Rant from Aaron over at TW about the “quality” of the current Google SERPs:

“The SERPs are full of off topic trash (wrong page from an authority site or just the home page of a site that has a relevant subpage) and spam and Google’s basic search operators don’t even work. Lame. Aren’t you embarrassed about this Google? Why not clean up the current mess before adding more shit to the SERPs?

I wasn’t on the WWW when Altavista went to shit, but is this the beginning of the end for Google?“

Heh heh. Well, I was - and I recall it was due to AltaVista trying, rather unsuccessfully, to combat spam. All they managed to do was provide irrelevant results, so there may be some parallels.

The question is: are Google’s results noticeably bad? After all, webmasters often complain, but does the average joe surfer also feel the results are bad? It’s pretty hard to judge given that any sample I use will be too small to make any meaningful conclusions. Also, there’s very little buzz on the topic, except within SEO/Webmaster communities.

What I can say is that I’m glad I like Wikipedia - because Wikipedia is coming up under everything! I think there’s something to be said for Aarons theory that this has a lot to do with the recent heavy weighting towards authorities.

Interesting article about how not all audiences are created equal:

“Here’s where I get accused of being elitist — the collective intelligence of some groups of people is more intelligent than that of other groups. Why? Because on certain topics, and in general, some people are smarter than others“

I think he’s right, however, from a marketing perspective, some audiences are far more valuable than others. The key to Adsense and affiliate marketing isn’t traffic generation, although big numbers can help, it’s about getting the audience who are most likely to lead to desired action. That audience doesn’t have to be smart, just identified, and then given what they…cough…”need”, at the right time.

So, are visitor behaviour patterns the next Page rank?

Handy list of essential, cant-put-down bedtime reading. Sadly, the paper entitled “100 criteria for ranking webpages
in hyperlinked environments” doesn’t appear

Hopefully my friend Bill doesn’t find that list. His head will explode.

Post on NorthWest VC Blog about how a rather interesting question was pulled from Google Answers.

The question:

“What percentage of Google searches are contextual?”

Fairly innocuous, I’d say.

But no:

“We’ve removed your question because you can find the answer on our main site, free of charge.”

However, it seems the answer is nowhere to be found.

Curious.

Spotted a very interesting crawler experiment on the fantastically-named DrunkMenWorkHere.org:

“a large scale experiment on search engine behaviour was staged with more than two billion different web pages. This experiment lasted exactly one year, until April 13th. In this period the three major search engines requested more than one million pages of the tree, from more than hundred thousand different URLs. The home page of drunkmenworkhere.org grew from 1.6 kB to over 4 MB due to the visit log and the comment spam displayed there.”

Revelations include:

• the frequency of visiting a page seems to be related to the PageRank of a page
• Google visited nodes at deeper levels less frequently than their parent nodes
• Yahoo! Slurp was the first search engine to discover Binary Search Tree 2, and crawled most vigorously early on
• Over the last six months Googlebot requested pages at a fixed rate
• msnbot virtually ceased to crawl Binary Search Tree 2 after five months
• most spam was related to pharmaceutical products - many comment nodes weren’t crawled, possibly as a result.

Now, I recall remarking on some forum discussions about crawl issues, and the fact that many posters were jumping to some pretty wild conclusions. If you’re not getting crawl depth, site structure might well be the cause.

Worth testing

From The Boston Globe:

“By rolling out a spate of free search products….the company is doing more than building its consumer base. It’s also building an alternative environment for software, advertising, and Internet content that is challenging the business models and eroding the revenue of everyone from publishers to software makers to Internet service providers.”

And, to a large extent, this is an environment they control. They control a lot of what internet users can see, what they can’t see, and they control a powerful advertising system that is effectively driving the cost of content to zero. What’s next? Payment systems?

As Nick Carr points out:

“By democratizing the production and distribution of media, the internet ensures that an overabundance of supply and the resulting competition will drive the price of most content down to its marginal production cost, which is zero”

Are Google the next Microsoft? Do they have even greater potential to monopolize almost everything online?

Well spotted, SEOBlackhat:

“Google has done it - at least for now. They have REALLY cleaned up their act when it comes to pharma SERPs like Viagra and Phentermine”

Google have placed portal-style links at the top of the serps for many pharmaceutical related search queries.

Good move.

Thoughtful post by Andrew at Traffick:

“Depending on the type of search query, over the years, certain large websites have been so good at offering the “definitive” or at least leading resource page for a given subject that Google searchers have found themselves clicking through to the same major portals again and again. In short, these are the perennial SERP’s winners, the ones that seem to have a reasonably good answer, solution, or chunk of content for just about anything.”

Andrew is talking about how DMOZ, and other sites, used to feature a lot in the SERPs, now they don’t. These days, it’s Wikipedia. Which site will it be next year? And the year after that?

Which begs the question - why? Are Google, as Andrew suggests, tweaking the playing field, or is Wikipedia domination an unintended consequence of anti-seo algos?

Possibly both, of course.

According to a Massey University study:

“…hacking” attacks are on the rise…Dr Ellen Rose, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, and graduate student Natalia Nehring, ran Google search queries known to return sensitive information from the Google database. They wrote a computer program that for three months ran 170 daily queries against the Google database, looking at sites in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and the Czech Republic”.

The results weren’t too good, especially outside the US.

To check if your websites are vulnerable, the “Google Hacking Database” lists a lot of potential problems.

From The Independent:

“Google’s ultimate aim is to create a search engine with artificial intelligence to exactly answer any question a user puts to it, the company declared last night….(Page) said: “People always make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very far from the case. We’re probably only 5 per cent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything … some people could call that artificial intelligence.”

Nothing like ambition, eh.

Still, we’ve been hearing about AI since, what - the 50’s? - and nothing much has become of it. Does Google stand a chance of capturing the holy grail of computer science?

On the question of money:

“Mr Page and his chief executive, Eric Schmidt, who was also addressing the event, said Google’s revenues could grow exponentially, as it had tapped a tiny proportion of the $800bn (£424bn) global advertising market.”