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Always Connected Marketing
by Sasha.The buzz around the productivity sphere is the recent Associated Press poll which shows 1 in 5 bringing their laptop along on vacation.
Besides using that laptop to offload digital photos from the camera or watch a DVD or two, we do quite a bit of communicating on that vacation laptop.
1 in 5 of those who bring their laptop stay connected to work somehow. They check email, check work messages, work. And a whole bunch of course check our personal messages.
Google goes offline
by Sasha.The number one request when it comes to online application is offline access.
It seems counterintuitive but yes, people want to be able to prepare email, read feeds, compose documents, offline and then, once online, have those actions translate back into the online application.
It is what has set hosted applications and locally ran software apart. Google Docs & Speadsheets is for online, Microsoft Office if for offline.
Not any more.
With Google Gears an online application, any online application, can be made to run offline as well.
Barry Schwartz has a look at Google Reader offline.
Google: privacy policy is vague
by Sasha.Peter Fleisch, Google’s global privacy counsel, while defending Google’s privacy policies, has admitted to the BBC that Google’s privacy policy is vague at at least two points.
“The general principle is that we are going to maintain the privacy of our users; that is pretty fundamental.
We will never transfer to third parties, including advertisers, any personally identifiable information about our users.
Our goal is to be as transparent as possible with our users when it comes to privacy. That transparency builds trust and we will succeed or fail on whether our users trust us.
– Peter Fleisch
Google’s Latest Conversion Tool
by The Guy.Conversion is always a key component to any marketing strategy and Google’s new one is rather inviting.
In short, it’s a “Don’t click here” call to inaction.
And the five year old in me say: Uh-huh.
Mea culpa. I had to click something.
The long and short of it is I really can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. That little “don’t click here” order has stayed with me all afternoon.
And of course, if you see enough of those little don’t click here signs, I suppose it could prove enough incentive to move to the paid listings, but Google wouldn’t do that… would they?…
Can Google Count?
by The Guy.So, courtesy of our resident Wizard and his apprentice, a query was postulated today.
Why doesn’t Google provide numbers beside rankings?
If you look at Yahoo, you’ll notice the numbered listings that appear beside each result. 1…. 2… 3…. blah, blah, blah.
The premise put forward today was that Google doesn’t do this because it may inflate clickthroughs of the first position. Interesting thought, that the number “1″ would be more motivation to click than the listing itself.
I’m not sure I agree entirely but it’s an interesting thought.
Google Announces Universal Search
by The Guy.And under the category of not news, Google announced today that is unveiling Universal Search but for the sake of convenience, let’s just call it AGATT. (ALL GOOGLE ALL THE TIME.)
Work with me here. Do a search for red roses on Google, not google images. Theses are the results and my, aren’t those just about the prettiest durn red posies you ever seen? Click on those results and you go to another Google property, not to the web site from which the flowers image orginated.
Do a search for car crash and there it is, as it’s been for months now, a YouTube result and now with pictures!!!
Google Using Click Volumes/Link to Value Links?
by Jeff Quipp.Given the barrage of new link development techniques and spammy approaches that Google et al have had to contend with over the past year, it appears obvious to me that Google needs some divine insight (he says jokingly assuming that their myriad of PhDs haven’t already considered this possibility) in their efforts to define and value inbounds links in the ranking algorithm. People are always trying to game the system, and understandably so when the value of high rankings is soooooo outstanding.
That said, how do the search engines really know if a link is a vote or not, or if it should be counted towards rankings? Its quite obvious that current link valuation techniques have their share of problems, and consequently Dave Naylor’s posting today that Paid Links are being devalued on mass. So we know that Google is trying to solve this problem of link manipulation, but how else can they work to solve it?
Lets look at this from a different perspective. What if the search engines were able to create a ‘checks and balances’ mechanism that provided a second opinion about the value of a link? To some extent they’re already doing this by filtering based on content relevance. So now, lets add a powerful checks and balances mechanism which we’ll call ‘the click test’. In its most simple variation, the click test is just, if a link from site “A” to site “B” is not ‘clicked’ on over a prespecified time period, then Google would set the value of the link to “0″. If it was clicked on, then perhaps Google gives the link a value of “1″. The click test value could then be multipled by the previous value yielding a score of either “0″ or the previous score. Voila … link values are validated on an ongoing basis, and only quality links are scored. Those scoring a “0″ value are completely discounted.
This of course begs a number of other questions, namely:
a) wouldn’t the search engines need to make sure the links aren’t being gamed? The answer is yes … but the search engines can use simple technologies to ensure that the same person doesn’t click on the same links each month. This would be relatively easy to do for a Google, very similar to the algorithms used by Digg and other social media.
b) what if the value of a link was a multiple of the number of clicks it receives, so that the value is not merely as simple as assigning it a “1″? What if sites with links that did not receive clicks received negative points? Certainly possible, but far beyond the scope of this posting. Our main contention here is that, gaming the system should not be your goal, as the effort is doomed to fail long term. Google can use a number of relatively straight forward approaches to validate link worthiness.
c) could they gather these statistics? Absolutely, given all the tracking information Google has (see Why Does Google Remember Information About Searches and Yesterday’s “the SEP guy” posting on SEP You Have the Right to Remain Silent. It wouldn’t even require a whole lot more computing power to be frank.
So where does this leave us? Apparently, its going to leave me with an experiment to perform. That said, stay tuned, as I’ll set-up and report on the experiment. In fact, special offer; subscribe to our feed through Feedburner, and we’ll make the research findings available only through the feed. Regular blog readers going direct, will not see these results.
Stay tuned!
Google & Your Psychological Profile
by Ruud Hein.Although already tiring, the discussion about Google Web History is anything but over.
Difference is: it’s just gotten a bit scarier.
So far we’re thinking about Web History as the personalized search that isn’t, general user profiles and highly targeted ads.
But how about psychologically profiling you? Figuring out what kind of a person you might be?
Far fetched?
Google has filed a patent detailing how it can profile players of online virtual world games — in real time.
Profiling will take place by evaluating language used as well as game play style.
Google’s Incomplete Web History
by Sasha.Trying out Google’s Web History I see value in instant recall of things you’ve seen but forgot about. Searching your own history, that is.
I already showed how you can have your own web history without Google. Today I found out that I might actually prefer that technique versus Google’s — and privacy has nothing to do with it.
I was reading the extremely interesting New York Times article Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside. Later today I mentioned that article to a friend who asked for the URL. Oh, what a beautiful moment to experiment with the usefulness of Google’s Web History!
Enable Web History Without Google
by Sasha.The majority of people don’t trust search engines when it comes to keeping their search behavior private.
Yet having access to your complete history is useful at times. You just know you recently read that good quote but where is it? You just can’t seem to replicate the search for it.
For those of us who would wish to have the luxury of a complete web history but would like to keep Google in the dark here’s a setup that works.
What you need
