Google WebQuotes

Google WebQuotes: "WebQuotes "

Think you know everything about searching on Google? Think again. Underneath it all, there's a host of little-known features that can be used for market research. Here's three:

1. Find out what people say about your site.

WebQuotes [1], a Google Lab experiment, allows you to find out what people say about a person, Website, or product.

I suggest trying variations of your site name, such as "SitePoint", "www.sitepoint.com" and "http://www.sitepoint.com" to see if they bring up different results.

2. Do a background check.

If you type in "info:siteURL.com", Google will provide you background information about any site on the Internet. This includes links to cached copies of the site, similar and related sites, pages that link to the site, and pages that mention the site.

3. View indexed pages.

As of several weeks ago, searching for "site:www.URL.com" brings up a list of all indexed pages in Google. Prior to this being implemented, the only way to get an guesstimate as to the number of indexed page was to run a search like "site:www.sitepoint.com -asdfkljasdf", which often resulted in inaccurate results.

It doesn't make a difference where or not you put "www." in front of the URL, the result will be the same.

When running this search, I noticed that the number for SitePoint.com would switch between 163,000 and 169,000 indexed pages. I'm not sure what why this is; maybe it has to do with the server processing the query. I recommend running it a few times and going with the highest number.

Wired News: Google Gets More Gmail Guff

Wired News: Google Gets More Gmail Guff: "Twenty-eight privacy and civil liberties groups sent an open letter to Google on Wednesday urging the company to reconsider its plans for a free e-mail program that would scan the content of incoming e-mail and seed it with targeted ads.
The groups want Google to suspend its proposed Gmail plan until the company has adequately addressed privacy concerns raised last week when the company announced the program. "

Google says it cannot change results

Google says it cannot change results: "What 'manual changes to the results' are depends on the precise context of the statement. It wouldn't necessarily include deleting spammy sites from the index.

Agree 100% - the key word is 'results' By 'results', they mean the sites that make it to the pool of sites to be displayed to the public - they say nothing about what goes on before that happens. "

Google Guy:(same forum)
I walked over to see David Krane and asked him about it, because I had a hunch that David was talking about the results for this particular search (the word "jew") and not our overall system. And that's the correct explanation.
To give some background: people write us all the time to say that they dislike or disagree with a particular set of search results. For example, at one point someone wrote in and claimed that one of the search results for Martin Luther King was a revisionist history and wasn't accurate. Should Google go and remove that result by hand? Who gets to decide whether a result deserves to be in the top 10? You can see where the slope gets slippery really quickly when you start bringing value judgments about the content of the site into the mix.

So historically Google has very strongly tried to follow a policy of letting our algorithmic search results stand as they are; we put our efforts much more into improving search by writing better algorithms instead of trying to fix a smaller set of searches by hand. We have a quite small set of circumstances that can result in taking manual action: things like a valid legal request (e.g. a DMCA complaint), spam and things outside our quality guidelines (e.g. off-topic porn for a person's name), and a very small amount of security-related stuff (e.g. credit card numbers on a web page). Other than that, we do our best to let our algorithms work out the results on their own. I think that's the right approach, and I think most of our users would prefer that instead of lots of hand-editing.

Does that mean every search is perfect? Of course not. With 200+ million searches a day, there will be some searches that aren't as good as they can be. But when a bad search is pointed out to us, we look to how to improve our algorithms instead of doing some one-off change.


"Isn't the traditional method of dealing with web sites containing such material (race hate) to contact the hosting company / owner and take it from there?

I'm sure that this site shows up in Yahoo! and other search engines, so why put all the emphasis on Google to sort it out?

It's like telling one tv station to stop reporting on the conflict in Iraq. It doesn't stop the others and it certainly doesn't stop the conflict."

The Observer | Focus | Google is watching you

The Observer | Focus | Google is watching you: "Jordana Beebe of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearing House said: 'The privacy implications of going through and perusing a customer's email to display targeting advertising could be the Achilles' heel for Google's service.'
Google, which has enjoyed an almost slavishly admiring press since its launch, is unused to dealing with criticism. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that its response to last week's onslaught veered from unconvincing ('The ads would be akin to coupons that shoppers get at grocery stores, based on what they've just purchased') to apologetic ('We'll learn. I'm sure our users will tell us frankly when we don't get it right, and we'll adjust accordingly') to simply bemused ('I am very surprised that there are these kind of questions,' said Larry Page.) "

Google Search: pizza near Palo Alto, CA

Page from click thhrough on one line listing Google Search: pizza near Palo Alto, CA: "Searched the web for pizza at 240 Cambridge Ave, Palo Alto, CA. Results 1 - 7 of about 10.

Domino's Pizza
240 Cambridge Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94306-1504
(650) 326-6552

Get driving directions to this location:
Start Location

N
WE
SZoom Out Zoom In
"

Google Search: pizza palo alto

What google slocal results look like....Google Search: pizza palo alto: "Local results for pizza near Palo Alto, CA

Domino's Pizza - 1.0 miles S - 240 Cambridge Ave - (650) 326-6552
Papa Murphy's Take 'N' Bake Pizza - 1.0 miles SE - 2730 Middlefield Rd - (650) 328-5200
Ramona's Pizza - 1.0 miles S - 2313 Birch St - (650) 322-2181


Pizza - Palo Alto Live... California Pizza Kitchen on 531 Cowper Street in Palo Alto. Call (650) 323-7332. Jose's Pizza on 2275 El Camino Real in Palo Alto. Call (650) 326-6522. ...
www.paloaltolive.com/entertain-dining-pizza.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

Dining - Palo Alto Live... Chinese Continental Deli French Indian Italian Japanese Mediterranean Mexican Pizza Seafood Singaporean ... Link to Us | Help Wanted | � 2000-2002 Palo Alto Live. ...
www.paloaltolive.com/entertain-dining.html - 13k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.paloaltolive.com ]

Pizza A GoGo San Jose Palo Alto"

Press release Google Connects Searchers With Local Information

Google Connects Searchers With Local Information: "MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. March 17, 2004 - Google Inc. today announced the integration of local search results into Google.com with the availability of Google Local. This new feature enables users to find relevant local information with neighborhood business listings, maps, directions, and useful web pages"

Google Responds to Gmail Privacy Concerns

Google Responds to Gmail Privacy Concerns: "Google's newly announced free e-mail offering has strengthened its position against Yahoo! and MSN. Before it can continue to battle its competition in earnest, however, it's working to quell privacy concerns.
The company's plans to include contextually targeted ads in its Web e-mail client are the cause for the concern, because Google intends to have its technology scan the content of e-mail messages, and target ads accordingly. Now that it's clear the initiative isn't an April Fool's joke, analysts, industry figures and individuals are debating the decision across the Net. Meanwhile a group of privacy advocates are drafting a letter asking Google to clarify its policies...

In response, Google says what's drawing concern is what computers are capable of doing, not what the company does in reality. "We pride ourselves in protecting users' data and holding ourselves to he highest standard," said Wayne Rosing, VP of engineering for Google.

"We do not keep that data in correlated form, it's separated in various ways and we have policies inside the company that do not allow that kind of correlation to happen. We consider any program or programming that correlates user data with user identity to be a violation of trust and we do not do that," said Rosing.

But Rosing stopped short of saying that the company will never correlate the data.

"Then it gets to be an issue of what happens if we have to do something to comply with a legal situation," he said, apparently speaking of criminal cases in which the company might be subpoenaed by law enforcement.

It's worth mentioning that Google already has the power to correlate IP addresses and search queries and clicks -- something Rosing says has never occurred.

"I have been here a long time and I have no knowledge of that kind of situation [correlation] ever happening. It does not happen and every employee of Google knows they cannot do this. We have extensive monitoring of our people," Rosing said.

"We have very strict policies. We do not associate search clicks with a user's name or anything like that. And in certain cases we age data and it disappears from the system to provide enhanced privacy protection," Rosing said.

Rosing also pointed out that when computers filter spam, "they have to look at the e-mail in detail or they can't find the spam. It's nothing extraordinary or new going on here."

Mega blog entry....The Secret Source of Google's Power

Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power:

Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.

No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.

I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

What are all those OS Researchers doing at Google? Rob Pike has gone to Google. Yes, that Rob Pike -- the OS researcher, the member of the original Unix team from Bell Labs. This guy isn't just some labs hood ornament; he writes code, lots of it. Big chunks of whole new operating systems like Plan 9.

Look at the depth of the research background of the Google employees in OS, networking, and distributed systems. Compiler Optimization. Thread migration. Distributed shared memory.

I'm a sucker for cool OS research. Browsing papers from Google employees about distributed systems, thread migration, network shared memory, GFS, makes me feel like a kid in Tomorrowland wondering when we're going to Mars. Wouldn't it be great, as an engineer, to have production versions of all this great research.
Google engineers do!

The downside...
Google Watch: "A look at how Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy policies are undermining the Web."
"Google's control over information is going further and further. We use his services every day. He knows us, our questions, our desires, our needs, how we live. Everything is stored into its database. Information is power, commercial power, political power. Who's controlling Google ? http://www.google-watch.org/"

Google Adsense Could Mean Death to Affiliate Programs!

Google Adsense Could Mean Death to Affiliate Programs!: "Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs penned an interesting and insightful article on Adsense this past week where he mentions this as an issue and predicts the death of smaller or weaker affiliate programs.

I agree.

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/search/adsense.shtml

Google Adsense simply requires the host site to paste in a few lines of HTML code on their pages where they want those ads to appear. Once Google has spidered your content pages, they can assess what those pages are about. Adsense serves a series of ads that match and compliment your page topics automatically without site owner participation!

I've been impressed how Adsense has performed for me in just the last week. I've actually enjoyed looking at my own sites to see what ads are served to match my content. WebSite101 demonstrates very well how Adsense works. If you visit the HTML tutorial, you see Adsense ads for web page editing software or web hosting. If you visit my email tutorial, you'll see Adsense ads for email broadcasting software and targeted email list broadcasting services. If you visit the Domain Name tutorial, you're served Adsense ads for Domain Registrars and web hosting. If you visit the Anti-Spam Tutorial, you get Adsense Ads for Spam Filtering Software."

How Google could kill spam

How Google could kill spam: "Google struck a nerve with its announcement of a free e-mail service that could make it unnecessary to ever delete a message. GMail.com rocketed from nowhere to rank 495th among Websites visited by U.S. Internet users the day the service was announced, according to Hitwise, a monitoring service that analyzes the Web activity of 25 million users.

GMail has also caught the fancy of Seth Godin, a best selling author on Internet marketing and self-described agent of change. In his blog, Godin wrote GMail is a threat to Yahoo (YHOO: news, chart, profile) and other sites because, 'a huge percentage of the portals' traffic comes from e-mail.' Google has an opportunity to become the gold standard for spam-free e-mail, he said. What if Google decided to charge $1 a year for its service and required users to post a valid credit card, he asked. And, what if a violation of Google's (assumed) anti-spam rules would cost $20 each time? Suddenly, Google would be it. "People would happily let it through spam filters. You could trust it. People would become suspicious of anyone who used any other e-mail," Godin said

Google Gives Most Referrals

Google Gives Most Referrals: "The California-based Web analytics firm finds that on 23 March 2001, Google claimed just 11.93% of total search referrals while Yahoo!�s share was nearly 40%. On the same date this year, Google�s share surpasses 40% whereas Yahoo! claims just over 27% of US search referrals. "