Google SERPs result: Put it on quote before your EGO blown ;-)

Observing (again) my log today I saw a Google referer on "Web Marketing News" ???
Make a query and second position on 28 million pages ? I really don't deserve that second rank even if thoses words are in the title of my blog!



But don't worry it will not last for long and if you put thoses words between quotes it's only on less than 5,700 pages.
Morale : Never take the first nice digit for real.

New Advertising Model : Cost Per Action

After the recently Pay Per Call for small business who don't have web presence, a new innovative ad scheme appear today with Snap CPA or Cost Per Action decline (badly) in two differents options whitout giving a lot of details before filling a form.

At first view the Fixed-Cost-Per-Action have not so much difference with the Variable-Cost-Per-Action for products sale. They should separate the first one for service and download and give more information and keep the second one for e-commerce in my mind.

But it's seem a very good alternative for affiliate in e-commerce, specifically since the new rules on affiliate programs in SE, who are one of the cause of cheatings like PPC Frauds and the new nasties Page Impression Scam.

MindRaider : Semantize your files and resources

MindRaider seem to be a semantic application who scan your hard drive and add, with your help, to organizing your resources with metadata.
As I saw inside a comment of a blog, the next release will use SE like Google to explore the FOAF link friends and relative to build a semantic map of your interests. Mix with Deliocius and other tagging project this can be a serious turn in the semantic Web.

Hey Googlers, here is a nice project for your 20% time on new project !

The Google Story

How those two little mens pass trough all the difficulties of making a multi-billion dollars search company in only 6 years. A must read article.

Google at a theater near you

Google introduce the movie: operator to find movie critics where you can sort your results by relevance, date or rating. Also in United State you can ask Google for showtime or location by city or zip.
The showtimes and location is quite useful, but for movie review/critics the Movie Review Query Engine is *the* place to go.

Yahoo on a Hollywoodize mood

Nice article from the Christian Science Monitor about the turn Yahoo seem to take in the entertainment business.

Yahoo New Operators

Seem Yahoo will add some new operator soon ! Or may be they are use internally use to help detect some page/bug/spammer ?

Here the new operator :

• TITLEWORDS (term1 term2)

This have to be uppercase. The main difference from intitle: is the number of words use. With the intitle: you'll have a lot of time only one or two words to be really in the intitle: searches. But when you're using TITLEWORDS all the words are include in the title.

Tiscali and the Black Hat technics

Here some facts in Italian telecommunications Tiscali's page from his division in South Africa. I'm not sure they will stand there for long :

We submit your website to key South African and International search engines and re-submit monthly to keep its rankings as high as possible. The search engines include: Gauteng.com, Ananzi, Northern Lights, Aardvark, Hotbot, Webcrawler, Altavista, Google, Excite, Go, Lycos and Ask Jeeves.

Resubmitting a website each month give you nothing more and it is not helping your site to keep its rankings as high as possible. Also they should revise their list of SE because Northern Light is out since a few years and HotBot no more using Inktomi, so it's not a search engine anymore.

But this other paragraph is going against a lot of search engines guideline :

We rewrite your home page in meta tags and hidden words and create doorway pages that target specific search engines in order to increase your website ranking. We also do on-going re-phrasing of power scripting and optimise each individual page for different engines.

Did some SEO company from France have make a deal with Tiscali ?

Semantic Browsing Project : Itunes Interface + Google = mSpace

A new project from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton with interaction model to help explore relationships in information call mSpace.

A combination of a ITunes like interface combine with mSpace Framework software to organize the information to suit your interests, while concurrently having available to your multiple other complementary paths through that information.

Nice integration. A project to follow !

Why I prefer Google over Yahoo

A few minutes ago I checked my log file and see that line in it :

17 February

10:30

Fidelity Investments, United States

A bit surprise by this new visitor, I check why he landed on my blog. When I saw he was coming from Yahoo, I look what was his query.

Ha ah ! This guy was auditing the Web to find people talking badly about his company. But when I saw my blog was in 11th position for that expression I was really surprise ! I even not remember the post on the big success that company got with the Google stock. But why Yahoo give me the eleven rank for that expression where in that post I don't use the word "sucks" ? In the archive of the month, this bad word appear only once and 1,992 words after the sequence "Fidelity Investments" !

That not really a good proximity ratio on 1,430 results ? Yahoo should lower this ratio because it make this guy landed here for nothing !

North Countries and Aussie are the most connected

Nice stats compilation by ClickZ about Internet penetration by country. Here the top 5 :

1. Sweden : 68,9%
2. Norway : 66,7%
3. Australia : 65,9%
4. United State : 63,9%
5. Canada : 63,5%

Google Maps : GPS and Movin Gmap make it find your way

Only seven day after his launch, Google Maps have already a little application, Movin Gmap, to makes the map recenter on you as you walk/drive around with a GPS and a laptop.

Exalead will be in the desktop search soon

Exalead the relatively new clustering search engine from France which I give my first impression last fall, was not supposed to be online at this time.

I received a email from the CEO Mr. Bourdoncle (a old AltaVista member) just after my post and I don't have anytime to release and test back the real thing about this since today. The launch was a leak and they got to let in online even after a they goofed on the parameters at midnight before indexing. That's why the number of pages indexed was at 300k at the place of the 500k promised.

But now the index is now at 1 billion page and the overall results in clustering and in SERP's are by far better. I got time today to compare Exalead with Clusty and I was amazingly surprise! It is the better clustering engine I seen from far. Also in the SERPS I discover a half a dozen results on me I never saw anywhere else (normally if I can saw 2 or 3 is very good on new engine). For a newbie like that it's promise well.

They will be some new things coming out soon with the Exalead Desktop (here some beta screen shots) in March and the Blog and RSS indexing. Also the meta-data of most multimedia files, archive and zip files may be come out soon with a index of 2 billion pages!

BTW: Don't forget to explore all the functionnalities of this search engine. Watch out GYM.

Google Maps Revisited : Don't follow the help instruction !

On my precedent post on Google Maps I find the rendering of the map spectacular, but the data associate with a query quite bad.

When you follow the help page to find a products/services in your city with the word "in" or "near" you usually get some results far away form the area where you live. Even zooming in you're area and remake the same search bring you back to the first area you've get in the first search prior zooming with some store/office far away where you are. But that's not the way to use it. The guys at Google who wrote the help page and the Map Tour have not talk to the programmers of the application !!!

Don't use "in" or "near" and even your city in your query !

Go to Google Maps

1. Double click on your search area on the map (this will center the map on your search location)
2. Type in the search box the product or service you want
3. Zoom in to a level you want to travel to, for the business/service
4. Drag the card to locate your area where you live
5. Go back to the search box again without erase the item you search and press Enter again

Tadam ! Finally the business around your area will appear !

My Google Analyst Day Interpretation Slide Show

• The Google Framework Strategy of 70-20-10


• Focus on localization with partners networks huge growing and bringing almost half revenue

• Focus on big corporation and for small/medium localize clientele

• A propective focus on Asian and Western Europe market because of the international revenue growing rate of more than 5% in the past 2 years


• And future services and products will go with ads.

Google Maps Reverse Engineered

Here how it's work.

Google find the WMD

Too funny !

RSS-SMS can safe your life

A new function on PubSub, the Earthquake Monitor let you choose a region of the world, indicate a magnitude degree and give your a RSS or email warning when a earthquake append. A SMS option will soon be on to warn you on the beach for the tsunami.

The Google Language Detection is Bad

When you're using rare words you can see the Google estimate going completely nuts. Here a few queries of the word "Gourganes", a french word for a kind of big pea :
Google Web : 698 results
Google Pages of Canada : 751 results ?
Google French pages : 1,190 results ???

Google Maps

The Google Labs release Google Maps Beta today. The draggable feature is one of the best I have seen but the overall is not at the height of Yahoo Maps with the exception of including us here in Canada. But the data provide in the maps in Canada are sometimes false, like the Autoroute des Laurentides as been replace by the Autoroute TransCanadienne in this case.

Update: The canadian data is sometimes really funny for the directions !!!

Google putting images in SERPs: To counter MSN-Encarta ?

As you can see here, Google start to put images in the Search Engine Results Pages. Why now, Google Image is there since a long time ? I suspect that new move from Google is to counter the new release of MSN Search who include Encarta database now in the results of its index.
PS: To see image in the Google results, you must use a proxy like Anonymizer, because it is sporadic on the regular result.

Will 2005 break the $10 billion mark in the paid search market ?

In a conference I gave in the fall of 2003 for the fed gov in Ottawa, I was citing this part of a study of PricewaterhouseCoopers made in the summer of 2003.

Researchers expect the paid search market to reach as much as $4 billion by 2005

Wednesday we read the numbers of the Q4 2004 for Google.

...the company's fourth-quarter profit beat analysts' estimates and sales topped $1 billion for the first time.

This mean we can expect Google reaching alone the $4 billion mark for 2005. If we add Yahoo, Msn, Aol and all the other players in the paid search market, we probably gonna reach the $10 billions mark in 11 month !

Google Registrar : Ten speculations

I vote for #6 for now, and #10 in the next month.
BTW : The third one is impossible because each registrar have access only to their clients information, not the database of all the regitrars.

A funny traditional marketing technique

Just use your creativity ;-)

Google referal program form not secure ?

Google launch today a referal program for his AdSense and Adwords ad. But the form to apply to it where is asked all your information like phone, address and bank account are not under a secure protocol ???

Huge after hour trading quote on Goog after releasing Q4

Shares hit all-time high $210 in after-hours trading !
Press coverage

Google and the 101k limit

Tara of Research Buzz ask a question about Google and the 101k limit. For my side, I found Google caching more than the 101k limit like this page with 535k when you save it to your hard drive or 549k in File info of Firefox, where Google show the 101k in the SERP (First result).

If you go see the non-cached version you will see the cached version is about the third of the original. But if you make searches with a bunch of words located at the end of the cache page, or even in the middle of the file, you will never see that page in the SERPs. I don't know why Google cache more than it really index, may be he will increase the 101k limit in the future to match the Yahoo limit ?