Google

I bought a text ad on Google yesterday for the search term Mark Felt, wondering how many people would hit the search engine for more information on the deep-throated stool pigeon: Chasing Mark Felt How a 19-Year-Old College Student Unmasked Watergate Source in 1999 cadenhead.org/workbench The result: 525 clicks on 14,260 impressions, which cost me $26.22 (5 cents per click). Though at first my ad had no competition, by the end of the day, it was joined by ads from NPR, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, ... (read more)

2005/06/02

I'm Totally Straight, But ...

A few weeks ago I invented a new game dubbed googlemilking -- looking for a phrase in search engines that lends itself to hilarious, off-color, or unintentionally self-revealing results. The game was covered by the Scotsman newspaper yesterday, and you can find players by searching for the first googlemilk: "I'm totally straight, but ...": Just as you know that any sentence beginning with the words "I'm not one of those racialists but ..." will end in a diatribe about immigration, it is obvious ... (read more)

2005/04/14

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution

I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer. The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the immediate effect on sales of a rank move. Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of an algorithm. Google's support for a ... (read more)

2005/01/19

I'm On Board with RSS

I've accepted an invitation to join the RSS Advisory Board, the group that evangelizes the RSS 2.0 specification. Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, RSS 2.0 isn't owned or controlled by vendors. The specification has been released under a Creative Commons license and the format it represents has no trademark or copyright claims. My new job has very little actual power associated with it, sadly enough, and only one groupie. The Advisory Board's primary task is explaining why the ... (read more)

2004/05/12

Google: Don't be Evil to RSS

Jeremy Zawodny reports that Yahoo has added Atom support to My Yahoo: Since everyone's jumping up and down about the Atom vs. RSS (or "Google vs. RSS" if that's your paranoia) debate, it's probably worth pointing out that My Yahoo's RSS module also groks Atom. It was added last night. It took about a half hour. Yahoo's ability to add Atom support that quickly demonstrates why Google is wrong to mothball RSS. As the 600-pound gorilla in weblogging, the company ought to support an established ... (read more)

2004/02/13