SEO Stuff

Raising Your Profile: Beyond the Basics
By LAURA LORBER
August 27, 2007; Page B4
Small companies may not have to take big steps to raise the likelihood that potential customers can find them on the Internet.

One or two changes in the way they do things often can help lift a Web site's visibility online, says Rudy De La Garza Jr., manager of search-engine optimization at Bankrate Inc. , an online consumer-banking marketplace.


Bankrate
Bankrate Editor in chief Julie Bandy and Rudy De La Garza Jr.
Search-engine optimization, or SEO, makes a site more friendly, or "optimal," for Internet search engines such as Google Inc.'s, Yahoo Inc.'s and others. SEO can improve a site's listing in "natural" search results -- the unpaid rankings on search engines that many people use to look for information online.

Bankrate hired Mr. De La Garza last year to integrate SEO into how it thinks and operates.


With its interest-rate information, calculators and consumer-finance articles, Bankrate.com had a solid foothold in its niche. But the company was concerned that competition for search rankings based not just on a few keywords, but on thousands, could chew away at its visibility in search results. It started looking at other ways to expand its SEO efforts to give its editorial content greater exposure.

To emphasize SEO planning across the business, Mr. De La Garza, 35 years old, works closely with programmers, writers and Web designers at the 163-employee company, based in North Palm Beach, Fla.

"Part of it is having the interpersonal skills to get a midlevel manager to do something different than he or she did over time," says Mr. De La Garza, who has been a consultant to small and midsize companies.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with Mr. De La Garza about SEO tactics for small companies and how they've been put into practice at Bankrate's Web sites. Here are some of his tips.

Focus each page on one theme. The keyword or keyword phrase you choose for a page should directly reflect the page's content. Headlines, subheads and formatting, such as bold and italics, also should be related directly to this central subject. These indicators will signal to search-engine spiders that the keyword or keyword phrase is more prominent or prevalent than other words on the page, increasing the likelihood of a higher search ranking.

At Bankrate, Mr. De La Garza showed editorial employees that, for some articles, deciding on about 10 main keywords before writing could help increase their number of page views. Writers were already vying for bragging rights to the most popular articles. He told them: "You know what, guys? If we apply a few SEO tactics here, I can help you win the weekly battle," he says.

They began to coordinate metatags -- Web coding describing a page's content to search engines -- headlines, and keywords' frequency, formatting and placement. Content that's higher on a page, where spiders will read it soon after beginning to scan the page, tends to help get that information featured in search rankings.


"I would get one or two writers to take part, and it would slowly, over time, creep into the process with everyone, because they all wanted their stories to do well," he says.

Resist the temptation to overload pages with keywords. Among other factors, search engines may look at keyword density -- the percentage of words on a page that match the keywords -- when determining whether a Web page is relevant to a search term or just "keyword stuffing."

"You can out-optimize yourself," he says. Bankrate's target keyword density range is 2% to 9%, he says.

When writers don't think about keywords, they can easily leave out the search terms that could help readers find their story online, he says, "but when you get people mindful of it, it's not that hard to get it into the right range."

Know what you want visitors to do. In marketing lingo, this concept is known as a "call to action." A company might want a visitor to add a product to a shopping cart or complete a survey or newsletter sign-up, for example. Mr. De La Garza says he sees many small and midsize companies stumble on this step.

"They inundate the visitor with too much information without saying: 'Click here to buy it now,' " he says.

Bankrate.com articles, when their topics allow, often remind readers that the site has related rate information and calculators handy, by embedding links or placing them nearby.

BANKING ON SEARCH

The Crunch: A multitude of companies are competing for top rankings for a limited number of keywords in attempts to raise their Web sites' visibility in search-engine results.
A Solution: Some are turning to experts in search-engine optimization, or SEO, to use other simple but effective methods for getting noticed on the Web.
Some Tips: At Bankrate.com, an SEO manager works with employees across the business on everything from structuring Web pages to focusing on what customers want.
"We keep our eyes on the prize," Mr. De La Garza says.

Study your traffic data for trends. Web-site hosting services and search engines have tools offering an array of statistics about what pages were visited on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, the Web pages that visitors used to reach your site, how long they stayed and other data. Sit down once a day or week to see how people are using your site, so you can learn what's working and what isn't.

Bankrate uses several sources to look at how much traffic there is to be had, what percentage of the traffic it is getting, and how much business the company is getting as a result.

The company's number-crunching helps it make revenue projections and sometimes guides business decisions. "We know the difference in revenue to us if we move from No. 5 to No. 12 for a particular keyword phrase," Mr. De La Garza says.

Search engines, for example, tell the company where its sites stand in rankings associated with specific keywords. Data from sources like mortgage associations and banking groups give indicators of overall industry activity, and online-rating services can show how much traffic is going to a specific term. Bankrate also uses a Web-analytics tool from Omniture Inc. to estimate how many visits particular search terms generate, and how much business the site gets from those visits. The company can learn, for example, whether the site is getting one click out of every two searches on a given keyword, or one click out of a million searches.

"It's like trying to drink from a fire hydrant," Mr. De La Garza says. "The information is constantly there, and every second you're gathering more."

Write to Laura Lorber at laura.lorber@wsj.com

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Scientific American: Feature Article: Hypersearching the Web: June 1999

I think that this is the "orginal" pagerank price from SciAm

Scientific American: Feature Article: Hypersearching the Web: June 1999: "Brin"

Then thre is this :
The Anatomy of a Search Engine

ClickFraud settlement

Behind in posting news here, but this one is important.
1) credit on all AdWords accounts
2) but what are they going to do to prevent future fraud?

Google Settles Suit Over Ad Referrals - New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO, March 8 (AP) — Google has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit contending it overcharged thousands of advertisers who paid for bogus sales referrals generated through a ruse known as click fraud.

The proposed settlement, announced by the company Wednesday, would apply to all advertisers in Google's network during the last four years. Any Web site showing improper charges dating back to 2002 will be eligible for an account credit that could be used toward future ads distributed by Google.

NOTE :
The lawsuit, filed by Lane's Gifts and Collectibles on behalf of all Google advertisers, also named Yahoo. Yahoo said Wednesday that it intended to fight the lawsuit.

David nails it

All around good guy and telco thinker David get's it right

Piece on alternative network models, from monopoly to customer owned.

Big problem for the telco's is that Google figured out how to monetize the network.

isen.blog:
Subhead: Google World

The fifth scenario is a free market scenario in which some company figures out how to make money running a network business despite (or maybe because of) the fact that raw IP connectivity is becoming free. Google is my candidate.

Google has apps like its search engine that we can't live without. Others, like Blogger, Gmail, Google News and Google Maps, we simply use frequently. All of them are free. Each of them informs its personalized advertising business, its money machine. Google Internet service could also be free. It, too, would pay its own way by informing G-Ads. G-Net could tell G-Ads about things only an ISP would know, like where you are and what you do on the Internet beyond the Google family. To get good data, Google would have to run an open, application-neutral network. G-Net would have an added benefit -- it would be a pre-emptive defense against other Internet operators who might try to charge Google for use of their network (see my VON Magazine column Disconnectivity, April 2005, for more on this).

It would not be the first time a company offered a freebie to get customers. Grocery stores don't charge for parking. Gas stations don't charge for bathroom use. Telcos don't charge for directories.

Google's size scares some people. The information it collects scares others. I think these fears are unwarranted as long as Google makes good on its public pledge, 'Don't Be Evil.' To Google CEO Eric Schmidt the pledge means that Google should follow newspaper ethics by maintaining a clear prohibition against its advertising side interfering with its applications. Schmidt explains, just as a reporter should ideally write fearlessly about a bad-acting business even if that business advertises in the reporter's paper, so should the Google applications themselves never discriminate on the basis of what the advertising side of Google 'knows.'

Like all scenarios, the Google scenario may never happen. Blogger Doc Searls points out that Google is now a monoculture, thus a single failure could bring it down. Or perhaps its size will make it hard to manage well. Or maybe a high-visibility subpoena will blow the public's faith in 'Don't Be Evil.' But the Google scenario is at least as plausible as the other four."

More on Google vs MadAve

Smackdown ... simple piece from BWeek covers it.

Google's Search for the Advertising Edge:

"But while Google has gone from search engine to media octopus in less than a year since expanding its reach, it hasn't lost all the feel of an Internet startup. Says a slightly self-effacing Armstrong: 'One of our challenges is just figuring out the right way to sell and even who and how many should be in the room when we go see a client.'

For the Vanguard meeting, there are just six people -- two from Google, two from Vanguard, and two from Vanguard's ad agency, Avenue A/Razorfish. It turns out that with AdWords, Vanguard in November spent less than 50¢ per click, one-tenth that of some rivals, and 14% of Net surfers exposed to the ad clicked through to its Web site.

That performance beats the response rate from a typical direct-mail effort, for example, of about 2%. And it's why Vanguard upped its Net ad spending by 33% since 2003, to $12 million last year, while it cut every other media category, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Vanguard spent $40 million total on ads last year, says TNS."

MuSoft vs Google

Jan 9 issue of New York Magazine on the decline of MuSoft (below)

Then we have MuSoft bowing to the Feds on requests for search data (what, where and when) while Google resists.
Having lost the fight, MuSoft seems to say ... but you better go after those guys over there.

Data : November Nielsen//NetRatings :
"At the top would be Google, which snared 46.3 percent of search
queries in November 2005. Almost 2.4 billion searches wound their
way through the Google server farms. Yahoo held its place at second
on this list, with a 23.4 percent share and 1.194 billion queries
received, parsed, and tossed back to the user.

That takes care of the billionaires of search share. MSN Search at
number three picked up 11.4 percent of the November '05 search
market, 583 million queries. AOL Search was tops in single digit
share, 6.9 percent and 350 million searches handled."

46.3% vs 11.4%
No wonder Billy G is willing to give up to the Justice Dept ... if it can hurt Google.


Microsoft's Bill Gates Wants to Save the World - New York Magazine:

"The Softening of a Software Man'

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO and assumed his current title: chairman and chief software architect. The official line at Microsoft was that he was reenergized, reinvigorated, up to his elbows in the company’s future, shepherding new products and formulating new strategies. But by the time I saw him a couple of years later at a conference in California, it was clear to all in the auditorium that software no longer got Gates’s juices pumping the way his work at the foundation did. Technology questions were answered quickly, without passion, whereas questions about global health elicited lengthy disquisitions full of detail and emotion. The way he talked about wiping out malaria was how he used to talk about wiping out Netscape.

Ever since then, Microsoft has noticeably been drifting. Not that the company isn’t still enormously profitable and doesn’t exercise terrific clout in the markets where its products are entrenched. But there’s no escaping the impression of an outfit beset by strategic blurriness and lumbering middle age—or disguising the fact that, despite countless fervent if flailing efforts, Microsoft is getting its ass kicked handily in the race to rule the Internet. Here you have Yahoo, trouncing MSN as an all-purpose Web portal. And there you have Apple, crushing it in online music. Here you have poor, doom-struck AOL, beating it in e-mail and instant messaging. And there, most glaringly, you have Google, whipping Gates’s company in Web search and advertising—and the crucial competition for top-drawer talent."

Nowhere is Microsoft’s decline more keenly felt (or warmly welcomed) than in Silicon Valley. “Ten years ago,” observes Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, “if you were starting up a company, you assumed that Microsoft already had ten engineers working full-time on the same thing, and they were probably going to eat your lunch. But you don’t say that anymore about Microsoft. You say it about Google. They’re the 10,000-pound gorilla now.”

For Gates, then, losing out on the AOL deal to Google—a deal he’d personally been involved in negotiating, courting Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons at last year’s Allen & Co. summer retreat in Sun Valley—would have been all the more painful for what it represents. For 25 years after Microsoft’s founding in 1975, Gates labored furiously to see that his company would escape the fate that befell his archrival IBM, along with every other technology outfit that rose to dominance in one era, then slid into senescence in the next. Yet now he sees his precious baby veering dangerously in the direction of becoming the new Big Blue: large, profitable, and stuffed with happy employees, but feared or followed by no one. Unimportant, in a word.

BWeek Cover story on Math ... and Google's use for Ads

Big Boys start to understand

Math Will Rock Your World:
"The clearest example of math's disruptive power is in advertising. There Google and other search companies built on math are turning an industry that grew on ideas, hunches, and personal relationships into a series of calculations. They can pull it off because, quite simply, they know where their prospective customers are browsing, what they click on, and often, what they buy. Internet companies use this data not only to profile customers but also to pitch for more contracts. Some 18 months ago, 30 blue-chip companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Walt Disney Co. (DIS ), underwent a series of tests promoted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group. These studies crunched consumer data to measure the effectiveness of advertising in a host of media. The results came back in hard numbers. They indicated, for example, that Ford Motor Co. (F ) could have sold an additional $625 million worth of trucks if it had lifted its online ad budget from 2.5% to 6% of the total. Ford responded vigorously: Last August it announced plans to move up to 30% of its $1 billion ad budget into media targeted to individual customers, half of it through online advertising. Such moves are sure to generate even more data, giving greater clout to the numbers people.
"

Google to Justice Dept ... Nope

Good for Google, others cave, Google says "not so fast".

While data mining of open communications is something I'm not terribly concerned with (the NSA Flap), this seems creepy to me. Camel's nose under the tent to mix metaphores.

Google Resists U.S. Subpoena of Search Data - New York Times:
"Google has been refusing the request since a subpoena was first issued last August, even as three of its competitors agreed to provide information, according to court documents made public this week. Google asserts that the request is unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users.

The dispute with Google comes as the government is moving aggressively on several fronts to obtain data on Internet activity to achieve its law enforcement goals, from domestic security to the prosecution of online crime. Under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, for example, the Justice Department has demanded records on library patrons' Internet use.

Those efforts have encountered resistance on privacy grounds.

"

Google Growing Up Fast

Good comment from David on Bell's challange to charge for connections ...
isen.blog

See also the comments:
"This reminds me of the Associated Press/Western Union situation of the late 1860s, which many argue is the origin of the separation of content and carriage in the US."

Google on MadAve

More on Google Taking on the whole world (of Advertising)
Big Note : Google ain't MuSoft ... they adapt much more quickly.

Google Casts Its Eye Past the Web - Jan. 11, 2006:

"The Google the world knows best occupies a spacious corporate campus in Mountain View, Calif., complete with a volleyball court and plenty of lava lamps. What's less well known is that the search giant also maintains an East Coast stronghold. In a gleaming high-rise in Midtown Manhattan, steps from Madison Avenue, Google has quietly built a 550-person outpost that is already outgrowing its own lava-lamp-decorated space. To get to the massage room or the refrigerator with 20 types of free soft drinks--Mocha Frappuccino, anyone?--you have to weave your way through hundreds of cubicles where eager young reps work the phones. What are they up to?"

Then we have this guy who likely fails to see the tsunami coming.

Not everyone in the ad world is concerned about Google's thrust into agency work. Rishad Tobaccowala, a top strategist at Starcom Mediavest, a media planning and buying firm that purchases $35 billion worth of advertising each year for clients, finds the Google Print program for magazines amateurish and says his clients consider the concept "ridiculous." He pooh-poohs the Google threat. In fact, he thinks the search giant is overreaching. "It wasn't until ten years after Microsoft went public that it was seen as a threat by a lot of its partners," says Tobaccowala. "It's taken Google less than a year." But bet against it at your own peril. As that ad industry CEO cautions, "I would not be complacent. It's dangerous to say Google will never take us all over."

Much Googlie stuff here

Too numerious to mentition
Likely will add to link list

John Battelle's Searchblog
Author of "The Search" ... history of search/Google

ClickFraud Continued

Why is clickfraud a minor issue for big advertisers?
Because other media is so much worse at it's best

From BusinessWeek on broadcast metrics:

Television: Counting The Eyeballs:

"In the TiVo Age, Mad Ave is turning to services that explain which ads work

By some estimates two-thirds of TV viewers cut the sound during commercials, channel-surf, or skip them altogether because they are annoying or irrelevant. In fact, if TV commercials were subjected to ratings the way TV programs are, most would be canceled faster than Martha Stewart's The Apprentice."

excerpts:
" MediaCheck is one of a handful of services emerging to make TV ads prove their worth, in part to answer the challenge posed by Internet ads, whose viewers can so easily be counted by clicks. Advertisers and networks are coming to view ad ratings as a necessary part of competing with the online ad boom. More important, the new tools will help them put the screws like never before to often free-spending Madison Avenue idea factories. They also stand to wreak havoc on the process of buying and selling ad time.
"
""We're pursuing any move to get the accountability -- the real numbers -- on TV audiences that we are getting with our Internet ad buys," says Julie Roehm, Chrysler's marketing communications director.
"

"...ad ratings could upset the decades-old system of pricing ad time based on how many viewers are watching a show and instead force networks to price time based on how many watch the commercials."

and :
" For now advertisers and agencies are left with the hard truth that 8 out of 10 DVR buyers took the plunge to avoid ads, according to media agency MindShare. MediaCheck's Weinblatt has a possible solution for that, too. Besides delivering ad ratings, his digital boxes also let an advertiser offer consumers coupons, product samples, or discounts."

Comments on Ad shifts ...

From Jim Louderback of PCMag.com

"...interesting set of forecasts laid out the other night by Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service newsletter. Mark's audience includes a wide range of the most influential venture capitalists, investors, and CEOs in the tech space, and I find his insights to be mostly on target."


Column from PC Magazine: Industry Expert's Predictions for 2006:

" 2. 'Online ad flows jump 40 to 50 percent as advertisers flee TV and print, for the Web.' Anderson sees new networks of bloggers aggregating together, similar to what Jason Calacanis did with Weblogs Inc. He also predicts a shakeout in advertising, with a 'new generation of young shops taking the lead.'

My take: We're seeing this already. Many magazines have already evolved, newspapers are in trouble, and TV is next. I believe that in 2006 this flow will hit broadcast and cable TV most heavily: This will be the first year that the 'upfront,' where ads are presold into the fall TV season, will generate less money than in the year before."

Guess who is right in the middle ... Google

Big Threat to MuSoft

Good read even if speculation not facts.
Spread the software, spread the Adsense ...

Pass the peanutbutter ... MuSoft is toast ?

CES analysis: Why I know Google will do an office suite and a desktop OS in 2006. - The Jason Calacanis Weblog: "The story everyone wanted to talk about--and Eric and Larry didn't--was Google going into the operating system, deskop computer, and office suite business (let's call those three things 'Google Desktop' for simplicity).

Eric kept saying the Google vision is to index the worlds information, but we all know that is a smoke screen. Google's business is to make money from targeted advertising (i.e. AdSense). "

Google Acquisitions � SEO by the SEA

David isen.blog pointed this one out ... compilation of Google acquisitions:

Google Acquisitions � SEO by the SEA:

"On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective - like speaking but with a paper bag over your head. - Tim Berners Lee, in Links and Law: Myths"

2006 CES keynote with news ...

Live coverage of Google Keynote with Robin Williams - Engadget

Sky's the Limit

No wonder Larry is funding (able to fund ?) studies about the "space elevator" ...

Note that in interview on CNBC, Stahlman said that this price could be over a 5 year time frame. About a 33% annual compounded gain.

Figure This: Google 2K:
"Google (GOOG:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) shares at $2,000? That's what Caris & Co. analyst Mark Stahlman says is theoretically possible.

In note issued to clients Thursday, Stahlman stresses that he isn't setting an official price target for the stock of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. New York-based Caris doesn't set price targets for stocks. Earlier this week, Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray, which evidently does set price targets, predicted that Google's shares would hit $600. So far that's the highest projection of any analyst.

"We believe that Google's addressable market has a chance to become much larger, more quickly than initially anticipated, perhaps a $100 billion annual sales company over time," Stahlman writes. "Google is not limited to the size of today's advertising market and is likely to expand into next generation financial services, and health care, among other digital service opportunities considerably larger than typically recognized."

In an interview, the 57-year-old Stahlman, who as an investment banker wrote the prospectus that brought America Online public, stresses that he believes that the excitement over Google is different than the hype he saw during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.

"We now have the technology to actually build out digital services," he says. "We didn't have broadband available in the 1990s. We didn't know how to build grids of computers."

Google, whose shares more than doubled last year, has considerable potential to grow. Stahlman estimates that Google's share of the $2 trillion digital services market, which he says has the potential to expand to $10 trillion annually, is about 0.3%. He arrived at his theoretical price -- not a price target, by any means -- by multiplying the 6.2 multiple that Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) now fetches on an enterprise-value-to-trailing-12-months-sales basis by what he sees as Google's potential $100 billion in revenue.

Stahlman's analysis is the latest attempt by Wall Street to figure out the potential growth of the largest search engine company, a difficult task even for the most ardent Google admirers given that the company doesn't give earnings guidance and is on the cusp of what is widely considered to be a nascent market.

But analysts are still giving it their best shot. Goldman Sachs' Anthony Noto Thursday raised his price target for Google to $500 from $400 and raised his fourth quarter earnings per share estimate to $1.69 from $1.62. Analysts are predicting that the company will earn between $1.51 and $1.95, according to Thomson Financial. Noto also raised estimates for Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's Take). He rates both shares as outperform.

Google is expected to announce plans Friday to allow customers to buy content from providers. It also will provide a downloadable bundle of software to allow people to set up new computers without using Microsoft programs.

More Cringely speculation

More speculation but the quote below is the crux of the issue: GRANULARITY.

PBS | I, Cringely . January 5, 2006 - A Commercial Runs Through It:

"Google is an advertising company. Their edge is granularity. No one uses Google AdWords to push toilet paper because everybody uses TP. But if you want to sell custom Warlock capes or hand-machined shifters for discontinued Studebakers, Google can charge advertisers a huge premium (per prospect) because these customers are too expensive to find any other way."

Google Ecosystem

Good stuff.
Contrast G's model of living within the web, with MuSoft's "we must dominate".
One is soft, co-operative, the other is Imperial.

Bear Stearns Upgrades Google:

"Bear Stearns lauded a self-reinforcing 'Google ecosystem' that should allow the Internet behemoth to grow while continually seeding new industries and attendant 'sub-economies.' While the ecosystem bodes well for the future, Bear said the higher price target reflects a one-percentage-point reduction in its estimate of Google's long-term cost of capital and higher revenue estimates."

And the reason behind the AOL deal (very obvious) ... stall MuSoft:
"We think that there is less risk in Google's business model for the following reasons: 1) Our thinking that an ecosystem is developing around Google which could provide a lift in revenues, 2) Google's stronger balance sheet which it will use to ward off competition, 3) multiple product rollouts which should expand Google's revenue potential, 4) Google's continual market share gains, and 5) the fact that AOL is not in the hands of a major competitor," Bear said.

Cringely on why Click Fraud is a minor issue

Although he doesn't come right out and say it, I will.
Assuming his thesis is right that Ad Agencies engaged in a form of fraud anyway, some, maybe a large amount of clickfraud will be tolerated.

Piece on the end of print publishing
Reference to the 75% ration has to do with USPS rules on 2nd class postal rates.

PBS | I, Cringely . December 29, 2005 - Stop the Presses!:
"Ad agencies 12 to 13 years ago didn't want to know whether or not their ads had actually been read, they told us. This was simply because if an advertiser discovered that few, if any, people were actually reading their modem ad on page 113, they might just pull the ad and save their money. The entire ability to sell an ad-edit ratio of 75 percent was based on this deliberate ignorance. Ad agencies and publications alike knew that many -- even most -- advertising dollars were simply wasted, but it wasn't in their interest to admit that, so they didn't."

This guy has no love for "G"

Ran across this today ... Peter Ireland

The Great Startup Game: Are Adwords & Adsense Dying?

and

The Great Startup Game: My New Non-Google Startup Strategy

ClickFraud

Wired 14.01: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet:

Pay-per-click advertising is big, big, big business. So are bogus hits on Internet ads. It's search giants against scam artists in an arms race that could crash the entire online economy."

Cringely seems to have an impression of MuSoft even lower than mine ...

PBS | I, Cringely . December 22, 2005 - Tough Love

"Why didn't AOL do a deal with Microsoft, which, after all, has more money than anyone and could easily have written a check of almost any size to make it happen? The boys and girls of AOL awoke one day and realized who'd soon be lying next to them, and it was just too creepy. Remember, these are two companies that were not that long ago opposing each other in an anti-trust case that was based on the simple idea that Microsoft wanted AOL and its Netscape subsidiary to die, and did a lot to make that happen. That kind of memory is hard to shake off even if Microsoft did pay a $750 million settlement. Just because blood money is paid doesn't mean there remains no memory of the bleeding."

What's next ?

Dancing Hampsters ???

Bound to happen sooner or later.
Risk of damaging the "image" (pun slightly intended)

AOL Coaxes Google to Try Busier Ads - New York Times

"Users of Google's search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics. And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations.

... and ...

The executives close to the talks said that at AOL's request, Google would begin to test various forms of graphical ads, and that it would make the same formats available to other advertisers. Google has started to sell graphical ads for placement on other sites; plans to do so on Google itself were accelerated by the AOL talks, an executive involved in the negotiations said."

Data gathering

I have no problem with the collection of aggreation of data, in fact, I think it's damn good way of intergating client and provider's interests.

Don't give me data on an individual, but give me data on a class of individuals and maybe I can provide them with something they are interested in ...

Getting to Know You

"Google's introduction of new extensions for Firefox is all about knowing more about some users."

Telsa

Insight from reading:
The Search : How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Busines and Transformed out Culture, by John Battelle

Battelle is cofounder of Wired and of The Industry Standard

Chapter 4 : Google is Born

"Of all the frictional resistance, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance."
and
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search...
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theroy and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
Nikola Teslaa as quoted in the NYTimes 1931

Larry Page read a biography of Tesla at 12, and wanted both to invent like Tesla and advoid the relative obscurity that Tesla suffered.

Looks like, so far, he's succeeded.

The orginal paper

Larry and Sergey on BackRub and more.

Here it is:

The Anatomy of a Search Engine

Abstract:
"In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/
To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date.
Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want."

Dance Monkey Boy !

The orginal and still greatest "Monkey Boy" Video

dancemonkeyboy.mpg (video/mpeg Object)

This is the CEO of the "Greatest Software Company in the World?"

MuSoft frozen out?

Does "Do No Evil" beat the "Evil Empire"?

Does MuSoft's reputation hurt negotiations?
Did Dick Parson's see the "Dance Monkey Boy" Ballmer tape?

WSJ.com - U.S. Home

"Time Warner entered exclusive talks with Google over a partnership with AOL, shutting out Microsoft, which had been aggressively pursuing a deal. "

Simplicity : more

From Yahoo ... talk about timely
Prior post gave points to Google, now this:

---
Dear Advertiser,

A new look is coming to the Yahoo! search results pages that
will translate into more clicks for your listings. On January
18th, Yahoo! will debut a streamlined design that will make
the search results displayed on Yahoo! even easier for
consumers to read. Our research has shown that by improving
the search experience in this way, advertisers can generally
expect to see an increase in clicks, while maintaining their
conversion rates.

How this change impacts your listings:

* Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored
Search listings
* You don't have to make any changes to your listings; they'll
be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
* If you'd like to optimize your listings for Yahoo!, begin
your description with one short sentence that includes your
keyword and focuses on your most important information in
the first 70 characters
* Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that
we believe works best for advertisers and search users
* Most of our partners, including MSN, CNN, ESPN and Infospace,
will still display longer descriptions for your Sponsored
Search listings, though the exact length may vary from
partner to partner

Yahoo! is taking this step to improve the search experience
for its users. By continuously focusing on delivering highly
relevant search results in a user-friendly format, Yahoo!
also gives you the best possible platform for reaching customers
interested in what your business provides.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Walled Garden?

Temporally Relevant

Revelation that Google Base is Google Only ...

"...when any web tool other than a browser (such as another search engine) tries to access the content hosted on Google Base, they encounter this bit of protocol will disallow all use of the content to anyone other than Google:

http://base.google.com/robots.txt:

User-agent: *

...

Disallow: /base

---
Thanks to Doc for the lead

Simplicity

Title says it all ...

The Beauty of Simplicity

"Marissa Mayer, who keeps Google's home page pure, understands that less is more. Other tech companies are starting to get it, too. Here's why making things simple is the new competitive advantage."

Google has it and wins
Yahoo doesn't

Simple as that

Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist

I'll try to remember to get around to putting this in the links list as it looks like it gets updated.

Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist

Will Google move to true pay for performance ?

What happens if Google adopts and impliments Bill Gross's idea

From Economist 10/01

Online advertising | Pay per sale | Economist.com

Sep 29th 2005 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

The holy grail of advertising is within reach

“HALF the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” John Wanamaker, the owner of America's first big department store, allegedly said in the 1870s. “The trouble is, I don't know which half.” It has been the advertising industry's favourite witticism ever since. But it may expire soon, at least in the online world.

This week, Microsoft unveiled a new system for placing advertising hyperlinks on its MSN internet search site that could help it to close the gap with Google and Yahoo!, the two most popular search engines and the leaders in so-called “paid-search” or “pay-per-click” advertising. (MSN currently uses Yahoo!'s advertising technology.) The basic idea behind pay-per-click is that advertisers bid in an online auction for the right to have their link displayed next to the results for specific search terms—“used cars”, for instance, or “digital cameras”—and then pay only when a web surfer actually clicks on that link (hence “pay-per-click”). Since the consumer has already expressed intent—first by typing in the search terms, then by choosing the advertiser's link—he is more likely to make a purchase. From the advertiser's point of view, this reduces some of the waste that bothered Mr Wanamaker.

Pay-per-click advertising is the fastest-growing part of the advertising industry. In the first half of this year, it rose by 27% to $2.3 billion in America, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group in New York, said this week. That is 40% of all online advertising (though only 3% of total advertising) in America. Piper Jaffray, an investment bank, thinks that the pay-per-click market will grow to almost $20 billion within five years.

But pay-per-click is far from perfect. There is “click fraud”—bogus clicks generated by software-powered websites set up just for this purpose. And even humans who search and click often stop short of buying. Hence the next step: pay-per-call advertising. Most people first heard the term last month, when eBay, the world's largest online auction site, bought Skype, which makes software that lets people make free computer-to-computer phone calls. Meg Whitman, eBay's boss, explained that one rationale for the deal was to “monetise” Skype's internet telephony by placing little Skype “buttons” on web pages instead of sponsored text links. A web surfer might click on such a button and talk live to the advertiser's salesperson, at which point eBay would charge the advertiser.

A San Francisco company called Ingenio pioneered this approach in 1999 and already makes a decent living by placing toll-free numbers for local businesses on the results pages of search engines. This April, AOL, one of the big four internet portals, signed up as Ingenio's largest partner. The other three—Google, Yahoo! and MSN—will also launch pay-per-call programmes sooner or later, says Greg Sterling at The Kelsey Group, a market research firm, because small businesses and service providers like lawyers or plumbers find it much easier to close deals on the phone (many do not even have their own web sites). And faking calls is harder than faking clicks. Mr Sterling reckons that pay-per-call will be worth between $1.4 billion and $4 billion by 2009, on top of pay-per-click revenues.

But even the pay-per-call model may turn out to be only an intermediate step towards the ultimate in advertising efficiency, which would be a pay-per-sale approach. This is what Bill Gross has recently started offering at SNAP, a search engine that he founded. United Airlines, for instance, places text links on SNAP's search pages, but it pays (about $10) not when somebody clicks or calls, but only when somebody actually buys a ticket. Eventually, argues Mr Gross, 100% of advertising will follow such a pay-per-sale approach—although he won't guess how soon—because this is “the holy grail of advertising.”

A bold claim, but credible, since it was also Mr Gross who invented the pay-per-click model in 1997 by launching the company that would become Overture, now part of Yahoo!, and whose business model Google imitated with spectacular success. His first innovation, says Mr Gross, merely liberated advertisers from the old “cost-per-thousand” model, in which they targeted audiences and then blindly threw money in their general direction. In this round, he says, he will liberate advertisers from all wasted spending, by tying their costs directly to real sales. Mr Wanamaker would be amazed.

Google / AOL

Times piece on the players
Brings in the Comcast angle

Conclusion that Google ends up giving AOL even better deal on revenue split
Makes more sense to me

AOL Deal May Omit Stake Sale - New York Times

MuSoft-AOL deal

Not sure that this makes any real business sense
Fight off Google, yes, and important for MuSoft
But not sure it makes sense for TimeWarner

Maybe they still don't "get" the online world.

WSJ.com - Time Warner Nears Agreement With Microsoft in Online Ad Deal:

By ROBERT A. GUTH, DENNIS K. BERMAN and JULIA ANGWIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 6, 2005 2:45 a.m.

Time Warner Inc. is closing in on an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to build an online advertising service designed to compete with Google Inc., say people familiar with the negotiations.

After months of on-again-off-again negotiations, the two companies are now focused on a deal that would combine advertising-related assets – with minimal, if any, money changing hands. An agreement is expected to be struck sometime before year-end, but it is still possible that AOL could choose instead to deepen its relationship with Google at Microsoft's expense.

As of Monday, however, initial signs pointed to a Microsoft-AOL alliance, albeit one far less ambitious than many analysts and investors had expected.

Under the negotiations, AOL would drop Google as its primary provider of Internet search and use Microsoft's MSN service instead, say people familiar with the talks. Currently, AOL relies on Google's search-engine, and Google gives AOL a cut of the advertising revenue generated by AOL customers. Last year, Google turned over $300 million in revenue to AOL. Their current contract runs well into 2006. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt Monday declined to comment on discussions related to AOL. "They're a valued partner and we look forward to continuing to work with them," he said.

Looming over the talks is Carl Icahn, the hedge fund investor who is preparing for a proxy fight to replace a majority of Time Warner's directors, and who has criticized the company's business strategy. A deal that assigned a public valuation for the AOL unit could be a lightning rod for Mr. Icahn's ire. One person close to the negotiations suggested that Time Warner may want to sidestep that possibility by announcing a type of joint-venture that cannot be assigned a dollar figure.

Included in the talks are negotiations over creating a joint advertising sales force that would sell online ads across both the AOL unit and Microsoft's MSN, while keeping the two online services under control of their respective owners, a person familiar with the talks said. The deal would include using an automated "advertising platform" for brokering online ads for the MSN and AOL services, say people familiar with the plans. Microsoft's MSN unit is developing such a service, called AdCenter that it is testing in certain markets outside the U.S.

The deal, if reached, would fall far short of earlier negotiations between the two companies over Microsoft taking a minority stake in AOL unit, say people familiar with the plans. The two companies expect to announce a deal by the third week of December, say people familiar with the talks.

The move is a reaction to Google, which has created an online service that efficiently connects advertising with Internet search results. That has helped the company post an outsize growth rate that has made Google worth $120 billion, compared to Time Warner's $88 billion market value.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. A Time Warner spokesman couldn't be reached.

Google Gameplan ?

Some interesting speculations as to Google's plans
Basically, play to own strengths and do end around on teleco/cableco network interference threats (degraded connections for free services/apps)

See (and follow) David's blog isen.blog
"The Washington Post reports that BellSouth CTO William L. Smith thinks that BellSouth

. . . should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc."

From "DataCenter in a Box" (40ft Container)
Note : ISP Agnostic

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart

To ubiquitious "GoogleCube"

PBS | I, Cringely . November 24, 2005 - Google-Box

And wrap-up
PBS | I, Cringely . December 01, 2005 - The Sweet Spot

Official Google Blog

Should have gotten into this earlier

Official Google Blog

Nice list of what they keep track of

Lots of reading

George Dyson on Google

Very interesting piece

Edge: TURING'S CATHEDRAL by George Dyson

"My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

BusinessWeek on "Googling For Gold"

Googling For Gold

"Googling For Gold
With a market cap in orbit and more cash than a small nation, Google's heft is altering the tech industry's behavior. But when does its long-awaited shopping spree begin? "

Google vs the VC's

Steve Rubel on Wikipedia vs Google

Micro Persuasion: Wikipedia is the Next Google

Commentary and comments on a rather wierd idea.

Wikipedia interesting but flawed.
A bit too "Wild West" lacking enough marshalls.

See comments on spuriours postings and inaccurate information.

Most likely, the Google "Borg" assimilates Wikipedia in some manner

The "Official" GoogleBase Blog

Official Google Base Blog

Search Engine News on Google Updates

Here's a piece on latest (Nov '05) update of Google Algorithm with guesses as to what may affect ranking:

� On the Google Jagger Algo Update - Part 1

Some Google Tools

Some things I've run across


PageRank Explained. WebWorkshop

PageRank Calculator. WebWorkshop

Link Popularity Checking Tool

This one from a guy who really doesn't like Google (nor Wikipedia)
But maybe some ideas on gaming Google

Google-Watch

Wired 13.12: Summary of speculation on Google Moves

Google as the 800lb Gorilla in the room...

Wired 13.12: Who's Afraid of Google? ... Everyone.


It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.

What follows is a summary of various products, with who could be hurt.

No wonder "When one of Microsoft's key operating system engineers defected to Google last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw a chair across an office and vowed to kill Google."

Eric Schmidt interview

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: The 70 Percent Solution
By John Battelle, November 28, 2005 "

Before he arrived at Google (GOOG) in 2001 to serve as adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt was little known outside Silicon Valley. With his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and research stints at Bell Labs and Xerox�s (XRX) famed Palo Alto Research Center, he had a solid reputation among geeks, cemented by his championing of the Java programming language as Sun Microsystems�s (SUNW) chief technology officer. And he faced his first real management test as CEO of Novell, the troubled software maker that has fought a long, difficult war with Microsoft (MSFT).

These days Schmidt is on a stellar winning streak, recruiting top talent, seeing his company through a stunning IPO, and fending off rivals from Barry Diller to Bill Gates to Terry Semel -- while trying to keep Google�s good-guy reputation intact. How does he do it? One rule was handed to him by Brin and Page when he walked in the door: Don't be evil. The other one is a formula he uses to stay on track while innovating: Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses. Business 2.0 talked to Schmidt to find out how he and his colleagues live by those rules.

Click title for rest of the interview

Google Base as threat to classifieds

Print newspapers are getting gutted.
No wonder their stocks are crumbling.
I recall Dave Webb telling me years about that Classifieds were the lifeblood of newspapers...

"Rupert Murdoch once described them as the ?rivers of gold??the lucrative classified-advertising revenues that flowed into big newspaper groups. But the golden rivers are being diverted online as the internet breaks the grip that local and regional newspapers once held over their advertising markets.

Typically, a local newspaper would expect to get some 80% of its revenue from advertising, of which around two-thirds would come from classifieds. But last year in the San Francisco Bay area, job ads worth some $60m were lost from newspapers to the web, reckons Classified Intelligence, a consultancy."

Online advertising | Classified calamity | Economist.com

"Perhaps the most significant development came on November 16th, when Google started up a prototype service called Google Base. It offers a searchable database of free listings, including small ads which can be narrowed down to postal regions. Among its first offerings were used cars. In time, Google could challenge eBay, whose own auction listings now work much like a giant classified website?especially with its ?buy-it-now? options. But eBay charges sellers. Even so, it sold more than 450m items in the three months to September 30th, for almost $11 billion."

BW Rob Hof on GoogleBase

Google Base Goes Live

Lightweight, some comments follow

BW on Google's Analytics

Analyzing Google's Analytics Strategy: "The online giant's decision to make its Urchin Web Analytics software free could spell disaster for search-engine optimization companies"

Scanning Books and the issues involved

Stewart Brand: "Information wants to be free ...

Online books | Pulp friction | Economist.com

Information also wants to be expensive"

Conundrum
Ideal would be anything written available anywhere, anytime.
Problem is how can Publishers get paid?

Google Analytics - here we go

Google blows up another business

The Trail of a Clicked-On Ad, Brought to You by Google - New York Times

"When you put Google's application next to any one of the existing ones, you'll not see glaring differences except that one of them is free,"

Net threat to oldline firms

Google and others threaten publishing and media firms

Business and the internet | Bubble 2.0 | Economist.com:

Sep 22nd 2005 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
A spate of expensive internet deals is creating a sense of deja vu

"

Google is so highly priced in large part because of its mastery of one of the few truly profitable internet business-models: the sale of effective online advertising. But its striking success is alerting rivals to the dangers that Google and other peddlers of online advertising pose to their businesses—which is prompting them to explore how to fight back, which in turn could hurt the now thriving firm's profits, and expose any overvaluation.

Newspaper, television and radio companies, for instance, have all recently started to understand the threat posed to their traditional advertising revenues by online advertising. A speech by Rupert Murdoch earlier this year on the need for media firms to embrace the internet showed that the industry is not willing to give in easily to its new enemy. The traditional telecoms and cable companies have also started to wake up to the potentially massive threat posed to their revenues by cut-price internet telephony of the sort offered by Skype. They, too, are looking for ways to fight back."