Give Google Contributor a try

Recently I’ve seen several interesting conversations about ad blocking, and I wanted to remind people about a great offering called Google Contributor. With Google Contributor, you contribute a certain amount of money each month. That subscription means that you see fewer ads on the web, and you support the sites that you visit with your money.

You get to decide how much to contribute (I do $10/month, but for example you can do $2/month if you prefer). The more you contribute, the fewer ads you see. The handwave-y explanation that when you go to a website, your monthly subscription actually bids on your behalf in ad auctions. So you end up buying the ad yourself rather than someone else. This is cool for several reasons:

1. You support the sites you visit without expending any energy.
2. You see fewer ads.
3. (And this is the cool part) you get to decide what to show in that ad space instead of ads.

That’s right: you can pick a custom URL to show to yourself instead of ads. It’s like buying space on a billboard and showing nature scenes instead of ads. Personally, I like to show a dynamically generated Mondrian-like pattern:

Mondrian-like pattern

But here’s the part I love: when you sign in, click the gear icon and then “Advanced settings,” and at the bottom of the page you can provide any custom URL you want (it does have to serve over https). You could replace ads with pictures of kittens, or your family. Or make ads your todo list, or a reminder to get back to work. Think outside the box, like Paul Ford. It’s the open web–you can have all kinds of fun with your HTML.

Here are some common misconceptions about Google Contributor:

Q: I thought Google Contributor only worked with ten websites or so?
A: No, it works with millions of websites. Contributor launched with a small set of websites initially, but if a website runs Google ads like AdSense or DoubleClick for Publishers, it’s likely to be compatible with Contributor.

Q: Isn’t there a waitlist to join? Or I need an invite or something?
A: Not anymore! You can sign up immediately and support tons of websites with one monthly payment.

Q: Can I see which websites I’m supporting?
A: Yes! You get a report that looks like this:

Contributor payout report

(Adding a few more questions)

Q: Why don’t you support Google Apps accounts? I thought it only worked with Gmail accounts?
A: This is very fresh news, but I believe Google Apps accounts are now supported. Try it out!

Q: Why doesn’t Contributor support country X or currency Y?
A: It’s safe to assume that the Contributor team has heard that feedback. I’m happy to pass that feedback on as well. That can be a complicated issue though.

If you like the web and use it as much as I do, why not support some of your favorite websites while reducing the number of ads you see? Give Google Contributor a try now.

How Cuil generates its categories

This “hairball” post about Cuil isn’t really snarky, so I’ll post it. Cuil is no longer around, but it did spawn a funny post on Reddit about Cuil Theory.

Cuil launched this week. For a search engineer, a new search engine is like a Christmas present: you can’t wait to play with it. Most search engineers can get a good feel for the strengths/weaknesses of a new engine within 10-15 queries. And I’d like to think that with another 5-10 queries, I can usually figure out how I’d spam a search engine. It’s my job to protect Google’s index from spam, so naturally I’m intimately familiar with different webspam techniques. 🙂

What’s also fun is to figure out the how a search engine provides various features. For example, for a Cuil search like [matt cutts] you’ll see the following categories:

Cuill categories

Where do those categories come from? Most people didn’t drill down that far, but it’s quite doable to figure out. If you want, take a few minutes to see if you can puzzle out how the categories are generated before reading on.

Google OS figured it out, for example: “Another interesting idea is the explorative category section that shows related Wikipedia categories and topics.” With a little work, it’s easy to verify that the right-hand box comes from Wikipedia category pages. For example, the string “matt cutts” occurs on the Wikipedia page for search engine optimization, and that page also includes a link to a search engine optimization consultants page. Sure enough, one of the categories listed for [matt cutts] is “Search Engine Optimization Consultants” and the entries under that category are from Wikipedia. Likewise, I think the Wikipedia page for Traffic Power and its link to a category page for black hat SEO probably accounts for why the category “Black_hat_seo” appears for my name.

There’s nothing wrong with surfacing Wikipedia category pages, of course, but sometimes that can lead to some drift in topicality. For example, p2pnet wrote about a search for their name: “[The search query] p2pnet.net, however, gave Canadian copyright law, Project Gotham Racing Series, file sharing networks, Wired magazine people, and filesharing programs.” You can see the categories for the search [p2pnet.net] below:

Cuill categories for p2pnet

And this Wikipedia page has the string “p2pnet.net” and also has a category page for “Project Gotham Racing series”. The idea of surfacing Wikipedia category pages will have advantages and disadvantages depending on the user and the query.

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