Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

Helpful, if fairly general, interview with Froogle exec Craig Nevill-Manning by Shari Turow, author of the excellent Search Engine Visibilty.

Key points I took from it were that Froogle is likely to be made available as a white-label syndicated shopping service - watch out for a Wannadoo Froogle coming to a screen near you soon - and that paid inclusion is pretty much ruled out as it is with Google.

A new study examining the effectiveness of search engine advertising, in terms of users' proclivity to actually click on it, helps us understand further the importance of natural or organic search results on Google. Amongst a number of conclusions one may draw from the study is that glaringly-obvious one of Google users preferring the natural results over the adverts.

The reason this is interesting in this instance is the search engine context in which the report puts Google. When compared with the other dominant engines; Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Lycos, Google is by far the most satisfying search vehicle, with users of the other engines being frustrated by the lack of clarity about what is a paid result and what isn't.

I find it ironic that the advertiser-centric use (and sales) to which this report was clearly targeted causes the consultant in charge to pontificate that Google is losing the 'Ad Activity' race. Regardless that due to its massively higher reach Google serves more adverts in total anyway, and that lack of clarity on the other sites promotes clicks on sponsored listings by accident.

PageRank + Google SERPs = Proogle. If you would like to, but can't, resist the morbid fascination of the Google PageRank and your own site's SERPs, then Proogle is a dangerously addictive new toy. It pulls through the Google results but includes the PageRank for each result. Use it now as there is some question mark over its compliance with Google's terms of service, and therefore how long it will be allowed to live on.

Update on Yahoo! Slurp feeding - from April 4th. Two more of the blogged Immediart products made it into the Yahoo results following my experiment from the 4th April (read below). The Yahoo site search for Immediart (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3awww.immediart.com+immediart&dups=1) now shows the Black Ferrari Enzo and the Ferrari Modena from the four mentioned. The web stats (this is a friendly link to the WebAbacus web analytics tool I use, not a view of my web stats) show additional visits only to these two pages by the Yahoo Slurp crawler just two days after the links went live. Why some and not the others? The hunt for an answer continues.