Not really. I don't see how all these SEM/SEO experts can go to all these conferences - especially when the 'Internet' obviates the need to actually go!

Reading about the sessions on seoroundtable, InsideGoogle and SEW is better than going. It's like watching an NFL game on TiVO! And you can get some actual work done that day.

PS. Why do all these SES attendees get all worked up about Barry Diller? Who cares? Since when did ask.com ever send you a customer or make you a dime? I get more hits from www.google.pl than I ever do from ask.com...

¶ 2/27/2006

Google is gathering the e-commerce pieces together. Today they put up Google Payments so you can buy stuff and pay through Google. It's visible for certain items on base.google.com - like this: Wanna buy a rock?

Combine base and payment and you get an odd form of Craigslist meets PayPal, with Amazon/Ebay Marketplace thrown in.

Is it any good? Let's wait to see what Paul Kedrosky says. But obviously it's early.

Google is also a bit like Microsoft used to be - their stuff doesn't need to be that good for millions of people to try it. And it's likely that they will eventually subsume the dominant paradigm because they have the most traffic that is searching for something to purchase.

Update: Go here to get on the Google Payments seller waiting list.

¶ 2/24/2006

Here's what I wrote:

Comscore reports around 5B total searches/month in the US across all search engines in July 2005.

...

However, I think comScore and Nielsen are wrong in these estimates. Not wrong by a little, but wrong by a lot. And it throws into question a lot of the analysis that people do about Google and the search engines.

...

Of course, both Yahoo and Google subscribe to these services. I wonder what they think of the accuracy of these reports?

Well, now we know what Google Director of Research Peter Norvig (he's someone who would know) thinks of the accuracy of those numbers. Not much. Take a look at this article lambasting the typical journalist's math skills on Norvig's "blog".

Peter writes:

Finally, another report on Nielsen/NetRatings says that "The activity at more than 60 search sites makes up the total search volume upon which percentages are based -- 5.1 billion searches in this month." Of these, Google gets a 46.3% share of the searches. 46.3% of 5.1 billion is 2.4 billion, so Nielsen/NetRatings (as quoted by these two reporters) is saying that each Google search results in 7,000 clicks.

Exercise for the reader: is the Nielsen/NetRatings estimate of 2.4 billion Google searches per month (which translates to 80 million per day) accurate? Consider research such as ["million google searches per day"] and note the year those estimates were made.

In case you are too lazy or disinclined to do the math, (Norvig would say you'd do fine as a typical journalist), he's implying that those numbers are way off.

Thank you from me to Peter Norvig. I only wish I didn't have to steal bartnagel.com's bandwidth to put up a picture to display of him in one of his loud shirts. Oh what the hell, Norvig probably has $546M in Google cash lying around, and he's stealing bandwidth from Bart, so maybe I'm ok...

¶ 2/16/2006

So here's an interesting mashup - it plugs your Google AdWords campaigns into your Salesforce CRM system: Kieden.com. I just riffled through the website, and it obviously makes heavy use of the Google AdWords API and the Salesforce API.

It might be especially useful for dealing with Google's Click-to-call, I'd think.

¶ 2/16/2006

Here's a mostly civil stream-of-commentness on Firefox 1.5 memory problems. People offer a lot of suggestions, mostly involving disabling caches.

Ben Goodger also posts on minimizing the bloat in firefox. As earnest and well-intentioned as that post is, I have to say: "Too late". Firefox is simply and deservedly "The King of Bloat". Barn. Horse. Left.

You know most of the bloat is just crap I don't need. I don't need any of that stuff. I wish they'd make a stripped down version of firefox without the bloat that just had the good javascript. And maybe the web developer extension. And that's it and that's the only thing I need. And the css compatibility. That's it.

The javascript, the web developer extension and the css, and that's all I need. And these tabs. The javascript, and these tabs, and the css and the web developer extension. And this lamp. The javascript, this web developer extension and the css and the lamp and that's all I need.

¶ 2/15/2006

This is pretty brillant - Yahoo is giving away tools and 'design patterns' for their look and feel. The more screen share that Yahoo's UI gets, the more comfortable the great masses of internet users will be with it.

There's a Ajax javascript library and a bunch of design patterns - stuff like:

• auto-complete
• breadcrumbs
• pagination
• tabs
• ratings

For the average "little one-man shops who are just flailing about", this toolset is a huge productivity boost.

I'm so excited I'm gonna permit myself to post a closing reference to a song lyric, pseudo-Knuthian fashion:

Oh, baby you can walk, you can talk just like me.
With a little practice, you can walk like, talk just like me.
If that’s what you wanna do.

Thanks for sending me an angel Yahoo!

¶ 2/14/2006

Matt Cutts tells us how Google's sitemaps site now lets you test drive changes to your robots.txt files. That's a huge help. Thanks Google.

BTW, Google's Sitemaps really work. I was a bit of a conspiracy theorist about them (i.e. would google use the knowledge of who owns sites to mark down all of your sites if one was a bit iffy?). But they really do get you indexed faster.

For RouterComp, my new network equipment price comparison site, I put up a sitemap of about 3500 pages at Google, and Google had a lot of the pages in the index within 3 days! Yahoo hasn't slurp'd much past the homepage yet. And MSN, I don't think it's ever come by yet.

So don't delay - make sure you get that sitemap mojo workin'

¶ 2/08/2006

I've never really liked many of the blog-network type blogs. Too contrived for me. But Valleywag has already won me over.

First, they've got pix of Larry Page's cute/babe girlfriend! And they've kinda got a Marissa Mayer stalker / fascination thing going. But even more appealing to me was this post:

So, please, let's just stipulate, already: Lloyd Braun is out of Yahoo. The rumors of his departure have been around so long that everyone's bored of them; we're promoting them to the status of fact.

You know I'm a sucker for any Lloyd Braun related snarkiness!

¶ 2/03/2006

Check out this vertical shopping comparison site I wrote: RouterComp.

It's a shopping comparison search engine, mostly for Computer Networking equipment. It uses the Ebay API and the Shopping.com API to show prices and product specifications for both Ebay auctions and online merchants.

RouterComp can help you decide if it's worth buying from Ebay or just buying from a store. It has some stats on pricing and it's easy to compare buy-it-now vs auctions vs other online merchants.

It's not quite Froogle or Become.com, but it's pretty cool to be able to leverage APIs to do something similar.

¶ 2/01/2006