Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

December 30, 2003

I spent a happy afternoon releasing the next batch of images into the Immediart catalogue. Alfa Brera, if beautiful concept cars get you going, Aston Martin DB9, if British muscle car's your thing and the Lamborghini Gallardo, if you prefer the classic Italian supercar. It was touch and go, though, as Car Magazine subscribers received their February edition this morning, but we still had no images for the web site, let alone for printing. And Car Magazine haven't come back from their Winter break! Fortunately Colour Systems, their pre-press outfit came to the rescue. Thanks guys.
posted by Steve Tuesday, December 30, 2003

December 29, 2003

It happened on Boxing Day. The Chinese Jump Rope in my daughter's stocking came without instructions. Not a problem you would think, in this age of Google. So on Boxing Day I scootled off to the PC to 'google' for some jump rope guidance. After some fruitless link-following over a number of pages I actually gave up and went over to AltaVista. Of course I had changed the search terms by the time I'd got to AltaVista, but the pain was felt. And the disillusionment seeded.
posted by Steve Monday, December 29, 2003

December 23, 2003

My old friend Patrick Dunn, a leading e-learning consultant, reminded me today of an excellent vision piece written as future-fiction on Google's role in the Semantic Web by Paul Ford in 2002. When I get a moment, I will try and digest how well his fiction is panning out as fact, 18 months on, for now you can just go and read it (again, maybe).
posted by Steve Tuesday, December 23, 2003

December 22, 2003

Just come across Googlism; kind of left-of-centre, lateral thinking auto-profundity. Or just twerpy lightweight nonsense. Either way, it takes half a dozen submissions to get bored. Which turned out to be one of the more entertaining 30 seconds I spent today. Apparently I'm getting married to a young trollop called Robin.
posted by Steve Monday, December 22, 2003

December 21, 2003

Thanks to Tim Ireland for this bit of Christmas spirit. If you have any feelings about the recording industry and the current behaviour of organisations such as the Recording Industry Association of America, and maybe have music-consuming offspring, you will love this: WhatACrappyPresent.
posted by Steve Sunday, December 21, 2003

December 20, 2003

It's enough to make you want to quit. This year's Guardian Weblog Awards show how high the quality is out there. I won't quit, I won't.
posted by Steve Saturday, December 20, 2003

December 19, 2003

Comment on yesterday's link to the Time 'Search and Destroy' article. The principle confirmation for me from this piece - and it is well worth reading - is Google's vulnerability. One of the main suggestions in the piece is that Google's brand has overtaken Google's technology as its greatest asset. If this is true, and I suspect it probably is now, we can expect to see it cash in this asset at an IPO next year and we will be able to watch the integrity of its technology fade away as it seeks to pursue shareholder value.
posted by Steve Friday, December 19, 2003
Product pitch: No more slaving over your web stats program such as WebAbacus to drill out the data that tells you precisely where the Spiders of the search engines have been, Robot Manager is a new, cost-effective tool dedicated to providing this information for this sole purpose. Of course it won't tell you why the spiders aren't coming to your site, or aren't crawling certain pages, or why those pages aren't being ranked so well. So it isn't quite doing me out of a job. Yet.
posted by Steve Friday, December 19, 2003

December 18, 2003

Some more Google-centric bedtime reading for you - and, no I'm not being lazy today - this time from Time Magazine. Search And Destroy. When I have finished reading it myself, I may post an opinion.
posted by Steve Thursday, December 18, 2003
Interesting analysis of Google's potential approach to its IPO. Take the Investment Bank out of the scenario and sell direct to the retail invester - i.e. you and me (hypothetically speaking, of course). Thanks to Martin at Monograph for this pointer.
posted by Steve Thursday, December 18, 2003

December 17, 2003

Not content with indexing all the content on the web, Google is heading for print. In line with their ultimate ambition to index all the world's information, Google has on beta trial a new print.google.com service. By tapping into the ongoing experiments by the likes of Amazon, Google is providing a first step into the contents of printed material.
Use it like this: ferrari site:print.google.com
posted by Steve Wednesday, December 17, 2003

December 16, 2003

Tricks of the trade No. 64: When trying to find how much of your site is indexed in Google, there are operators you can add to the search expression that will help. The 'allinurl' and 'site' operators working together restrict the search to terms that appear in the url of the indexed page whilst 'site' restricts search to the given domain. Using the query 'allinurl:www.johnston.co.uk site:www.johnston.co.uk' Google will tell you precisely which pages have been indexed in the Johnston.co.uk domain. The 'site' operator doesn't work on its own, unless you use a term that should appear on every page. I find using the allinurl expression more reliable. I've got a big site, haven't I.
posted by Steve Tuesday, December 16, 2003

December 15, 2003

Some useful stuff for a Monday evening. Depending what your definition of 'useful' is, naturally. The job of weeding out what Google's Florida update wasn't about, continues (interesting attempt to empiricise what didn't happen). And the Scroogle interrogation of affected terms is a comfort in these crazy times. One of my clients is inexplicably affected: No. 1 on a search for Domino Hosting.
posted by Steve Monday, December 15, 2003

December 14, 2003

You will have noticed that my weekend posts are conspicuously work-free. I hope you'll forgive the ramblings of a family man. This morning found me in the fresh air supporting the boys in their team sports. Elliot, in his inaugural year playing rugby, is pleased he has a team in Bradford-on-Avon Rugby Club under 12s in which to have a go. They are a good team, short, but good. Today they played two quick 20 minute games; lost the first to a team of ringers (a handful of big under-13s mixed in with the under 12s) and drew the second. Rory was playing the John Terry role for the BoA under 10s football club. Sadly not doing as well as the team he left behind in London, who won their championship in the Tandridge league last year. Today's result, a disappointing 5-0 away to Trowbridge. Onwards and upwards.
posted by Steve Sunday, December 14, 2003

December 13, 2003

Christmas is coming and the carol services are rolling in. They are impossible to avoid in the Johnston household as son number two, Rory, is singing in the Abbey choir in Bath. It was a full house, immaculately compered by the musical director Peter King. Amongst this evening's traditional fare were concert performances by the choir which included the arrangement of Stille Nacht (Silent Night) by Andrew Carter. In the words of Gramaphone magazine "Carter is the supreme carolist who can take the most hackneyed tune (Stille Nacht) and revive it into something ravishingly beautiful." (I'll be damned if I can find a decent link for it.) I have to say that it was the highlight of the evening and quite stunning.
posted by Steve Saturday, December 13, 2003

December 12, 2003

Sneak previews (screen shot) of a new look Google have popped up on the Google Weblog in the last couple of days. Not sure how legitimate it is, but the sample results always make me laugh. If you ever want a good example of why fresh content can help your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), search for 'Search Engine' on Google. You'd think being the most widely used search engine on the planet would assure them of first place on their own search engine. Try it on the other engines. Which do you reckon are being manipulated?
posted by Steve Friday, December 12, 2003

December 11, 2003

Put my money where my mouth is today, spending mine rather than my clients'. Taken out a campaign for Immediart in Google's Adwords. I'm not going to tell you what the campaign is, naturally, because I don't trust you not to click on the ads (out of curiousity, of course). Their reporting interface is fantastic - I've got 22 keywords live, serving just the one ad - and incredibly easy to self-serve. I will report on how successful it turns out to be.
posted by Steve Thursday, December 11, 2003

December 10, 2003

Yahoo's acquisitive activities this year have led many of us to assume that when they were ready they would pull the Google results from Yahoo and replace them with the Inktomi results (currently visible at the likes of Hotbot or the BBC. But early signs - i.e. rumours of sightings of AltaVista data in Yahoo results amongst the US SEO community (can't link directly as the reports are in a subscription forum) - are that they may be considering AltaVista instead (hmm, some of its data is old).

If this proves to be what Yahoo actually does, then two likely reasons strike me:
1. Altavista always had a reputation for excellent 'pure' search, so with Google messing with its purity right now, this could be a smart move.
2. Inktomi is pretty well commercialised already, particularly with paid inclusion, so a cleaner slate of data in Yahoo, could give them more opportunity for more revenue in the future (clearly this would negate some of the benefits in point 1. but, hey ho).
posted by Steve Wednesday, December 10, 2003

December 09, 2003

An excellent analysis of Google appeared yesterday on the site of Fortune Magazine: Can Google Grow Up?. Such articles are confirming my fears about Google. I am beggining to wonder whether Google, despite all its many virtues, is actually going to be able to hold it together in the face of a rampaging, billion-dollar-investment in MSNBot and the self-inflicted pressure of its IPO.
posted by Steve Tuesday, December 09, 2003

December 08, 2003

For a brief spell yesterday it was possible to see Google placing results from its shopping catalogue sub-site Froogle at the top of the results list on Google (screen shot). This didn't happen in the UK, but was visible in parts of the US and only then from one or two of Google's mysterious datacentres. The implications are pretty profound when there are only three listings and then an invitation to go to Froogle directly. More on this, no doubt, soon.
posted by Steve Monday, December 08, 2003

December 07, 2003

Well they say that The FA Challenge Cup is the best knockout competition on the planet, and to prove it is full of excitement, Yeovil Town, of whose terraces we graced yesterday, have drawn a home tie with Liverpool in the 3rd round! The 3rd round is the place of dreams for non-league and lower division teams - Yeovil are in the 3rd Division - as they can get lucky and draw one of the big boys - Liverpool are in the Premier Division - which beside the excitement of playing such a team, can be very lucrative in terms of gate and TV receipts, never mind the giant-killing possibilities. Given that our outing yesterday would have made this exciting enough, the fact that the Johnstons are 40% Liverpool supporters - me and my eldest son Elliot - this is now a tie to die for. I don't fancy our chances of getting a ticket for the 3rd January through the normal channels, so it may be we are heading for ebay instead!
posted by Steve Sunday, December 07, 2003

December 06, 2003

One of those 'six degrees of separation' moments happened last night whilst dining with new friends in Bradford-on-Avon. The intensity of it - i.e. how close and strong the mutual connection was, yet how divergent the paths were to get there - sent me scurrying away to do some more homework on the theory. There is some nonsense dating activity here, but also an intriguing Scientific American article claiming: E-mail Study Corroborates Six Degrees of Separation. So I followed up the piece and enrolled in the Columbia University research effort. I'll keep my blog posted of progress.
posted by Steve Saturday, December 06, 2003
It's an FA Cup Saturday - 2nd Round - so we spent a chilly afternoon on the terraces of third division Yeovil Town enjoying them thump the Conference pretenders Barnet. Took my ten year old son Rory and joined local Yeovil friends - Yeovil is an hour drive South from Bath for us - for a very entertaining match during which Yeovil only wavered for about 5 minutes when their opening goal was equalised within a minute of the restart. Final score 5-1. 3rd Round draw for the cup tomorrow.... will Yeovil get the dream date away from home to a Premiership team?
posted by Steve Saturday, December 06, 2003

December 05, 2003

Google is seeking guidance by the US courts on search term trademark infringement. According to this CNET report, trademark owners are regularly demanding Google stop advertisers using trademarks that don't belong to them, to drive traffic. On one hand you can understand this, would I want people using Immediart as a name to drive traffic to their competing service? No I wouldn't. However, I don't see how I have a right to complain about it if they are simply using my name as a keyword to trigger their advert in a way that gets them close to me. If they are not passing themselves off as me then why is it so different from buying space on the shelf next to your competitors product or buying display ads alongside your competitors? It isn't.

Example: Google search for WebAbacus
http://www.google.com/search?&q=webabacus
Brings up an Adword on the right for their competitor Site Intelligence. Strikes me as perfectly reasonable behaviour.

posted by Steve Friday, December 05, 2003

December 04, 2003

The headhunters called today. Always a gratifying little nudge that you really might be worth employing. Shan't name them though (client confidentiality), I might need them one day. Some VP post in a growing and profitable full-service agency in High Wycombe. Ok so it's sounding slightly less glamourous now.
posted by Steve Thursday, December 04, 2003

December 03, 2003

I was asked recently how many sites there are in each Google PageRank bracket. This is an answer Google clearly knows, but is not telling. This list suggests that there are currently 32 PR10 sites. Netcraft surveys approximately 46,000,000 sites, which if it is the same number that Google indexes encourages me to adopt a logarithmic PR scale of 4. Of course it's nonsense, and besides, it doesn't feel right - only 2048 PR7 sites - and it would take only one assumption to be wrong to put it way out. It was a mildly diverting exercise.

PR Number of Sites
10 32
9 128
8 512
7 2,048
6 8,192
5 32,768
4 131,072
3 524,288
2 2,097,152
1 8,388,608
0 33,554,432
Total 44,739,232

Hmmmm......
posted by Steve Wednesday, December 03, 2003
A day at the coal face in which I wonder how much of a blessing Address Verification is. Our credit card acquirer, WorldPay, try to verify whether the card holder's address as given to us, is the same as that registered with the bank. So far it is 50/50 on those it has flagged as a 'caution', with half seeming to have a good reason, such as a recent house move, or leaving the post town out of the address, but the others are puzzled why it may not have matched. Hold our breath time, whilst the chargebacks do or don't kick in.
posted by Steve Wednesday, December 03, 2003

December 02, 2003

Please visit my venture back into retailing: The Immediart Print on Demand Store. It is early days, with only one partner - Car Magazine - but you should get the drift. Doors opened November 25th 2003 - ticking over nicely.
posted by Steve Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Tim Ireland told me to start a blog two months ago. I try to do as I am told by figures of authority - and he certainly is one when it comes to blogs - so here you go Tim, I'm trying. Not that I haven't been paying attention. I left the post in below, just to prove that I opened my Blogger account over three years ago :-) More soon.
posted by Steve Tuesday, December 02, 2003

The stream-of-consciousness of a marketing and e-commerce oriented Google consultant.