Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

Update on GreetStreet.com. We are slowly removing the variables that could be causing Google to have a blindspot about Greet Street. The first thing we spotted was that the site was doing some complicated redirects when landing on the home page. These amounted to a confusing mix of a home page that nobody actually saw, and a 302 (content temporarily moved) redirect.

I believe the consequence of the above has been to cause the GreetStreet content to be indexed incorrectly under the URL of one of the shopping directories that the site has been submitted to. This screen shot shows the current SERPs and the GreetStreet home page content indexed under a url of the Kyotee shopping directory.

We have fixed the redirects and the 302s by replacing them with a simple 301 (content permanently moved), and now we need to prompt Google to re-spider the location on Kyotee under which it thinks GreetStreet's content resides. We are doing this by publishing the url here: www.kyotee.com/gosite/3252.htm and hoping that my blog's daily indexing holds up and that around 01.00am tomorrow morning the Googlebot will come along, follow the link and realise that the content is indexed incorrectly.

Before the Googlebot comes along tomorrow morning, we are going to see if we can get Kyotee to change the fact that the URL above has a 302 redirect of its own, which may also be causing some confusion of its own.

More later...

According to ZDNet Google have let their enterprise search appliance loose on the UK market. The Google Search Appliance starts at £19,000 and scales up to 150,000 documents, and slots into your file server stack in bright yellow. Desktop search = FREE, Google Search Appiance = £19,000, there really should be something in the middle.

AOL Europe and Overture have parted company. AOL has long used Google's search data to power its search services, but had relied on Yahoo's Overture paid placement services to provide sponsored links. That changed this week, when AOL announced that it would use Google's Adwords instead. Silicon.com has a fuller version of the story here. Overture are spinning it as an insignificant move. Hmmm...

In the dim and distant dotcom past, Greetings Card supplier egreetings.com used to own a domain called greetstreet.com. At some point they acquired their current trading domain and let the old domain fall fallow.

Last year a very new client of mine bought the domain - which had not been used for a number of years - ignorant of this history, and launched a business providing craft supplies on GreetStreet.com.

The new GreetStreet business was launched in May 2004 and despite six months of trading in craft supplies on a live domain and a with small but growing amount of genuine in-bound links from craft-related sites, Google singularly fails to recognise the site, and does not crawl it. Naturally this leads to no index entries on Google and no referred visits. This mystery has been handed to me to solve, if I can. Watch this space.

Clusters. This month's small-to-middling topic on the search horizon. Google has been showing off it's clustering technologies at the recent Web2.0 conference (Danny Sullivan's write up and an MP3 of the session) and Vivisimo has taken its search grouping to the next level by launching the somewhat tweely-named Clusty search site.

Clustering is based on Bayesian (A method of combining the likelihood ratio with additional information to produce an overall estimate of the strength of a piece of evidence, named after the Reverent Bayes) principles and is particularly useful when search terms can have source material across completely different areas of interest, as it seeks to group the results in their most likely overlaps first. I am not convinced, however, that clustering will make a significant difference the hunt for spam pages.

Google has released a new search tool designed to index the content of your local machine. The Desktop Search application is available at http://desktop.google.com/ and there is a fascinating debate going on about it at WebmasterWorld. The bits of insight that particularly struck me were that, with a bit of imagination, it could be made to perform a bit like the Google search appliance that currently costs around $15,000; and that on the assumption that it includes elements of the Google algorithm for web search, then it becomes an interesting, if scaled-down, test application where it may be possible to identify subtleties in ranking by doing contolled tests on local documents. It comes with some interesting default privacy settings, and no, I haven't installed it yet. Still trying to find a use for the last Google desktop based search tool I installed; the Google Deskbar.

Microsoft have let loose the next preview of their MSN Search technology. Visit the http://techpreview.search.msn.com page to have a look. As before, it is nice to see that some things are staying constant in this changing world... Search for a Google Consultant ;-)

Froogle UK appears to be just around corner, as it has quietly started asking for applications for feeds to the UK site. I have worked with Froogle on the Google.com site for a US client, and found it incredibly simple to work with. Optimisation proves to be a separate challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Conversion rates from Froogle seem to be universally low, though. Having a UK site to use may help understand why this is the case, as I have never used the US site as a consumer. More on this when I have a client feeding the UK engine.