Looking at the World with Google Blinkers On
The world more and more depends on the Internet to go about even its most basic everyday business; and this would be a good time to begin thinking about how effectively the Internet is regulated. The FCC in the US is beginning to put together a set of conventions for the Internet, that aim to make sure that Internet infrastructure providers, are never given the freedom to discriminate among different kinds of services in the setting of prices for the use of infrastructure. They call it the network neutrality rules. Any kind of Internet service or website needs to be given the same terms of service as anyone else. But these rules are only mainly aimed at Internet giants – the Warners and AOL’s of this world, and the FCC needs to expand the scope of its rules.It isn’t just the service providers that own the Internet’s hardware that need to be regulated this way; the software and services that form the backbone of the Internet, the search giants Google, Bing and Yahoo, need to be brought in as well. New companies and services are discovered by users through these gatekeepers of the Internet; and little startups have their entire survival controlled by how well they are visible on these search engines. Any kind of discrimination they face, would be their undoing. The FCC needs to make sure of this.
So do any of the major search engines actually use active discrimination? Google is a company that has a finger in all kinds of pies at the same time: maps and directions, e-mail, Internet payments, among others. Google doesn’t feel any compunction plugging its own products with top billing on its search results with no mind paid to what its own algorithms think of it. Without a doubt, Google is not impartial; and for a basic service that ought to belong right up there with the other human rights, this is intolerable.There is also the Google sandbox that lots of companies and get permanently lost in, because they can never make out what rules Google has that they have broken.Google has near-complete domination of the Internet; if something doesn’t appear on Google, chances are it will never be found. And this is not good for innovation.
Most of Google’s greatest services, YouTube, Google Maps, or even AdSense, were developed by others,and when they became popular, Google acquired them one way or another. What if a Google stranglehold over the Internet prevents new services like this from ever having a fair chance?
What Does Google Care about Anyway – Quality or Quantity?
There is a certain kind of web property that seems to find extra special success exploiting a certain take on social networking. Their success comes from putting to work the need people have to share with the whole world whatever comes to their mind,; not share with just a select list of friends as on Twitter. These websites, best represented by Answers.com, just keep moving higher and higher up the Internet charts, sometimes even breaking into the top 10 for short periods. Success on Google’s search listings as everyone knows, comes from finding a way to put new content on your website as often as possible. Webmasters usually pay to have writers think up content, one pains taking piece at a time, to add to their website every day. On the other hand are websites like Demand Media that with no effort at all, have people around the world add thousands of pieces of new content on their own, at no cost to the website. Answers.com, has about 40 million pages of content on its servers so far. Google has no choice but to list these websites on the top of its search results; and they therefore get lots of visitors and advertising income, and are on their way to Internet superstardom. But is this something to worry about – that websites should become popular not for the quality of what they have online, but for the sheer quantity of it?Answers.com has no bother with trying to edit content for quality, like Wikipedia does, either. They just have all the content, at no cost. The profits they make, they use to advertise on Google AdSense. All of this just gives the bloggers great ideas about how they just have to pump out nonsense on a massive scale , advertise a bit, and there you have your instant millionaire formula. Demand Media actually pays freelancers for this too.
Google is the reason why these websites choose their path of mas content-isation – Google’s policy of how the most new additions to a website makes it the most popular. It is quickly becoming so that any standard search for information on a topic gives you nothing but a results page that is clogged with banalities from Answers.com, WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers. This is also what happens with any standard newspaper that has grown fat and old on its own success. How could this be what the Internet has turned into? How will people find articles from genuine freelancing experts who aren’t on the payroll of a major magazine?
Web 3.0 will Change the World – and Probably SEO Too
The Web 2.0 has been around for a few years now, and it has been exciting enough. It gave you a chance to shape a website yourself; and if you have a vision powerful enough, you could really shape the entire web even. But using the Internet today, to use search in particular, admittedly feels thoroughly last-century by most accounts. Today’s search experience is still very keyword-dependent; you could get very different results searching for, say, movies versus searching for films. Bing, especially, has received a lot of criticism for being too literal, and not trying to interpret a search, the way Google does.The next iteration of the Internet is around the corner ( a rather long corner); they call it the Web 3.0, and it’s all about putting a little intelligence into the way the Internet works. And will this ever be an SEO game-changer.If you ask your friend about what he thinks of the Yeti, what will he think Yeti means? If you are an anthropologist or a biologist, he may think you mean the rumored giant ape that is supposed to live in the icy upper reaches of the Himalayas. If you have no such special interests, he would probably think you meant the new SUV from Skoda that goes by that name. Web 3.0 is promoted as something that would be able to tell the difference. Web 3.0 is believed to achieve its additional insight into your searches, by keeping online an Internet profile of yours, that contains all the searching you ever did. Right now, if you are signed in to your iGoogle account, you could conceivably do something like this – it remembers all your searches. But the Web 3.0 experience is all about intelligence that can interpret this information. You can ask your search engine open-ended questions like, “Where should I go on vacation if I only have $4500 to spend?” And it should be able to look at different vacation packages based on places you’ve been to before, and places you’ve spoken about in your e-mails, look at all the different offerings on the Internet, and come up with a properly compiled results page.
There are currently intelligent music referring services even today that try to “understand” what your musical preferences are like, based on songs you already like. And it will try to look up all the new music that could fit your listening profile. But as anyone who’s tried a service like Pandora music explorer knows, the results of that artificial intelligence can often be very trying on the patience. Admittedly, science hasn’t advanced far enough to make Web 3.0 a reality. The intelligence comes from what they call Ontologies. An Ontology is a file that contains collections of information, and additional information on how everything in the file is related together. In fact, this was a part of the way the Internet was envisioned when it was first designed back in the 80s by Tim Berners-Lee. Software agents, automated web crawlers, use Ontologies to understand your browsing habits, and looks around the Internet for you. These Ontology files will be created manually, by people who donate their time – sort of a Wikipedia for computers, not people. Once the browser (and it would be called a semantic browser) is able to think for itself based on this information, undoubtedly, learning, knowledge, and science itself will change beyond recognition. SEO will probably need to evolve as well.
YouTube is a Big Fish in the Internet Pond; but in the Real World, Maybe not so Much
Most video serving websites will look at YouTube with awe and feel hopelessly dwarfed; but could there be anything that actually dwarfs YouTube? As it would happen, YouTube, a site that has a guaranteed lock on about 15 minutes of its viewers’ time every day on average, feels envious of the kind of command the regular boob tube has on people ‘s time that they would not mind spending hours in front of it. The way a small niche YouTube clone site looks at enviously at YouTube’s 15 minute sand thinks “Now if only I could get two of those minutes, what a difference it would make”, YouTube salivates for a couple of hours stolen from television.It’s not that YouTube lacks the content; they once said that viewers pumped a couple of dozen hours of video every minute into YouTube’s servers. They have the content; they only need a way to help viewers find the things they like, and watch them. It could take YouTube through the the roof. And this barely profitable company could really begin to pull in advertising.
What is the biggest search engine on earth after Google? Well, it’s YouTube search, of course. And YouTube searches are much more difficult for search algorithms to decipher, because there is actually nothing in the videos that actually has any keywords that the algorithm needs. No search engine actually understands the images in a video; they depend entirely on the tags submitted by the uploader. They need all-new approaches for YouTube search; kind of like the data mining that eBay or Amazon use, to give you recommendations based on what you already are known to like. Maybe they need to announce a search design prize like Netflix did, to improve recommendations.
And of course there is negative marking; if their recommendations are often wrong, they could turn visitors off.YouTube and Google figure that they need personal information for this; much, much more than what they have already. They’ll need to spy on your e-mail, look at what you do on Facebook, look at what your friends do on Facebook, before they can get something right.
They figure that perhaps users need to be given a more TV-like experience if they are to compete with it. Maybe if they could get their viewers to relax a little, and have instant gratification like with TV, they could get somewhere. If YouTube could just move away from having users used search to discover videos; if users could just flip through stacks of videos with the minimal buffering wait period, then YouTube will finally have it made.
After the Niche Facebook Clone Websites, Here Come the Newspaper Clones
NewsCred is an Internet company that, and by the standards of the Internet, has been around for an eternity – since 2007. It started out as a tiny business in Switzerland that aimed to help people with the best sources they could look to for the most reliable news stories. NewsCred tried to do this with a special combination of community votes, and also intelligent algorithms. As ambitious a concept as that was, NewsCred found little success with it. They haven’t given up yet though; the are trying a new tack. Perhaps they got their inspiration from Ning, the website that allows you to create your own social network, in minutes, to run off its servers. NewsCred is trying something similar, and it’s a ground breaking concept. They want to help you create your own custom Internet newspaper in minutes, aimed at whatever niche you have in mind. Once you sign up, you get to put together a professional looking journal, even in the free version; in the premium paid version, you could create a site that combined the standard news and opinion principle with the aggregator concept, much in the way The Huffington Post works.NewsCred is simple enough to use. You open a new paper ; you submit information on what topics you want to pick up. NewsCred offers all kinds of ready-made topics that you can choose from, religion, science, politics, or anything else; or you can generate a new topic not already on your list, with a new keyword. As soon as you hit Submit, the website will right away publish your news paper for you with a bunch of basic current stories on all the topics you choose. They choose your stories from several popular news domains and blogs around the world. If you want, you can even give your paper an RSS feed, if NewsCred does not have it on its directory already.
Looking Closely at User-Generated Content
Amazon is a website that is perennially at the top of Google’s rankings – for its popularity with customers of course; but as those in SEO know, Amazon’s pioneering efforts in allowing customers to rank its products, and write reviews, have given the site a boost in a way that only a constant stream of new content is known to be capable of doing. Amazon realizes that an active user community on its website helps newcomers trust the company more. In a recent move, they’ve started a program called Vine that helps reward the best contributors to its website, with free products.SEO is usually is all about paying attention to every last word that is published on your website: you have to be careful that the right keywords come up often enough, and so on. Using user generated content is a new kind of SEO though. You are supposed to exercise your SEO while you trust other people to do the right thing while you have only a moderate degree of control over it. You usually need to pay attention to areas like seeding the forum when user input thins out, and judging to see whether there are enough tags and other opportunities at interlinking the content generated. There is actually a software product that helps you analyze the user content on your forum; it is called Leximancer. It helps you analyze your user content to see how often your targeted keywords turn up, and analyze link ability in those keywords. You could easily check, for instance, how often a brand or product that you promote, comes to be associated with a positive or negative term. It also helps you gain some insight into the psychology of your visitor by analyzing the content for you.
Software like Leximancer also helps you moderate your forum by giving you some tools in text mining. On a very large forum with hundreds of pages of user generated content,you can easily zero in on hecklers, bullies and people who break your rules for, say, family-friendly content. With the way webmasters race for fresh avenues in obtaining free content, user generated content and software to manage it effectively,certainly deserves a close look.
Local Domain Name Suffixes are Second Best – Fact or Fallacy?
To anyone with the foresight to plan their SEO approach right at the start when they think of a website concept, it has to occur at some point to them to wonder – should they go with an international domain name suffix, a .com or the like? If they choose a local domain with their own country’s suffix, will they forever sound to all visitors like they are some kind of a provincial loser? People have been wondering about this for about ten years now; even if the rule has always been clear. A local domain name beats an international .com hands-down any day. If it is all that clear, why do people constantly look longingly after a .com suffix for as if they couldn’t believe they’re really on the Internet until people get to type in a .com to reach them?
Let’s say you live in Madrid, and you are looking for a classifieds publisher where you can put up your used computer for sale. You just type ‘computer classifieds’ into a search engine, and you get results like ‘loot.com’ and also ones like ‘loot.es’. If you didn’t know anything about either site, which would you choose? Since a classified ad is really all about your local region, surely you would think that the .com sites were just too generic to waste your time on. People do tend to gravitate towards local offerings over the generic, because they feel that there would be more relevant information there.
In link building endeavors, other local sites in your region are likely to be better disposed to linking to you if you have the same local domain name as theirs. What is more, there are many local directories that won’t approve of indexing your name, unless you’re local. And basically, search engine algorithms tend to reliably rank you, if you’re local. Sites of the same dot com linking to one another are not all that valuable. Having really different websites linking to one another is. If you split your dot com into many different countries with different suffixes, you stand a better chance. Moreover, it is quite common these days to find hosting in a country other than your own. You would be virtually guaranteed a proper listing and ranking in your own country if you used a proper local domain suffix getting your site served there. And in hours too.
So why do SEO experts still continue to think that a .com suffix is somehow more equal than the other suffixes? It could be that they just use English keywords in their research to test sites they design for search availability. The language barrier is just too great. If people could just move out of their comfort zone and research all the parameters that actually matter, language and others, the local domain suffix, or the ccTLD would always come out the winner.
Hacking rises to Fearsome New Levels
Coca-Cola has its super secret cola recipe, Dolby has its closely-guarded noise reduction circuit design, and Google has… what is it that Google has? For Microsoft, Google or any other software business, the thousands of lines of code, and the philosophy that informs them are their stock-in-trade, their capital. Google has had the Chinese authorities hack into its Gmail accounts recently; if they, or any recreational hacker were to succeed in getting into their system, and to sell their loot to the highest bidder outside, it would quickly bring Google’s search business to its knees. Or if it were the Chinese authorities doing it, or a competing search engine,they could ever-so-slightly modify Google’s codes, to make it less effective, or spy on everything Google did, and lend themselves a better advantage.This is no longer just a doomsday scenario passed out in a Hollywood movie. This is exactly what Google declares China did earlier this month to it. Google announced that some of its copyrighted code had been stolen, and the code owned by several other companies as well. Google, with help from VeriSign iDefense, when it investigated these attacks, did not even know if it has its original code anymore. They believe that China’s government has possibly inserted alterations in Google’s core coding that will help them spy on Chinese citizens using Google to search for restricted information in China. Why, in Greece, five years ago, hackers inserted alterations to Vodafone’s code, so that they could listen in on conversations conducted by the country’s political and military leaders.
Just as Microsoft has been a favored target for years, Google and Adobe are in the cross hairs today. Adobe’s software is reputed in particular to be deeply flawed security wise; since it enjoys 95% market penetration with one or another of its products, anti virus experts have their attention trained on Adobe now. It is becoming obvious too, that China, a country that first rose to prominence for its cheap knockoffs of reputed branded goods, still retains its knack for counterfeiting. Routers by Cisco, for example, are legally required to include firmware that will allow the government to obtain a backdoor into your information, for criminal investigations purposes. China could easily manufacture counterfeit Cisco routers, that will help the Chinese government look in for more information than a democratically-elected government would ever be allowed to. As it happens, the biggest risk that software corporations face still lies in the way employees can get careless, and open tainted spam when they are at work, at a company terminal.
Is Yahoo Really an Illusion?
Bing is full of surprises these days in its unending competition with Google. Bing adds new features regularly like the Wolfram Alpha function and mapping tools that are visually stunning. Integration with the Wolfram Alpha computational engine means that they will now be able to interpret what you ask in human terms. If you search for “fast food”, it will give you the usual restaurant information, but also exercise tips and indigestion information. Yahoo has introduced a major search feature too – as of last year. The feature is called Bing. Yahoo is finally throwing in the towel in search; they may have snubbed Microsoft’s $44 billion takeover offer two years ago, but they have other Microsoft-friendly attitudes in place.Yahoo has closed its search business, and is allowing Bing to do the backroom work. They closed down their shopping API as well, and chose to power their shopping site with Price Grabber.There have been other reports out there wondering if Yahoo is preparing to shut shop entirely; if they don’t do their own search, what is it they do? Yahoo’s management has put out a vehement statement about how it isn’t fair for anyone to consider Yahoo a spent force. The statement claims that Yahoo has a great relationship with its developers and a commitment to open platforms; well, my Log Blog was an innovative service that developers and geeks loved too. And that’s been closed by Yahoo as well. GeoCities recently got the ax, and it looks like Yahoo these days is all about closing down and outsourcing. It would appear that pretty soon, the US search market will be left with just a big two – just like the US auto market when it lost Chrysler.
But Yahoo is still in the search business to all appearances. They take care of all the advertising business on their own site as well as on Bing’s. Yahoo’s plan is to cut costs, of course. But to do that, it still needs to be around, doesn’t it? Yahoo is no longer a website that provides original services; it is just an aggregator. And this makes for the passing of an era.
Local Twitter Use with Google and Bing
First there was Bing with its localized content, then Twitter Local, the app ( designed on Adobe Air by the way) that helps you find out who in your immediate geographical neighborhood is online and tweeting, and now there are Bing and Google Maps (and the iPhone) offering to pinpoint tweets on a map for you, to locate where exactly in your neighborhood a tweet you are interested in emanates from. Using this kind of locating with Bing requires Bing Maps Beta and Microsoft Silverlight. Google Maps makes it much easier on you: you can just use an RSS feed of the tweet stream, that includes the geolocation. The way it is implemented is pretty amusing in itself. You are just supposed to open Google Maps, and paste into the search box the URL of any Twitter feed that you are interested in. Right away, you get a bunch of blue location balloons on the map. Click on any one of them, and you should get the tweet itself. Google Maps will even remember all your favorite twitter streams for the next time you open it.
The iPhone works just the same way; but Bing Maps, surprisingly, takes the lead in visual appeal, even compared to the iPhone. Next to Bing Maps, Google Maps clearly looks a decade old. The balloons contain little Twitter icons, and it displays tweeted pictures too. But Twitter is different on Bing (Bing calls that search engine Bing Twitter). What Bing calls a hot topic is not what Twitter calls one. Bing’s Beta version now allows Twitter results on the search page, and also a cloud of the most happening topics on Twitter, hot in Bing’s opinion, not Twitter. It may not seem like much if you don’t put stock in Twitter, but Bing’s Twitter search usually has a half minute lag to when tweets appear on Twitter. Microsoft ascribes this to the processing they have to do before they publish a search result: removing duplicates, flagging adult content, and so on. Things could improve – they are after all still in beta.
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