Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

Google IPO and GMail. Ouch! It is the 30th April and I haven't posted for more than two weeks. If you cared less, you may have wondered if I'd been hit by a truck or something. Rest assured I am fit and well, and very busy.

Google finally files with the SEC, the IPO is on! Can I get excited about it? A little, perhaps, because I suspect I'll find some hotter competition popping up for my winning 'Google Consultant' search term. But seriously, I feel all 1999. High profile dot com IPOs were intoxicating then and this feels very nostalgic. The most interesting thing about the way Google plan to execute it is that they will pursue an auction-based IPO for their entire offering. Meaning that the little guy really could get in on the ground floor. Will I be recommending share purchases? Er, no. Whilst Google seem destined to be a very successful company, the initial offering will value the business at over 20 times earnings. There doesn't seem much room for genuine growth in value in the short term to me.

Gmail came last month, and hey, it pretty much went away again afterwards. The initial fuss about privacy seems to have been a flash in the pan, despite the enthusiasms of one US state senator. If you park the whole concept of providing an email service for one moment and ask yourself how does all information in email help Google in their quest to assess relevance? If Blogs help Google sense the flow of information in a non-commercial way, then email, particularly personal email, helps even more. More time-sensitive links, more memes, more contextual content, more of what the world's information is all about.

New monthly consumer column, very, very local. Going live in the May edition of Bradford-on-Avon's wonderful monthly magazine, The Gudgeon, is a new column by yours truly helping readers get a better grip of Google. I will be publishing a web page for it each month to help readers follow the searches and tips more directly online and the first 300 words for May are now available on www.johnston.co.uk/gudgeon.html. For the more advanced readers of my blog, I doubt there will be much that is new for you here, but please feel free to have a browse.

Incidentally, if you were wondering why I had not yet expressed any opinions about Gmail, I have been reluctant to jump the gun as there appears to be a great deal of rubbish being promoted as fact. I plan to blog my thinking about Google's Gmail during this week.

Steve Johnston - The Blog assistance to Yahoo crawling. At the time of writing, and despite a paid for Yahoo Directory entry being live for over a month in Yahoo, Immediart is still waiting for a deep crawl by the Yahoo! Slurp crawler. After digging around in the web stats and after the recent arrival of our Hubble Ultra Deep Field print in the Yahoo listings, the penny dropped that the only products in the Yahoo listings for Immediart were ones I'd mentioned specifically in this blog. Call me dim! In my defence I have been terribly busy with client projects, honest (which also explains the paucity of recent posts).

This is the current Immediart 'site' search on Yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3awww.immediart.com+immediart&dups=1. Today there are only four listed products of five I have blogged; Ferrari Enzo, Alfa Brera, Lamborghini Gallardo and the HUDF mentioned recently. So, if you will bear with me, here is another batch to see how quickly they arrive in the Yahoo SERPs. Sod's law says the deep crawl comes along in the meantime.

Porsche 911 Turbo, Ferrari Challenge Stradale, Ford GT and Black Ferrari Enzo.

I will report back on the success of this shortly.

If you are in any doubt about the veracity of this sort of claim, have a look at the current Google search for me: http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+johnston&start=10, on this page (results 11-20) you will see the Yahoo Directory result page for the same search (position 17), but which I prompted Google to spider on the 25th February (see below). More soon.