Round-up

What a day. Thoughts:

– I’ll post more on Google Co-op and Google Trends in the next few days.
– One of the things that strikes me about Google Co-op is that it’s open; many vertical searches are walled gardens, but Co-op is more of an open garden that anyone can contribute to; the users get sent outside of Google.
– Google Trends is pretty addictive. For example, in the search [full moon, solar eclipse] you can see regular spikes when people search for “full moon,” and you can see spikes when there were solar eclipses. You can see news coverage of the solar eclipses too. The query [summer, winter] shows how these queries wax and wane. While [olympics, torino] let you see when the Olympics are, and when the Torino Olympics were. It really is addictive to throw things out like [flowers, mother’s day] or [serenity, firefly]
– If I had a nickel for every time Orlowski wrote a linkbait article, I estimate that I’d have $1.20. πŸ™‚ I knew a girl in high school that really liked to be the center of attention. We eventually concluded that “if you talked about her, she won.” Because if you kept talking about her, you just encouraged her.
– I feel bad for any search engine that launches on Google Press Day. πŸ™‚ So I want to send some love to Yokel; it’s a local shopping engine mentioned in today’s SearchCast. “Local shopping engine” sounds like the worst of local engines and shopping engines, but it’s not. For example, I’ve been attempting to procure season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for, um, a friend. I checked the local Target, Wal-Mart, Tower Records, the San Jose Best Buy, and the Suncoast Video store in Valley Fair Mall that the directory says exists but when you walk the entire length of the mall, the store is in fact not open. (Bastards!). I finally gave up and Amazon’ed it last night. But if you do this search on Yokel, you’d see that the East Palo Alto Best Buy probably has it. I’m not sure if that’s true, but at least it didn’t suggest any places that I’d checked. Good stuff, Yokel.

One last thought: I’m still using a crufty old version of Google Desktop Search (GDS), maybe v1. Why? Because that version is so old that I think that updating loses your search history. I really like having my safety net of being able to search my surfing history, so I’ve resisted upgrading, even when they introduced the “control control” shortcut to pop up a search box. Now there’s gadgets and a “shift shift” shortcut to toggle those, plus improved indexing. So I may finally cave and upgrade.

21 Responses to Round-up (Leave a comment)

  1. Just one question about “last thought” – why everything which isn’t browser-based requires Windows?

  2. About Google Health, good to see HON on board and others ehealth actors.
    As for Google Trends, what is the relevancy of those results.
    I tried poker, came up most nordic countries are on top, if you try sex, you got iran india, and the most amazing is if you try any order a,b and then b,a … you end by different results // how can you explain this ? is it just a psychometric feeling to marketers or 65 % true ?
    Thanks.

  3. Matt, I was hoping you could verify that the cursor “mouse trap” is OK for adsense search.

    cheers!

  4. It’s interesting to see what others do and say about upgrading softwares which they use. I know I do the same thing if I have software I really like. I use an older version of ‘Handy Find & Replace’ and I love it to death. Newer versions seem to make ‘upgrades’ which are less user friendly!

  5. The google sitemap verification is in large volume of request, it is quite difficult to verify by google now.

  6. My grandmother always told me that if you have to ask, it’s probably wrong. πŸ™‚ Another thing i always consider is if i like ‘X’ event occuring while i’m surfing, ‘X’ being popups, page full of ads & nothing else, yadda yadda yadda …

    *clink clink*

  7. Hmmmz – Yokel looks like it as been hit with a Canonical penalty though. πŸ™

    yokel.com cache 13th July 2005, http://www.yokel.com cache 4th May 2006 – not being crawled by the looks of it.

    Matt – has my site got a penalty ? I didn’t get a reply from the bostonpubcom email address thing – if so que sera sera, as I mentioned I maybe to late on the scene for that type of sites nowadays.

  8. OH, ps, google trends looks great and very usefull! water, food, shelter, clothes was interesting. I still cant’ figure out what that huge water spike is though? Was that about the time katrina happened? cant’ remember … old age creeping up on me….*runs to coffee machine*

  9. Ooops – I should say although I put que sera sera – doesnt mean I dont care, I obv. want it in the index and I think it brings value to it users – it is just that if it has I would rather know πŸ™

    Best wishes.

  10. I’m afraid Yokel didn’t fair so well on this search:

    http://www.yokel.com/search?what=kodak+z740&city=omaha&state=ne&zip=&remember=no&findit.x=0&findit.y=0

    The first result being a store that has been closed for at least two years. The second result being in an outlying community (if they had used the geographical center of the city, the first two results would have likely been the best). The third was the store where I bought my camera. So, I’d rank that query at a 60% relevancy.

    Definitely has potential if they can get accurate data feeds from stores. Thanks for sharing!

  11. Jason Bondwel

    I dissagree and think that these DCs http://64.233.179.104/ , http://64.233.179.99/ , http://64.233.187.99/ , http://64.233.187.104/, http://64.233.167.99/ , http://64.233.167.104/ and http://64.233.179.107/ are providing way beter and more updated results.

    I say this because one of my clients is in the process of doing a 301 domain move and these DCs seem to be the only ones that quickly acknoledged and replaced the URL while the other ones are still completely lost. with redirects.. Also the other DCs seem to have a lower index count which seems to have more spam at the top of the results..

  12. Damned American local search engines. Boourns to Yokel until they get some hoser products in there, eh?

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=matt+cutts%2C+sergey+brin%2C+larry+page&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

    Dude, you’re losing your steam. Larry and Sergey are both stomping a mudhole in your ass and walking it dry.

    You need a publicity stunt. Something nice and stupid too, like having an affair with a washed up B-list actress. YOUR GOOGLE SEARCH CAREER DEPENDS ON IT!

  13. Stephen, someone is still working through the emails and replying to quite a few.

    Adam, I don’t want most people to know who I am. Think about all the headaches Larry/Sergey must get. No thanks. πŸ™‚

  14. Hi Matt

    You know my thoughts have always been that a lot of problems are to do with Canonical issues…….I have commented on the thread at Google Groups a fair amount:-

    http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps/browse_thread/thread/f205fbfdafd68c56/a060130ccbba4c4b?lnk=raot#a060130ccbba4c4b

    Sites seem to have things in common that they have an indexing/split PR etc on non-www and wwws. The issues vary between sites a lot. EG. Some sites have split homepage PR/BL, some sites have split internal page PR/BL while the homepage is looking about fixed. Some sites still have the non-www and the www pages indexed (In fact try a site:domain.com search on some of them and then a site http://www.domain.com search – you will see that the site ordering on the domain.com sometimes excludes the http://www.domain.com results)

    I dont want to troll that feedback though – but if you do (as in Google) look at most of the sites (I think all) they have issues in that area – OK could be conincidence of course.

    GG commented ages ago at wmw (years – cant find the post) that Canonical issues could effect crawling etc, and I remember that free host sites got removed at one stage.

  15. I think you should admit, that you watch Buffy πŸ™‚

  16. I think you should admit, that you watch Buffy πŸ™‚

    Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want most people to know who he is πŸ™‚

  17. Thanks for the love and all the Buffy queries Matt ! Matt G, we’ll fix the bad store location near you. Humans validate most of our store locations but that one slipped through, sorry.

  18. Thanks for the love and all the Buffy queries Matt ! Matt G, we’ll fix the bad store location near you. Humans validate most of our store locations but that one slipped through, sorry.

    What about Canada? Just because we’re America’s socially retarded little brother doesn’t mean we don’t like to shop, too. πŸ˜€

  19. Adam, I don’t want most people to know who I am. Think about all the headaches Larry/Sergey must get. No thanks.

    TouchΓ©.

  20. The google co-op is the most confusing thing I’ve ever seen…It looks awesome if I could figure out how to use it…but the trends is addictive, no doubt !

  21. “One of the things that strikes me about Google Co-op is that it’s open; many vertical searches are walled gardens, but Co-op is more of an open garden that anyone can contribute to; the users get sent outside of Google.”

    It’s openness is the pathway to spam, which Google is trying to avoid by having a directory of trusted contributors, a strategy that doesn’t scale.

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