Surprised Google & Microsoft Talked Takeover? You Shouldn't Be!: "Google used to say it was focused on search, but these days it's about 'organizing the web's information.' Email is information. And with email spam a growing problem, I could see Google seeking a spam-filtering company such as Brightmail or SpamCop (which I use and highly recommend). A plus to such a move is that this type of service would generate subscription-based revenue that Google currently lacks.
Perhaps Google might seek a company that lets people sell products online, which would then feed into an actual Google shopping or auction area...

"who's going to win" in the search race that continues to heat up. Don't expect this to be the service that uses "personalization" to prevent switching, as the article suggests. Yahoo and MSN already have personalization. That's not kept people from going to Google when they want to search.

Instead, you're not likely to see any clear winners. Why? Think television networks. In the US, there are four major networks that capture viewers. None of them are going to collapse overnight, though any one of them will gain or lose users depending on its programming.

Search is programming. As long as Google's programming stays substantially good, users are going to keep tuning in out of habit. Potentially, it is "easy" to switch from Google. But ask any smoker how easy it is to give up cigarettes.

"who's going to win" in the search race that continues to heat up. Don't expect this to be the service that uses "personalization" to prevent switching, as the article suggests. Yahoo and MSN already have personalization. That's not kept people from going to Google when they want to search.

Instead, you're not likely to see any clear winners. Why? Think television networks. In the US, there are four major networks that capture viewers. None of them are going to collapse overnight, though any one of them will gain or lose users depending on its programming.

Search is programming. As long as Google's programming stays substantially good, users are going to keep tuning in out of habit. Potentially, it is "easy" to switch from Google. But ask any smoker how easy it is to give up cigarettes.

while Google got Microsoft's pitch, there's no doubt Microsoft heard Google's. "Use us," Google would argue, "because we are far less competitive with you than Yahoo."

For the time being, both sides seem to be sticking with the status quo. But don't be surprised if we hear more about Microsoft and Google talking. It's unlikely to be about a takeover, but it certainly could be about working together."

Guardian | Google fights for top spot: "Against that, Google's search is stuck: its database is not getting bigger, and its search results are not getting better, they are getting worse. Things that were simple when Google had just a few geek users are now hard because it is under continuous attack from thousands of people who track its every move and will resort to any trick they can find to get their sites ranked higher. The technology that won the last search engine wars won't be enough to win the next one, as Google surely knows.

According to Pitkow, the one most likely to win in the long run is the one that can increase its "switching costs" by adding personalisation. At the moment, anyone can search at Google or Teoma or any other search engine, and there is no penalty to switching. That's different from, say, Amazon, where things like one-click ordering, intelligent book recommendations, wish lists and other personalisation features discourage users from defecting to rival sites, even if they are cheaper.

It's hard to switch from Yahoo if you use its personalised My Yahoo service, email, instant messaging, chat and shopping facilities. It's hard to avoid Microsoft if you use its operating system, browser and Hotmail email service. It's easy to switch from Google. Whether they know it or not, the people who plan to buy Google shares could be taking a gamble on it solving that problem, and soon"

Search patents:
United States Patent: 6,615,209: "Abstract
An improved duplicate detection technique that uses query-relevant information to limit the portion(s) of documents to be compared for similarity is described. Before comparing two documents for similarity, the content of these documents may be condensed based on the query. In one embodiment, query-relevant information or text (also referred to as 'snippets') is extracted from the documents and only the extracted snippets, rather than the entire documents, are compared for purposes of determining similarity. "

Adsense example:
UpMyStreet FindMyNearest: Reading, Reading: "Sponsored links" on right hand side.

Possibility for totaltravel adsense boxes to appear on other sites ( not thinking for tt to have ads for other sites - traffic probably too low to be eligible )

CHART
Google Search Engine Dominance: "This tells us what we already knew -- that Google is dominant. If you consider that Google also fed Yahoo and AOL search listings during this time period, then Google traffic amounted to 90% of the search engine driven traffic to my site. That's huge. No wonder Yahoo! and Microsoft are preparing to go head-to-head with Google in the future."

Key Google quotes by Google:

Google Corporate Information: Today: "It is a core value for Google that there be no compromising of the integrity of our results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results. No one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust Google's objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust."

Google Job Opportunities: "Google's goal is to do important stuff that matters to a lot of people. In pursuit of that goal, we've developed a set of values that drive our work, including one of our most cherished core values: 'Don't be evil.'"

Interesting re patentsGoogle & The Bad Guys Newsletter 077 -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: " Google was just granted a patent (Oct 21) that I think will change a LOT of how the results are posted. It's a duplication detector that seems quite good, but will have huge implications for SEO's and copyright holders. Not all of them good. I'm saving it for a different post (and re-reading it several times to make sure I fully understand it)"

More re personalisation
It's in the algorithms - A glimpse into the future of mapping the Web
: "new technique for speeding up the computation of PageRank™ by 30 percent, and he proposed several algorithms for personalizing the ranking function to produce more relevant results for each individual searcher (see " )

potential competitors include WebFountain, Nutch and Netnose.

Developed by IBM, WebFountain (www.almaden.ibm.com/WebFountain) wants to challenge Google in the corporate market. WebFountain will collect, store and analyze vast amounts of information from unstructured and semi-structured sources including Web sites, news feeds, Weblogs, bulletin boards, enterprise data, legacy data, licensed content, newspapers, magazines and chat room text. The project's claim is that it can read and understand text, and use natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to keep organizations informed of emerging trends, competitive activities and "buzz".

Nutch (nutch.org) is an open source search engine that, unlike commercial search engines, will lift the veil on its ranking algorithms and demonstrate to users that there is no bias in its Web crawling and search returns. High scoring ranks will not be bought, sold or otherwise fudged.

Netnose (www.netnose.com) is the first search engine to claim to be "powered by people"; meaning search accuracy will be controlled by the voting public rather than a computer algorithm. Users will cast votes to determine what words should find what Web sites and as more people use the engine to match Web sites to search terms, the developers claim searching will get more and more accurate.

Google & theories of knowledge
Web Epistemology : References: "Search Engines
Web surfing as an epistemic practice
Democratisation of knowledge
Distributed Cognition
Miscellaneous publications "

Google dance :
looks like there is still some heavy duty filtering out of totaltravel pages...

Basic: G allinurl:www.totaltravel.com 37,500
Across 10 data centres: T10 allinurl:www.totaltravel.com 64,100 n/a 92,900 78,700 69,000 71,500 78,700 84,700 51,400 36,900

Google as Big Brother: "Google is one of about four search engines that matter."

Bit of a backlog here from when blogger was down...
fantomNews - the ultimate search engine optimization know how on fantomaster.com! Archives - 2003-11-03: "puts the issue of Google's search
dominance (or, as many will have it: monopoly) in a
global, political perspective"

Here's a fairly telling quote:
"If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing,
and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep
your mouth shut and hope for the best. That's what
Google is doing. The other problem is that geeks have a
poor record on social ethics, and Google is very geeky.
They don't know what the word 'public interest' means;
it's completely outside their frame of reference. Most
of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a
philosophical principle if they ran over one in their
SUVs. It's all binary to them - either they're gaining
market share or they're losing it."
He also lets on about getting kicked from the Webmaster
World Forum some months back for taking a somewhat too
pronounced anti-Google stance. Interesting.

Read the full Counterpunch interview here:

Mark Hand: Searching for Daniel Brandt: "Searching for Daniel Brandt"

Lately, Brandt has been leading an opposition against what he calls the "hegemony" of the Google search engine. On his Google Watch website, Brandt says his struggle against the search engine's ranking system "feels like the right thing to do. It's the cyber equivalent of my draft resistance days...
It's always a moving target, and the game isn't always fair. But it's the only game on the Internet these days. Many webmasters who follow the situation are hopeful that Yahoo's recent acquisition of Inktomi will mean that Google may see some competition in 2003. Presently Inktomi provides results for the MSN network, and that may change as well.

To give you an idea of the scale involved with respect to search engines, from 1995 to 2000 we averaged about 300 page accesses, or name searches, per day. Recently we've been doing over 15,000 per day...

Brandt: No, Google is not responsive to public criticism. Rumor has it that they may file an IPO [initial public offering] in 2003, which could introduce some new variables into the equation. I have never heard directly from Google about anything. They use robots to answer email, so I'll just keep on nagging them, like a robot. I have noticed that other webmasters agree with me more often these days. Only six months ago I was a lone voice in the wilderness. I got kicked off of one of the webmaster (www.webmasterworld.com) forums for being too anti-Google. But recently I've felt that a fair number of webmasters have come around to my position on Google.

Still, this has had no effect whatsoever on Google. If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing, and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. That's what Google is doing. The other problem is that geeks have a poor record on social ethics, and Google is very geeky. They don't know what the word "public interest" means; it's completely outside their frame of reference. Most of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a philosophical principle if they ran over one in their SUVs. It's all binary to them--either they're gaining market share or they're losing it. If they're gaining, then all is well with the world. Ethics is too fuzzy a concept for Silicon Valley geeks.

PageRank is very important. The smaller you are, the lower your PageRank, and the more desperate you become to get Google to steer traffic to you. At the moment it's do or die with PageRank. I'm hopeful that things will loosen up in 2003 somehow, perhaps with some new competition from Yahoo."

greyed link pages
Very many link pages seem to be greyed out in PageRank - Best Practices Search Engine Forums: "Very many link pages seem to be greyed out in PageRank "

opping for the UK Marketing To The Uk -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "marketing to the UK"

Keeping up with the forum debates I started is heavy going, but as long as there are no more sleep-overs so I am not seperated from my keyboard it should get easier.: ..especially as it got a mention in Search Engine Guides "Forum discussions of the day" & Jil herself says "Hey all! Wow, this topic is being discussed everywhere!"
Cre8asite Forums
"The other more more important point Jill made is that she thought attempts to catch devious SEO tricks was something Google was diligent about catching. She's finding this may not be true. From an SEO perspective, why in the heck should ANY SEO bother to follow Google's own guidelines for SEO's when Google itself isn't monitoring what's going on?"

Choice quotes:

Relevancy factors:
Cre8asite forums. Google - Kudos to Jill Whalen and Wed Advisor. [ Search Engine Optimization, Usability and Web Design. ]: "Google certainly work constantly to improve their relevancy algos, however relevancy, as far as Google is concerned, is not defined soely in seo terms. Relevancy includes other variables such as timeliness, cultural bias, semantics, inter-relationships etc etc. They have certainly improved timeliness of late. It's obviously a pretty important factor.

It all comes back to Googles user centric model. If the user is happy, Google is happy. I'm a user, I always find what I want with Google and I couldn't care less how those top ten sites got there, so long as they are relevant to me."

Adwords:
AdWords are often more relevant, and more varied, than the serps and they provide a revenue stream. Something to think about

Economist.com | The next hot internet stock: "How good is Google?

Most of the article follows as it is an excellent analysis of crucial issues.

Oct 30th 2003 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition"

kaluta asks: "The [0]Economist has a typically clear and concise [1]story about bringing Google to the stockmarket. Basically, is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon, or will it 'simply be the next overhyped share sale to make its founders rich only to wither away miserably, either for lack of a sustainably profitable business model, or, like Netscape, because it finds itself [2]in the path of that mighty wrecker,
Microsoft?' Cool picture too."

"customer searches (now 200m a day) ... Google has clearly been a runaway success. Not only is its own site the most popular for search on the web, but it also powers the search engines of major portals, such as Yahoo! and AOL. All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google's algorithms. That is power. "

Yahoo! which still has about half of the $2 billion-or-so market - bought Overture 2003...
The next step is to take this approach to advertising from the results pages of search engines and on to other web pages. Increasingly, web publishers—from hobby bloggers to small businesses—allow firms such as Google to crawl through the content of their pages and place relevant text advertisements in the right margin. Once page visitors click on the links, the webmasters share the revenues with Google. At a stroke, this so-called “contextual advertising” makes much of web publishing self-financing. This may result in better web content by making hitherto unprofitable online activities economically viable.

Meta Group, a consultancy, reckons that the market for paid search and other contextual advertising will grow to $5 billion by 2006. This is Google's main market opportunity (although it also gets some revenues from licensing its search technology). Currently, Google is thought to make annual profits of about $150m.
... That means matching such internet stars as eBay (market capitalisation $37 billion), but without the natural-monopoly advantages that have made eBay so dominant—the classic network effect of buyers and sellers knowing they do best by all trading in one place. For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead. In contrast to a portal such as Yahoo!, which also offers customers free e-mail and other services, a pure search engine is always but a click away from losing users....
Yahoo!, in fact, will probably be the first to attack. It now owns rival search technologies including AltaVista, AlltheWeb and Inktomi. With the contextual-advertising technology of Overture, Yahoo! now has under its own roof all the elements of the business model that made Google such a success. It cannot be long before Yahoo! turns from a lucrative customer of Google's into a powerful rival...

Even more frightening (especially to those who remember Netscape's fate in the browser wars), Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google's share listing. Historically, Microsoft has been good at letting others (Apple, Netscape, Real) pioneer a technology before taking over, exploiting its dominance in desktop operating systems.

Google the new-age advertising agency makes money, but it is Google the search engine that builds the consumer brand which makes the ad agency powerful. Whenever users click on advertisements on Google's own site, Google gets all the revenues. Whenever users stray to other search engines, even ones where Google has placed sponsored links, Google has to share the revenues with the site owner. As the competition between Google, Overture and others heats up, Google's profit margins will fall.

This may already be happening. Craig Pisaris-Henderson, the chief executive of FindWhat.com, a smaller rival to Overture and Google in contextual advertising, reckons that Google's operating margins on sites other than its own must be much worse than FindWhat.com's (23%) or Overture's (12%) because it has been wooing advertisers away from Overture by being more generous to webmasters.

One thing that might help against Microsoft, says Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, an online consumer guide to the industry, is Google's image of “niceness”—at least by implicit comparison with the forces of darkness in Redmond. Scott Banister, a pioneer of paid-search technology (and now a founder of IronPort, an e-mail infrastructure firm), thinks that Google has already built sufficiently deep networks with advertisers to mount an effective resistance to Microsoft's impending assault.

Even so, Google is no sure thing—as those who hope to sell its shares are no doubt aware. John Doerr and Michael Moritz, for instance, between them also brought Netscape and Yahoo! to market, and may remember their lessons. With luck, Google's owners will remember to work out a viable strategy for Google beyond the point at which they cash out.


After reading that I reckon a paid listing in Yahoo! has to be a total must... freee regional listings for the UK are no more.

Some feedback (!) from the forums re Google. As J Whalens approach so far has been based on being paid to get people free high rankings esp in Google I think she is talking Bull*hit.
Google & The Bad Guys Newsletter 077 -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "Does Google care about how a site gets to the top, as long as when it gets there it is relevant? That's what I want to ask them.

I used to think that they cared how one got there, but I'm not so sure any more. They either do care but can't do anything about it yet, or they really don't care as long as their users (the searchers) are happy.

As a searcher, I'm very happy with the Google results. I still think they're tops in that department. So, I guess that's all that matters.

As to all the Webmasters losing money because Google let's spammy results in, well that's not my concern and not Google's either. Any Webmaster whose business model depends on the free Google results for their livelihood, deserves whatever they get."

Case to keep an eye on:
CNN.com - Handbag maker Vuitton sues Google - Oct. 24, 2003: "The 20-page October 13 ruling by the court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre called into question the legality of the search system at the heart of Google's business model.
It said that when searches are done on registered trademarks, Google should 'find the means to block advertisements by third parties who have no right to these trademarks...

Telephone payments firm Rentabiliweb has sued Google for allegedly selling its trademark as a keyword to rival company Tel 4 Money.

An official at France's Software Protection Agency, which gathers evidence for court hearings on piracy and trademark infringement, said several major companies are preparing cases against Google. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
"

Forum feedback of interest:
Google over 50,000 pages dropped: "The problem with PR sometimes not showing in the Toolbar when there is an ending backslash is a known Toolbar glitch, and happens to many pages on the web"

"My theory is that Google has figured this to be a "directory page", which it is! and therefore has decided real content is to be found on subpages. The page is in Google it just doesn't have any keywords linked to it. You can test this by going to one of the sub pages and if you have Googles Toolbar installed press on "i" and select backwarf links. You will see that http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/vic/baysandpeninsula/ does come up, but without description or anything.
The same is true for another page on your site:
http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/vic/greatoceanroad/
And probably many more.

I am just speculating here, but I think Google does this to make sure the users get directly to where the content is and not end up on a sitemap or similar.

I wouldn't worry about the "/" issue as long as you are consistent and only make your links point to the "/" pages. That way no PR is waisted on the pages without it.

"We used to have over 100,000 pages indexed. Now, we have just over
50,000 and dropping. "

How many pages does your site really contain? Maybe you eliminated a lot of double entries when you cleaned up your site. For example Google thinks that one of our sites has 80.000 pages. The real number is well below that, but because of dynamic pages a lot of them look different to Google. This is hurting us big time in PR. Wd have one page in particular where this is true. This single page is linked to by more than 100.000 different pages on the net, but because the links are dynamic and values are added - Google thinks this is 1000 different pages and PR is spread accordingly. This could probably be a PR8 site if we could make Google understand that this is a single page. "

A couple of PR observations:

Check out the PR for this page
http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/qld/tropicalqld/cairns/directory/cafes/

Compare to any other at similar directory level
http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/qld/tropicalqld/cairns/directory/bars/

Thanks to this page's deep link
http://www.icem2004.im.com.au/general.htm
The cafes I looked at all also appear to have PR3 compared to PR2 for pubs...
Here's to many more quality links!ICEM2004 - International Conference on Emergency Medicine: "The following websites highlight a number of Cairns restaurants:
Cairns directory: www.cairnsweb.com.au/directory/listings/restaurants.htm
Cairns Convention Bureau: www.tropcialaustralia.com.au/
Total Travel: www.totaltravel.com/localguides/cairns/cafes"

Adsense - About become "partner" so see any about site for examples of adsense ads.

PRIMEDIA's About Links With Google for Targeted Advertising: "As part of the deal, Google will become the exclusive provider of contextually targeted and search advertising across About.com, the Web's largest content site, and most of PRIMEDIA's Consumer Media and Magazines Group ('CMMG') websites. The deal extends the reach of Google's base of more than 150,000 advertisers to the targeted audiences served by About.com's 450 topic-specific Guide Sites that cover more than 10,000 topics and the CMMG 127 targeted magazine-related sites.
'Combined, the CMMG properties and About.com are among the largest providers of original content on the Internet today,' said Dean Nelson, Chairman of PRIMEDIA. 'Google's targeted advertising is a perfect match to our portfolio of high-quality content and large special interest audiences. Google's advertisers will benefit from this extended reach across a broad range of enthusiast-centric properties and on About.com's 450 Guide Sites and our users will benefit from relevant advertising.'"

The Guardians take on possible IPO:
MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Stock and search: "The only reason it really needs publicly quoted shares is to make acquisitions. That would go completely against the philosophy of largely organic growth that has made the company what it is today. Once it is quoted, it will have to meet Wall Street pressures to improve quarterly earnings instead of doing its own thing at its own pace. When you sell your soul, don't expect to retain your freedom. "

Wired News: Google Raring to Go Public: "Google's search for an investment bank to take the Internet firm public is widely seen as the type of seismic event that could help wake up the dormant market for new issues of technology shares.....A few Net-specific business sectors have emerged from the rubble of the dot-com bust-up of 2000 including websites that hunt for shopping discounts, online dating, online travel agents and the business of selling advertiser-sponsored search listings, believed to be Google's biggest revenue-generator"

More re Auction/ IPO
Slashdot | Google Considering IPO Auction Online: "HackerStickers writes 'An article in the Financial Times states that Google could be considering doing their IPO online via an auction versus the standard methods of raising funds early next year. The article points out that auctioning it could bring in a larger chunk of cash for the company. Would you bid on a piece of Google?'"