Barry Schwartz (or Rustybrick)’s excellent Search Engine Roundtable blog has been named the top Search Marketing Blog of 2005 by 2065 readers of Marketing Sherpa, mostly marketing executives. The award is part of their Best Blogs of 2005 awards, which also named Seth Godin’s blog the Best Individual blog on Marketing, MarketingVOX the Best Group Blog. Last year, Search Engine Lowdown won in the category, then called the Internet Marketing Blog category.
(via Search Engine Watch)
June 15th, 2005
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
no comments
Web marketter Ken McGaffin says he found an invisible link on the Financial Times’ website acting as search engine spam. He shows a screenshot of the link, invisible and then made visible by selecting it. Apparently FT responded by making the link visible.
I don’t care anymore. This is the fourth time I’ve reported on a reputable website doing something of this sort. I’m refusing to be outraged anymore. Oh, I’ll still post about it, but I’m not going to let it piss me off. Let this be the spammers problems. If you sell a link to some website and hide it, just to pass along PageRank to a website, you will get found out, and hopefully 100 or more bloggers will write about it. Then, when people search for your website, maybe they’ll see the word “dishonest” in a high ranking article about your company. And you’ll deserve it, you certainly will.
Take a look at the Google results for “Matt Mullenweg“. Number six? Why its my post about him gaming Google (and I love Matt’s software like crazy, but he still deserved to be outed). On a search for “Syndic8“, number three is Andy Baio on their trangression, and number 2 on a search for the “Stanford Daily” reveals Asa Dotzler’s post on theirs. There are few companies with the Google juice to get around this. Thus far, every company that has been found out has very bad Google results, and that seems quite fitting.
(via Techdirt)
June 15th, 2005
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
one comment
SiliconBeat points to a GreaseMonkey script that adds a “delete” button to Gmail, which doesn’t normally have one. Very cool.
… Gmail engineers apparently view the delete button as a quaint time-waster. Gmail hides its delete function in a non-intuitive pull-down menu and discourages people from using it.
Not a problem anymore.
UPDATE: There seems to be a major bug in the script, which Arjun says is related to the timing at which it refreshes the page. This causes Google to lock out your account until you get support to reactivate it. Arjun does say that it is fixed in the latest version of the script, but make sure you are aware of the risk before you install it.
June 15th, 2005
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Gmail, Email, General |
4 comments
Weblogs’ Brad Hill has some good stuff on Google (and I’m too busy trying to catch up after taking a few days), so I’m just going to link to all of it:
- Google comes in 3rd in brand growth survey (Apple was #1, Yahoo #5)
- Google Code has a page listing a bunch of Google SiteMaps generators [post, via Blogoscoped]
- Gary Price took advantage of the Michael Jackson verdict to see who got the story first, Google News or Yahoo News. Naturally, Yahoo did, because Yahoo is hand edited and any human would know instantly that the verdict was the biggest news of the day, even before the story broke. Meanwhile, Google’s algorithm needs to see a pattern, which apparently took half an hour (not bad, but not as good). [post]
- On a side note, even though its absurdly off-topic, I wouldn’t mind if anyone ranted (or raved) on the Jackson verdict in the comments. Could be a very fun discussion I’d love having.
June 15th, 2005
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Google News, General |
no comments
BetaNews reports that Google has struck a deal to bundle some of its utilities with WinZip, the popular compression software. The lead says it all:
In a marketing tactic used primarily by spyware and adware companies, Google has begun bundling its Google Toolbar and Desktop Search software with the popular WinZip archive utility.
Yes, bundling is evil. Not entirely of course, but this is opt-out bundling, where the programs will be installed unless the user notices and tells the installer not to. Opt-out is always evil. Why should anyone have to opt-out? If Google believes its software is very useful (and I would certainly agree with that), then why not just offer it to the user during install, but not installing it by default?
Most people install software by just clicking “Next” over and over, and they won’t even notice Google’s programs are being installed. They won’t even notice the slight loss in performance on their machines from running Google Desktop Search. They won’t realize that their IM conversations are being logged. They won’t realize a lot of things that are happening without them choosing to do so. “Evil”? You betcha.
I think antispyware programs should report this as low-risk spyware, what with the privacy implications inherent in GDS and the Toolbar’s AutoLink feature being installed without the user’s knowledge. Not that those programs are as bad as real spyware, but it is the responsibility of antispyware programs to warn us if those programs are being installed, so we can make informed decisions. Don’t be surprised if Microsoft AntiSpyware starts warning on Google software. It certainly should.
(via Weblogs)
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On a side note, huge thanks to Coolz0r for taking the reigns these last two days. I’m thrilled to see it worked out as well as it did, with some real good posts. Hopefully a bunch of you guys have subscribed to his blog (but don’t stop reading this one!).
June 15th, 2005
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Microsoft, Desktop, Desktop Search, Tools, General |
one comment
