Back in the late 1990s when Google was just an idea in two young men’s minds, we in the search engine optimisation industry were making our living positioning our clients with the likes of AltaVista, Lycos, etc. And when Google appeared on the scene we were seriously impressed - we became instant fans because the relevance of the results was so good - when you searched for blue widgets you got a serp of blue widgets. But now in the days of Google Earth, Maps, Video etc etc I have to ask whether Google, as regards being a search engine, has taken its eye off the ball?
For instance, this morning one of the extractor fans in our office died, so I searched Google to see if we could still get that particular model so the refitting would be easy. I typed in the following search phrase - Marley extractor fan - and got this -
1st result was www.propertyfinder.com - the page was a house for sale with a Marley fan fitted in the loo 
- 2nd and 3rd results were ebay, the next three results were houses for sale, result number seven was a comparrison shopping site, eight and nine were property sales sites again and number ten was a BBC news item about drugs in the UK that mentioned Bob Marley…
Click here
The BBC News website has just run a piece on Google and its policy on privacy.
Apparently the Article 19 group, a data protection group that advises the European Union, has written to Google expressing concern “that it may be breaking European privacy laws by keeping people’s search information on its servers for up to two years.”
Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, said that Google “was committed to dialogue with the group.” Google will answer the EU’s concerns before the panel’s next meeting at the end of June.
The article goes on to explain the group’s worries and details the current European trends in the field of privacy and data retention - and with Google collecting a massive amount of information about searchers and their online habits it will be interesting to see where all this ends up. Essentially Google’s “mission” is diametrically opposed to most people’s concept of privacy.
Irresistible force meets an immovable object?
Read the BBC News article here
We advise a Scottish holiday website (dot com domain) on search engine optimisation and during the preparation of a monthly report for the client we found a big hole in Google’s results. For the bulk of the relevant search terms they were very highly placed with many number ones when one searched “the web” - but on a “pages from the UK” search, they were not anywhere for anything. Yet the site is quite clearly in the UK, so is Google going too far with its (clumsy) geo-targeting?
Couldn’t sleep last night - this Yahoo! cloaking thing was on my mind - will Google punish me for linking to a “bad neighbourhood”? 
Anyone working within the search engine optimisation industry must surely take notice of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, this is where the search giant lays down the law on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable and mentions two things in particular that are relevant to this situation:
1) “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods”
2) “Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.”
This definately makes Yahoo! a bad neighborhood - and I linked to it! Bugger!
I’ve always thought that linking to relevant sections of the major search engines, Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project helped my readers more clearly understand the backdrop against which we work and showed us working in the spirit of the web - err, I was wrong…
Funnily enough, I remember a similar situation a few years ago when Microsoft was also caught with its pants down. The pages are long gone now, but the incident is still well documented on a few of the search engine forums, like cre8asiteforums, webproworld.com and ihelpyou. Oops! I’ve given Dougie a link - will that come back one day to bite me on the bum? 
I must like living dangerously - linking to these bad neighborhoods - maybe I’ll take up bull riding as a new career
A more than slightly amusing story caught my eye this morning as I did my daily trawl through the online SEO landscape. On agerhart.com is a report that Yahoo! have employed “cloaking” techniques on their Autos’ site. To those who don’t know what cloaking is, it’s the practice of serving up two different pages, one designed for normal users and a second that is designed only to be seen by search engine robots - the latter of which is usually keyword stuffed to increase its chances of appearing highly on the search engine results pages.
Strictly against their own guidelines, this technique is practiced by the so-called “black hat” search engine optimisation companies, where bending and breaking the rules is the norm - not something you would expect from one of the first and well-respected search engine/directory/portal sites on the web.
I don’t tend to go down the “whingeing about everything” route in my SEO ramblings, but talk about being caught with your hand in the cookie jar! Anyways, take a minute to read the full post over at agerhart.
Original blog post here
But it isn’t perfect either…
Interesting news for the search engine marketing community as Google announces the implementation of it’s new Universal Search. Put simply the universal search combines videos, news, books, maps and images into the results for a particular query.
To test this new type of result we searched for Steve Jobs, da boss at Apple - and sure enough the results page had three sub menus, one for the web (normal search) and one each for News and Video. On the displayed page were three sample images followed by normal web results - and this is where the results were far from perfect. For some reason Google is giving massive preference to Wikipedia pages, so instead of the Apple website being number one on the results page it was in fact, number two to Wikipedia’s number one. How can an online encyclopedia built by volunteers with very little control (and lots of opportunities for corruption) be more of an authority on Steve Jobs than the Apple site itself?
Clicking the other two tabs gave a selection of news and video sites - and very nice they were too. This Google Universal Search is great - I am not about to try to find things wrong for the sake of it. Without doubt, Google is the world’s greatest search engine but little details like the Wikipedia thing really bug me.
Read the Guardian article on Universal Search here
I’ve been following a story over at Threadwatch about the US authorities banning troops from using websites like YouTube and MySpace in what appears to be an attempt to censor videos etc depicting real life on the ground.
This quote from the article caught my eye - “The U.S. Army’s not going to pay the bill for you to get on MySpace and YouTube,” said Maj. Bruce Mumford, of Chester, Neb., who is serving as the brigade communications officer for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, in Iraq.
Meaning, we expect you to lay down your life for this (unjust) cause but you cannot do anything that would compromise our propaganda?
Aaron, the main man over there also adds this quote from the BBC News website:
“The US military has taken the war in Iraq into cyberspace, with the launch of its own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.
Its 25 brief clips include footage of US soldiers firing at unseen snipers in Baghdad, handing out footballs to Iraqi children and rescuing an Iraqi family injured by an explosive device. ”
Shortly after reading all this I saw on the Guardian website the news item that Prince Harry will not be going. Remembering the street interviews by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911 documentary asking American politicians about their kids going to fight, I was struck once again with the overwhelming hypocrisy of the current American right.
A victory by the head of the British Army General Sir Richard Dannatt for common sense! Now, let’s make the final leap of faith and bring the troops home now.
</RANT>
Threadwatch story here
Original article here
BBC news article here
Guardian article here
The BBC’s site is currently running a story about uber search engine Google’s new mission - to identify websites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user’s knowledge. Whilst not strictly relevant to search engine optimisation, I have to say it makes a refreshing change to read something positive about Google these days.
From the darling of the seo community to the market leader it has become - Google has had to jump through some hoops and take a massive amount of criticism from all sides, particularly worries that G is collecting so much personal data that even the CIA is jealous!
So to read that Google has characterised the scale of the problem and “analysed the main methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages” is a step towards the end of these nefarious tactics.
Read the BBC article here
Working in the search engine marketing industry invariably means “Google watching” on an almost daily basis. A piece in the Guardian caught my eye this morning - David Adam and Bobbie Johnson report that Google may be intending to track online game players’ habits to better serve relevant adverts.
Inevitably, privacy campaigners were quick to spot the downside of this idea - that Google, already holders of massive amounts of personal data, would be surreptitiously creating psychological profiles of it’s users. Sue Charman of the Open Rights Group comments, “Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people - we’ve already seen the American federal government going to court over data from companies including Google.”
Excellent article that deserves a read by anyone interested in Google’s technology and ambitions - and, of course, those whose job it is to protect our individual freedoms, already seriously eroded by “War on Terror” legislation.
Read the Guardian article here
