Welcome to InsideGoogle
InsideGoogle will be a mirror of http://www.livejournal.com/community/insidegoogle/, which you can see is a comprehensive source of Google and search engine news. I am still in the process of creating this blog, so for now just use that site.
If anyone would like to help with designing the site (I am going for a clean, Google-like look), just contact me. I am offering an enourmous number of Gmail invites for it, something along the lines of 50.
Search Engine Tool Directory
Michael Wong has now released Search Engines 2, a directory of 12,500 search tools. If you have reason to be reading this, you have a reason to bookmark this site. Hell, I’ll probably get 50 blog posts out of it.
(via Resource Shelf)
Lycos Discussion Forum Search
Lycos is now beta-testing a discussion forum search engine. It allows you to search all the forums over the internet (presuming it has indexed all of them). This is definetly something Google should have done a long time ago, much like the blog search engine we keep hoping they release. Must suck getting beaten to the punch by Lycos, doesn’t it?
(via Pandia)
Search Harder?
SEO Roundtable says there is another new Google feature that I can’t reproduce, but they have a link that shows what it does. Apparently, Google has added a button to the bottom of some search engine results pages (SERP) that says “Search Harder”. A normal search for cars gives you 83,600,000 results. The “Search Harder” result is 341,000,000 strong (check the URL to see how it differs). What is the difference? The “Search Harder” search is the slowest search Google has ever released. The normal search took a Google-typical 0.23 seconds. This expanded search took 9.54, which is most likely why it is not the normal Google search. Could this be why even though we got our third backlink update of late, we have not seen a PageRank update in months? Has Google’s database finally gotten too large for its computing power, and the company cannot make that new database available for fear of losing customers due to reduced speed? Is “Search Harder” a test to see if we will accept a far slower Google? Time will tell.
GOOG Faces Major Test In Just Two Days
SAP Info says that Google’s stock price will be tested Thursday, when the first “lock-up” period ends. The lock-up period, which normally lasts 180 days, prevents certain insider investors from dumping their shares so soon after an IPO. Google decided to do several lock-up periods, to avoid releasing 270 million shares at once, so instead we see 4.6 million new Google shares Thursday, an unprecedented 15 days after going public. Google has been breaking all the rules, so we’ll have to see if avoiding one bad day by creating a lot of smaller bad days pays off. It may not, since two venture capitalist firms already want out.
Search Engine Radio
Yup, there’s an internet radio station dedicated to search. Shows are Tuesday at noon Eastern time. The archives contain host Brad Fallon talking to John Battelle, Barry Schwartz, Andy Beal, and several other experts in the world of search or SEO. Tres’ cool.
(via Google Blogoscoped and John Battelle’s Searchblog)
WinFS Ain’t Coming, Google Plans Party
In possibly the best news for Google since they made several billion dollars, Microsoft has announced it is scaling back Longhorn, specifically removing WinFS. Longhorn, Microsoft’s next OS due in 2006, will no longer contain a Google-like file system, designed to take on the number one search engine’s move into the desktop. Google’s major future strategy is rumored to involve producing Google for the desktop, allowing users to search the massive amounts of data they store on large hard drives. By delaying Longhorn, Microsoft is ceding the battle to Google, and will be forced to play catch-up when WinFS finally releases.
The Incredible Linktron5000
Google Blogoscoped brings us The Incredible LinkTron5000, which takes any web site and gives you its Unbreakable Link, that is a link that will bring you to the page through Google, even if the page moves, because Google can always find it. It works by including the most obscure terms on the page. This is also known as a memomark or a Google URL. Phillip has his own version, but it uses the most common words on the page, so it is less precise. My site worked perfectly in the LinkTron, but not in his Memomarker.
Why Gmail Is A Spam Killer
Sushubh Mittal at Search Engine News Journal points out problems email marketters face with the advent of Gmail and context sensitive ads. The main problem is that when they spam you, a relevant ad, most likely from a competitor, appears next to the email, and the user is more likely to click on that than your spam. It points out two solutions: either eliminating Gmail from spam mail lists (which would push everybody to use Gmail) or delivering all ads as images, which would clog up all the smaller than Gmail inboxes and eliminate relevant ads. I propose a different solution for spammers, that Gmail users will hate. Spammers can send emails to only Gmail users that contain specific fake words. They can then buy those fake worde for next to nothing in AdWords. When a user looks at those fake emails, they see that companies ads, and are so frustrated by the spam that they are more likely to click on the ad, which in turn costs the advertiser next to nothing. If an advertiser tries this, feel free to skewer me.
Google Adware? Shudder…
John Battelle, and before him, Gary of SearchEngineWatch, discuss a patent Google filed three days ago. The title: Serving content-relevant advertisements with client-side device support. Read the whole thing (it’s one paragraph, ya lazy bum), but the gist is its a patent for a program that delivers ads to your computer. Since Google has sworn never to deliver spyware, this patent either (a) covers somehow a previous Google app, just in ways that are not obvious, or (b) Google is designing a program you will want to install to deliver ads. I’m thinking an offline Gmail POP3 app that still contains Google AdWords. A great way of keeping things profitable and delivering what users want.
