Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

Mixed messages on the Google IPO. Chairman and Chief Exec Eric Schmidt was reported in The Times today as saying an "An IPO is not on my agenda right now". So what do you make of that? Cold feet in light of the fact that Google is broken right now? Can they wait much longer given that they are never again likely to have such reach as they do right now? Answers to this and many more questions next time.....

Something's going on over at MSN. beta.search.msn.com has broken cover and is even appearing under the search.msn.com monika from some territories. Clean new look, but seems like the same old flawed Inktomi data so far.

Google Alert is a great way of tracking the results in your five key searches. Developed by an Israeli PHD student and ultilising the Google Web Services API it sends you the changes in the results of your specified searches whenever they happen. Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch, cynically suggests that it is popular with 'ego searchers'; I've no idea what he means, but suggest, in the meantime, you try the service and watch the progress of the Car Magazine images in my Immediart site as new products get added to the catalogue.

Two new services launch today on Steve Johnston - The Blog: Email subscription and an RSS feed. The Email subscription is courtesy of a link between my Blogger account and a newly setup Yahoo! Group appropriately entitled SteveJohnston. To receive my blog postings by email click on The Blog by Email and simply send. You can expect the highest standards of privacy from me; i.e. you will only get what you asked for! The RSS feed is part of a new facility from Blogger, but at present seems only to work with Atom enabled RSS readers.
Use www.johnston.co.uk/blog.xml to subscribe.

Okay, so call me naive, but Thursday's post was not intended to promote the first attempt at Eureksterbombing, but hey, now that Peter Caputa - of the newly founded Eureksterblog - has suggested it, I shall happily take the credit. Wish I'd chosen a better target ......

Eurekster is a search interface to the AlltheWeb data and is worthy of note because it is trying to do two interesting things: Personalised search and Social networking. The combination of these two enhancements seems compelling. The personalisation works by assuming a click on a search result amounts to you finding content of relevant interest to you, at the destination URL, if you don't then click on another result within a minute. It then also, optionally, pools the collective clicking behaviour amongst your invited group of social peers to further improve the likely relevance of the results.

Try it yourself: Search for ferrari enzo prints, then scroll down to result 21 (approximately) to the Immediart entry, click on it and browse around the Ferrari print there and other cars such as the Aston DB9 for at least a minute, then return to Eurekster and perform the search again. This time Immediart should be number one, prefixed by a Eurekster 'e'.

Will it work or help? Only time will tell. I am going to use it for a bit and I'll let you know how I get on. If you want to be invited to my peer list, Email Me.

A recent posting on Gary Price's excellent Resource Shelf prompts me to remind you aspiring Google sleuths that use of the 'link:' operator in a Google search, used to determine how many site/pages link through to a particular URL, will not show all the links that exist. There are two factors at play here; one is the page rank of the linking page - below a certain unconfirmed level (probably 4) the page won't appear, and the other is how recently the link has been indexed - links are updated once a month.

Another tool for the online marketer, and this one is free: Good Keywords is a simple Windows interface to the keyword/search-term suggestion tools of Overture, Lycos and Teoma and to link popularity checks with Altavista, Lycos, MSN and Google. The search terms component is a terrific sanity check on the terms you maybe seeking to optimise, with the Overture check particularly useful as it carries over the search count for each term.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch has just updated the Who Powers Whom? search engine chart. Along with a helpful sense of contract timings across the portals and search sites, it helps enormously in assessing where to exert one's efforts when undertaking optimising work. Clearly Yahoo's announcement about the use of its own technology will mean an update in the coming months. Everyone is still assuming it'll be the Inktomi data (currently visible on MSN and Hotbot) although I can't believe it will simply port it in untouched. We shall see.

As part of your armoury of online marketing tools, I thoroughly recommend Alexa. Since making the statistics from their widely downloaded toolbar (launched in 1997 - 10 million downloads and counting - now owned by Amazon) publicly available, their service is a mine if useful information and insight. Ignore the search function, which is Google's and instead drill into the data they collect from the use of their toolbar. Download it now.

Yesterday, Google updated its PageRanks, as it does every month (pretty much), and my blog is now the proud owner of a PR4. Somewhat more gratifyingly, however, is the fact that Immediart has acquired the same. Both sites going from PR0 to PR4 in a little over six weeks. The net effect of this can be seen if you search for, say Enzo print on Google, and see that Immediart now has the number three result, whilst Gallardo print achieves the top slot (results at the time of blogging, of course).

Recent posting on the wonderful UK-NetMarketing discussion list prompts me to pass on a few more tips about understanding how the Google algorythm works. On this occasion an online business manager didn't understand why his site was performing well in the SERPs for a word that doesn't appear on their site at all. The example here is a search for Football Manegement incorrectly spelt. The site concerned is no.1 at the point of blogging (www.workssitebuilder.co.uk/page.php/pageid/56) and really doesn't have the word 'manegement' anwhere on the page. The clue to why this happens and how the Google algo works is in the Google cache (this link may prove unreliable - if it does, perform the search above and visit the cache from the Google result page entry) for this page. What it explains is that the term 'manegement' appears only in links pointing to the page concerned. This is an excellent example of the algorythm in action and demonstrates the power of anchor text.

New client, old problem. How is it that in this day and age sites are still being built with no search engine friendliness at all. It is remarkable that frames are still in use on entry-level sites when there is absolutelty no need for them. It was very disappointing for the client to find the rebuild of their site in the Autumn of 2002 has exactly 21 words in the Google index and 18 of those are from the Description Meta Tag!

The 2003 Zeitgeist info is now available from Google. Always helps keep your feet on the ground about how the mass market thinks.

New Year's resolutions. Be happier, be slimmer, be fitter, be richer and be a better parent and husband. Oh, and be a better search engine consultant.