It’s fast, easy and hip – its Google.
Google, who gave “search” a new synonym, launched Google 411, a free directory enquiry service today.
All you need to do is, dial 1-800-GOOG-411, speak out the location and the name of the business and Google gives you a list of businesses ready to be dialed!
Here’s the YouTube video:
(Source: vnunet.com)
Jennifer’s posts on “paid links and ads” are very interesting.
Part 1 talks about “nofollow” tag and its origin while the Part 2 talks about Google’s new policies of using it.
In my post earlier about Google banning paid links in July, I’d shared similar thoughts on paid links.
I agree that humans should be informed if the product review is paid or not, if the promotion of the third party is being done because you’ve been paid to do it or because you really are recommending it.
But I do feel Google’s going a little overboard with this. Below is what I copied into Jennifer’s comment box as well:
Webmasters have been buying and selling links before Google was even born. It was the very exchange of links ( I’m surprised it was assumed all links were “unpaid for” links when PageRank was invented), including the buying and selling of links that resulted in an algo that is treating links as a voting mechanism. After Google, reciprocal linking became even more aggressive because webmasters realized how important these links were to Google. Soon, reciprocal linking changed to paid links and three-way linking, all methods of link bargaining for webmasters targeting Google rankings. And it worked. I’m sure it still works and thats why now Google wants paid links to be punished – but how exactly will this stop webmasters from running after the rankings. And really, its about rankings, not PR. There are many websites out there with excellent PageRank and no rankings.
There are rarely such cases who only buy links for PR – everyone wants traffic – the whole objective of wanting to rank on Google is to get traffic. Then when a website is getting traffic from another source, why will it not want to? If a PR 6 website is giving a text link for $50 on its homepage, and has some xxxxxx v/m, why should that website not charge. A usability study shows that a text link gets more the click-throughs than an image ad. Then why should ads be just converted to images?
Those who really do it only for PR and not traffic, will figure out a way to beat this too. Many of the genuine cases will suffer (ok, I posted “only genuine cases will suffer” in the comment – but sense has prevailed 
).
The Internet has been flooded with link directories and link farms that are providing links for free (in return of another link – nothing comes for free these days!) or for a certain fee (does this qualify as a paid link?.)
Its quite understandable that Google doesn’t like it. Artificial inflation of links just doesn’t serve the purpose. The SERP results are then not in control of an algo but in control of the individuals who can build maximum links!
It hurts. But can reporting paid links help?
How do you find out if the votes are genuine or bought?
Is Yahoo directory selling links (its a paid directory – how do you know that people want a link from yahoo directory because of th PR value of that page and not really the traffic coming from there)?
What about other link building directories? How can you find out the purpose for paying for a link? Is text ad a paid link? What about directories that allow free inclusions provided a linkback is provided?
Thats brings us to SEM companies. Are they promoting paid links? Is reciprocal linking paid? No money is being exchanged between parties – only link swapping. But the SEM company is getting paid to carry out the link building campaigns. So, whose selling links and whose buying links here? And how will a computer program come to a conclusion that the link bought was with the intention of increasing traffic and not PR.
I believe one can argue that if traffic is the sole purpose, use javascripts, iframe etc for sending out the link. But why should a webmaster do that? For the sole reason that otherwise, Google “might” think that its a paid link created with an “intention” to increase PR?
Before Search Engines, links were the only source of traffic movement. Anyone today with a PR of 6 on the homepage is (assuming) getting good traffic. So if the webmaster decides to sell links from his homepage to make some money, is he violating Google’s quality guidelines? If another webmaster buys that link in hope of getting traffic from that website, is he too violating Google’s quality guidelines?
How do you know what the intention behind the buying/selling of the link was?
I’m curious to see if any website makes news for buying/selling links.
Can you have your competitor banned by going and buying links for their website on their behalf and then reporting them?
Google seems to be carrying out PageRank (PR) update near the end of April 2007 now. Several of our sites have picked up PR. CueBlocks.com has moved up to PR of 4 now from the earlier value of 3. A good friend called up to inform me about this.
Despite it’s dwindling importance in Google’s algorithm, the event still does not fail to attract a lot of attention. The Search Engine Marketing community, for many years now, has been terming PageRank’s importance to be only of “entertainment value” – a fall from it’s yester years of glory. It’ll be a good idea to let the PR update settle in and be reflected in all data centers before either congratulating yourself or sulking.
For those who are new to this industry and are probably confusing PageRank (PR) with actual ranking of their website in Google Search Engine Result Page’s (SERP’s), please take a few minutes to go through the following links:
Google had registered the domain www.searchmash.com on 13th September 06 and have made it live now. Using old google data, it seems to be a testing environment for some interesting changes Google seems to be thinking of bringing in the SERPs. Some interesting use of Ajax on the site.
Some of the features listed on SearchMash are:
- Start typing! You don’t have to have your cursor in the search box to start typing your query.
- URL menu! Click the green URL of a web result to open a menu of options for viewing the URL or refining your query.
- Image results panel You can see the top three image results next to your web results.
- Reorder results Click the number next to a result and drag it around to reorder. This is just for fun right now, but we have some ideas for how to use this.
- More results bar Click the “more results” bar at the bottom of the page (or hit the space bar) to load more results and automatically scroll down to view them.
It would be worth seeing what Google eventually does with SearchMash.
A search on “CueBlocks” shows some of the images of the CueBlocks team playing carrom – taken from our blog posting many months back.
We’ve been noticing that Google does not return the usual domain information, when we search for just the domain name. Earlier a query for www.cueblocks.com on Google would have returned just the home page title, description as per Google and the URL of the home page – www.cueblocks.com. This was followed by a few links which allowed one to check the links to Cueblocks.com as per Google, search engine saturation (number of pages of that site indexed by Google), link to cache of that page, similar pages etc. But as of now this additional information is not being returned. This has been replaced by what looks like a list of all pages (as Google wishes to report) which has a mention of your domain name.
This has been happening since the reported Google Pluto update of 24th August 06 – a back link update, with no significant changes in the SERPs.
Much to the delight of avid readers, Google Book Search is allowing the download of free copies of out-of-copyright books which one can read at leisure.
To find the out-of-copyright books, make a search after selecting the “Full view” radio button. From the results, click on the title of the result which would take you to the page dedicated to that book. The right side panel has the option of downloading, apart from other useful information about that particular book. The books get downloaded as PDF files. I must add here that the quality of scanning they have done looks very high indeed!
Read more about this at the Google Blog.
CueBlocks Blog | Powered by WordPress | Custom Blog Design - CueBlocks