Bloggasm

The New York Times has an article brainstorming a potential search engine that could come along and overtake Google. Considering that Google is #1 in search by a wide margin, this obviously wouldn’t be an easy task. But some web moguls have found a vulnerable kink in Google’s system: it’s run mainly by an algorithm.

New search engines that are emerging are currently using a system that involves a “human factor,” in that humans will go in and tweak the search results to cut down on those who are trying to manipulate the search engine system, otherwise known as “search engine optimization.” Apparently, this idea is so potent that even Google is looking into trying it out.

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After a 10-day period when Ebay pulled all its ads from Google, it finally has resumed its advertising on Google Adwords. Granted, it will be spending far less money on Google

Online auction house eBay Inc. said Friday it will resume advertising through Google Inc., 10 days after it pulled ads from the search engine.

San Jose-based eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) said the removal was an experiment to find the best way to lure customers into its site.

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Ok, I was already amazed at the extravagant luxuries heaped upon Google employees, everything from a professional chef who fixes their lunches to volleyball courts to free on-site hair cuts. But I had no idea that Google was running its own bus transit system:

In Silicon Valley, a region known for some of the worst traffic in the nation, Google, the Internet search engine giant and online advertising behemoth, has turned itself into Google, the mass transit operator. Its aim is to make commuting painless for its pampered workers — and keep attracting new recruits in a notoriously competitive market for top engineering talent.

And Google can get a couple of extra hours of work out of employees who would otherwise be behind the wheel of a car.

The company now ferries about 1,200 employees to and from Google daily — nearly one-fourth of its local work force — aboard 32 shuttle buses equipped with comfortable leather seats and wireless Internet access. Bicycles are allowed on exterior racks, and dogs on forward seats, or on their owners’ laps if the buses run full.

I know that it would be an understatement to say that Google’s online advertising has been successful, but it’s almost hard to believe that they can shoulder this kind of expense. “They run 132 trips every day to some 40 pickup and drop-off locations in more than a dozen cities,” the article says, “crisscrossing six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and logging some 4,400 miles.”

Unfortunately Google won’t discuss the cost of the program. It would have been interesting to know how much money they’re spending on a bus system that rivals any other company.

via rough type

In a new Wired article titled How Yahoo Blew It, Fred Vogelstein highlights the many mistakes Yahoo committed that led to them losing text-advertising dominance. He quickly glosses over what, in my opinion, was their largest mistake by not buying up Google’s search techonlogy when it was first offered to them on the cheap. To Vogelstein, their main problem was that they didn’t refine their text-based advertising quickly enough, buying Overture and then not updating its technology and implementing it into Yahoo right away. At one point of the article, he claims that Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was infuriated because Google’s success “could have been [Yahoo's success]“:

Semel could talk tough because he had a backup plan. Yahoo would go out and buy its own top-notch search engine and its own search-advertising technology, and it would beat Google in the emerging arena of little text ads that pop up next to search results. Semel’s decision to opt for this plan B was a fateful one. It was a smart play — but Yahoo fumbled, bungled, and mishandled its execution at every step. (More on that in a moment.) As a result, Google today controls nearly 70 percent of the search-related advertising market, an industry worth more than $15 billion a year and growing at roughly 50 percent a year. It’s these ads that are the source of Google’s riches and the basis for its expanding power.

And what must infuriate Semel: This could have been Yahoo.

What Vogelstein fails to note properly is that Yahoo’s loss on the text-advertising market is only a small part of the problem. The main obstacle lies with the fact that Google has such a large dominance in search. Sure, if Yahoo had better advertising technology quicker, then they could have gotten a slightly larger chunk than they did, but that still doesn’t mean they would have grabbed the largest market share in online text advertising. They can only get so many people to click on their ads when only a certain number of users are performing Yahoo searches instead of Google searches.

Checking my own stats, 92.58% of search engine hits to Bloggasm come from Google. From Yahoo? A measly 1.88%. It doesn’t even beat out MSN search. To suggest that Yahoo could even come close to out-performing Google in text-based advertising would be to ignore the total number of users who search from the two engines.

Yahoo just simply doesn’t have the numbers.

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Grr…I need to use Technorati to do some research for the new bloggasm case study that’s suppose to launch tomorrow, and of course it’s deciding to act up right now by not displaying the results in the way it’s supposed to (or more specifically, it isn’t displaying a blog’s rank right now). And yet I keep coming back to it, mostly because the other blog search engines don’t provide nearly as many functions.

So what would other blog search engines need to do so that bloggers can have a viable alternative if they don’t want to stick with Technorati?

1. Create a ranking system. I’d say that a lot of Technorati’s searchers are mostly bloggers who are ego searchers. Almost every time I put a link up to a blogger, within 24 hours he or she visits my blog through a Technorati ego search. Obviously, a lot of bloggers, myself included, like to check in on their ranking every day to see if they’ve improved at all.

2. Have a profile-creating system. This allows all your blogs to show under your name within Technorati, and makes it easy for you to find other blogs that have the same writers, since a lot of bloggers have multiple blogs.

3. Create a tag way of searching. A lot of people search by tag rather than just by word-choice.

4. Have blog highlights and display top blog posts. Allows one to see what’s hot in the blogosphere.

5. List “most-searched” items. A lot of people are curious as to what other people are searching for, there’s been lots of times where I’ve seen an odd word on the most-searched list, clicked into it, and was immediately glad I did.

I think if other blog search engines put in these things, especially the blog ranking system, then people would feel more comfortable switching over from Technorati. But for now, most of the blog search engines just allow simple search, and without a good way yet of categorizing the blog posts like Google’s Page Rank system, simple searches mostly give way only to splogs.

UPDATE: looks like it’s working again.

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Ok, this woman, Theresa B. Bradley, admits that she clicked on her own ads on her website, which resulted in her being banned from Google Adsense. Her claim was that she was testing the ads for competitors, but either way, she was. 1. Still profiting off those clicks, 2. Providing fraudulent clicks that the advertiser wasn’t making any money off of:

Steve Bryant at eWeek reports that a woman has sued Google after she was suspended from the program for clicking on her own ads. Theresa B. Bradley filed a lawsuit against Google for $250,000 for fraud and misrepresentation, even though she admits she clicked her own ads “to verify that the advertisers were not selling competing products”.

The site in question is [URL REMOVED], and she claims it took her staff 100 hours for “placing and reviewing HTML code for Google AdSense” on her site which seems to have under a few dozen pages. In addition, Bradley is also claiming her “brief business relationship with Google caused her irreparable harm by damaging her reputation and the reputation of her products and services.”

This is, of course, a bullshit law-suit. Click fraud is such a huge problem that nobody can blaim Google for banning people for life, it’s the only way they can even make a dent in it. People like this are the ones who are going to ruin it for the rest of us.