Google IPO
Features: "24/October/2003
We all knew it would happen - we all knew why it would happen - perhaps this week's 'news' has thrown us a little on how it would happen - but why is the slight movement on Google's inevitable float plans causing such a crazed level of excitement?"
Friday, October 24, 2003
A timely reminder of the Google commandments:
Top 5 Google To Dos and Donts Debate 2: "5) TIME & EFFORT, Tid-Bits:
Don't look at the PageRank in the toolbar
Don't make assumptions based only on what is happening with your site(s)
Don't sign with or continue to use an ISP that has bad downtime, research them well. A 404 crawl by Googlebot will cost you much more than you will save with a cheap ISP.
Don't stress
Don't expect instant results. "
Top 5 Google To Dos and Donts Debate 2: "5) TIME & EFFORT, Tid-Bits:
Don't look at the PageRank in the toolbar
Don't make assumptions based only on what is happening with your site(s)
Don't sign with or continue to use an ISP that has bad downtime, research them well. A 404 crawl by Googlebot will cost you much more than you will save with a cheap ISP.
Don't stress
Don't expect instant results. "
Espotting Media: "Register now and drive targeted leads to your website
Espotting Media can help you access targeted leads from 72% of the UK's online population. To view some of the benefits of listing your site click here. By ensuring that your listings appear within our top 3-5 search results, you will benefit from highly targeted traffic from our entire network of sites and be exposed to over 850 million searches."
Espotting Media can help you access targeted leads from 72% of the UK's online population. To view some of the benefits of listing your site click here. By ensuring that your listings appear within our top 3-5 search results, you will benefit from highly targeted traffic from our entire network of sites and be exposed to over 850 million searches."
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Old news but situation still stinks so it would appear the tinkering goes on...
a Web Site Design Web Development Network: Pixel Resources: Wisconsin-Madison-Milwaukee-Watertown-WI: "Google Confirms Introduction of New Algorithms
June 11,2003 - Courtesy of: Stepforth
Google has finally confirmed what SEO practitioners have been assuming for weeks now. For the past three months, Google has been tinkering with its ranking formulas in order to introduce several new factors in clustering, ranking and SPAM filtering. During this time, websites that had once received Top placements have found themselves bouncing around the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), often dropping as far as 50 - 100th place in Google's rankings. While Google has not issued any official statements, an engineer at Google who writes under the name, 'Google-Guy' has confirmed in the SEO Discussion Forum, Web Master World that the changes perceived by SEO professionals were in fact being made, 'on the fly' as Google attempts to work out the kinks in their new systems.
The changes being introduced by Google have made a significant impact on search engine rankings and has caused a great deal of damage to many companies dependant on Google listings. As Google is a private company with no contractual obligations to the websites listed in its directory, there is absolutely no recourse for companies effected by a loss of position. Unfortunately, at this time, Google is the absolute king of search engines being responsible in one way or another for over 70% of all searches conducted on the Internet. According to our pseudonymous source, Google-Guy, the changes should be complete by the end of July. We expect to see a fairly different Google when all is said and done but we also expect that Google will continue to be the dominant search tool for at least the next 12 - 18 months as they have several distribution agreements with other"
a Web Site Design Web Development Network: Pixel Resources: Wisconsin-Madison-Milwaukee-Watertown-WI: "Google Confirms Introduction of New Algorithms
June 11,2003 - Courtesy of: Stepforth
Google has finally confirmed what SEO practitioners have been assuming for weeks now. For the past three months, Google has been tinkering with its ranking formulas in order to introduce several new factors in clustering, ranking and SPAM filtering. During this time, websites that had once received Top placements have found themselves bouncing around the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), often dropping as far as 50 - 100th place in Google's rankings. While Google has not issued any official statements, an engineer at Google who writes under the name, 'Google-Guy' has confirmed in the SEO Discussion Forum, Web Master World that the changes perceived by SEO professionals were in fact being made, 'on the fly' as Google attempts to work out the kinks in their new systems.
The changes being introduced by Google have made a significant impact on search engine rankings and has caused a great deal of damage to many companies dependant on Google listings. As Google is a private company with no contractual obligations to the websites listed in its directory, there is absolutely no recourse for companies effected by a loss of position. Unfortunately, at this time, Google is the absolute king of search engines being responsible in one way or another for over 70% of all searches conducted on the Internet. According to our pseudonymous source, Google-Guy, the changes should be complete by the end of July. We expect to see a fairly different Google when all is said and done but we also expect that Google will continue to be the dominant search tool for at least the next 12 - 18 months as they have several distribution agreements with other"
The Register: "It's been called a 'Google-NACK': you enter a particular search term and Google tells you that there are thousands of matching results, but fails to return many, or any results. "
The Register: "'I found your article on Google’s limited results kind of strange, so I ran the search myself, and was able to browse all of the returned results. The catch? I was using Opera (specifically, its built-in search box). I have since tried the Google search from Google’s home page using various browsers and got the same results you did.'
'It boggles the mind – the only difference with Opera’s search is that it adds a tag telling Google that the search request came from Opera. Why would that turn off Google’s anti-blog filter? I don’t know, but don’t let Google know or they may screw that up as well!' "
Google gossip
Mercury News | 05/04/2003 | Inside Google: "While they dream, Brin and Page also keep their eyes on the details: They use software to tally, to the second, how much money the firm is raking in.
They said the free, healthy meals only came about after calculating the time saved from driving off-site and reduced health care costs. There's even a Webcam trained on the cafeteria lunch line, so employees can avoid a long wait.
While most of the tech world buzzes about an IPO, Google's founders hold firm to their technological ambitions -- building, in Page's words, ``the ultimate search engine.''
``It would understand exactly what you type and would give you the right things back,'' said Page. ``We're pretty good, but we're nowhere close to being perfect. We won't be for a long time.''"
To understand is so very, very different from phrase matching or link popularity...
'It boggles the mind – the only difference with Opera’s search is that it adds a tag telling Google that the search request came from Opera. Why would that turn off Google’s anti-blog filter? I don’t know, but don’t let Google know or they may screw that up as well!' "
Google gossip
Mercury News | 05/04/2003 | Inside Google: "While they dream, Brin and Page also keep their eyes on the details: They use software to tally, to the second, how much money the firm is raking in.
They said the free, healthy meals only came about after calculating the time saved from driving off-site and reduced health care costs. There's even a Webcam trained on the cafeteria lunch line, so employees can avoid a long wait.
While most of the tech world buzzes about an IPO, Google's founders hold firm to their technological ambitions -- building, in Page's words, ``the ultimate search engine.''
``It would understand exactly what you type and would give you the right things back,'' said Page. ``We're pretty good, but we're nowhere close to being perfect. We won't be for a long time.''"
To understand is so very, very different from phrase matching or link popularity...
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Links Are All About Reputation - An Interview with Mike Grehan: "What do you think about selecting sites as link partners based on their Google PageRank?
Mike: I've done a lot of research on this. I know exactly what PR7 means: It means you have one more than six but one less than eight. That's all it means. Stop obsessing about PR; get on with business!"
Mike: I've done a lot of research on this. I know exactly what PR7 means: It means you have one more than six but one less than eight. That's all it means. Stop obsessing about PR; get on with business!"
Monday, October 20, 2003
Website personalization:
Why personalization hasn't worked: October 20, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern: "Personalization hasn't worked because most people don't have a compelling reason to personalize. It hasn't worked because the cost of doing it well usually significantly outweighs the benefits it delivers. It hasn't worked because managers have seen it as some Holy Grail of content management...
Not surprisingly, the Jupiter report finds that personalized websites are four times more expensive to run. It also finds that personalized websites are twice as likely to attract visitors who will never pay for anything. Worse still, it finds that 25 percent of consumers actually avoid personalized websites because they fear that their personal information will be abused."
Why personalization hasn't worked: October 20, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern: "Personalization hasn't worked because most people don't have a compelling reason to personalize. It hasn't worked because the cost of doing it well usually significantly outweighs the benefits it delivers. It hasn't worked because managers have seen it as some Holy Grail of content management...
Not surprisingly, the Jupiter report finds that personalized websites are four times more expensive to run. It also finds that personalized websites are twice as likely to attract visitors who will never pay for anything. Worse still, it finds that 25 percent of consumers actually avoid personalized websites because they fear that their personal information will be abused."
A search engine (& tech change) to keep an eye on...
///ExactSeek makes use of Alexa ranking.
(October 18 2003) ExactSeek, a newcomer to the search engine scene, has announced that it is now using the Alexa ranking for a site for determining the position of a listing in search results.
Alexa, now owned by Amazon.com, is a search bar that tracks user activity. Based on the information gathered, it ranks sites according to popularity. Users of this browser plug in can therefore at all times see how popular a site is among the users of Alexa.
(To see a site's "popularity" without downloading the toolbar, go to Alexa.com and use their Google-based search engine. Click on the link named "site info" next to the relevant search listing.)
"With the exception of Google, the major search engines have offered little in the way of innovation," says Jayde Online CEO, Mel Strocen.
"Factoring user popularity into a ranking algorithm is ground-breaking. Link popularity, keyword density and content relevancy are subject to manipulation by savvy webmasters and SEO specialists. User popularity is a far more reliable indicator of where web sites should rank and gives the surfing public some input on the search results they see."
ExactSeek is definitely one of the smallest search engines around. The database contains some 2 million web pages, but the site receives and indexes some 30000 new site submissions daily. Unlike most search engines ExactSeek actually makes use of meta tag data.
ExactSeek.com: Web Search Engine and Directory
http://www.alexa.com/
///ExactSeek makes use of Alexa ranking.
(October 18 2003) ExactSeek, a newcomer to the search engine scene, has announced that it is now using the Alexa ranking for a site for determining the position of a listing in search results.
Alexa, now owned by Amazon.com, is a search bar that tracks user activity. Based on the information gathered, it ranks sites according to popularity. Users of this browser plug in can therefore at all times see how popular a site is among the users of Alexa.
(To see a site's "popularity" without downloading the toolbar, go to Alexa.com and use their Google-based search engine. Click on the link named "site info" next to the relevant search listing.)
"With the exception of Google, the major search engines have offered little in the way of innovation," says Jayde Online CEO, Mel Strocen.
"Factoring user popularity into a ranking algorithm is ground-breaking. Link popularity, keyword density and content relevancy are subject to manipulation by savvy webmasters and SEO specialists. User popularity is a far more reliable indicator of where web sites should rank and gives the surfing public some input on the search results they see."
ExactSeek is definitely one of the smallest search engines around. The database contains some 2 million web pages, but the site receives and indexes some 30000 new site submissions daily. Unlike most search engines ExactSeek actually makes use of meta tag data.
ExactSeek.com: Web Search Engine and Directory
http://www.alexa.com/
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