You can click the image to enlarge.

This is similar to the test shown on The Official Google Blog, but mine doesn’t have the PageRank like scale on the left hand categories.

There are adwords at the top and bottom in some searches, sometimes on the sides (I SWEAR I saw it, but can’t get it to show up again), and sometimes none at all. Here is the other half of the search I did for new york hotels:

You can click the image to enlarge.

Changes in inline revisions

Google seems to like the inline revisions, but I have notices several changes in how they work. There are new queries that work now, and old ones that don’t. I think these changes are due to the testing I wrote about earlier. The also have changes the position for results 7,8, and 9 to results 4, 5, and 6.

New inline revisions:

Old inline revisions:

I am looking forward to seeing more tests

“There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/about-aol-announcement.html

Of course they already have used graphic ads on their pages before, but they were less banner like. Danny Sullivan pointed this out late December 2005. It looks to me like this latest add is the most banner like so far - and is relatively new. Based on other posts I am guessing this happened a few days ago on 4/26. According to these reports the reason for the ad is to “help provide our users with a great search experience”.

Google’s Ten things Google has found to be true has changed from:

“Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. Google does not accept pop-up advertising or rich media ads. Text ads that are properly keyword-targeted draw much higher clickthrough rates than flashing banner ads appearing randomly.” [emphasis added]
Internet Archive - June, 2004

to what it is today:

“Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. Google does not accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads (AdWords) that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly.”

While it is debatable whether this ad is “evil” (I don’t think it is that evil), but this is EVIL:

The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google

“They’ll be released over the next 24 days, in the form of six different challenges at four difficulty levels, with enough variety that I think everyone will be able to find something they like and play it over and over — although if you’re in the U.S., you’ll want to try to complete all 24 and make it to the Final Challenge, where I hear there’s a pretty nice prize package awaiting the winner.”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/can-you-crack-code.html

“One (1) new Daily Puzzle will be released via the Module (”Puzzle Release”) every twenty-four (24) hours along with Game Play Instructions for that particular Puzzle beginning on or about 1:00 p.m. EDT on April 17, 2006.”
http://flash.sonypictures.com/movies/davincicodequest/us/rules/

“Over a span of 24 days ending May 11th, you will encounter unique challenges. These daily puzzles will pull you deeper into the world of The Da Vinci Code. Answer all 24 puzzles correctly for a chance to win untold riches. ”
http://flash.sonypictures.com/movies/davincicodequest/

Now I like puzzles, and enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code, but felt let down by it supposed facts when they were intermingled with almost all fictional details about history. Historical fiction is fine, but Dan Brown outright lies on the stuff he implies is true. However - it is a big selling novel - and I probably will see the movie.

My problem is this - this contest is misleading. You don’t have to solve 24 puzzles. You have to solve much more than that - and it is a blatant sales pitch for google, the movie, and the book.

The first puzzle, actually a fun Sudoku like puzzle, I solved and thought, “Well I don’t know if I will do this every day, but it seems fun enough - who cares about the contest.” Unfortunately, this site was slow as balls (Matt Cutts seemed to fine that description humorous for some reason.)

After solving the puzzle I get another puzzle, but this one isn’t fun. In fact it is just a way to try to make you read the story or visit the site about the movie. It is a picture of Tom Hanks from the movie with “Please name the symbol on Robert Langdon (pictured at left).” and a blank for you to type in the answer. It notes, “a visit to www.SoDarkTheConOfMan.com might prove fruitful.” That is just the website for the movie. It is much faster now, but before it was very slow and I could not find the answer (blade).

It is a shame to see Google attach its name to something so slow and pushy. It is much, much faster now, but I assume I am not the only one put off by the initial slowness and effort that needs to be put forth for a “contest”. Some people are spending some time on this:

“Jeez, I’ve been working on the Day 13 symbol challenge for an hour or two now and it is really giving me a headache, I have no idea on how to work this and I have never done Sudoku puzzles either can someone help me please, everytime I think I’ve got it right it says I’m wrong, the other ones were easier.”

and frustrated:

“THis stupid symbol game……..There is no such thing as yottagrams I have looked on every search engine I have heard of and haven’t found anything…………..”

“I am STILL stuck on #12!! I am so annoyed. I have the googlemap and have been clicking furiously, but nothing happens. I cannot load the image posted by Hungrytrash so nicely because it directs me to a site that says the image could not load.”

“Solved all the puzzles so far, but the geography puzzle never downloads. did anyone else have this problem??”

“This competiton is just an advertisment for themselves! All you have to do is google search all of the questions and the answer is there! sooo easy!”

“Okay… what do you use for search terms on day 10 on Google Video?? I tried a lot of things. Is it the movie trailer?”

“Post 273 is wrong….. use all your senses to get the answer to that one.
Has anyone gotten the conductance quantum times the magnetic flux quantum in zeptocoulombs?”

I could go on and on, but there are 479 comments in that thread as of now, and I only read about a third of them. You can see that is an attempt to get people to use Google more and learn about the book and movie. These are the things people are having trouble with - the information demands, and not the actual puzzles.

It is supposed to be a contest and not a time share sales pitch. The rules are long, but basically only one person wins anything of value ($30,000+ trip to France with a bunch of other stuff) and up to 10,000 people win “a limited edition Cryptex replica. ARV of each Finalist Prize is: $30″ which is part of the final puzzle challenge - and hopefully no one will have to go to the “original written essay on a subject related to The Da Vinci Code” tiebreaker (not joking).

I think it would actually be somewhat fun if they didn’t make you learn how to use Google’s products and more about the movie and book. They are getting way more in value than they are handing out.

Learned some of the following at PubCon from Mr. Vallaeys

1) CTR still matters of course - the higher the better
2) Suggests using 2-3 creatives per adgroup with 5-7 keywords
3) Landing page quailty - design and content - should be relevant to both adgroup and keywords on page
4) Strongly suggested google is looking for a privacy policy - either on a manual or automated basis
5) Was very concerned that people would have a positive experience when visiting your site

MSN also had a very interesting presentation. Their adcenter product was awesome looking, but it is still in beta.

Thanks to Keith, Jake, Rae (with some WITS pics at her blog), Floriana, Ted, Eric, 888 was awesome and sponsored the event along with some other great companies – and I had I great time hanging out with them. , and everyone else who made it possible.

Hung around with Thomas some, as well as, Jimmy, and John Coronella.

Too bad I couldn’t hook up with Scott, Shoemoney, or Dave N as they didn’t manage to make it this time.

Ok - I sort of got sick when I came home from WITS and haven’t gotten around to thumbnailing, uploading, and other stuff I wanted to before leaving for pubcon. Anyway - I took the lazyway out and got a flickr account. I did write a little bit, but haven’t proofread it, and will post two events for now - and some pics from the Flikr account.

Poker Tournament

We had either 18 or 19 people for the WITS No Limit Texas Hold’em Tournament. Jake was tournament director and both Jake and Rae were dealers. Jake makes an excellent tournament director. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of this game, but maybe someone else does. The picture is of another game played at the Padres game. The tournament took us about 4 hours and I ended up finishing 1st. The top four places were “in the money”. Here is who finished:

1st: Chris Raimondi
2nd: Werty
3rd: Goodroi
4th: Darren from InjuryBoard
Ted almost made 4th - it was a vairtual tie.

Not sure if that is how you spell Darren’s name, injuryboard was also kind enough to buy us drinks for the poker game – and 888 gave away an iPod.

Padres Game

Saturday evening we had three executive boxes for the WITS webmasters. It was a lot of fun, but I hardly watched the game at all. Colorado scored seven runs in the first inning and there wasn’t much of a contest, but the conversation going on was top notch – and some people stared another poker game (don’t know how that one finished).

A am writing this at six in the morning - no sleep as of yet - and need to be on a plane in less than six hours. If I haven’t mentioned you - it doesn’t mean you weren’t loved - It means it slipped my mind. Now I remember nick, cheaters guy, and caveman. Had great conversation with caveman.

Anyway hop to see some of you in Boston

Wits Photos - Click Here

“Authorities also hopes the records will help identify customers whose credit card numbers were obtained in previous summons that were issued to Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Nowhere in the court records was there any mention about how many individuals the government has already received information about or estimates of what PayPal will provide.”

Lovely - soon you’ll have to turn your pocket change in too if things keep going this way. They’ll argue it on money laundering and national security grounds - rolled up quarters can be used as a weapon.

Google has added three new sin items including an odd bottle opener/keylight and two gambling items.

Google Chocolate Poker Chip

This chocolate poker chip sells for $0.75 and has a face value of $25 dollars. Not a bad deal I suppose and I will probably pick up a few and hope they don’t melt at Pubcon.

Google Burton Morris Poker Set

This set is basically useless. It is pretty, but I don’t know how many of you play poker. I used to play a lot of poker and still play a little bit. In fact - I left SES NYC one day early to play at ATLarge which I have played in many years now. I did ok finishing 11th out of 174 people in their biggest event - the No Limit Texas Hold’em event. Oh and note to Jodi - I wasn’t pouting cause Iwanted the wine cozy - I always look that way.

Anyway - the problem with this set is three fold:

One with 78 poker chips - in three different colors - that doesn’t allow for a lot of players. I think the MINIMUM number of chips I have EVER started with in a poker game is 20. After rebuys, change and stuff you need more. In AC I usually will sit down with 100 chips - in most home poker games - around 20 - 60. This set would be good for two players max IMHO.

Two, the cards are unidirectional. when picking up some players cards and shuffling - most people shuffle in a manner that would not reverse the direction of the cards. In fact, in most casinos, I believe the regulations would prohibit this. This would allow for easy cheating as aces from the previous hand could be oriented in a different direction. This would make everyone at the table with even a modest poker background uncomfortable as most of them would not be attempting to cheat, but it would be hard not to notice this happening. These cards would be illegal in every casino in the world.

Three, I am not following poker as much as I did - I know things have changed and it has gotten popular and there are tons of TV shows, but I have played for over a decade and don’t recall ever seeing dice or Yahtzee as part of any casino poker or even home poker game - and I have seen some weird home poker games.

Oh and it sell for $52.95.

Shocking abuses at Googleplex rumored to finance burgeoning anti-spam division

Ongoing abuse discovered by LA Times

While the U.S. Minimum wage is $5.15, California has an even higher standard of $6.75 an hour, but the LA Times has revealed that Google has had three employees “volunteer” to take a drastic salary cut that amounts to less than 2 cents a week. That is not a misprint. These employees are paid $1 a year in salary. Not only that – they are forced to work long hours under what can only be described as prison wages – even their food is provided for them by the company like in prison. I personally witnessed two of these employees working at 2 am on a hot summer night as I reported last year.

This means if they come in at 8 am – and leave at 2 am every night – they are working 18 hour days. Even assuming they are allowed off two days a week, then this means they are working 90 hours a week and 4680 hours a year. This works out to a salary of less than – geeze – it is in scientific notation 2.1367521367521367521367521367521e-4 dollars an hour.

Rumor: Salary Cuts used to Fund Cutts Empire

In the early years Google used very little counter measures in attempting to oust sites from its sites for TOS violations. Google worked pretty well relying on PageRank alone in combating this. Matt Cutts is "head of the Webspam group at Google". In a devious plan to gain control over Google, Matt used both pornography and food to bribe overworked employees at Google. In the book - How to do Everything with Google - Matt admits to having his wife make cookies and bringing them into work and asking for "volunteers" to try and find porn in Google Safe Search, "anyone who did would get a cookie as a reward".

You probably think I am making this up. You can click on that link to Amazon and search inside the book at amazon.com - it is on page 164. Anyone who has studied psychology knows this is Pavlovian conditioning . I am told these cookies were very delicious. Many of these Google employees are young and impressionable. Soon he had an army of employees that would do anything for these cookies and the porn that many had never seen before. Have you ever seen a Google employee - they are always smiling - now you know why - except for those poor three that are forced to work below minimum wage to support all this.

After two and a half year of working at Google, Matt’s power and influence at Google had grown to the point that he was able to start assembling an aggressive strategy in combating what he viewed as “SPAM”. This division has been codenamed “Death Star”. Everyone knows that Google’s computers for running google.com are distributed around the world at various data centers. However Cutts demands that the computers used for the “Death Star” divison are kept on site. His demands have forced Google to move from their relative new and swank Googleplex to a new facility with a secret underground bunker that is rumored to be able to survive a nuclear explosion – so that Google can still combat spam in the event of a terrorist attack.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050929-5365.html

“In the new Mountain View facility, Google staff will be able to access NASA scientists and supercomputing technology, along with the agency’s space data and images. Of course, Google’s already registered domains for the entire solar system and beyond.”

In the same article they try to hide these motives with stuff like this quote from Google CEO, Eric Schmidt:

"Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it. That’s just one small example of how this collaboration could help broaden technology’s role in making the world a better place."

Ever heard of email attachments? Does anyone buy this?

Matt Cutts True Goals Revealed for the First Time
Picture: Committed copyright violation by stealing this from Matt’s blog - however I thumbnailed it so hopefully he won’t ban me

I am able to reveal here for the first time that Matt’s true goal is obvious. Over the years many have noticed Matt has gotten into much better physical shape.

Those of you who have thought this was for health reasons are wrong. This is because Matt’s secret goal is to replace Mandy Patinkin in the upcoming second installment of the Princess Bride Trilogy:

Princess Bride 2: Buttercup’s Baby

Since moving from Kentucky rumors are that he befriended the same Mandy Patinkin and used his connections in the Intelligence community and California to get him a job as Special Agent Jason Gideon on the CBS show “Criminal Minds”.

In the early days of their friendship Matt fed Mandy Patinkin so many of his wife’s cookies mentioned above that Mandy developed high cholesterol and became a spokesperson for Crestor - a popular cholesterol lowering drug.

Matt’s Force FX Lightsaber Confiscated by Sergey Brin

Rumors persist that one night late in the Googleplex Sergey found Matt in a Sprite induce sugar high with his Force FX Lightsaber alone in his office shouting, "HELLO, MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA, YOU SPAMMED MY ENGINE, PREPARE TO DIE." Apparently the sword fighting display was actually quite beautiful and brought a tear to Sergey’s eye. Matt has studied fencing since he was 11 (picture of what could be Matt fencing) and his skills clearly worried Sergey as he did not want to lose such a valued member to what he feared at the time was Olympic class abilities that could place him on the US Olympic team. However, Matt confided his real goal and that night they worked on a plan of succession to keep Google’s spam fighting abilities in place should he ever leave.

Order of Succession for Spam Czar

The actual plan is appparently a well guarded secret, but from what I have been able to gather it involves a complex scheme using parts of the plans to protect the formula of Coca-Cola, The Post 9/11 Secret Government Plan, Mount Weather (Matt is rumored to have a Mount Weather ID Card issued by FEMA which is given to the about 7,000 government and other workers in order to continue life and infrastructure in the US in the event of Nuclear or other disaster), and in true Google Geek Fashion - the Master/Apprentice training program between Jedi and Padawan or some would say Sith Lord and Apprentice.

Matt’s Possible New Apprentice
Picture: Aaron seen here with the world’s leading expert on 301 redirecte Dave N (whose site I stole the picture from)

If you have watched the Star Wars movies you know the way it works - a Jedi has one - and only one apprentice. Same with sith lords. As Yoda said, "Always two there are, a master and an apprentice." I noticed in SES New York Matt (who has almost from the get go been the person giving presentations for Google at SES and WebmasterWorld functions) was in the room quietly observing in the back another Google employee speaking.

Aaron D’Souza was there at the link session from Google and that is the session I found Matt observing. I have talked with Aaron at several conventions and he is a very nice guy, but I don’t think he would be allowed to admit if this was true. Notice there is no bio for him on that page. Also, Vanessa Fox was at SES with Matt as well at a lunch with the Google Engineers. There is no bio for her either, but I notice she apparently does a lot of work on Google Sitemaps so either that is a cover or she is not the apprentice. Also noticable at the same session Aaron was speaking was Tim Mayer was not there. However, since Tim Mayer had a baby (or rather I guess his wife did), and he works for Yahoo that is a pretty good excuse and I am not sure what that has to do with this other than to say congratulations.

Available as a podcast so you can hear both Jeremy & Me in our sexy voices.

I was going to post how to do a DMCA request and how to protect your site, but this podcast covers many of the bases.

Still might do a post, but this is the first post I have made since August - so don’t hold your breath.

I checked and sure enough - it is banned.

Hey just send an email to yourself with “reinclusion request” in the subject line.

Akamai claims they handle between 10-20% of all Web traffic.. Now the cool part - you may have seen a picture of their “War Room” before - now you can get a little piece of that on your browser - just go to:

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/industry/net_usage_index.html

This shows you a map of the world updated every five minutes with facts and figures about the level of Internet traffic at news sites.

The Akamai Net News Index is the world’s first and only daily Web traffic benchmark that tracks where news is being consumed on a global basis. Akamai, as the delivery platform for more than 100 global news portal companies, has a unique view into the daily Web traffic of major news sites. Akamai has been in business for seven years, and serves content on behalf of the majority of the world’s leading online news portals. Distributing billions of page views daily for these news information sites, Akamai is in the unique position to be able to track news consumption on a global scale. At any point in time, millions of PC users (and increasing numbers of cell phone and other PDA users) are online consuming news.

Well I think it is cool.