So I was snooping aroiund YouTube to see what information I could find about Windows 7, when I came across this video of Construction Mike managing his day to day with a myriad of various informational and communication devices, all apparently loaded up with Windows 7.

 While I found most of the devices to be soooooo cool and I want them, I have difficulty actually imagining people from most industries, let alone the construction industry, investing in the number of gadgets per employee that Mike had the good fortune to use in his daily routine.

It was just my birthday, so I get to make a wish. And I’m going to…

I’m going to make a wish for Google, a wish for Yahoo and a wish for MSN/Live/Sympatico.

My wish for Google for 2008.

My biggest wish for Google for 2008 is a “negative” geotargeting capability. As odd as that may sound, in my 2007 travels I came across a need/desire for it more than once. To wit: I want all of Ontario EXCEPT Toronto… ergo, negative option Toronto for me. In the Google world, I can set an all Ontario Campaign and a Toronto campaign. Wouldn’t it simply be easier to do the reverse?

Greed is good but a little common sense is even better.

While cyber Monday and online holiday shopping have every marketing manager wringing hands in anticipation, too often, I find one of the biggest mistakes a marketing department or company can make happens at this time of year.

Changing campaigns or web sites.

December is absolutely, positively the worst time of year to do this and for so many different reasons.

Why risk your business?

It is with great pride that I get to announce another Canadian first (to the best of our knowledge) for Search Engine People. We are the newest addition to the list of Microsoft adExcellence accredited companies.

Due to the determined effort of a certain SEP paid search director, and you know who you are, we are the first Canadian company to become adExcellence approved.

In short, Search Engine People is a triple threat company. Yahoo! Ambassadors, the first Canadian Google Adwords Qualified Company, and now the first Canadian Microsoft adExcellence company.

Office Depot’s announcement of new mobile marketing services caught my attention today. These new services include the launch of a mobile store locator, RSS feeds, text message coupons and offers, and mobile sweepstakes capabilities.

I doubt anyone’s getting exited about Office Depot RSS feeds on their mobile device and I’m not alone. According to Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now.

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.

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!

What I like most about the possible Yahoo/MSN merger is that it will raise the profile of Ask.com which, to my mind has possibly the best interface of them all.

Saw the new Google search results page design and decidely do not like it. It seems forced and is redundant in ways.

Haven’t seen it? Google Blogoscoped has it covered.

Have a good one.

~The (SEP) Guy

Will it finally happen this time? Will Yahoo and Microsoft merge? Combined they would be able to own at least a third of all Internet searches. They would have 600 million users. They would own one of the largest content networks. They would be the world’s largest webmail provider. They would own the world’s most used online bookmarking tools. And of course they would have a set of toolbars which already does most of the things Ruud one day expects in Google’s.

MSNBC and the David C. Churbuck article Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads provided not only some interesting insight into the Google Doubleclick deal, but also this little nugget way, way, way, way down the article, and it’s a long article so perhaps if reading it, you might have zoned out. It is after all Friday.