Google kicks ass in search. There’s no doubt there. It seems they are continually jumping into anything and everything they can, but nothing has really become as successful as their search product.

Now the talk is about their new open source web browser, Chrome. When I hear “Chrome”, I think of shiny metal on cars. I also think of a band I always dug back in the day called Catherine Wheel who put out an album called “Chrome”. Can Google recreate the word “Chrome” with a shiny, cool web browser? Tough road to climb.

I’m giving it a test run now and it will take some getting used to, but the initial look and feel is very ‘Google’; simple and clean. I’ll be waiting to hear of data collection claims by the smart people who will dissect the source code, but for now, I’ll use it sparingly.

Here’s a collection of features the current version has with a video.

Have you tried it out yet? Thoughts?

Earlier this week we attended the SES San Jose show. The show was awesome, as usual. We met many new faces and noticed many familiar faces.

Unfortunately we made it a quick trip this year and missed the Search Bash, but we did attend the G00G Dance for a little while, which is always worth the trip.

Here are a few interesting thoughts I have looking back:

• Quite possibly the worst food ever served at a conference I’ve attended.
• Being that the show was in “Silicon Valley”, isn’t it odd that the Hilton, where we stayed, did not have wireless internet in the hotel rooms?
• Should we hint to MCutts that we really don’t approve of what he does and maybe suggest that he looks for something else to do? A kind of ‘reciprocal link’.
• Is there really anywhere in the states that has better weather than California?
• There are so many good looking people that are in our industry these days, I’d say the “Nerd” tag is long gone!
• 2 hours delay there and 2 hours delay return with American Airlines. Can someone say “NO MORE!”
• While at the G00G Dance, someone left their “footprint” on the life sized globrite they had on display:

I’m not sure why I didn’t look at the dot com while researching my last blog about Knol, but something made me think of it today. Pretty interesting move by using the name “Knol”, since someone named “H Knol”, from the Netherlands, has owned and operated Knol dot com since November of 2002. (whois source)

After translating this page correctly (Yahoo absolutely sucked at it!), presumably ‘Knol’ him/herself, discussed the recent launch of Google’s Knol,

Google is working on “Knol”
UPDATE 24-7-2008 UPDATE 24-7-2008

On various Web sites (including nu.nl, Google Blog, Blog Hosting 040) is now officially read that Google now has its own wikipedia started with the name Knol. There are articles by professionals and put these can be appreciated by readers.

And that we move google can appreciate Clearly, the focus on, especially our domain, is again grown considerably.

It needs no explanation that we are not here to follow up, as in december.

NOTE: We sell steam cleaning equipment and don’t sell our domain !!

Friday 14 december:
On a blog from Google published an article which reported that Google was working on Knol. This is a kind of combination of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia personal paginabouwer Squidoo. Advertising revenue goes to the Internet to share with the authors.

Knol is an abbreviation for “knowledge”, speaking of “nol”
Now you will think what that has to do with Tuberous Stoomreinigings Systemen?

Well, from that Friday there is immediately a true run in areas that had the word “Knol” in itself, as also the domain knol.com.

This has resulted in tens of thousands of visitors who came to take a look at the website of Knol.com! In a short time we had received visitors from more than 130 countries from around the world.

Fortunately, the website was able to be able strongholds and the site remained in the air.
But that was not in, we were also alleman by Jan and asked if we wanted to sell the domain. Unfortunately, we have to disappoint everyone, how beautiful their offerings sometimes has been.

In short, it was a special experience …

So imagine that. You sell steam cleaning products in the Netherlands operating under your last name, then one of the world’s wealthiest companies comes along and chooses your name to run one of its future products under. Would you sell? Or would you remain as is and constantly have huge bandwidth bills due to Googler’s constantly hitting the wrong site?

I checked to see what trademarks there were listed at the USPTO.gov and the only thing that came up with Google’s registration in December of 2007. I dealt with a trademark dispute many years ago in another business and can see where the original Knol owner wouldn’t have much of a dispute, other than keeping Google out of the geographic region where Knol products are sold. But how likely is that!

There are also a couple of previous owners of knol dot com that might be kicking themselves in the rears for letting the name go. Looking on Archive.org for knol dot com, it would appear a company named Knoll and Company, Inc had ownership back in 1999 & 2000, then another company called the KnollGroup ran the domain for 2001 and most of 2002. Think they wish they had a do-over? There are also 72 Whois changes for the domain, so I’m sure there are probably more.

Just a little further insight into Google’s new Knol.

For some reason, the name reminds me of the old “Gary Gnu Show”. “No Gnews is Good Gnews!”

As defined on the front page of Knol:

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

Of course, if you look at the top left of the page, where the logo is, it defines it as:

A unit of knowledge

Maybe the 2nd one is their slogan and the 1st is the actual definition. Just to make sure I understood it completely, I do what I always do and went to my trusty online dictionary and did a quick search to define knol. There is only 1 result, but it links to some acronym finder site and this is what it tells me:

Knoll (postal suffix)

😐 . . . I’m confused now.

I have always thought ‘Google’ was a very creative and clever name. The story of how they came to the spelling of their name is a fun read, but armed with this knowledge it makes me wonder where ‘Knol’ came from. Maybe someone has some insight to this and can enlighten us.

Anyhow, Knol is going to be the new wikipedia. You submit articles about a topic and I’m sure that after a few years, it will be the predominant top listings in their search results. The only problem I have with Wikipedia and possibly Knol is the fact it can be slanted towards whoever controls it. For example, in Wikipedia there are people who govern different categories and ultimately have control over what is allowed and what is not. I see so many times where a business about “Widgets” is listed as a resource, but if another business about “Widgets” tries to provide a link to their site, it’s rejected. If the person rejecting has ties to the first business, is it really fair to the second business trying to add their link? There are good editors, but all it takes is one bad apple to ruin the whole thing.

What does this all mean? Go to Knol right now and start adding good info about your site while the service is still new.

Google does own all of your information in some way or fashion, but just how safe is your information with the monster? Tonight I happened on a couple screens that suggest our information isn’t all that safe. Maybe it’s a glitch, but the fact remains, I got these screens thrown at me. All hackers need is a split second to get in and grab what they need.

If you want your online business to be worth a flip these days, you have to market for Google results. They’re pushing 75% of all online searches these days and just to put this into perspective, I’ll plug in a few numbers to illustrate how important Google is to an online business.

An average conversion rate for internet sales probably falls around 2-3% of traffic you receive, we’ll use 3% for this example. Your site receives 10k visitors per month and the average sale price of what you offer is $100. Let’s see what Google means to your business:

Need I say more?

But why do I say “Search Somewhere Else”?

It seems like Google is getting into everything we do now. They keep track of every step you take if you’re using any of their products. If you’re marketing for Google, then you’re more than likely using some of their products. Any of their products will place cookies on your computer and they log everything you’re doing. Since they came out and said they track our IP and cookie search logs, if you do anything remotely questionable (which everything will be questionable at some point with them), then why give them any sort of insight?

Using your customer data to improve things is a common thing these days. The problem I have is how Google uses this information to possibly hurt businesses and people’s livelihoods. So many stories pop up where a website disappears from Google and they have no idea why. Sometimes it’s warranted, sometimes it’s not. Unless you know where to go or who to speak to, being dropped from Google can literally shut a business down. This all sounds very similar to what people had to say about Microsoft back in the day and it doesn’t make sense that someone should have that much power over so many people.

With this in mind, if you do any marketing on Google, it would probably be a wise move to limit your use of Google services and/or products, but when you do, make sure you do what you can to limit their visibility. When you want to search, use one of the other search engines like Yahoo, Live or Ask.

We can all agree that the past year of link building, well SEO in general, has been quite the hot topic. Damn near ‘everyone’ participated in link building in some form or fashion. If you read someone that says they have never participated in link building, you can bet most of your money that they’re not telling you the whole truth. It was just part of the landscape and you had to do it to compete. A good analogy is like trying to compete in a marathon but not working out, you can still participate but you probably won’t finish.

All this rambling leads me to my point. Since the ‘so called’ hammer was thrown down, a lot of people have either turned their heads towards link building or have continued on as under the table as possible. Those that have turned their heads have found it impossible to compete, once again. Why? It’s because linking is still alive and well. The truth of the matter is it will always be alive and well unless the engines change the way they rank websites, a point that I’ve said over and over. Sure, they can try and slap people’s wrists, but if you knock 10 down, there’s 10 more waiting to take their place.

A great example of how well the text linking business still works, I bring to you exhibit A. If you look at the page source, you’ll find that it is nothing more than a frameset page with absolutely zero content. Only a title and meta description. It is currently ranked #1 for the term “Text Link Ads“, which is pretty competitive. I first thought our pals over at TLA were back on track but then realized it was just an affiliate page. Either way, I was thrilled to see what I was looking at. That gives even more proof that you can rank a page with nothing but a pure linking campaign. All you have to do is look at the back links listed and you’ll find their text links. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you have become a non-believer, what more proof do you need that we can help!

For those of you that follow the search engines and their cockiness that flies first class wherever they go, you should be very familiar with Google and their ‘unbeatable search algorithm’. The Google algo has probably been one of the most talked about, targeted, studied, tested, learned and contested of any other search algo in the history of search engines. Here are a few points that would put them in this position:

1. They own between 60%–70% of the search market/queries, so why not target the big dawg?
2. They proclaim to have the most detailed and steel proof equations of any out there.
3. They claim to know of all webspam and can stop most of it with their algorithms.
4. They have attracted some of the smartest people in the world to work for them.

With this knowledge at hand, how would you feel to know the ‘smartest algorithm’ in the world has had to resort to human editing to better their search engine results?

Well it is happening and the once untainted results will now be at the mercy of a Wikipedia type editor, which is paid by the hour and will undoubtedly be in bed with the market they govern, somehow. If not when they sign up, definitely once they have the power. Google is offering to pay $25/hr and that is great money, but who wouldn’t take side payments for doing whatever? “Hey Joe Blow, I’ll give you $50k to make site A vital and site’s B, C, D, E, F and so on non-relevant.” Would you take the bribe? I think most people that will be doing this would.

Here is the posting on Craigslist found recently:

Search engine results rating:

We need individuals who can work from home to perform search engine results ratings. The work is straight-forward; you log into a Website and then look at predetermined web pages or other similar material and rank them based on how relevant they appear for a given search query. The workload could be anywhere from a few hours a month to a few hours a week. You will need to have a PayPal account as that is how you will be paid.

When you perform this testing you must have the ability to sit down at a computer uninterrupted for 1 hour periods. Also, we will check the data. If the data is inconsistent or done with little regard for quality, you will lose your opportunity to do this in the future.

If you’re interested, here are a few more details:
-You must be willing to be interviewed for approximately 15 minutes on the phone.
-You must be totally and completely fluent in English.
-Please have a college degree, or an AA degree at a minimum.
-Please send your resume along with a brief paragraph about yourself, and also tell us how long you have been using the Internet, how many hours a day/week you use the Internet, and what you typically do on the Internet.

The pay is approximately $25 per hour.

It may take us up to a week to get back to you so please be patient.

Thanks!

And here are the guidelines handed out.

Maybe the business of the future will be to load up a building full of employees, who all apply for the ‘human search project’, and then they become the online service who can apply spam, Non Relevant or Off-Topic tags on the competition listings and then tag the customer sites with the vital mark. Google will basically pay for your entire workforce salaries, maybe you make money off of the newer employees, then give the veterans the full $25/hr plus a little compensation from sales you earn for the service provided to individual companies, seo agencies and other search related marketing firms. The great part is getting off the ground would require very minimal costs, since salaries are usually the biggest cost.

The underlying point here is after all that we’ve heard from Google about having the smartest search algorithms out there, no matter what they do, people will always be smarter than machines. However, once you start inserting humans into the mix, the chances of corruption goes through the roof, as my example company above illustrates.

Google, don’t become Mahalo! They suck for a reason.

PS. (If someone takes my business model idea, at least give me a thank you!)

When you come across a SEO agency, their main motto is, “We’ll get you listed naturally in the search engine results.” According to www.spamzilla.io, the goal is to eliminate the need for PPC because you’ll be listed in the natural results. That is even the motto in our niche market. The idea is you get search engines to read your site, then your site will be listed well for your target keywords. Plain and simple, right?

If that is the case, wouldn’t it make sense that the SEO company you find ranks well for their own keywords and do not have to attract people by using AdWords? You can browse around these guys to find a reputable SEO agency for your job. Should it make more of an impact to the customer if that company doesn’t spend a dime on AdWords and only gets their customers by way of natural search traffic or through non-search related advertising?

I think it is quite humorous when I see SEO or SEM companies that don’t rank well for a single keyword in their own industry, but they tell potential customers that they can do it for them. While this maybe true of reputable SEO companies like Home Service Direct, it’s not necessary that the same tactic employed by them works for other companies. You could definitely point the finger towards the fact customers aren’t hip enough to do the research on SEO companies before they spend a dime with them, however, I know of situations first hand where people in our industry put certain companies in a high regard even though they are nowhere to be found when it comes to natural search.

I’m definitely not here to point anyone out, this post is more about asking the question regarding this subject. I’ve always wondered how a customer feels when searching for red deer seo / search engine optimization services. I know I’ve read new SEO sites that talk a big game, yet they’re nowhere to be found on simple keywords related to them, which always makes me think they’re a bit full of it and I’ve always wondered how the actual customer feels about it. With that being said, some of the smartest cats out there could not rank for the easiest of words, but it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t get amazing results for their customers. If you need this SEO agency in Birmingham, these Quirky Digital SEO professionals can provide your company with the healthy organic growth it needs to be a winner through Google search results.

Look for a company like King Kong that guarantees results! Remember that you can also use a professional Google Ads agency, as that way you are assured of great results and so do not have to worry about such matters.

If you have a second, give me your thoughts. I’d like to hear what everyone else thinks.

Happened across this video and thought it would be fun to show since it involves a set of questions, a smart human and Google. The goal is, one person uses Google to answer the questions and the smart Human uses only his brain. I think this goes to show us the human brain is more powerful than we realize: