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Google Updates Google is using third-party sites for rich snippets. This is an important precedent: it’s one of the few cases where Google gives up brand-blessed real estate for non-brand sites. There are some rumblings that Google’s privacy policies may violate HIPAA, but Google appears to fall outside the purview of that law. Google released a…
A hardy band of Google competitors—engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace—have built “Don’t be Evil,” a tool that basically recreates the Search+ experience with social media sites other than Google+. This concretely illustrates one of the lurking problems with Google’s search and social integration: it’s really bad for the search experience. There are a…
Google Updates Danny Sullivan has much more information on the “Don’t be Evil” tool. He actually makes a pretty good case for the bookmarklet as a genuinely useful piece of software: if it weren’t for the life-or-death struggle search and social companies, this kind of thing would be an obvious feature to add. Google may be
Google Updates Google’s Q4 earnings disappointed investors—they had higher ad clicks and lower costs per click (for the first time in a while). It’s hard to understand exactly what happened here, but John Ebbert at Ad Exchanger has an interesting theory: Google may be funneling traffic to PPC advertisers whose cookies can be used by…
A group of large media conglomerates banded together to lobby against a bill pushed by another large group of media conglomerates. In a victory for democracy, one of these enormous self-interested groups got exactly what it wanted from Congress.
That’s not great news.
At best, it’s the status quo: whenever two large interest groups collide,…
When Google announced Search, plus Your World, they made a dramatic decision: they’re embracing the paradigm of a web of people, rather than a web of verbs. And it’s a dangerous move.
There are two broad strategies for improving search engines: making them more aware of intents, or making them more aware of preferences. Most…
Why Infographics Still Work
This horrible Mashable article reveals why infographics are still such a powerful marketing tool. The author of the article clearly has no idea what any of this means (for example, at one point she seems to think that the amount of money Facebook is raising from the IPO is also somehow an…
It’s popular to cast black-hat SEO in moral terms. The popular understanding (made popular by Google), is that black-hat techniques are necessarily bad for the Internt, even if they benefit the spammer. That puts them squarely in the “immoral” category. But as this lengthy analysis from Aaron Wall illustrates, there’s another view: on all fronts, Google…
Is Online Advertising Just Good for Direct Response?
Seth Godin notes that easily-analyzed, numbers-driven direct response ads are the dominant form of online ads, which has some negative side effects. But a Vizu survey indicates that advertisers will spend more online dollars on branding than direct response in the coming year.
What gives? First, there’s sampling: Vizu…
Google has just gotten slammed for apparently subsidizing a huge number of low-quality blog posts, all linking to the Google Chrome download page. Take away the Google brand name, and it’s a classic low-quality SEO campaign: each blog post sticks to a pretty simple template, and is clearly written in order minimize the amount of effort…
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