with most of Kevin’s points that Craigslist is wasting a great opportunity to do real good in the world. So maybe they’re shortsighted, but far from evil.

Really, we all need to get over it.

TechMeme’s sponsorship model makes sense

25 Monday Sep 2006

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TechMeme’s new ad model is all the buzz (and of course, is at the top of TechMeme itself) today. And almost all of the opinions are glowing.

Actually, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t like it. That’s a rarity: an idea on the web that has a positive consensus.

And then there’s John Tokash. I really wouldn’t want to jump on the man (he’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever met), but he posted his disapproval of the new system, then sent me an email taunting me to take him down.

Bring it on!

First, yes, I agree with him that of course, sponsored posts on TechMeme will get more attention than non-sponsored posts (that’s why they’re paying for them). And yes, that means that more bloggers may write about them and so they’ll climb up TechMeme’s ladder.  Is it the death of TechMeme? Hardly.

John argues that Google’s sponsored listings are separated from their organic listings in a way that prevents them from being tainted. But the parallels between TechMeme’s and Google’s systems are everywhere. If a sponsored link on Google will get some people to click on it, look at the site, and then later link to the site from their own website.  Voila! Bump in Pagerank.  That’s exactly analogous to the “artificial bump” in TechMeme.

The reason that both systems aren’t artificial is that a human has to consider the site (or blog post) that they’re looking at and then decide if they’re going to link to it (or blog about it).  In both cases, Google and TechMeme are trying to approximate global interest in a site or post, and if sponsorship boosts that global interest, then both systems should reflect that.

The flaws in the systems are exposed when the global interest if faked (link farms, blog comment spam, etc.).  Those are real, troublesome issues, but are independent of whether or not Google & TechMeme offer sponsored space on their websites.

Ball’s in your court, John.

Google’s failure to diversify

01 Saturday Jul 2006

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Really interesting read on Business Week on Google’s hype but lack of actual market delivery on many of its products beyond its flagship Search.

The stats cited (assuming they’re accurate) are really eye-opening:

Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger, according to comScore Media Metrix. Three-month-old Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site, according to data from Hitwise, a competitive intelligence firm. Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail…

…Take Orkut, Google’s two-year-old social-networking site. Since making an initial splash, Orkut has seen limited changes and has faded in popularity everywhere except Brazil. Today it draws less than 1% as much U.S. traffic as MySpace.

The article does admit that there are some great successes to tout, like Google Maps. But in general, despite some really fancy technology and cool features, they can’t reach the marketshare they want.

Clearly, Google is still a successful company and every company out there would love the level of press coverage (read: hype) and batting average that Google has (Homestead included). But I think the facts show what many of us already believed: while it is a great technology company and great recruiting company, it’s currently only a decent product company and a worse product marketing company. Oh, and they’re run by engineers.

As Don Dodge writes, their products’ success “depends on how much effort Google puts into making them better, and how much real value they deliver to users”.

Also, given the unbelievably favorable opinion that the blogosphere (and Internet industry in general) has of Google and everything it touches, the fact that most of their launches haven’t gotten much traction reminds us of something else. It reminds us that most of the world doesn’t listen to us.

Update: The discussion continues: Michael Parekh focuses on how Google and the others can better market these hyped products.

Google Checkout: Why will users use it?

29 Thursday Jun 2006

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Google announced Google Checkout today, and all the world’s a buzz about it. But like TechCrunch, I’m not sure yet why end users would use it.

Now, I see a huge reason why merchants will use it. Merchants who use AdWords (which is pretty much everybody) will get the little shopping cart “I accept Google Checkout” icon next to their ad. And that is huge advantage. With Google’s very stark search results pages, a little icon does do a lot to attract attention. And of course, the more clicks you get on your ad, the higher your ad tends to float…

Forget the cheaper transaction fees ($0.20 per + 2%) or the credit against those transaction fees that AdWords users get. That doesn’t really amount to much unless a lot of customers actually use Google Checkout. The real merchant benefit is this little icon which will make their ad much more noticeable on the page.

But again, why would customers use it?  There have been a lot of online wallets before (like Yahoo) and none of them have taken off. Paypal is not a simple online wallet and, I think, has real benefit to end users (direct person-to-person money transfer). Even then, most customers’ interaction with Paypal is just a place to enter their credit card so someone else can receive money. In the case of Google Checkout, the end user can’t do simply that. They have to use their Google info to pay.

 So far, I only see two reasons that end users will use it:

  1. They are intrigued by that little icon next to all the merchants that they see, and they decide to sign up for it.
  2. They want to use it just because it’s Google.

Will it work?  I don’t know. The public uses a lot of Microsoft stuff just because it’s Microsoft, but then again, they own our OS and browser.

Anyway, I can see a lot of merchants integrating with it to get the little icon on their ads, but not getting a lot of transactions through it, unless Google provides more end user benefits.

Update: John Tokash has written a great review. He thinks Google Checkout’s shielding of your email address has a ton of value, but note how it will only forward the email to your gmail account. Tricky…