Search Engines
Does Facebook Represent a Google Killer?
I saw a really interesting (and controversial) viewpoint by Robert Scoble that I thought was very fitting into my look at Facebook this week. He contends that Facebook, along with Mahalo and Techmeme, represent a force that will spell trouble for Google within the next four years. Here, check out these videos by Scoble:
Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.
His theme was very similar to that of Jason Calacanis, who spoke about Mahalo at Gnomedex. Jason’s point was that the SEO industry has reduced the value of search engine results, and that human-powered search was the answer to it. Scoble elaborated in these videos, talking about the concept of a social graph based search. The idea is to use the power of trusted community to determine what is important.
Mahalo is a human-powered search engine in it’s early stages. I still remain a bit skeptical about the model. He is paying a group of people to approve content into the search engine. It seems incredibly high maintenance and damn near impossible to pull off given the scope of the internet. And most searches entered into Mahalo illustrate to me the very incomplete nature of the Mahalo database. Some searches garner good results, but many more arcane searches generate almost nothing. I admire the point behind Mahalo, but I still doubt the ability of it to keep up with the net itself. Scoble gives his opinion of this on his third video.
Techmeme makes more sense to me. The content of the site is generated by a trusted network of bloggers. In other words, it is a social network of tech bloggers who use the trust of the network itself to determine what is important. It is not a search engine, which is what I think is the major chink in Mahalo’s armor.
Then we come to Facebook. Facebook is a huge network of people who are interconnected. Scoble says straight up, and rightly so, that many people don’t understand Facebook. At this point, I would put myself into this category. I am investigating now to get the big picture. What I do see, and what Scoble points out, is that the Facebook network is an indicator of trust. For example, if I have a bunch of friends on Facebook, it may be an indicator that things that I write are more trustworthy. If this kind of thing was coupled with a service like Mahalo, we get the basis for a social network based search. A search based on social authority, not one based on how well I fool the search engine algorithms.
Google is all computer powered. Since a computer lacks human judgement, it can be fooled by SEO specialists whose entire lives are spent trying to deconstruct Google and learn how to fool it.
So, what do you think? Do you think the social networks represent a platform that will eventually evolve to a Google killer?
Google’s Empire Expands into Phone Service
Whenever there is money to be made with something, Google swoops in and buys it all. That’s my observation now that it seems Google has just acquired GrandCentral.
GrandCentral is a cool service. I have not personally used it, but it claims to be able to combine all of your existing phone accounts into one managable line. Essentially, take the best features of web-enabled phone accounts (like Vonage) and centralize them and make it work with existing carriers. It really is very convenient. One of the things I love most about Vonage (and I use Vonage for my home office) is the fact that I can check voice mail through the web or via my email inbox. With GrandCentral, you can do that and more, apparently.
Google’s blog announced the acquisition 3 days ago now. According to Google:
We think GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.
Perhaps it does. However, with the growing sense of unease about Google becoming big brother, this is going to get some attention. Personally, I’m not one of these big brother conspiracy folks. I don’t like it when I see a company grow and become successful only to have the mob try to take them down to size. It happened with Microsoft, Wal-Mart – now its starting with Google.
Perhaps Google will make GrandCentral free. Wouldn’t that be awesome. But, would that mean we start getting “relevant” audio ads in our voice mail box? Oh brother.
Google Free Tools Keep Getting Better
Google is the king of free web-based tools. I make routine use of Analytics, Gmail and Google Docs. I am also using Google Groups for a new group for WebbyOnline. I have used Google Webmaster Tools for site diagnostics. In short, I’m a big fan of Google.
Google Docs Sports New Features
This morning I logged into Google Docs and noticed it looks quite different than it did before. The most notable change is that you can now organize your documents into folders. The list of folders is now on the left side of the screen and the list of documents are on the right – pretty much just like Explorer in Windows. On the spreadsheet side of things, it is now much easier to create charts. The spreadsheets now support comments as well. For the full list of improvements, check this out. The beauty of Google Documents is that it allows easy collaboration. You no longer need all the fancy document sharing tools built into Microsoft Office. You can do it for free using the web at Google Docs.
Analytics Continues to Impress
I covered the re-design of Google Analytics back in May. Again, they have taken an already great tool and made it better. The reports are so much simpler to use than they used to be. All the graphs are Flash generated and load quickly. The put all the data people want most right in front of them, whereas it used to take many clicks and hunting to find what you needed.
Gmail for Business
Late last week, I decided to use Gmail for business. I needed to find a way to let my virtual assistant handle some of my email. I was thinking about installing a mail client to a second PC here in the office and providing remote access via Logmein.com. That would have worked, but with some of the recent webcam setup work I’m doing, that PC can be a little busy and I didn’t want my VA to unwittingly kick the cam offline. Next option was to hook it up with Kayako eSupport. Now, I own a license to this software and it really is killer helpdesk software. However, its almost too bulky and I was worried about the spam overflowing the thing. It then dawned on me – what about Gmail?
I already had a Gmail account for personal use, however I logged out of it and went to create a new account. After I had created the account, I was poking around the settings and was pleasantly suprised to see that Gmail now allows direct access to a POP3 account. Perhaps I’m just a latecomer to finding that one, but that’s incredibly useful! I thought I was going to have to set up forwarding accounts from my server to Gmail, but apparently now Gmail can actually log in to up to 5 external POP3 accounts and bring the email into your Gmail account. Gmail, in other words, is a full mail client – not just a box for your Gmail account which you then need to find other ways to pool your email into. And, of course, being that this was business email, I don’t want to use Gmail.com in my email addresses.
So, now my VA is able to check email for those accounts on the web with no hassle at all. It really gets me thinking if I want to use Gmail for my own mailbox. I’m still using Outlook here, and with the soon to-be-released version of Cloudmark Desktop for Thunderbird, I was thinking about a Thunderbird switch. But, I must say that having it online is elegant and convenient. And needless to say, if my hard drive ever dies again, my email would be fine. Only problem is I cannot import past email into Gmail.
Web-Based Computing
Perhaps someday we’ll all conduct all our computing needs in a web browser. It’s almost to the point now where you can practically get away with it. Software as a Service (SAAS) is very real.
Cross-Linking Multiple Sites – Bad For SEO?
After my little brush-up with Youtube yesterday, we decided to post our new video on Revver instead. BTW, I also got definitive confirmation from Youtube that this is indeed the case. They said:
We’re no longer offering the option to upload videos longer than 10 minutes, regardless of your account type. If you see a video on YouTube that’s longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably owned by one of our content partners. There are also some users who can upload longer videos because they were given this permission before the feature was removed.
In the meantime, I have posted this video presentation which discusses how to cross-link your websites without harming your SEO. Many webmasters, including myself, I have more than one website. The instinct is to cross-link all of them in order to promote them – especially when you have one site which is much more popular than the others. However, it might not always be a good idea to do that. Search engines recognize cross-linking and reciprocal links and do not look at them the same as a one-way link into your site. So, check out the video below for more.
Lazy Linkage – Wordpress, Universal Search
A snippet of the content from this week’s newsletter, too. See, I told you it was lazy linkage!
Chris Garret makes a great point over at CopyBlogger. He talks about how fancy jargon can and will drive away your visitors. As a person who writes online and has also spent time studying the subject of study, I tell you to NEVER under-estimate the power of words. Both to inform and sell, but also to put people to sleep. Fast. Once a person hits a word they do not know the definition of, the process starts that will eventually lead them to leave the material. And on the internet, you’re already dealing with short attention spans, so that exodus is going to happen in a flash. So, make sure to use words that are easily understood. And if you cannot do so and still maintain the point, then DEFINE the words right on your website. Always test your website using a person not already integrated into your niche and see how they do with it.
AddThis (a social bookmarking tool) has posted a trends page which shows which bookmarking services users of AddThis are using. It covers this year (2007), so only a few months. The top two web bookmarking services are Google and Del.icio.us. BTW, an interesting page worth bookmarking is the Del.icio.us popular tags page. It’s a tag cloud of the popular tags on Del.icio.us, which can help you track what is popular and what people are buzzing about.
Wordpress has released Wordpress 2.2. Yep, a new version. Make sure you check your plug-ins before upgrading so they will still work. Want to know what’s so great about 2.2? Check out Aaron Brazell’s article 10 Things you should know about Wordpress 2.2. Also on the blogging front, its been reported that MyBlogLog is going to be rebranding. Makes sense now that Yahoo has bought them (which Techcrunch confirmed back in January). Among the changes are a re-design, a new name of some kind, and a new widget setup. Since I am a user of MyBlogLog on WebbyOnline, I look forward to seeing what they come up with. I know some bloggers are annoyed by MyBlogLog as it is now. Lastly, Daniel posted a list of the Top 10 Underrated Wordpress Plug-ins. My fave on that list is the Clean Archives plug-in. I’m actually not sure if the one he links to is the same as the one I use, but here is SRG Clean Archives which is the one I like.
In the world of copywriting, I found a great post by Michel Fortin where he lists 5 Copywriting formulas. Of course, he uses the post to point attention at 5 other posts he has describing each of them (very smart). But, worth the read because each of these formulas can serve as general guidelines to those of us who try to write our own copy.
On the search engine front, Profy posted about the story I also found on Yahoo and that is “Google Announces Universal Search“. The basics of it is that Googe is planning on integrating all their various search engines (web, images, video, news, etc) into one unified search engine so that one search will find relevant results in the whole gamut of content types. Here is another post at News.com about it. This is another good idea by Google, and if they are as spot on with their interface design as they were with Analytics, I’m sure the engine will be a breeze. And it brings Google one step closer to making all the world’s information accessible. And them controlling it. 
And in a bit of humor, Andrew has posted about the Maxim Hot 100 list for 2007. And he’s got some not-so-flattering pics of some of the contenders. Of course, we all know these women has hotties, but they have to be thanking the folks at Adobe for Photoshop, because its that in combo with the makeup which make them look above average on the red carpet.
Google’s Sense of Humor
I don’t have any particular proof of this other than an email I got yesterday from a guy over at PCMech, but it appears Google was playing an April Fool’s joke on the internet yesterday. According to the email, Google had this linked up on their homepage yesterday. So, its talking about free in-home wireless broadband. Weird, but then again, Google gives alot of crap away for free. But, then you see “Vacuum-sealed to prevent water damage”. WTF? Click on installation.
Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
I like at the bottom:
We’re actively developing a higher-performance version of TiSP specifically tailored to small and medium-sized businesses, including 24-hour, on-site technical support in the event of backup problems, brownouts and data wipes.
This is Google’s April Fool’s gift to those of you who always dreamed of surfing the net while taking a shit.
Google Pay-Per-Action Launches
Google has just launched a new service in Beta called Pay-Per-Action. Judging by the logo in the upper left, this is going to be some kind of sub-service of Google Adwords (and hence Adsense as well). The long and short of it can be gotten right off their site, namely: “Increase your advertising reach while paying only for actions that you define. First, you’ll create an ad and define the action that you want a user to perform when they visit your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. Then you’ll set the amount that you’re willing to pay when this action is completed. Finally, you’ll install conversion tracking code on your website so that we can verify when an action has been completed.“
This looks like a very interesting model, allowing advertisers the ability to set up simple CPA campaigns and run them through Google’s Adwords network. As a publisher, you could then view available CPA campaigns and decide based on quality and CPA rate whether to run the ad or not on your site. I have to say, this has got to have existing CPA networks a little worried. Google is always the big elephant in the room when it gets into something, and other affiliate/CPA networks have to be a little worried about Google doing this. AzoogleAds, keep your head up.
There are other issues at play here, though, as Diorex so aptly points out. As he puts it, “would you want to share any of this data with your competitors, suppliers, partners, or anyone other than an accountant? Profit per sale, sales volume, average transaction size, conversion rate, or average lifetime value of a customer? I would consider all of these pretty darn proprietary, yet tens of thousands of publishers have handed this very data over to what could very well become your biggest competitor.” It’s a damn good point. As I mentioned above, look at Google now getting into CPA and stepping on the foot of all of those networks already doing CPA. As we all hand a bunch of our business information over to Google, what’s going to happen is someday Google decides to get into a business which competes with us?
I use Analytics on my sites. I am a user of Adsense. I use Google Docs every once in awhile. I use Gmail sometimes when I am out of town. Of all these, Analytics and Adsense is perhaps the most open in terms of handing valuable information over to Google. However, any ad network I would work with would know information about my sites’ traffic, and it really doesn’t bother me. But, Google offers a LOT for free, and it does beg the question “Why would they do that?” IT could be simply that it helps promote Google. It could be that they just love all of us like their children and like to spoil us rotten. Or, perhaps it could be that they are using all the information we all send them to make business decisions that can make them a lot of money. In other words, are we their guinea pigs?
Using Lynx for SEO
Rich’s latest video for PCMechTV had to do with using Lynx for SEO. Why would one be interested in this? Because Lynx is a text-only web browser, which means it looks at your website exactly the same way a search engine spider would. Does your site make sense and show a lot of the keywords you want in Lynx? If so, you’re get to go with the search engines. Or are you seeing TONS of javascript code and nested table HTML that makes it hard to find where your content is? Well, then your site is that much harder to spider.
Here’s the vid:
Robots.Txt – The Often Forgotten File
This is one of those files that almost any web bot will look for on your server. If it is there, it can be useful. If it isn’t, your log file will be filled with 404 errors. So, what is it? Well, it is literally a file on your server called robots.txt. It is a plain text file that is placed into the root directory of your website. When a search engine crawls your site, it will look for the robots.txt file for instructions. What’s it good for?
The file is used to control what search engine bots do when they come to your site. One of the common uses is to block a bot from crawling certain directories on the website, such as an images folder or a folder containing certain scripts that you may not want indexed. The file must contain correct syntax otherwise it could potentially adversely affect the way that bot interacts with your site. So, for example, to block a particular bot from your site, you use the syntax:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
So, for example, let’s say you want to keep Google’s Image Search from indexing your site’s images. You would use the following in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Click Here To Continue Reading »
Disallow: /
10 Tips for Web Success
The webmaster’s biggest job is to get their traffic up and keep customers/visitors coming back. Building the site is one thing, but simply building and posting a website does not guarantee traffic. In fact, a website could be beautiful and an example of all the latest technology and still not attract a single visitor if not promoted correctly. Here are 10 tips to guide you to success with your website.
(1) The internet is a new medium.
At least compared to print, it is. A website is a waste if it simply re-hashes something which could easily be put into print. Don’t have the site be just an online brochure. Put up features which take advantage of the internet as a medium of communication. Filter information for them. Provide search capability. Provide interactivity with features like forums, quizzes and tools. Web visitors like to interact. Click Here To Continue Reading »
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
