Latest InsideMicrosoft Posts: InsideGoogle: 09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004 .comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}
InsideGoogle
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
 
Where Do We Go From Here?
Before I go off on another three day vacation (yep, no posts till Saturday night), I'd like to share some musings on Google's future.
In the last few weeks, we've seen a lot of big news in the world of search. A9 was launched, and brought us a very complex interface that any geek has to love, and will certainly grow into something great. MyJeeves was launched, also bringing personalization of search and saved searches. My Yahoo has revealed a new beta interface. MSN Search is still being developed.
So what does Google have in store for us?
Nobody really knows. Is it the Google Browser, or personalized results, or instant messaging? When is Gmail going live? What exactly is Google up to?
Google has not yet gotten used to being a public company. They are keeping every single project under wraps. Companies do keep secrets, of course, even from their investors, but I have never seen a company that didn't show any of its cards, at the very least in an attempt to boost its stock price.
Google's stock price has risen steadily, despite no actual news. The strong search industry and all the announcements from other companies have probably helped. Most investors are hoping Google will reveal something big in the next few weeks, shooting up the stock 10-15%. A little mystery always helps.
There's a flip side, of course. If Google doesn't bring something new to market, investors will get antsy. They had better have something up their sleeves, or the stock can drop just as quickly as it rose.
That's all till Saturday night. If anyone is interested in guest blogging next week Thursday - Saturday, let me know.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/29/2004 06:25:00 PM 5 comments links to this post
 
Google Executive David Scacco Tells All
David Scacco, an exec at Google, said some things at ChannelAdvisor Strategy Summit 2004 that give some insight into Google's plans and policies. He explained how more searches are for products than brands, how AdSense reaches 80% of web traffic, the possibility of an AdSense inclusion list, and Froogle. Read more about it at Search Engine Lowdown.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/29/2004 05:38:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Is Google News In Beta Because Of Lawsuits?
Adam Penenberg at Wired News says that he thinks Google News is still in beta after three years because if Google brings it out of beta and puts ads on the site, they may face lawsuits from angry content publishers. I agree that this is possible, but I disagree with any news site that thinks Google News is hurting their business. Google News is my news sites #1 referrer, accounting for more than half oof all outside traffic, and a lot of the other referrals come from Topix.net. Google News should increase traffic to any decent news site, and sites should be optimizing themselves for Google News. Google News is good for business, and news sites should encourage them.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/29/2004 10:06:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
 
Behind The Scenes At Yahoo Labs
YSearchBlog Gives the skinny on how Yahoo works on improving its search results, kind of a 21st century electronic focus group.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 10:32:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Goes Up, Up, Up
Google shares hit a new record high of $126.86, up over 7% on the day. Google continues to rise despite no major announcements, perhaps because investors expect Google to strike the next blow in the search wars any day now, and are hoping for a nice bounce.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 10:23:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Blog Speaks On China News Controversy
Google's Blog has issued a statement on the recent controversy on Google News China blocking certain sites. Nothing new, but a blog post definetly is more personal and pacifies the masses better than a press release. Good for them.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 08:19:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Bloglines Web Services Aims To Solve Major Blog Problem
One issue operators of blogs face is that all those people out there accessing their RSS feeds can really eat up bandwidth and make your web hosting unaffordable. Bloglines has always been very good at helping ease the problem, by making it so that Bloglines accesses all the RSS feeds for all of its customers, meaning the thousands of Bloglines users only count as one user in terms of RSS scraping. Now, other RSS readers can access Bloglines RSS cache through Bloglines Web Services, further increasing the number of computers that aren't downloading the same RSS feeds over and over again. Bloglines aims to have most RSS traffic go through them, instead of John Q. Webhosting. Great idea, and a great service, guys!
(via Geeking With Greg)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 02:44:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
This Day In Google
You can use this handy applet to find out what happened today. The search returns three results about what happened to practically anybody on that given day, and you can add a keyword to restrict the search to a subject. Very fun. I found out that on my birthday, Andre the Giant defeated Kamala. Fascinating stuff.
(via The Presurfer > A Welsh View)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 01:42:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Free Hotmail - Outlook Integration Going Away
Miscrosoft is frantically revamping Hotmail in an attempt to retain users who may be lured by Gmail. The upgraded Hotmail is slowly being released, but Microsoft is taking away one feature: Free access of your Hotmail account from Outlook and Outlook Express. That is quite a shame, especially since it means users can no longer use Outlook to export Hotmail contacts, as many have in the past. I can't blame Microsoft for doing it. It goes against their strategy of integrating products into Windows, but it is still a premium feature. Paid users will still be able to use Outlook.
(via Ars Technica)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 01:29:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Will GBrowser Spawn MBrowser?
Microsoft Watch wonders that if Google releases Gbrowser, will Microsoft respond with a standalone internet browser? Its an interesting idea.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 01:00:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Search Engine Lowdown Tuesday
Here's a sampling of what you can read at Search Engine Lowdown today:

Kevin Ryan says the search engine industry is slowing, but that "slowing" refers to only 34% growth.
ClickLab says as much as 50% of Pay-Per-Click advertising clicks are fradulent.
IBM will launch this week a corporate search engine code-named Masala, aimed at IT professionals.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 11:40:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Knows The Train Schedules
At least in France, Google knows the train schedules, according to Zorgloob. All you have to do is enter a search with the names of two cities, and Google gives you a result like the one at right. Tres' cool.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 11:27:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
New Beta Of My Yahoo
Yahoo now has a new beta of My Yahoo!, and the most interesting new feature are RSS feeds you can add for most of the content on the page. This leaves Google as the only company who hasn't made a major announcement on personalized search in the last two weeks.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 08:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Size Matters, Or Does It?
Just because they can, one company has announced a 100-gigabyte email service. Of course, in what may be the most bogus claim in the history of the internet, the company, Hellacious Riders, claims to have alrewady signed up over thirty million users. Who actually publishes statements like that?

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 08:12:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Quiet Period Is Completely Over
Google's underwriter quiet period ends today, meaning that underwriters of an IPO are finally allowed to publish their estimated valuations of the stock. CSFB promtly valued Google shares at $145, 25 above the current price. Also, Google will soon be launching investor.google.com as a resource for investors in the stock.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/28/2004 08:04:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, September 27, 2004
 
Why Gmail Is The Future Of Google
The New York Post talks more Google, this time about how Gmail is vital to the company's future. Their basic point is that Gmail may actually be a better, more consistent ad revenue source than regular AdWords on the search engine. Gmail is the most important thing in Google's future, if it is the only thing in Google's future. I think we can count on them to at least try to top this.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/27/2004 09:48:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Stock On The Up And Up
The L.A. Times talks about GOOG's slow but steady rise over the last few weeks. Google shares closed Friday at $119.83, a 99 cent loss, but only the second down day in three weeks. Shares actually hit an all time high of $124.10 before lowering back down to Earth.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/27/2004 09:44:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Does Google Images Suck?
Brad Hill on the Unofficial Google Weblog says Google Images sucks at displaying relevant images. I agree. While enough of them are decent, more than half are always porn or pictures of weird, completely useless stuff. It's actually a lot of fun sometimes trying to figure out why a certain picture turned up under a certain query. And really, who doesn't love kittens in a fish bowl?

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/27/2004 09:35:00 AM 1 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 26, 2004
 
Google Toolbar New Version Fixes Security Vulnerability
Version 2.0.114.5 of the Google Toolbar is out, and google-blog.dirson.com says it fixes the vulnerabilities that everybody was going crazy about last week. Of course, you'll see no evidence of the new version on Google's web site, and the toolbar itself, which claims to be self-updating, doesn't appear updated on my system. Guess we have to take Google at its word again.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/26/2004 08:36:00 AM 2 comments links to this post
 
Project D.U. Website Launching Soon, SBC To Pay Bloggers To Use Their RSS Feeds
So, I finally get a scoop. A friend of mine who runs a blog is part of the new site, Project D.U. He says to me:

Hey - this is the website for it all http://projectdu.com/
It's basically a fancy RSS reader, aimed at the college market, with
links to blogs in 4 categories. It should be launching publicly soon.
A private beta will be next week we hope.
You mention my blog in connection to this at all, and there will be suffering.
No problem, man, I'm plenty grateful for the info.
The site is run by SBC, and will basically be paying bloggers, in the neighborhood of $100-$200 a month, to use their RSS feeds and create this all-purpose hot spot for the college market. As they say:

To completely understate and definitely oversimplify, Project D.U. is like a roundtable of experts with the latest information on a variety of subjects – including, but not limited to, which national news anchors sport a rug.

The site hasn't launched, but I'm told the beta could be any day now, and some "tool" is referenced to be available soon for download, probably the mass-market designed RSS reader.

I love the idea of bringing blogs more into the mainstream, but the success of a site like this depends entirely on whether or not it is cool. We'll have to wait and see. Either way, good luck, guys.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/26/2004 02:22:00 AM 2 comments links to this post
 
President Bush Asks Google To Find Osama Bin Laden
In a brilliant campaign move, the President has asked researchers at Google Answers to help him locate Al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center attacks three years ago. Even if users can't find bin Laden (their record isn't much better than the CIA's), the move should endear him to the younger generation. I tried finding Osama myself on Google, with little success.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/26/2004 01:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 25, 2004
 
Findory Now Has A Blog
Findory has added a blog of cool stuff people found on Findory. Anybody can contribute, just be emailing mailto:finds@findory.com. Seriously, if you aren't listed on Findory, you're just wasting a potential source of traffic.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/25/2004 09:40:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google's China News Strategy Explained
John Battelle gets the last word on the Google News China story. As he explains, Google does not filter sites for Google News China, except for eight sites they did not include, because the Chinese government would block them anyway. Google thinks it would hurt the search experience if sites were listed that people couldn't access, but in that case, why not drop all subscription based sites in the U.S.?

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/25/2004 09:21:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Get Your GBrowser Rumors Here!
How badly are the GBrowser rumors coming? I must get 10-20 posts in my Bloglines notifier alone every day on the subject, and twice as many on Findory. I've avoided the speculation, since there isn't any actual news, and in the news business, it has to be novel. Today, we have actual evidence. Zorgloob point to http://www.google.com/mozilla/google.xul, which, as the URL suggests, is the Mozilla interface for Google. It won't work in IE, so try another browser. I ran it in Firefox, and its so fast it makes the regular Google look as slow as a turtle. A dead turtle.

Also, Zorgloob had a joke too good to pass up. Talking about international versions of Froogle, Zorgloob says, "Je pense que les Allemands arriveront avant les Français", which loosely translates to, "I think the Germans will arrive before the French." I find it funny, but I refuse to say why.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/25/2004 09:09:00 PM 2 comments links to this post
 
Hotmail Accounts Getting Upgraded
Slashdot says Hotmail accounts are finally getting the 250 megabytes Microsoft promised. I'm still waiting, and I pay for my account!
(via Findory Blogory)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/25/2004 08:52:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, September 24, 2004
 
Googland!
Eric LeBeau of Zorgloob pointed this out to me: Googland, the new Google island in the Pacific. Googland, formerly GoGoora Island, was chosen because it owns the .go domain, and because of its resemblance to the letter "G". It will become the new corporate headquarters of Google, and most of Google's employees will be relocated there. There will be enforced recreational fishing time of at least 20% of the day, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will share the title of Prime Minister (CEO Eric Schmidt will be named "Googland Republic President"). The site is made by Abondance. If you want more information, check out this site.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 06:19:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Would You Like A Private Carribean Island?
Google Omid Kordestani, Senior vice president, world sales and field operations at Google, and you might see the AdWords ad pictured on the right. I saw it, and if you hit refresh a few times, it should pop up. I clicked on the ad (what can I say? It's compelling!) and it brings you to halfmoonisland.com, a site about Half Moon Cay, a 9.2 acre island in the Carribean, two miles from Guanaja. It looks like a really cool island, complete with buildings, boat houses, a power station, and a beach party area. They even let you keep the ice cream making machine and the TV! If this is on the up-and-up, it has to cost a fortune, maybe around the price of a 3-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Anyway, you might just see that ad on this page soon, which would be hilarious.
(via John Battelle's Searchblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 01:15:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Tries To Be Fair
There are a lot of theories SEO people have. Because none of them actually work for the major search engines, they can never know exactly how they work, and there's no way to prove a certain plan was the reason you got good listings on Google. One theory is that sites that use Google AdSense get spidered faster. I wouldn't blame Google if they did it, since after all it's still better than paid listings. But rustybrick at Search Engine Roundtable
put it to the test, creating a site that had AdSense, but didn't exist as far as the rest of the internet was concerned. The only one that knew it existed besides himself was Google's AdSense, and since months later it still wasn't in Google, there's your proof: Google really is serious when it says it doesn't play favorites. Don't be evil, indeed.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 10:56:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Wanna Work At Google? Email Me.
Cedric Beust, a Noogler (according to google-blog.dirson.com), is inviting people to send him resumes if they want to work at Google. Well, that sure is easier than answering a billboard.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 09:27:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Internet Withdrawl Research At Yahoo
Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks going without the internet can be hell. When I was away last week for three days, it wasn't easy. Now, there is a study on Internet Withdrawl. I'll let Slashdot explain:
Experiment Cuts Off Online Junkies from Internet
The Internet
Communications
Index
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Friday September 24, @03:38AM

from the sometimes-it-still-feels-like-it's-there dept.

Ant (an Internet junkie) writes "An article from The Register reports one begins gibbering uncontrollably because he/she can't get a fix without internet access after two weeks. That, at least, is according to an 'Internet Deprivation Study' carried out by Yahoo! and advertising outfit OMD.
Participants in the human experiment were deprived of the web for 14 days, and found themselves quickly succumbing to 'withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness.' The reason for the rapid collapse of their universe is - say the researchers - because 'internet users feel confident, secure and empowered.'"

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 09:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
The Google Terminator
A billion years ago (about three weeks), I posted about a cover story in Technikart magazine about Google, and Sebism over at LiveJournal helped me out with translation of the article synopsis. Well, now he's provided me with high-res scans of the article (thanks a bunch!). At the very least, I can marvel at the cool images (especially the Arnold Schwarzenegger as metaphor for Google cover, and yes, that is a naked woman on page 8), but I'm hoping to run Optical Character Recognition on them so I can work on translating the article. If anyone can give me some tips on how to do this, it would be most appreciated.
Also, the article contains the first photo I've ever seen of noted Google critic Daniel Brandt:


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 09:00:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
How To Manage Multiple Gmail Accounts
Do you have more than one Gmail account, and it drives you nuts that you can't keep more than one account open? Well, Zorgloob has your solution: Run more than one Gmail Notifier. You may have problems keeping your Gmail account window open, but you should be fine getting new mail notifications. It's not easy to get it to work (you have to log in to a different account than Gmail Notifier recognizes, so the program gets confused and asks you for your password), but the main thing is it can be done. A good tip.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 07:56:00 AM 1 comments links to this post
 
Does Google News Have A Bias?
Some discussion on Search Engine Watch Blog and Online Journalism Review as to whether Google News is biased. I don't think so, but I enjoy the debate. I remember an speech Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave at the EECS Annual Research Symposium in February where he admitted Google News has two biases: It is biased in favor of stories about cricket (yes, the sport), and it is designed to show more international sources than the algorithms would normally pick. I posted about it last month.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 01:38:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Top Online Retailers Don't Optimize For Search
A study by search marketing company OneUpWeb says that out of the 100 largest retailers (as determined by Internet Retailer's Top 300 Guide) only 12 have had proper SEO, and 36 showed no evidence of paying attention to search engines at all. Of course, being a company that sells these services means you have to consider the source, which has good reason to want to drum up profit. Still, interesting stuff.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/24/2004 12:59:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 23, 2004
 
Paid Contextual Advertising Driving Search Towards Personalization
From Search Engine Guide:
There have been recent articles stating that contextual advertising is beginning to flat-line. Speculation that the sector is starting to dry up is more likely an indicator that a new twist or innovation on content delivery is necessary than it is that advertisers have gone sour on the concept. It is a short step from keyword targeted advertising to content delivered based on information gathered about your personal preferences.

Read the article

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 07:13:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Who Gets Credit In Google?
Adam Greenfield has a very interesting article on v-2 about how RSS can get in the way of proper attribution. An absolute must-read.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

I always try to attribute properly, as you can see, although sometimes it proves impossible. I think its a responsibility for every blogger to give credit where credit is due.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 05:39:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Print Search Engine
For some reason, Google has decided to combine Google Print into its search engine but not allow searching of the index. Now, Research Buzz has a Google Print search engine, to make up for the one Google didn't provide.
(via Search Engine Guide)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 05:27:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Founder Win Marconi Engineering Award
Andy Beal says on Search Engine Lowdown:
According to ZDNet, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have won the 2004 'Fellows of the Marconi Foundation' at Columbia University. They plan to donate the $100k award to the Fellows Fund at the Marconi Foundation. Yeah, I probably would too if I was worth $4 billion, they probably lose more than that down the back of the sofa!


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 01:35:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Fagoogle Banned
Fagoogle, the gay Google, was banned and just shut down by Google. Despite the fact that Fagoogle claimed to comply with Google's terms of service, Google said Fagoogle violated their trademark. Since Fagoogle is not a not a parody site but a charity site, it is not protected.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 10:45:00 AM 2 comments links to this post
 
MSN Search To Go Live On July 1st, 2005?
Search Engine Roundtable alerts us to speculation that MSN's new search engine will (finally) launch July 1st, 2005.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 09:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Finally This Revenue Sharing Deal Makes Sense
A few days ago, it was reported that Google and Reed Elsevier came to a deal to share revenues on traffic sent to his site. The Guardian reported the story, but the article by James Robinson succeeds in confusing the issue. PaidContent.org finally clears up the issue. Basically, Google is expanding Google Print, it's search engine of offline (magazine) content. Now, a search engine would be competition for a medical journal, since scientists rely on the sales of medical journals to help pay the bills. Google's solution, as it has always been, is to share the revenues from Google print with the content providers, meaning they gain money from including their content in Google Print and not just posting it on the web. Everybody wins. Oh, and while the Guardian makes the point that Elsevier "could come to similar agreements with Yahoo and Microsoft", I don't see how, since Yahoo and MS don't have similar projects.
(via Findory > Open Access News)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 08:59:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Can Paid Search Work For You?
I would argue that paid search is inherrently dishonest, because search engines are more of a public utility than an advertising firm, but it is still a reality for many webmasters. Kevin Ryan of iMedia gives tips on how to maximize your dollar in paid search. Interestingly, in linking to this article, Search Engine Watch Blog says budgeting for paid search "can't be done", since its so unpredictable, i.e. no guarantee of actual results.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 08:36:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Looksmart Gobbles Up Furl
Furl, a service that allows you to save and recall anything you see online, was scooped up by LookSmart yesterday. Furl sent out this letter to its members letting them know of the new bosses, and of one immediate new feature: the allocation of five gigabytes of potential page storage per user. LookSmart has clearly realized the velue of personalized search, and in one move assuages their customers fears of falling behind A9, Jeeves, and Yahoo. There is one other major search company that still needs to show they are serious about winning this battle...
(via John Battelle's Searchblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 08:30:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Noogler Hats!
You may have heard of Nooglers, which is the nickname for new Google employees. Well, Zorgloob has found out that Nooglers get a funky hat. At first, it looks dumb, then after a while, it looks even dumber, but I still want one!

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 08:18:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Ray Charles Google Doodle
Today is the late, and very great, Ray Charles' 74th birthday. Google honors him with a Doodle


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/23/2004 08:10:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
 
Notes On InsideGoogle
A few little notes on this blog:

First, InsideGoogle has 30 posts on each page. In spite of this being a relatively high number, because I post many times per day, this only includes the last two and a half days. I'm afraid raising that number will only increase people's bandwidth, so I hope readers are checking the archives. I scour the web like a madman for Google, search engine, and other web/tech news, so I hope people are reading it. If anybody has opinion on that or any design choice I make, speak up. Consider me open to anything.

Also, I've noticed Google is not indexing this page properly. Thirty days in, and a site:insidegoogle.blogspot.com search still only turns up two results, and the only post page it finds is a relatively recent one. InsideGoogle started as a LiveJournal site, but is now a Blogspot site with the LJ site just for a backup. Since Google is seemingly ignoring the Blogspot site, perhaps considering it duplicate content, I have to block Google from seeing the LiveJournal site. As a result, I am blocking spiders to the site. Hopefully, that solves the problem. If not, I'll have to make a decision on whether to keep the LJ site. Sorry guys, but Google listings are serious business.

Lastly, I picked up a referrer domain for this site. Typing in insidegoogle.info will bring you right here. I figured its a neat little courtesy for those who don't use bookmarks. Now you can save eight characters! Also, it has always been my plan to move this site to a proper domain if the right funding came through. While insidegoogle.com is preferrable, some company called "The Web Freaks" snatched it up, seemingly to sell it, probably to some poor shlub like me. So I can always use the .info if need be.

That's enough about me. Now back to your regularly scheduled InsideGoogle news!

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 11:53:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Recommended Findory Features
I have some features I would like to see in Findory, just my two cents:


And no, my suggestions have absolutely nothing to do with my recent realization that Findory's CEO just might read them. No, not at all. No siree. Right.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 11:09:00 PM 2 comments links to this post
 
Geeking With Greg
I just read this Seattle Times story on RSS feeds (an interesting read) and it quotes Greg Linden, who is the CEO of my favorite new site, Findory. Turns out its the same Greg Linden who runs Geeking With Greg, a site I rely on in my Blogroll (run by Bloglines, another company given a lot of attention in the article), and posts comments here occasionally. Ha! How did I not realize that before?

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 10:43:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Porn-Free Search From LookSmart
LookSmart's NetNanny 5.1 has a built in version of LookSmart that filters porn. Of course, like most products that protect children, this costs money. Walt Mossberg says the engine isn't even worth it, since it doesn't catch and block "some blatantly inappropriate Web pages". How good is Google's filter?
(via Search Engine Watch Blog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 09:37:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Toolbar Security Flaw Just A Bunch Of Hogwash
Webstractions explains that yesterday's reported Google Toolbar vulnerability is just an overblown non-story. The so-called flaw only allows content to be changed and run locally, meaning the attacker would actually have to already have access to your computer. If this person has access to your computer, why would he use the Toolbar to launch an attack when he can do it directly? That's like using a gun to shoot the trigger of another, less accurate gun. This vulnerability may exist, but it won't cause problems in the real world.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 09:28:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Overture Brings Broad Query Matching
Danny Sullivan reports on Clickz that Overture is allowing advertisers to buy broad search terms, which Google has allowed for some time now. What this means is that an ad buy for "shoes" can now also include everything from "women's shoes" to "golf shoes", a better value for Overture, the advertiser, and the searcher. Good move.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 09:07:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
What You Can't Google
Google Blogoscoped points out the limitations of current search technology. Phillip Lensen says the one thing search engines can't possibly accomplish with current technology: the ability to make value judgements. Sure, Google can tell you the most popular site for cars and the lowest price on batteries. The one thing Google can't do is tell you which car or battery is better. Of course, in many ways, these are the same limits all computers face today, and the ultimate goal of computing and artificial intelligence.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 08:42:00 PM 2 comments links to this post
 
Google Is Falling Behind
The Unofficial Google Weblog says Google is falling behind A9 and Jeeves, and even Yahoo, all of which offer better personalization options.
business thrust behind personalization is to own the user, since search engine loyalty is, in theory, non-existent.
Historically, toolbars have been the primary user-loyalty tactic, but they are now being supplanted by the server-side saved-search bookmark list.
Amazon and Jeeves have taken the lead. Where is Google? The Google Toolbar does not incorporate bookmarks, and the Google home page does not support saved search results. The clock is ticking.


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 11:52:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Fybersearch Gets New Features
19-year old Nathan Enns has added new features to his powerful Fybersearch engine. Search Engine Lowdown gives us a sneak peak.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 11:50:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Does Slashdot Read Slashdot?
You gotta wonder if there is any short-term memory in the blogosphere. I've been largely ignoring the "Is Google Censoring News In China" story, since I am pretty sure its false. But when I saw Slashdot reporting on it, I was perturbed. On September first, I reported on a Slashdot story on Google in China, where Slashdot said: "...type of filtering applied to Google by the Chinese government". As is clear from the OpenNet Initiative's website, Google has refused to comply with the Chinese government's censoring, and the only reason Google China is filtered is because China's firewall bans sites with certain words in the URL. Since every search site, including Google News China, uses search keywords in the URL, naturally Google News searched would appear censored, but only because the Chinese government is the one doing the censoring. My only question is, does Slashdot actually read its old stories?
Read my post: Googling Behind China's Firewall

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 10:00:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
What If Yahoo Was Like Google?
If Yahoo was like Google, and featured an API that developers could tinker with, what apps would you like to see? That's what Jeremy Zawodny is asking in his blog. Some answers want Google features, like what is already being done with the Google Search API. Others want features they wish Google had, like an API for Image Search.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 09:48:00 AM 1 comments links to this post
 
Google Finally Does Something About Ad Controversies
Danny Sullivan blames Google's secretive editorial policies for all the controversy we've seen the last few months, and he's absolutely right. The only reason Google is being sued by Geico and Rescuecom, why it has had to fend off lawsuits in Germany, why it has been the subject of confusion and criticism over liqour ads, gun ads, hate ads, protest ads, and others; the only reason is Google's own fault for not laying out an editorial policy.
My newspaper has run into trouble over not being clear enough in our editorial policy, so we fixed it. But at least we had one, so we had something to fix. Google's so-called editorial guidelines spend more time on the proper use of exclamation points and question marks, and virtually no time making sure Google doesn't get sued. It is becoming clear that the flip side of Google's "Don't Be Evil" is "Don't Say A Word", and that needs to change. "Don't Say A Word" is costing them money, and its costing them the trust of the online community, the courts, and other businesses.
Well, Google seems to finally be doing something about it. Danny says they plan to greatly expand the policies they publish online, so as to curb all the confusion.
"We're in the editing phase of what that page will look like," said Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of global online sales and operations for Google. "It won't be up in the next few days, but if we're not done within a few months, I'll be disappointed."


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/22/2004 09:33:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
 
Why Do We Need A Google Browser?
JR Conlin's Ink-Stained Banana says "the latest buzz about a Google Browser makes me giggle". He says we son't need a Google Browser, especially a Firefox-based one, and that other companies have tried and failed at making branded versions of browsers. Of course, he's absolutely right. A Google-branded browser is as dumb an idea as I can think of, and would ruin Google's reputation for innovation. The only was Google can release a browser, especially one they didn't even build, is if the browser has some major innovations. Convergence of Google products won't be enough. If GBrowser doesn't bring a killer app right out of the box, it will only hurt Google, not help it.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 10:34:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Why Is Google Paying Sites To Deliver Them Users?
Some news has come out over the last few days that Google now has agreements where they pay sites for delivering them traffic. I don't get it. The traffic is the benifit they get from Google, and now they want to be paid for the privelege of delivering them customers. If anyone can possibly explain the logic behind this, I'd like to hear it.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 07:51:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Hyperiffic!
eWeek's Jim Rapoza says "Don't believe the RSS hype".
George Dearing on Radiant Digital says "Why shouldn't I believe the RSS hype?"
Scobleizer says "We needed a bit of anti-hype".
InsideGoogle says, "Is there a bit too much RSS hype anti-hype hyping?"
Hehe. I crack me up.
(via Findory Blogory)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 07:40:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
The History Of Google
The story of Google, explained very comprehensively, from The Economist.
(Via Findory Blogory > Emergic.org)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 07:28:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Gmail Ads Being Tested Elsewhere
Google Blogoscoped has screen shots of Gmail ads being moved below emails, at least for some users. Gotta say, putting them over there is an annoyance, and defeats the purpose of having buttons at the bottom of the page.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 07:03:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Jeeves' World Tour
Want to see where Jeeves went on his world tour? Watch this Flash movie.
(via Search Engine Watch)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 03:35:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
AOL Robots Try To Take Over The World
Apparently, AOL has had AIM robots for two years now. AIM robots are automated buddies you can IM and ask questions, and the system responds with your answer. Kind of like a more humanized search engine. Now AIM is trying to expand and popularize the program, adding a CitySearch robot, and promoting the existing ones more. Sounds like a novel approach to search. Has anyone used these to great success? Check out a listing of AIM robots here.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 01:56:00 PM 13 comments links to this post
 
Google Toolbar Security Hole Exposed
Security Tracker has found a vulnerability that allows sites to run code via the Google Toolbar. A site can create code that can be accidentally run by the user, which loads the toolbar's "About" page and runs malicious code via that page. Google needs to prove it is serious about security by patching the toolbar fast.
(via Search Engine Lowdown and Search Engine Journal)

Side note: Has anyone noticed the Latin text in the Google Toolbar's About page? It reads "de parvis grandis acervus erit", which according to Webmaster World means roughly "Out of small things a great heap will be formed".

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 12:57:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
German Court Throws Out Google Keyword Lawsuit
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports:
A state court in Hamburg on Tuesday rejected a German company's lawsuit against Google Inc. over allegations the Internet search engine allows rival companies to buy ads using trademarked terms, an attorney said Tuesday.

Good news for Google hoping to fend off Geico and Rescuecom here in the U.S.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 11:38:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
MyJeeves Is The Talk Of The Town
MyJeeves is getting coverage from everybody. Here are some links:


Let me know of any others, so I can keep updating the list.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 10:29:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
GBrowser?
Boing Boing reports that Google snatched up Gbrowser.com back in April. Also, Mozilla bug reports contain hints of a Google branded browser. I gotta say, I see the security rationale for using Mozilla, since it is safer simply due to being less popular, but beyond that, I'm not sure why Google would want to go with it. Especially since it doesn't always work with every web page, so Google Browser users would have problems. Well, to each his own.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 08:32:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Finally, a Spam Notification!
Gmail now lets you know how many messages are in your spambox. Now, was that so hard?
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 08:14:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
I'm Feeling Perky
Fagoogle: The Gay Search Engine. All it really is is a version of Google Search with a gay look. Fagoogle claims using it supports gay pride monetarily, but I see no ads that aren't being run by Google, so I don't know (unless its just a cheap version of site search with AdSense). I like the disclaimer, though: "Fagoogle.com is not owned, run, operated, viewed, conceived, sandboxed, or banned by Google.com.". Reminds me of a few other recent sites that have had big problems. Also interesting, Fagoogle claims to index "a googol of pages", rather than a number. Given recent problems with reporting the number of indexed pages, maybe Google's home page should try the same.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 08:08:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
The Jeeves Is Out Of The Bag
John Battelle didn't waste any time revealing the new Jeeves. MyJeeves brings you closer to the PersonalWeb, where you can save, annotate, and manage your results in personal folders. Like A9, your search history is saved and can be used in the future. Jeeves aims to give everyone their own personalized web index. Also, Jeeves will be launching its desktop search product in the fourth quarter, most likely ahead of Google and everybody else. This is major stuff. Innovation in search is coming fast and furious, and companies will have to work twice as fast just to keep up. Two major engines integrating search history will force Google to add it, and soon, mark my words. Personalization has been all the rage these last few weeks, and Google is the only player left in the cold. Google has sat back and watched A9 and Jeeves deliver some powerful blows. Will we see a major announcement from Google in the next few weeks? If you're a stockholder, you damn well better hope so.

Oh, and Jeeves is back, and much better looking.Definetly a nose job, tummy tuck, and tanning booth were involved.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/21/2004 01:48:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, September 20, 2004
 
Findory Advances News Aggregators, And More
With personalization being a holy grail for many companies, its nice to see products that do it, and do it right. Findory is like Google News, except personalized. And you don't have to do anything to personalize it. Just register (registration requires a username and password, but no email address, a refreshing change) and every time you read an article, your preferences are automatically adjusted, plus the article you just read is dropped in favor of a new one. Its a great system, and seems to work very well. However, Findory has something else guaranteed to excite some people even more: the Findory Blogory, which is exactly the same as Findory News, except its for blogs. Finally, a news aggregator for blogs, and one that is constantly adjusted to whatever it is you like to read. Even better, you can sign up for an RSS feed to get constantly updated feeds of blogs that talk about things you like, but you may have never heard of. If you ever wanted RSS or already do, this is in my mind the number one way to find new blogs that print what you like. Check it out, it's worth your while.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 11:08:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Now Crawls Autocad Files
From SEO and Web Marketing News From North:

Google add a few mores filetypes parsing

Google can now parse files from Autocad (.dwg and dxf)


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 10:51:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Guess What? Your Cheap Uncle Is Actually On To Something
Do you have a relative who insists on unplugging things when not in use, and you think that person is just a cheap kook? Well, guess what? They're right. Bill Machrone of PC Magazine shows how devices which claim to be off are actually drawing power. In his case, 10% of his yearly power bill was from things that were turned off. Your results may vary, but still, this really makes you think. Plugging devices into a power strip and switching that off instead might not be such a bad plan.
(via Nial Kennedy's Weblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 10:35:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
AOL Brings Security To Another Level
AOL has come out with "two-factor authentication" for its customers. As the AP reports, $1.95 a month (after an initial $9.95 outlay) will get AOL subscribers a tiny devices which displays a security code that changes every sixty seconds. To log on or do practically anything on AOL, customers who signed up for the service would have to enter the password, making it impossible for anyone to steal their password, and later, their money. AOL expects 5-15% of their subscribers, or 1.5-4.5 million people, to sign up for the service. Although they are probably just being optimistic, smaller numbers would still make this the most widespread advanced security for typical home users, which guarantees other ISPs will take notice.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 10:04:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Jeeves Gets Better
More info about the new features on Ask Jeeves, some of which already work:

Site Image Preview - Park your cursor over a site and a preview image of it appears in a preview pane.

Shortcuts - New shortcuts, like what Google shows for stock searches and flight number searches. When you search for a famous person, you get options about that person, like a mini-biography. Regular people bring up their telephone book entry. Search for a movie, get a synopsis and movie review.

More to come, and I'll post whatever I hear...
(via Northwest Herald)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 06:47:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
A9 For Porn, Jeeves Just For You
Two little bits on two search engines, courtesy of Search Engine Lowdown.

First, A9's image search, which anyways runs off Google Images, shows porn. Now, this is perfectly normal, since Google Images is an excellent source of free porn. But the fact is, even with the explicit images filter turned on, porn still shows up. Try searching for "Frontpage SEO", and you get to see a fully naked short woman. Is this a problem with the engine, or added value? You decide.

Also, the new Ask Jeeves is coming tomorrow. SELowdown knows the score on Jeeves big news (look for lots of personalization from a new "My Jeeves" feature), but are deferring to Jeeves' wishes to keep it under wraps for one more day. With A9 and this, September has been a big month for search (including Google, which is now up to $119.36).

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 06:29:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
A Dialogue On Search Engines That Dialogue
A topic being tossed around on other blogs is whether a search engine can be designed to hold a dialogue with the end user, asking questions to refine the query until the correct answer is reached. First, read Greg Linden's post, then head over to Jeremy Zawodny's response, and finally read John Battelle's opinion, before coming back here.

We all on the same page? Okay.

The first issue is whether or not this should happen. I say, of course it should. As long is it is unobtrusive, like Google's spell-check, then why not code it in, if it actually works. However, this, more than many other features, under the category of "If it don't work, don't do it". If a user sees lots of irrelevant questions, users will be trained quickly to ignore them, much like the vast majority of internet users learned to completely shut out flashing banner ads.

Second, can it be done? I believe it can. Google's spell-checker works on the brilliant idea that since most words are properly spelled most of the time, a search engine can use the way words are spelled on the web to discover the proper spelling. This is why any word common on the internet, even nonsense words like n00b and words from foreign languages, will be corrected by Google. A similar concept based on a smart algorithm can work for "bad searches".

When a user users an incorrect search, the user typically notices immediatly. If a user wants to find the best of anything, and types in a Guaranteed To Fail search like "best cars", the user should notice the bad results immediatly and change it to "car reviews". When Google notices a pattern of the searches typing in a search, and immediatly typing in another, similar search without clicking on any results, that is cause to add a "Did you mean...?" to the Search Engine Results Page. A pattern of GTF searches only needs to be small to be useful, since after all, if they are useless, no one will click on them. A "Did you mean...?" result can be dropped if a large number of GTF searches ignore the "Did you mean...?" and move on to other searches, searches which will become the new "Did you mean...?"s until another better result comes along. It isn't a perfect system, but even if the results are only 15% relevant, that will be an enourmously useful feature. I'm sure Google's PhDs can build the algorithm that pulls it off.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 01:44:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Another Company Sues Google
Google is now being sued by Rescuecom, a computer service company, for selling their trademarked company name as an ad keyword to competitors, including Computer Troubleshooters, as I witnessed by searching for Rescuecom. Google is once again in hot water for selling trademarks, like the ongoing Geico suit. Why doesn't Google just stop selling these words?

I would just like to take a moment to give a shout-out to Topix.net, which provides me with oodles of up-to-the-moment news. It's a lot like Google News, but with RSS feeds and categories, so you can, as I do, subscribe to a feed of Google and search engine news. I recommend any heavy user of Google News give it a shot. You'll discover that both sites have a lot to offer you.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/20/2004 01:20:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 19, 2004
 
Google Gears Up For War
Google is readying the troops for the big one with Microsoft by... hiring away everyone from Microsoft. Google has stolen Joshua Block, one of the original designers of Java, four members of the IE team including Adam Bosworth, the "driving force" behind the browser, as well as the lead developer on Avalon, Joe Beda. An analyst suggests Google is about to break into everything, and plans to challenge Microsoft and everybody else on everything that is that internet. The major possibility: the long rumored Google Browser, eliminating the Operating System and giving Google control of your entire world. Microsoft better hope they have an excellent defense strategy. Read the excellent bit of reporting by the New York Post.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 08:13:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Design Your Own Jeeves
Ask Jeeves UK lets you choose your own alternate Jeeves, to replace their butler, who has been missing for a few days. My favorite is the Superman butler, mostly because the idea that Superman has nothing better to do than provide you with search results amuses me.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 02:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Hurricane Relief From Jeeves
Ask Jeeves is offering relief for victims of the recent hurricanes. Just use this version of Ask Jeeves, which is exactly the same as the regular site (even with the missing butler), except all profits go to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. Great cause, and a good reason to give Jeeves a whirl if you haven't already.
(via Search Engine Guide)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 02:08:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Heidrick & Struggles Cashes In
Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., an executive search firm, announced Friday it earned nearly $130 million for stock it received for helping Google find CEO Eric Schmidt back in 2001. Google was forced to offer the stock in lieu of having actual monies to offer the firm, a deal that was a throwback to the dot-com boom era. Normally this search would have yielded about $100,000-200,000. Guess Heidrick & Struggles is pretty happy with the deal now. They sold the stock for an average of $108.22 a share, slightly less than the street value, but much better than the terrible deal Yahoo got for its shares last month.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 01:51:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
GOOG Like A Rocket
Google had an excellent week. The stock shot up from 101.60 last Friday to 117.49 at the close of trading this Friday. In fact, all the major search players seem to have done well. This industry seems to really be heating up.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 01:37:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
A9 Gives You A Discount At Amazon
Search Engine News Journal is reporting tha A9 users get a 1.57% discount off all Amazon products. All you need is to be signed in to the engine when you buy stuff. Anyone who hears this and is buying anything from Amazon is just going to feel stupid if they don't, meaning a perfect way to force people to visit the engine at least once. A very good bit of marketing.

In more A9 coverage, my experience with the engine so far isn't very positive. I bought a bunch of books Wednesday, and decided to use A9 to find them. I searched for 7 books, and 5 of them gave me irrelevant search results, even though I was searching with the title and author's name. This was with the Books tab of A9. No matter how good the personalization features and goodies are, Amazon needs its internal search engine for its site to work right, otherwise its just going to look bad. I'll have a full review after some more tinkering with the thing.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 01:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
If Jeeves Is Too Stuck-up For You...
If you wish Ask Jeeves was more street, you should go to Aks Jeeves. This Jeeves is one tough mothatrucka, saying stuff like "What kind of backwards ass motherfucker are you! Get the fuck off my webpage!" and "Oh, you think cause I dress like a butler, that gives you the right to oppress me, motherfucker? Fuck you!" Definitely not a site you want to be visiting at the office with your speakers on real loud.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 12:54:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
What's Your Google IQ?
First things first, being without the internet sucks. Not so much that I would refuse to serve for my country, but it still stinks.
Check out the Google Labs Aptitude Test. The GLAT tests for how well you would fit in at Google Labs, a lot like the Google billboards. How Googly are you? I only wish there was a way to score it.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/19/2004 12:26:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
 
Bloggers Are Not Journalists
There has been a lot of criticism recently leveled at John Battelle and Danny Sullivan for articles they have written. Danny wrote on Yahoo's blog, while being creator and editor of Search Engine Watch, while John wrote a major article about A9 for Business 2.0, while organizing the Web 2.0 conference, which will be attended by Amazon's CEO and other Amazon executives.

Why are they being criticized for writing these articles, when for a regular reporter it would be par for the course? Because bloggers are not regular reporters.

A blogger does not just report on the news, he runs his (or her) own news organization. A blogger is not a journalist, but a publisher. And for a publisher to write a promotionary article for somebody else is a lot different than a reporter on Dateline plugging an NBC show or an SUV. Bloggers are more personally associated with their news organization, and the criticism NBC gets when it promotes a GE project on the news is the criticism John Battelle gets when he plugs A9. Bloggers open themselves up to new arenas of accountability a regular reporter never has to worry about.

The contrast between the newsroom and the blogosphere is striking. The future of blogs will depend on bloggers to distance themselves from their blogs, so as to legitimize and remove personalization from their content. Trust me, you'll see the trend moving to more community- and reporter- oriented blogs like Slashdot and Boing Boing over the next two years. Blogs will turn into magazines, not newsletters.

--------------------------

One problem a single-person blog faces is when that single person goes away on vacation. I will be without web access for three days, and suggest regular readers refer to the Blogroll for news. I swear to be back, blogging with a vengeance, Saturday night. Au revoir!

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 06:53:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
 
Coverage of A9 Is Through The Roof
Everybody seems to be writing about A9 today. Not a whole lot of reviews, positive or negative, but everybody's talking about it. Here's some good stuff:

Amazon must be very pleased. I think everybody on the internet know by now.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 05:46:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Hotmail Extra Storage = Extra Long Wait
Hotmail promised in June 250 MB of storage for free users and 2 GB for paid users, to combat Gmail. So far, no progress. I divide my email between Hotmail and Gmail, so I've been eagerly anticipating the 2 gigabytes I get as a paid user. Supposedly, the oldest Hotmail users get the larger accounts first, but I've been using my account for seven years, plus paying for it, so who knows how true that is. Microsoft is going to lose users if it keeps dragging its feet.
(via the Unofficial Google Weblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 05:14:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Gmail Phishing Scam
Some scammers have been trying to fool Gmail account holders into giving up their usernames and passwords. They receive an email that purports to bring more invites if the user just fills out the form. Don't be fooled. Common practice is that no company ever sends an email asking for your username and password. As an internet user, you need to be up on the latest fraud techniques. If you are not sure if you can thwart phishers, take Mailfrontier's Phishing IQ test.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 04:58:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Search Engine Focus Groups
Recently, sessions were held at Search Engine Strategies San Jose called "Inside the Searcher's Mind", where experts from Enquiro, Vividence, iProspect and Google were able to question users as to what they were thinking when they made searches. By better understanding how we search, the industry can better understand what we need. Probably, someone also realized that this information can also be used to break the mold, which is always a good thing. Among the fascinating things discovered were that women more than men stop at the first page of search results, Google users are more satisfied with their results, amd that practically nobody clicks on "I'm Feeling Lucky". Apparently, Google has polled, and although no one uses it, everybody wants it to stay. I think "I'm Feeling Lucky" is more of a brand thing, like a logo, than actually useful, which is why it is well-liked. Anyway, read the article. Paid members get to read a longer version.
(via Search Engine Guide)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 04:46:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
A9 Is Coming
Amazon's search service officially goes live today. John Battelle got to sit down and review it for Business 2.0, and his article explains exactly what A9 is and why it just might work. A9 uses Google's index, so right off the bat you know you are dealing with a search engine that actually has some decent results, unlike most new entries in the game. The pull of A9 comes from what Amazon has built and layered above the Google interface: a robust, scalable system of apps that add a lot of value to your searching. It remembers who you are and what you searched for, and if, you install the A9 toolbar, it knows every site you visit. Then, like Amazon already does, it can offer recommendations based on what it knows you already like to do. By building the search histories of its users, all A9 needs to do is hit a critical mass and it can dump Google, so Amazon has not stuck themselves with technology they don't own. It all adds up to probably the most interesting and capable search engine we've seen since, well, Google. I'll be testing it out for a week, and I'll deliver a report. I encourage readers to send me their reviews.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 08:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Green Going. Gotcha?
Check it, from Google's blog: There's a GoogleBus, a shuttle bus that ferries GooglePeople, and it runs on biodiesel. I want to see a picture of this bus.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/15/2004 01:46:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
 
Looking At The Current Face Of Search
What are people searching for?
Wordtracker brings us the top 500 search queries, for a fee. You can view the tracker at the site for free, or read the current list here.
Dogpile and Metacrawler both provide live feeds of searches. Yahoo lists recent searches in Yahoo Stores. Disturbing Search Requests is a user-submit based site.
Every search site should have a live feed, if only for entertainment value. Sometimes a Zeitgest just isn't enough.
(all via Search Engine Guide)
Bonus: Wired has a famous article from last May, where a writer watches the searches as they come through Google on a huge screen. It's a great read, and makes you wish you had one.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 04:30:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Report On The Emerging Face Of Information Search
K-Praxis has produced a huge, in-depth report on emerging search technologies and trends. If you can read the whole thing, please do. Here's just one quote:
In terms of information ranking PageRank - to quote from one of our earlier articles on K-Praxis: “Contextualized Tabbed OR Categorized Indexes and the Future of Search”, - system (to a great extent) assumes that the more linked a web page is, the greater is its value. And whatever algorithm Google uses to normalize this effect - to bring in other aspects such as keywords, relatedness of the content and so forth - because the basic system is PageRank, the results that are produced by Google tilt towards a theory where the more “networked” you are the more popular and trustworthy you are.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 03:33:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Jeeves Has Dissapeared
The Ask Jeeves butler has gone missing, reportedly to explore the Himalayas. Search Engine Lowdown reports this is a cover-up, and Jeeves has been kidnapped (see ransom note below). More likely, the rumors that Ask jeeves was changing its butler, or at least getting a makeover, are definitely true. More to come...

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 01:41:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Yahoo Makes A Move
John Battelle reports:
Yahoo bought Musicmatch for $160 million. They are making a play on the online music store business. Great move, since they can take Musicmatch a lot further than it could on its own.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 01:36:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Local Gets An Upgrade
Aaron Swartz says Google Local just got a bunch of changes, including:

Check out a sample search: Cheap restaurants in Palo Alto

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 11:23:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
A Little Bit Of Silly
Scott Niven and Saltwater Pizza have inspired me to create a Flash movie for InsideGoogle. It's quite lame. Enjoy!

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 08:10:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Does Paid Inclusion Take Away Yahoo's Credibility?
In the search business, credibility is everything. Google took over the search world based every bit on the fact that when you saw their search results, you knew they were "clean", specifically unlike Yahoo's. Yahoo's paid inclusion service lost all it's credibility when Google entered the scene, so much so that they were forced to use Google's results alongside their paid results, just to get any traffic. Now Yahoo has its own search engine, which according to most proffessionals is still young, but is technologically on a good level to compete with Google. However, Web Stractions is calling Yahoo's credibility into question. Yahoo still has two ways of indexing your site: either through a standard web crawl on its "Slurp" spider, or good old paid inclusion. Web Stractions says that barely more than one percent of pages on Gonzo forums that were crawled, made it into Yahoo's index. If Yahoo is giving serious penalties and making its site unfriendly to those who don't pay them, Yahoo won't expect to see an upswing in traffic. A few more stories like this one, and the pendulum will swing away from them, and back in Google's direction. Bad move Yahoo. From Yahoo's website:
When Yahoo! Slurp crawls pages from your site, the pages are not instantly put into the Yahoo! search index. Once crawled, the documents will be considered for inclusion at the next database update. Pages that are indexed will be able to be seen at the conclusion of the update process.

Either you index the web or you don't. If users are convinced you don't, you lose all the gains you spent millions of dollars on. Good luck winning the search wars without trust.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 06:41:00 AM 3 comments links to this post
 
AOL Launching It's "AOFROOGLe"
AOL will launch In-Store.com next Monday, a shopping comparison site designed to compete with Google's Froogle and Yahoo Shopping, the New York Times reports. Of course, AOL is really not competing with them, but with Shopping.com and NexTag.com, since the graphic at right shows that although Google and Yahoo have huge Internet presences, despite what we may believe, not everything they do becomes a huge overnight hit. This news comes just as the beta of the new AOL.com surfaces. Looks like AOL is slowly getting back in the game. Maybe one day they'll even have their own search engine.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 06:30:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Using elgooG Backwards
Search Engine Lowdows has a unique case where Robert McRackan had to find something he wasn't supposed to be able to find, using search operators that weren't supposed to work, by using Google backwards to find the worst possible results, thus the results he was looking for. Ladies and gentlemen, this is exactly the type of person who "gets" Google. When you can find anything through Google because you speak it's language, you win.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 01:58:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Danny Sullivan @ Yahoo Search Blog
Yahoo's Blog is always newsworthy. Sure, they are only ten posts in, but every one has been interesting, unlike Google's which is often irrelevant. This time, it's Danny Sullivan, talking about how the winner in the search wars is clear: us. Read it!

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/14/2004 12:37:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, September 13, 2004
 
Google Books
Zorgloob reports today that there is a Google book forthcoming, the French "Google: Trucs De Pros", or tricks of the pros. It has a website here. A paraître le 21 septembre. As if translating one site into English wasn't enough, I'm sure not trying it with a book.
Here are some other Google books, as provided by Amazon:

There are many others, but no doubt you guys can run the search yourselves.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/13/2004 07:49:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
What's Inside Google Blogoscoped This Monday
GB has all sorts of good stuff today. First, apparently there are Google Meetups. Meetups, you may remember, are groups set up to allow people of similar interests to "meetup" and discuss what they like so much. They were thrust into the spotlight back when Howard Dean was all the rage. Anyway, there are now 23 Google Meetup Groups, in Chicago, Dayton, San Francisco, New Jersey, Santa Monica, Santa Clara, Fort Worth, Marietta (Georgia), Dilli (India), Bengalûru (India), Bloomington, Eau Claire, Lansing, Raleigh, Seattle, Wichita, Middlesex, Camden, Akron, San Diego, São Paulo, Darmstadt, and of course, right here in New York City. One problem, every single one of them seems to have been set up by one guy on September 3rd, so a lot of them have barely one member at this point. Ten of them have two members, and NYC has seven members. Anyone want to explain to me exactly what goes on at one of these? The next meeting is 10/6.
A member in the Google Blogoscoped forums provides a neat workaround for adding contact groups (read: mailing lists) to gmail. Guess now's as good a time as any to link to my own workaround from months back on how to import your entire contact list from Hotmail. That post, in my decidedly less interesting and rarely updated blog, is precisely what inspired this one.
And finally, Google Blogoscoped makes note of this blog, which has a Google search results design. I'd like to also mention this blog, or this one with a Bloglines-alike layout. Very cool stuff. Now if only I knew how to do that, I could finally have the blog design I've been dreaming of for weeks: A Gmail style blog.
Thanks, of course, to Google Blogoscoped, for doing most of the work for me.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/13/2004 07:40:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 12, 2004
 
InsideGoogle Goes On Location
I previously posted about Digital Life, a Ziff-Davis run exhibition at the Javitz Center in New York, running October 14-17. I received my press authorization through my paper Friday, so I will be there, reporting on Google, Microsoft, AOL, Tivo, AT&T, XM Radio, CallVantage Service and Movielink, Intel, Motorola BestBuy, and any other companies you guys are interested in. I'll bring my laptop and wireless card, so I'll be blogging from the floor with regular updates and pictures from the photographer I'm bringing with me. If anyone has any suggestions of what they'd like me to check out while I'm there (I should be attending Thursday, Friday, and Sunday), just comment and let me know. It should make for some good blogging.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/12/2004 11:43:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
SEO Company Announces Its Intents For Google Grants
SEO Resource, a search engine optimization firm that assists small- to medium-sized businesses, as well as non-profits, has announced that it will assist non-profits with using Google Grants. Google Grants is Google's offer of free AdWords advertising on Google's own site, Gmail, and AdSense for non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations. Google Grants is supposed to allow non-profits free ways to promote their organizations, a great opportunity for these usually cash-strapped organizations. SEO Resource appears says in the press release that it is conducting these activities "on a philanthropic basis", which means that not only will these organizations get free ads, they'll get free help with all SEO activities. Obviously, most offers that sound too good to be true usually are, but if this is on the level, good for them, and lets hope they're not the only company to try this.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/12/2004 11:24:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
What Is In Google's Future?
Andrew Lackey of Tribune Media Services answers this question:
Now that Google Inc. is off and running as a public company, what is the outlook for its stock?

The answer is a perfect summary of the company, the industry, and a look at what Google's game plan has to be if it plans to survive.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/12/2004 10:17:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Calling All GoogleDorks!
Check out Johnny Ihackstuffs' listing of what they call GoogleDorks; that is people who are stupid enough to leave sensitive information or broken web pages in Google's database. Things included: passwords, files, personal info, and pages that turn up error messages in the title of the page. Be warned, though. This site is very hacker friendly, meaning very unfriendly to everyone else.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/12/2004 09:18:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google On September 11
I regret not posting this yesterday, on the third anniversary of the attacks. This paper, "The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine" by Richard W. Wiggins, discusses the way people used the internet on 9/11, and more specifically, how they leaned on Google for information in a time of crisis. It includes a screenshot of Google the day of the attacks, When Google had this message:
If you are looking for news, you will find the most current information on TV or radio. Many online news services are not available, because of extremely high demand. Below are links to news sites, including cached copies as they appeared earlier today.

Google also had a Zeitgeist for September 11.
The page is a fascinating look at Google, the one site internet users rely on more than any other, how it was used and how it reacted to such a major event. As the web was taxed like it had never before, someone at Google stepped up and decided that Google needed to be the face of the internet, evolving as the day went on and making small but significant changes so as to help web surfers with the tragedy. It is suggested that Google News and the tabs Google now sports evolved directly from 9/11.

We can expect that this study is now a primer on what we can expect from Google in the event of future tragedies and world events. Imagine Google in World War 2, or on the day Kennedy was shot. It would be comforting to believe that such a thing will never happen again. It would also be foolish.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/12/2004 02:08:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Who's Better? Google or Yahoo? Part II
I've found another site that compares Yahoo and Google search results, this time using a cool graphical interface. This one is also very useful in that it uses the top 100 search results, instead of the top 10 like many comparison tools. I also discovered a problem, one that may be affected my rankings. Google lists my home page simply as the domain, while Yahoo lists the actual main.cfm page. I hope that sort of thing doesn't dilute my PageRank.
Who's Better? Google or Yahoo? Part I

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/12/2004 12:28:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 11, 2004
 
Google Catalog Search
I'm surprised I never noticed this before, but it's Google Catalogs, a search engine for mail-order catalogs. It features scans of the actual catalog pages. Very cool to look through, even if you have no interest. What's amazing is that the search highlights the words in your search results, as some search engines do, but it highlights them on the scan of the actual catalog ad. It gives you an idea of what a magazine search engine could look like.
Go to Google Catalog Home
CatalogsBETA


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/11/2004 11:09:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Having Fun At Google Answers
Even if you aren't interested in asking or answering questions, there's some fun stuff at Google Answers. The service is one of several that have tried to get people to post questions and pay to get them answered. I know some people rely on it heavily, but Google has not released statistics on how popular it is. Oh well, I'm sure they must have some other lucrative business.
For now, we can all enjoy questions such as:

If you find any funny ones, post them in the comments.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/11/2004 10:47:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
 
Fidelity Owns Google?
CNN is reporting that FMR, the parent corporation of Fidelity Investments, owns 5.2 million shares of Google, which amounts to 15.5% of the 33,603,386 shares of outstanding stock. This news was revealed in a regulatory filing FMR made with the SEC, pushing Google's stock up $3.44 to close at $105.75. Of course, Google stock owners hold much less sway in the direction of the company than do investors in most companies, and Fidelity's stake looks much smaller compared to the 237,616,257 shares being made available over the next 5 months.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/11/2004 08:51:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, September 10, 2004
 
Gmail Takes Out The Trash
Unless this is the only Google-related blog you're reading, you know by now that Gmail is emptying Trash and Junk Mail after 30 days (and if you didn't know, you picked the right place to go!). What does this mean? It means that even though Gmail has provided absolutely no way of letting you know you have Junk Mail, it will still delete it before you find out. Couldn't they just add a number to the Junk Mail folder?

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/10/2004 05:03:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Not Everybody Wants Google News
Google News Japan is having trouble signing up some major news sources, Google Blogoscoped reports. The sites think they'll lose out on because users won't be going to the home page. Welcome to the 21st century guys! Nowadays, more and more people use the internet as a resource, looking for answers and information rather than specific sites. They gotta get with the times. My website gets most of its traffic through Google News, and I couldn't be happier. I'm always emailing the Google News team, looking for ways to improve their service so that, in turn, I can increase traffic. Any news site that resists Google News is just asking for potential readers to go somewhere else.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/10/2004 01:23:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
An Online Hard Drive
Lycos UK has announced the launch of a new email service that will also act as virtual storage. Users will get 10 megabytes of space, and can pay for 100 MB or one gigabyte, and they can drag and drop files into that space to their heart's content. Gmail, you listening? This is a brilliant plan, although if they want it to take off they'd better make 100 MB the free version, and allow paying for 1 or 10 gigabytes.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/10/2004 11:48:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Rotated
Ladies and gents, check out Google Rotated, that is, Google turned 90°, by Google Blogoscoped. Because it had to happen.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/10/2004 09:57:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
SEO Is A Dangerous Game
The business of Search Engine Optimization is a tricky one. Most SEO companies help you design your site properly, submit you to search engines, and help promote you for higher traffic and better listings. A small number of SEO firms try to game Google and other major search engines. This article shows what happened to one site which signed up with Traffic Power, one of the more notorious players in the SEO game.
(via Search Engine Guide)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/10/2004 01:16:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Hey, Bub! You Wanna Get To Google You Gotta Go Through Me!
Google is looking for a bodyguard! Prospective employees with "low PageRank" need not apply.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/10/2004 01:03:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 09, 2004
 
Yahoo Gets Friendly
Yahoo seems to be shedding its stodgy, faceless company image, as evidenced in this latest post at Yahoo! Search blog. Yahoo may not have Google's sense of humor, but it is developing a decent relationship with its customers, by posting about and fixing problems people bring to them.

Also, one of the problems they adressed was an "Error 999" some people got. Apparently they got it because they had MyDoom, or a similar worm. Wouldn't it be cool if major sites blocked users who were infected with viruses, returning an error message like this:

Now that would be a great public service.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 11:48:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Goooooooooooooooooooogle Blogoscoped
Google Blogoscoped points out that if you search for Goooooooooo oooooooooogle on Google, the spelling feature asks if you want to correct it to Goooooooooooooooooooogle. Well thank god they got THAT right!
Also, Phillip says that he has heard that Google News China is "scrubbed" for the Chinese government, but I'm not seeing it. I searched for "Democracy" and got plenty of sites that would be banned in China. Of course, China could be relying on its firewall to handle things, meaning I can see whatever I want and people in China can't. Plus, the "democracy" search only turned up 15 results, so who knows. See my earlier post on Google News China.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 11:16:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Project Gmail Mobile Aims To Bring Gmail On The Go
SourceForge brings us the Gmail Mobile Project, which, when its done, will bring Gmail to your WAP-enabled phone. I call it a very good idea that's also a terrible idea. Not only may this be against the Terms of Service, but Gmail is beta and changes all the time. Gmail notifiers stopped working a few weeks ago when Google changed some of the protocols. Gmail Mobile could stop working at any time. If they design it so they can fix and adapt quickly, fine, but it ain't gonna be easy.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 04:12:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google News Enters More Countries
ABAKUS SEO Blog reports that Google News is now in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and was made available only a few days ago in Japan and Korea. It seems like Google News China does not filter based on the Chinese government's restrictions (read more about China's internet censoring in this earlier post), so it is likely that people in China cannot use Google News China. If anyone can read Chinese and confirm my assumption, comment on it.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 02:25:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Finally, An Answer To "Is Google Broken?"
Google is not broken.

There has been much discussion on the subject of Google being broken. I've brought it up before, I've discussed the experts involved, we've even been visited by noted Google critic Daniel Brandt. Now, courtesy of the forums at Search Engine Watch and the good people at Search Engine Roundtable, we seem to have our answer.

The problem arose from the fact that the listing on Google's home page has read "Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages" for a little over a year now. Brandt, and later, Anthony Frederico, discovered that this was most likely related to the fact that Google uses a 4-byte unsigned long integer to mark its pages, which has a limit of 4,294,967,295 possibilities. So, the theory went, Google ran out of ID numbers for its pages, and could no longer index the whole web.

In fact, it seems, Google used one of the many workarounds available for 4-byte ULI. A search on the word "the" returns 5,800,000,000 results, more than the Google home page says. Google's home page reads the old number, because Google can't link that to its database, since it is using a workaround. As a result, the number is not real-time, but represents the last number before the update that pushed past the 4-byte ULI limit.

As "cariboo" explains in this thread:

This ID problem is an urban legend. A low skilled techie can solve it without any problems, and Google have a big team of PhD's. In fact, Google has a special "know how" about building huge "scalable" systems, with hundreds of machines working together... Gmail is their last demonstration of this know how.

And he says something that may explain why some sites are listed in Google but without page info. The gist: Google used to crawl the entire web, now it only crawls pages that are updated every so often. It keeps crawling the whole web with its old batch crawler, but it uses the new incremental crawler for most pages. It went live in July of 2003. If your site doesn't have page info (and this is my theory), it could be because the batch crawler caught you a while ago but the incremental crawler has no record. Are there any constantly updated sites that show this problem? Of course, it could be a different kind of bug.

There's your answer folks. Hopefully this will satisfy most people.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 01:43:00 PM 10 comments links to this post
 
What Is In The New Google Toolbar? Nothing You'll Ever Use
As Oliviez Duffez has figured out(translation), the new feature in the new version (2.0.114) of the Google Toolbar, which I reported on yesterday, is not actually a feature at all. Google modified the checksum that calculates the PageRank in the toolbar. Now, you know all those sites with Pagerank tools? Well, they all have to be updated and possibly rewritten. Guess Google wants you to use the Toolbar and nothing else.
(via Zorgloob)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 09:31:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
How To Promote Your Blog
Blogger's Knowledge base now has an article by Biz Stone about promoting your blog. It talks about a lot of Blogger stuff, but it is a useful read for bloggers on any service. Check it out. My favorite line:
You've got to think about it like watering a plant—do it every day and the plant will grow. Hopefully your blog is not like the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. That would be bad.


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 09:20:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Alerts Come Out Of Beta
Google News Alerts are no longer considered beta, even if Google News still is, and heve been rewarded with a new HTML look. So have Google Web Alerts. And you can organize all of them now in this handy-dandy interface, as long as you have a Google Account. And finally, they are all now called Google Alerts, and ar just categorized as News or Web, so we might see more types of alerts soon, like Froogle Alerts when a certain product goes on sale (which would be so cool). Google: Always something new. So check out the screen shots. The one on the left is from Sunday, the other from this morning, and below that is the Google Alerts interface. And yes, I do have Web Alert on my name. So what's it to you?


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 08:39:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
The Perfect Search?
John Battelle asks: What is the perfect search? What does the Holy Grail of searching look like to you? What can we expect in the future.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 02:26:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
How To Make An Annoying Web Page
I've been exploring a little, and discovered this: a site that gives step-by-step instructions on how to construct annoying web pages. While its gotten a bit outdated in the five years (I believe) since it was updated, anyone whose been on the net since Windows 95 knows what Stevyn Pompelio was talking about. It's a great look back at the early days of the Internet, to say the least, and very funny. My favorite part was the page on animated GIFs:


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/09/2004 01:42:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
 
My Alternate Ads
I spent so much time picking sites for my alternate ads, that I felt they needed to be shown off. They make for a decent list of links for humorous and fun sites. I will update them every so often, and if anyone has a good suggestion I'll take it. There is one condition: It cannot be a major corporate site that makes plenty of money. I'll link to your friend's funny page, but not to the New York Times'. My friend is uploading them to his site as a favor, but I need a more permanent host. The scripts are only 1-2k, and will rarely be used, so if anyone will offer to host them, it would be a huge help. Here are the ads.
Because Google has no ads, here's some fun stuff!
X-Entertainment: 80's nostalgia and side-splitting humor
Snopes.com - All those stupid internet rumors debunked
QCKN

Because Google has

no ads, here's

some fun stuff!
Dave Barry's blog - It's good! You'll laugh so hard you'll never come back here. Wait, don't go!
The Dullest Blog In The World - You'll laugh at how sad it is
Computer Stupidities - (supposedly) real stories of stupid people who don't know their way around computers
The 419 Eater - Scamming those scammers... and having a good laugh while doing it!
QCKN

Because Google has no ads, here's some fun stuff!
Masturbate For Peace - Using self-love to End Conflict
MoveOnPlease.org - A parody of MoveOn.org by National Lampoon
The Automatic Insult Generator - Trash talk for every occasion
The Brushback.com - Baseball news in the style of The Onion
QCKN


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 11:41:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Make Your Own AdSense Replacement Ads
When Google has no ads, it lets you choose between Public Service Announcements and blank space. Alternatively, you can submit your own ad, but it is rare that anyone does it. This site has a script that lets you place a list of links when there are no ads. One of the most useful AdSense solutions I've ever seen, it comes in every size AdSense offers. An example:
Get FREE video games at Free Video Games.com!!!
Win the DVD of your choice every single week!
AWS

If you set up to earn money through Amazon, you can use this to ensure there is a revenue-prodcing ad at all times. I'm inserting them so I can put useful links to sites I like.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 10:04:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google, Tivo, Other To Participate In ZD's Digital Life
Google joins a list that includes Tivo, AT&T, XM Radio, CallVantage Service and Movielink, Microsoft, AOL, Intel, Motorola and BestBuy in sponsoring and exhibiting at Ziff-Davis' Digital Life event at the Jacob K. Javitz Center in New York City, running from October 14-17. Google will serve as the "Official Search Partner" for the event. I've applied for a press pass through my newspaper, so if I go, I should have some pretty good stuff for you guys.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 09:41:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
GuruNet Brings Desktop Search
GuruNet 5.2 beta has a new feature that allows you to search anywhere on your computer, from anywhere on your computer. It touts the feature to work in any app, from Word to the Web. No word yet on how well it works.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 05:37:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Bombs Hit The President
One of the more famous Google Bombs is the one for President George W. Bush. If you searched for "miserable failure", he was your number one result. Now you can add to that list "worst president" and "worst president ever".
A funny note: On "miserable failure", Bush may be #1, but the secondary result is Jimmy Carter, and the #2 result is Michael Moore.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 05:30:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Toolbar Update to 2.0.114
Zorgloob discovered that Google has updated the Google Toolbar to a new version, from 2.0.113 to 2.0.114. What are the new features? Who know! Google hasn't updated that page.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 05:19:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Check What's Popular On Yahoo
Yahoo's got their version of Zeitgeist, the Yahoo Buzz Index. It's fun and interesting, and more pop culture focused,with the most popular searches on television, music, sports, video games, and more.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 04:55:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Feedback On Multiple AdSense Units
Last week's announcement by Google that they were allowing up to 3 ad units per page in AdSense was great news for many webmasters, myself included. However, the feedback thus far has been less than positive. Search Engine Roundtable quotes some participants in the forums at WebmaterWorld, who have been grumbling about their performance. Of course, this weekend was probably the worst time to test out a new ad format, since web usage is down over the Labor Day weekend. I'm waiting another week to guage performance of the multiple ads.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 11:42:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Ask Jeeves Now Has RSS Feeds
Search Engine Lowdown has noticed Ask Jeeves has been spidering RSS feeds. Maybe its just me being too much of a Googlefan, but I always expect Google to have these sort of features, or at least go for them after somebody else thinks of them. I hope they do.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 09:05:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Are You In Compliance?
John Battelle has been using AdSense for a few days now on Searchblog, and he has already run into some trouble. He put the title "Paying the Bills" over his AdSense ads, an inocuous phrase in most people's opinions, but not in Google's. They sent him a lettre saying he was "not in compliance" and had to change the wording before he could get any money. Apparently when the AdSense TOS talks about not giving users incentive to click on the ads, it means you cannot even mention that you are getting paid for the ads. That means "Sponsored Links" is okay, but "Visit Our Sponsors" is not. I hope Google doesn't have rules about blog posts talking about the fact that AdSense ads pay the bills, because I've added them to this page, or at least I will have added them when Blogger lets my updated template go through.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 08:59:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Somacon Helps Yahoo Store Owners On Froogle
As Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide explains, setting up your online store to work with Froogle can be quite daunting. Apparently, you need to set up a special feed that Froogle can read and can be updated daily. For owners of small sites, this can be more than they are capable of. Yahoo Store owners now have Somacon, a service which for just $.20 per submission will do all the work for you. Since daily submission is typical, site owners can expect a maximum monthly payment of $6.20. Not bad for all the traffic Froogle can bring. Now lets see Somacon expand to more than just Yahoo stores.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/08/2004 08:47:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
 
Websites Like A Flytrap
The Globe and Mail points out a solution to a common problem, developing sticky content.
One problem webmasters face is that users browse through search engines like Google, looking for specific answers. They find the site, read the answer, and hit the back button rather than exploring the site. As Jakob Nielsen says says, "Search engines have become answer engines." The solution writer Harvey Schachter proposes is that sites create pages that deliver very specific, relevant answers to very specific questions, so they rank high on search engines when people go querying. Then, after the answer, provide a list of "related articles", giving web surfers who come to the site a reason to stick around and explore. Well-written and informative.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/07/2004 04:07:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Happy Birthday To Google!
Today is Google's sixth birthday, and they are celebrating it with a birthday Doodle. Jeez. I hope their parties are a little more wild.
To celebrate, you can check out the history of Google. Interestingly, September 21 is the five-year anniversary of the Google search engine going gold. And the history finally explains why the Google engine was originally called BackRub, because of the way it ranked based on backlinks. A fun read.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/07/2004 03:51:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Gallina, The Gmail-Based Blog
Gallina is a Gmail-based blogging hack, which, while technically interesting, is simply a proof of concept, being more fun to think about than actually useful, in my opinion. Of course, hacks like this are also against Gmail's TOS, so beware.
I would be more interested in a Gmail based webpage/file system/p2p, so I could share files using the nice little gigabyte of storage.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/07/2004 11:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Allinanchor Explained
After checking out the Google Analysis I talked about in my last post, I noticed an interesting statistic, the "Allinanchor" number. After some confusion on my part, and bad jokes about "Allen the TV anchor" from my girlfriend, I realize it was actually "All In Anchor", and is a special type of Google search. If you use the "allinanchor:" switch in a search, you get results that have that term in the links that lead to them, an important distinction. For example, if you are searching for the best chili, while a simple "best chili" search would get you recipes, articles about chili awards, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a "allinanchor:"this is the best chili"" search only gets you pages that other people linked to saying "This is the best chili". What a great way to get specific, perfect results. It is the best way to narrow down people's opinions, not companies. Definetly worth a test drive.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/07/2004 01:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, September 06, 2004
 
Top Ten Page Analyzer
Jim, from WebBuildPages, has released "Top 10 Google Analysis", a tool which returns the top ten results for a search, along with statistics for that search. I used it to search for "Google Blog" and found many of my favorite pages, including Google's Blog(2nd), Google Blogoscoped(3rd) and two decent other Google blogs I read frequently. Interestingly, the Blogspace Google Weblog, despite having a PageRank of 7, ranks above Google's blog with its PageRank of 10. The tool's most interesting feature is that it shows the actual number of backlinks, revealing that google.com has 53,900,000 backlinks. A good start.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/06/2004 10:28:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
The Image Quiz
There have been a lot of apps lately that use Google Images. Now Google Blogoscoped brings us The Image Quiz, a game that pulls images based on a keyword and gives you three chances to guess what that word is. I can't believe how addictive it is; my girlfriend and I just spent half an hour playing it!

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/06/2004 07:07:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Is Google Broken? The Source Is Broken!
I've discovered that it is possible that the originator of the "Google Is Broken" theory is none other than Daniel Brandt, operator of Google-Watch. You can read his articles here and here. In fact, other than his articles, the rumor spread through this article, a press release submission at w3reports. Considering that press releases are released by companies announcing something, not anonymous articles touting the shortcomings of billion-dollar corporations by one "Anthony Federico", who is further commented on down the page by Daniel Brandt himself. Anthony may very well be the vice president, Platform Development, Xerox Production Systems Group, as seen here. More likely, he is the person described here, who designed the ranking technology for ScrubTheWeb.com, a rival search engine to Google.
What we are dealing with here is a serious conflict of interest on a major story. The only two sources for the "Google is broken" theory (unless someone would like to point out one I missed) are a man who has dedicated his time to bringing down Google, and a competitor. Both are fully aware that such a story, if it hit the mainstream press, would hurt Google's stock price in an instant, well before the story could be verified.
I would encourage other blogs to bring this fact to light. Since we spread this story, it is only fitting that we be responsible for the disclosure as well. Since it seems that the story was spread only by two people with serious conflicts, with no evidence to back themselves up, I'm retracting the story. I've also asked Google for a quote. We'll see where this goes.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/06/2004 09:44:00 AM 5 comments links to this post
 
In The Beginning, There Was... Backrub?

As a follow-up to the last post, here's a look at Google as it was, back in 1998. 25 million pages, the entire Google system fitting around a single desk, the "Backrub" crawler, Lego servers, and this questionable practice:
When no documents match your query, the system will return 20000 random web pages.

Huh.
And you can even dig and find Google founder and now billionaire Sergey Brin in drag.
Oy.
(all via Simon Willison's Weblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/06/2004 08:48:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Do We Want A Swiss Army Knife For Search?
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch provides the above screen shot as a joke, showing a ridiculous Google in the near future, but then he goes on to make an excellent point: Google cannot keep growing its homepage at the current rate. At the time of the writing of the article, last December, Google had four tabs on its homepage, and he correctly predicted Froogle was next. If Google keeps adding tabs, we'll have a homepage actually more cluttered than the one you see. He makes quick count of Google services at the time, and comes up with 17 possible tabs, and more services, like Gmail, have come around since then. Apparently Ask Jeeves does a much better job with "invisible tabs". Google should think about doing the same. Read the article, it's good for you.
And if Google 2005 isn't enough for you, here's Google Circa 1960

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/06/2004 08:37:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 05, 2004
 
Google Sends A Takedown To Parodies
Ars Technica notes that Google has sent a takedown notice to the owners of goegel.be. The notice, which is available at the site, says that their parody site "misleads consumers" and dilutes Google's trademark. Google not only demanded the site be taken down, but that it be surrendered over to Google. I can see why. Check out the cache of what the site used to look like. It sure doesn't look like a parody, but like the real thing (of course, I can't read the foreign words). As far as anyone would know, this was the real Google, and that's why they got the takedown. I guess from now on, people should stick to all-out parodies, like Booble, which Google tried to takedown, unsuccessfully.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/05/2004 01:36:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
The Elusive Supplemental Result
I was Googling my friend Azriel to dig up some dirt on him, and I discovered several "Supplemental Result"s. Confused, I searched for them. Naturally, the best answer came from a Google Blogoscoped post from August of last year. In it, he has a (now-removed) portion of Google's FAQ that explains supplemental results. I'll let it do the talking:

"Supplemental Result
Google augments results for difficult queries by searching a supplemental collection of web pages. Results from this index are marked in green as 'Supplemental.'"

-- Google Inc.: How to Interpret Your Search Results


This is one way it will be hard for newcomers to beat Google. Google's cache acts as the "old web", featuring pages no one else has.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/05/2004 01:22:00 AM 2 comments links to this post
 
Hehe

(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/05/2004 01:02:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 04, 2004
 
France, You Will Be The Death Of Me
Eric Lebeau at Zorgloob has officially ruined my life, giving me a reason to jump headfirst into the world of Google Translation Tools. I'm kidding about the ruining my life part, of course. It's just that his blog has exactly the kind of news I'm looking for, and the added "fun" of translating it. Today, he posts about the cover of Technikart magazine (yup, its French too), which is about Google. The best thing is that the cover has a photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bodybuilding prime and the great headline "Google, It Is Stronger Than You!". From the article synopis (which is barely readable in translation), it seems to be a deep, comprehensive look at Google. Now if only I could have the "enjoyment" of translating the whole article.

*UPDATE - Sebism over at the LiveJournal InsideGoogle has posted a translation of the entire cover synopsis. I've posted his translation in the comments.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/04/2004 11:40:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
Friday, September 03, 2004
 
Geico Gets The Go-Ahead To Sue Google And Overture
Geico received the okay from the U.S. District Court to sue Google and Overture for selling advertisements linked to their trademarks, CNET reports.
I can see their point. Although the first reaction is that Google is just selling ads, free speech, yada yada, I realized that trademark law is meant to give trademarks some value. If every trademark can link to competitors on a service that runs an enormous percentage of internet traffic, those trademarks become useless.
And it's more than just that. In the law, as I learnt in a Constitutional Law class some time ago, is all about consistency. Every ruling requires the judge to think about other cases in the future, and how this ruling will affect those. At some point, some search engine will decide to accept money for a trademark in the search results. It will take money to push a trademark further down or off the listings, and the company paying them higher up. If the judge rules in favor of Google, it is possible that the company in my theoretical case would actually be allowed by law to do what it is doing.
Furthermore, Google is selling another company's trademark. Under no circumstances is that okay. That would be like if I decided to sell Pepsi use of the word "Coca-Cola".
For all these reasons and more, I believe Google is going to lose this case.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 02:48:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Did Everyone Wake Up Feeling Funny Today?
Some Google silliness, courtesy of Google Blogoscoped:
First, BritneyGoogle lets you search while looking at pictured of Britney Spears. That's all it does. Who is ever going to visit this site twice?
And then there's Catherine Parker of Search Engine Lowdown writing about how Google is a woman. Funny, and a good read. My favorite qoute, on why SEO won't work:
So you want to be liked by your favourite lady? Then don't be a player. Don't use underhanded tactics and try to spam the search engines to climb the rankings. And don't cheat on her by setting up link farms and running around with every bad guy on the block.

That's all. I'm going to sleep now.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 02:01:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Gmail Invites Find A New Home
Google has moved the area where Gmail invites are kept again, this time to a more asthetically pleasing area at the top, as you can see in this screen shot. Not that you can even give these things away. I've been offering 52 invites for days now without a bite.
(via SEO Roundtable)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 09:28:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Did Google Run Out Of Room?
Anthony Federico states over at w3reports.com that he thinks the lack of proper updates to the Google database may be because they ran out of room. The problem he describes is similar to the Y2K bug we all remember from four years ago. The basic idea is this: Google uses a 4-byte unsigned long integer in Linux to ID every single page in their index. This method tops out at 4,294,967,296 permutations, extroardinarily close to the 4,285,199,774 pages Google.com says to have indexed, a number that he says has not changed at all since 8/25/2003, over one year ago. He surmises that Google ran out of page ID numbers, and until it can fix the "ID2K" problem, it has to dump old, unpopular pages in favor of newer ones. If he's right, and only a quote from Google (which would never happen) would prove it, it means Google's search is missing a lot of the web, and unpopular pages might be impossible to find over time. Not good, definitely not good.
(via Search Engine Guide)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 08:48:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Removes Old GoogleDance Datacenters
Zorgloob and Abakus report that Google has shut down www2.google.com and www3.google.com and replaced them with 302 redirects to the main Google site. For as long as I can remember, site makers would watch those sites carefully for evidence of a Google Dance, but there hasn't really been a real PageRank update in a while. More on that in my next post.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 08:30:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Testing Google's Language Tools
So, I found another really good Google news blog, similar to this one. It's called Zorgloob, but there is one tiny barrier. See, it's "Zorgloob, The french news about Google". Yup, the whole site is in French. So, I do believe I will finally get to test Google's translation filter on a regular basis. It definitely works well, with every single sentence on the translated page being readable. However, some parts of the translation are just silly. Examples:
Astonishing not? From there to think that Google can allow, each one of us, to be caught for grass Hacker, there is only one step.
You are a pro of the programming? You touch your ball in Java, C++, C # or VB.Net?
You know many companies which recruit this way? Too much extremely Googlers!
Always also generous Zorgloob!
One cannot be a journalist with the Barber and Google specialist!

So, who's gonna complain about good news and bad translating little entertainment? I added it to my Blogroll.

UPDATE - Turns out Zorgloob has some useful English blogs, one that collects appearances of Googleguy, a Google employee who answers questions on message boards, and one that collects Google interviews, like the now infamous Playboy interview. Both have been added to the InsideGoogle Blogroll.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 08:04:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
GOOG Weathers The First Lockup Release
Despite a lot of worrying, Google's stock went up the first day more shares were made available as lockups were released. The presence of 4.7 million new shares did not faze the market, as GOOG went up 1.26 to close at 101.51. There are four more lockup releases to come, as Forbes reports, with 39.1 million more coming on November 16. Google seems ridiculously stable for such a publicized stock, with typical volume barely more than a third of what Yahoo pulls. Stability is very good, even if it is boring, and indicates investors trust Google, and are in it for the long haul.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 01:10:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
ZDNet Interview With Bill Gates
Microsoft founder and chief software architect Bill Gates gave a short, but very interesting interview to ZDNet this week. He explains the removal of WinFS, and the reasons why, which seem to indicate that Microsoft wasn't quite sure how to market the technology, and is pushing it as a development platform. Even so, Microsoft is saying WinFS, when it does ship in 2007, is the "big breakthrough", indicating their hope that the system represents a huge leap forward for Windows. In contrasting Microsoft's work on search to their progress on Windows, he says:
Some things here are cases where there is a clear competitor. If you take our guys who are competing with Google, they understand exactly what they're measured against and how everybody thinks Google walks on water, and they've got to surprise the world.
Then we have other groups, like WinFS, where we're way out in front, and there's nobody to compare ourselves to.

Gates seems to agree that competition is the best thing for Microsoft, because it forces the company to develop at a much higher, more innovative level.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/03/2004 12:52:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 02, 2004
 
InsideGoogle Blogline
I have produced a feed at Bloglines for Inside Google, so you can check out many of the news sources I use. It currently has 10 feeds, and you can comment or email me if you think there's another I should add. Enjoy! Right now it contains:


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 02:54:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Nextaris Brings Deeper Search
The company behind the Surfwax search engine has released the free Nextaris, which it calls a "web based search related tool". Nextaris is a combination of internet apps, many of which are like Google apps, in a single interface. Users register for accounts, and can then access 30 search engines, a news aggregator, bookmarks, free 20MB file storage, an address book, and messaging. Nextaris also takes advantage of bookmarklets to let you access its features from anywhere. It works in IE and Mozilla. I gotta say, I'm impressed with the scope of this product, and I wish there were more of these out there. Obviously, I'm hoping for a Google interface application. Hey Google! You listening?
(via Search Engine Guide) (Press Release)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 02:38:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Firefox Now Has Its Own "blog this"
Using the Google Toolbar with Blogger is a snap, with the Toolbar's "blog this" button, which lets you start blogging instantly on the page you are looking at. Of course, only IE users got to enjoy the Google Toolbar and this function, that is until now. The Firefox Toolbar now has a toolbar with many of the functions the Google Toolbar has, plus customizations that let you use non-Google tools, including LiveJournal and other search engines. A must for all Firefox users.

(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 02:18:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google On The S&P 500?
The top stocks all wind up the Standard & Poor 500 Index. When Google is added (and it surely will be), that will be a big boon for the stock, as more people will invest in it. CNN/Money's Paul La Monica writes that Google may be added much earlier than normal S&P policy, and notes how GOOG meets every criteria they have. According to Search Engine Lowdown, a now-missing Bloomberg article says that Google's stock will not settle until it is added to the S&P and NASDAQ 100 Tracking Stock (QQQ).
(If the article ever comes back, comment and let everybody know)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 12:00:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Microsoft Issues A Declaration Of War
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced yesterday at a conference in Boston that MS is "hell-bent and determined" to challenge and beat Google in the fight over internet search. He must have read my mind, when he said "It'll be a lot of fun for the rest of you to watch". Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, the higher the level of competition, the better the quality of the product. The spoils are very rich in this battle.

(via Search Engine Lowdown)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 11:38:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
16 Months Ago, PageRank Is Dead
In this article by Jeremy Zawodny last May, he declared PageRank dead. His reasoning: blogs killed PageRank, because Google was forced to give them false, lower PageRank numbers to push them down in the rankings. Obviously, Google has been adding layers of complexity and hacks to their search algorithm for a while now, so much so that the simple explanation of "democracy" does not suffice to explain how Google ranks pages. Of course, PageRank has still not been abandoned. Had it been abandoned, link spammers and link farms would not still be pulling off some of the results they do.
My suggestion is that if Google has an algorithm to lower the value of blogs, why not something to lower the value of pages with no content? I believe web directories should have penalties, even though they are legitimate pages. In most cases, a small site will find that the web directory appears ahead of it in the search results, which is just ridiculous. In fact, I would recommend that if a site is just a list of links then it should be ranked below every single site on that list. This may sound like sour grapes, but when I search for my own site, not by keywords but by its actual title, I receive results from thefreedictionary.com, wordiq.com, usnpl.com (a newspaper directory), topix.net (a news crawler), and directory.google.com before my site, which may make sense to Google's algorithm, but no one could argue is actually an accurate search.
No one who is searching for something is searching for directory pages that mention that something, they are searching for that specific thing. Google aims to have the most accurate results. If a search returns directories, and that directory has the accurate result, that means that Google did not have the accurate result, and it is pointing people to a site that does. That is what we call a complete failure in a product, and will cause Google to lose customers.
Google might also want to consider a plagiarism detector. The first two directory results I mentioned are Wikipedia ripoffs. They took the content, links and all, right out of that site, and use it to sell ads. I appreciate the linkage, but I know that's just plain wrong.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 09:14:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google AdSense Unveils New Features
Google released this list of new features for its popular AdSense program, which allows website owners to place Google ads on their websites and make money, even bloggers. Some of the features are very convenient, including the long sought ability to place multiple ads on one page. One of them is just silly:
We're currently running a test with new branding features on Google ads. You may notice some of your pages displaying 'Ads by Goooooogle' ad units. We welcome your feedback on this new look, and we'll be analyzing the results of this test over the next while.

Uh huh. Why?

(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/02/2004 08:21:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
 
Google Shares Drop 2% Ahead Of Lockup Release
Google closed at $100.25 Wednesday, as investors braced for the release of 4.7 million shares Thursday. Google is now down 12% from its high of 113.48. 16.9 million shares were released in the IPO on August 19. By the time the 180-day lockup period ends, 176.8 million shares will be available. Thursday is a big test, and if Google proves volatile, the stock could go through major shakeups every few weeks as more shares are made available.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 11:44:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Googling Behind China's Firewall
From Slashdot:
xcham writes "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint project of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge, have released a bulletin regarding the type of filtering applied to Google by the Chinese government. Most notably, certain keywords are filtered, as well as Google's 'cache' function. More information on how the keyword filtering is implemented is available in a previous bulletin."

InsideGoogle reads it for you:
In 2002, China blocked Google, but later stopped blocking it. Google, rightfully so, refused to negotiate and create a filtered Google for China, unlike other search engines, which are glad to get the Chinese revenues even while supporting that government's oppresive policies. China, however, filters the internet itself, and as a result, Google is filtered, but it is Google-independent. Users are blocked from certain keywords, and from the cache of those keywords (since that is a typical runaround). The cache block can be runaround by simply adding an ampersand, as in changing 'search?q=cache' to 'search?&q=cache' (try out those searches, you'll see what Chinese users see). The cache block is Google specific, meaning that Yahoo's cache is still available.
The list of banned keywords was discovered by Chinese hackers when it was included as a DLL with the QQ instant messaging client. 15% are sex-related, almost all the rest are political, and 20% of the words are Falun Gong related. of the more than 1000 words, 71 are in English, including:

The filtering works not by banning websites, but keywords, meaning a smart searcher may be able to sometimes break the Great Firewall, or at least access these sites in the cache. Often, connections are no just blocked, but dropped. OpenNet has a Circumvention Lab, which mostly just points to Psiphon, a proxy designed to circumvent filters.
Analysis: Kudos to Google for taking the high road, shame on the other search engines for playing along, and more shame on the Chinese Government for doing this in the first place. Good work by OpenNet, but being a product of major universities like Harvard, they aren't willing to take the risk of providing true hacker solutions. There are reports that
elgooG, the mirror of Google that displays Google backwards, can get around the filter.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 11:29:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
 
Picking Up Sensitive Information On Google
As reported by CNET, and about a million other websites, credit card numbers can be found by searching on Google. I won't go into the process, but plenty of websites explain the process. You can also find Quicken files (entire tax records for a person), and home adresses. I found social security numbers as well. Websites are at fault, not Google, but their ignorance and carelessness at letting such information out means Google should take the lead and find a way to filter them out.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 10:25:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Should Google Go The Portal Route?
Motley Fool's Rick Munarriz says Google should become a portal like Yahoo. David Meier has been arguing against the idea, saying Google should concentrate on different types of search, rather than new services, like it has been doing. Realistically, aren't they both making the same arguements? Google, rather than providing a large number of services, has been creating search engines for every possible area of the internet, thus creating new services. Froogle may not compete with other online stores, it means to beat everyone by providing an online store that is the best simply because it contains every other store. It is a far better strategy than Yahoo's, which creates a large number of products, many of which are just no good. By not creating the services themselves, they ensure everyone uses Google. You may like Yahoo Mail, but hate their news service, so you don't make Yahoo your portal. Instead you use Google because everything they make is quality, since they rely on the entire resources of the internet as the means to a perfect portal. It is precisely why Google is the home page for far more people than Yahoo is, which is the goal of a portal anyway.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 06:34:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
If You Blinkx You Might Miss It
Blinkx is set to challenge Google, providing an application (Windows only) that searches the internet and your computer. Supposedly, the program is very powerful and has had 800 downloads since its launch in July. By pushing search onto the computer, Blinkx is beating Google to the punch on its rumored next big project. It even has a cheesy Google-ripoff logo.
(via Search Engine Guide)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 05:43:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Don't Be Evil. But Why?
Paul Ford, whose "How Google Beat Amazon And eBay To The Semantic Web" was loved by blogs everywhere, has a new column, entitled "The Banality of Google", about how Google came about its motto (and business practice) of "Don't Be Evil". A funny read. A qoute:
This was in 1998, and it was excellent timing, because there was this huge run on evil in late 2001, with the Axis of Evil, and evildoers, and on and on, and if Google hadn't gotten there first, people might have been like, "there goes Google, getting on the evil train, trying to cash in on mass death in their unofficial slogan, isn't that just like them?"

(via John Battelle's Searchblog)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 05:16:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
Google Code Jam 2004
TopCoder is holding their Google Code Jam 2004. The Code Jam is a competition where participants are given a problem and need to code a solution in either Java, C++, C# or VB.NET. The top prize is $10,000, and a lot of cash prizes will be awarded. Registration runs through the 14th.
(via Google Blogoscoped)

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 04:56:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
 
The Google Superhero Costume Parade

As a fan of the Man of Steel, watching the images of other, far less rational or fashion-conscious fans putting on Superman costumes is always a source of delight. Scott Niven's Saltwater Pizza has put together a "parade" of Superhero costume images. He's designed a neat little drop-box that gets you instant pictures of people in their foolish, sometimes homemade superhero costumes, straight from Google Images.

Of course, as funny as those are, nothing beats the Superman costume for dogs.

Random fact: Did you know the word "superhero" is actually a trademark jointly owned by DC and Marvel Comics? Read about it.


- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ <