Opera reports settlement with US company for 12 million dollars.

Rumors abound that Opera's report of a 12 million dollar settlement with an unspecified "international company" over specifically creating pages that were incompatible with versions of the Opera web browser was none other than Microsoft - who's site specifically threw broken pages to visitors whose user agent was identified as Opera.


http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39155572,00.htm

Google Takes a Stand Against Spyware

Google has been a long-time anti-spyware advocate. Now they've made a clear stand against the spyware problem by announcing a set of software principles:
http://www.google.com/corporate/software_principles.html

If you have no idea what spyware is - it is software that surreptitiously installs itself, or hidden components of itself that monitor your activity, open pop-up ads, record credit card numbers, and worse. Usually it pretends to be something benign - a free game, a system tool, an "optimizer" - but all that is a trojan horse to show you the company's advertisers.

There's a great free tool for checking and removing these types of programs: Ad Aware.

The Google Bug that Buggers Sites II

Just a little update on the "Buggle" that was boggling Googlers:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3354441

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23927.htm

Google's statement:

"We can confirm that less than 10 websites were inadvertently removed from Google's index for several hours [Thursday]. All of these sites have been restored and are accessible through a Google search. The removal occurred as the result of an outside attempt to abuse Google's automated web page removal tool -- a free service we provide webmasters who would like to remove web pages they own from Google's index. Upon discovering this bug, we fixed it immediately. We will also perform a thorough analysis to ensure additional web pages were not inappropriately removed."

Kudos to G for fixing and admitting to the problem.

Google URL Removal Bug Blags Site Rankings

Direct from WebmasterWorld - a major flaw in Google's remove URL tool allowed unscrupulous webmasters to remove their competitor's URLs.

Basically it works like this. Let's say you use .asp web pages on your site - the competitor requests that www.example.com/index.html get removed - Googlebot comes to your site, but you don't have an index.html page - your main page is home.asp (or whatever) - google requests index.html - gets a 404 - so it says okay, www.example.com/index.html has been removed.

So what's the big deal? Well - Google removes not only /index.html but the home page of the site as well. The poster that outed the technique was able to remove the home pages of both Abobe.com (PR 10) and Microsoft.com (PR 9) in this manner.

So - if you have had a site in a competitive field that suddenly got its home page deindexed (and you don't use index.html as your home page) - well it might be worth looking in to.

Google Blog Watch...

Well, it's day 4 over at /googleblog/ - Now they've put up a post about their disturbing results flap that surfaced when a "Hate Site" (no need to link to it) started ranking well for the search term "Jew".

100% Corporate PR rehash... I suppose this is to be expected - I wasn't expecting them to post Google's "secret sauce" (unless it came from Charlie Ayer's Recipe Book) - but still...

WebmasterWorld Pubcon 6.5

Hot on the heels of PubCon 6 (Feb 26 - 29, 2004) - Webmasterworld announces Pubcon 6.5 - slated for June 4th, 2004.

I had the privilege to attend #6 in Orlando - dunno about London yet - got a lot of stuff going on in June... mmm... Guinness. 8)

Details here: WebmasterWorld Pubconference.

Google launches their own blog

Whether you consider it nothing but a corporate boost for Google's blogger division, or yet another example of a forward thinking of a non-traditional start up.

At the mo, it's pretty much a recycle bin for press releases, written blog style (in other words - in a less formal, personal style). Let's see what's to come.

Here it is: http://www.google.com/googleblog

Did you mean....

Misspellings are hot in Adwords, Overture, Enhance Interactive (AKA ah-ha.com)and FindWhat.com - nothing like paying a couple of nickels for misspellings of words that others are paying several dollars per click for. Sure - there's less traffic but the ROI rocks. Next time you bid in a PPC engine - remember your speeling, typos and "thinkos".

AdSense earnings - down across the board

Despite of complaints from the usual moaners, it appears that Google's Adsense program has really taken a bite out of the earnings goldmine. Don't get me wrong - the earnings are still there, but...

"...we're introducing enhancements to our pricing model for advertisers. Google's smart pricing has always provided better placement for better performing ads, and reduced the cost of a click to the least amount possible for an advertiser to stay above their competitor's ad. Now, with the new AdWords pricing model, we’ll also automatically adjust the price of clicks across the Google Network based on their expected value to the advertiser. A number of factors will be taken into account when calculating the expected value, including the keywords or concepts that triggered the ad. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.

What does this mean? Well prior to the "smart pricing" I never noticed a click that earned less than $.03 - now I have seen numerous occassions when the earnings were very definitely less than that. Unfortunately, I am not the only one....