Jeeves - All About The Benjamins

At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon VII in Las Vegas , I got the opportunity to ask the Ask/Teoma rep about their "unusual" choice to show 10 AdWords in front of search results, and why they didn't lay their PPC advertising out in a manner that mimicked the choices of the *majors* - ie Google/Yahoo/MSN.

Well, after a lame attempt to justify this practice by saying that the Google Adwords were also relevant content that was appropriate to their users - it became clear (not that it wasn't already) that despite their hard work to improve their search results - it makes absolutely no sense to optimize for Ask / Teoma at all - just make sure show up in the top 10 Google Adwords results.

The Ask sites have the barest minimum requirement to classify them slightly better than the oft maligned "scraper" sites.

More Google Than Ever

Google has just about doubled the size of their index,

November 9th, 2004:
©2004 Google - Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages

November 10th, 2004:
©2004 Google - Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages

This includes HTML, pdf, javascript, powerpoint, doc, rtf, flash and more.

I've noticed some juggling in the search results, and one of my pet terms jumped from 157,000 results to 235,000. Another term went from 4.1 million to 6.5 million.

This comes shortly after Yahoo's hoohah about having 1 billion images indexed.

How do you like them apples, Yahoo?

Gmail POP Access

Long anticipated, and although already gmail pop mail access was available informally - Google is now allowing desktop users to download their Gmail via the usual mail client such as outlook.

More here

A9.com - Not Quite Fixed Yet

Well I decided to revisit good ol' A9.com - sort of a follow up of my original Amazon's A9.com Show Adult Images post.

A search for "Latinas" pulls up adult images, starting on page one, and gets pretty raunchy in pages 2 and 3.

Below, a screen cap of the last image for the page for "latinas" search (censor bar added by me).

So when is A9 going to fix this? Is it an impossible task?

Time will tell.