Today’s search podcast covers Google Answers not allowing questions about
Google; Google’s inaccurate results counts; Google partnering with Adobe on
distribution; the Matt Cutts vacation countdown and more!
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Below are links to items discussed:
- Google
Answers: Ask Whatever You Like, Except About Google
We wrote earlier about Google pulling a question at Google Answers about
Google. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped followed-up further and found
that Google officially disallows people to ask questions about the company
because the researchers at Google Answers aren’t Google employees. Got that?
Freelance researchers are apparently qualified to answer questions about any
other company in the world, but when it comes to Google, special treatment is
required. Incredible….
- Google,
Kill The Web Search Counts!
Number one on my 25 Things I Hate About Google list from March was "web search
counts that make no sense." This week’s fiasco with the "5 billion spam pages"
in Google only underscores that those counts really are a big issue that can
be noticed by more than a few tech heads. Fix them or get rid of them, I
say….
- More
Stats & Features From Google Sitemaps
The Inside Google Sitemaps Blog announced more features and statistics added
to the Google Sitemaps product. The features mainly include additional
statistics, but you can also find additional tools. Here is a quick rundown of
the new items you can find at Google Sitemaps. + Unlimited crawl errors in
reports + More query stats, a lot more, including reporting on subfolders +
Common words report increased to show 75 words from 20 + Submit up to 500
sitemaps under one Google Account, up from 200 + Adsbot-Google useragent added
to robots.txt tool + Added a rate this tool poll. That…
- Google
Partners With Adobe For Toolbar Distribution In Shockwave, Other Product To Be
Named
Both Adobe (PDF link) and Google have announced a new deal where Adobe will
distribute the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer as part of Adobe
Macromedia Shockwave Player downloads. That was supposed to begin yesterday,
and bundling with other Adobe products will happen in the future. Wait a
minute? Weren’t Yahoo and Adobe buddy-buddies? Yes — a special version of the
Yahoo Toolbar is built into the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader program, through
a deal dating back to October 2004….
- Google
Updates Toolbar Privacy Policy
It appears to me that Google updated the Google Toolbar Privacy Policy
yesterday. I know the dates do not reflect that on the page, but if you take a
look at the current version and compare it to the cached version from Jun 16,
2006 you will notice a lot of changes. Below are some of the larger changes to
the privacy policy….
- New
Search Patents: June 22, 2006 – Google File System, Microsoft Blocks, and
Yahoo Autonotifications
Google patents the Google File System, Microsoft claims a Functional Object
Model for mobile devices, and Yahoo! (Overture) describes an autonotification
process to inform advertisers of when a certain condition has been met
concerning one of their ads….
- Wall
Street Journal Piece On Tracking
Mylene Mangalindan of the Wall Street Journal wrote a solid piece on Monday
that was unfortunately buried at the end of the annual All Things Digital
section. If you’re a multi-channel internet marketer, read her article, Ad
Vantage (Paid reg. required). The piece looks at potential pitfalls of
advertising online without proper analytics tracking and covers such topics as
Garden Harware?s difficulties tracking which search advertising or comparison
shopping clicks actually convert (PriceGrabber and Shopping.com are singled
out), eBay?s solution for search marketing (seems they developed a system
in-house after leaving Efficient Frontier), Alibris? problems with affiliate
sales (not all…
- What the
Critics Said
The web has made it easy to seek out criticism to help us decide what to
watch, listen to or read. But as with web search in general, finding the best
sources of criticism can sometimes be a frustrating experience. In today’s
SearchDay article, Searching for Critical Acclaim, I take an in-depth look at
a service that aggregates reviews of movies, books, music and more and assigns
a unique score that represents the collective critical opinion on the quality
of each reviewed title….
- When’s
Matt Cutts Back From Vacation Countdown Clock
Thomas Bindl does what I was hoping someone would do — make a countdown clock
for when Google’s Matt Cutts is returning from his vacation, spotted via
Threadwatch. I’ve seen a number of posts in various places suggesting that
Google has been having its recent spam and indexing problems because Matt’s
finally taken a nice, long break. Bull. Matt’s great, a huge resource to
Google, but the problems going on seem far more fundamental than Matt being
away. If they really are due to him being gone, then Google has even bigger
issues to deal with. Still, plenty of us…