Google's April Fool's Joke 2005

I was nosing around in google.com.au this evening and noticed some strange references to "Google Gulp".

Damn, I thought, Google is doing some sort of weird branding promo in Australia, and was on the verge of asking one of my AU buddies to pick me up a bottle.

Then I started reading the fine print:

...Google Gulp will send packets of data related to your usage of this product from a wireless transmitter embedded in the base of your Google Gulp bottle to the GulpPlex™, a heavily guarded, massively parallel server farm whose location is known only to Eric Schmidt...

There is also a nod to the Autolink controvery, since the "Google Gulp" includes and "autodrink" feature.

From the Google Gulp FAQ:

5. Well, shouldn't Auto-Drink™ be default-off?

You mean we should cripple a perfectly useful feature just because of a little bad PR?

My question is, is this what Google's model of the ideal ecommerce site is? 4 pages?

Ha! Good luck with that G - hope you have an affiliate program...

The funny thing is that the stuff would probably sell well - assuing it had plenty of caffeine in it... Maybe Google needs to team up with Jones Soda and really pump out some "googlicious" flavors - I can just see it now... twist off caps with adwords coupon codes, top rankings and more fun.

Other Google April Fool's Jokes include:

Pigeon Rank

Google Lunar Jobs

Google Patent Highlights Anti-Spam Techniques

Google's latest patent filing, "Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data" has opened up some interesting aspects of Google's fight against SEO and search engine spam.

Highlights include various confirmations of rank scoring factors:

1) evaluation of link growth

2) evaluation of quality based bookmarking and volume of return visits from bookmarks

3) evaluation of quality of domain based on years of registration.

4) gradual increase of content on site

5) click pop in the serps leads to higher scoring.

6) identical anchor text penalty / artificial variation of anchor text penalty

7) outbound links to trustworthy sites

More to come, but its 30 pages of tech speak...

Google Acquires Urchin

GOOGLE AGREES TO ACQUIRE URCHIN

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - March 28, 2005 - Google Inc. today announced it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as
a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.

Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience andps generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.

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Now what does this mean?

Well, I thought this announcement is odd, unless you consider this thread (subscription required) at Webmaster World started by Brett Tabke.

In summary Brett suggests that a major search engine may soon stop leaving referral tracks in webmaster's logs by changing its method of sending searchers to pages using Post instead of Get.

This is all technical stuff, but it basically means that none of the current website analytics / referral tools will be able to determine what term a search from Google was.

Now, what if they hooked their newly acquired Urchin analytics into the Google search; suddenly there is only one web stats tool that can show you what terms your Google traffic is using to visit your site.

On the other hand, this could just be an additional defensive measure to fend off the upcoming MSN advertising program, and the upcoming Yahoo contextual ad program for publishers, just another tool to add to the conversion tracking tool... Interesting.

Time will tell.

Ask Jeeves Purchased by IAC

There are reports that Ask Jeeves is being purchased by Barry Diller's company IAC.

IAC has a large set of valuable web properties, including Expedia, Ticketmaster, Match.com and CitySearch, LendingTree, .

The most interesting will be folding CitySearch into a Local Search function.

What is interesting is to contemplate the possibility that since IAC is an Overture partner, Google adsense has a very real possibility of being pulled from the AJ site.

What remains to be seen is if Ask will finally stop throwing all the ads as if they were content at the top of their results pages.

SEO Tools For Firefox

There are a growing set of extensions for the Firefox web browser that are rapidly making it an indispensable part of the SEO's web development toolkit.



Setting aside the debate over the value of PageRank for a moment, "seeing green" is still a component of the process.

Download the Google PageRank Extension directly from Firefox (it knows how to install these extensions automatically). After it installs, you'll be able see the page rank for pages, just like as if you had the Google Toolbar installed, except look for it in the bottom righthand side of the screen.

Next, you need the User Agent Switcher extension. First off, this extension is very handy in some sites (like my bank) that block access to my online banking pages unless I have an Internet Explorer user agent string... strangely enough, the online banking pages work fine in Firefox as soon as I spoof the IE UA ;).

Now - aside from that the user agent can be used to spoof search engine bot User agents - Googlebot, slurp (Yahoo), and MSNbot. What you can do (usually in conjunction with disabling JavaScript) is see sites that are cloaking. For some reason, these are pretty common in Yahoo's serps. Just look for "ransom notes" that look like randomly generated text or keyword lists, and visiting the site doesn't have the content on the page, chances are high that the site is cloaking. Some of the smarter cloakers are using the IPs to cloak, but try taking a peek at the search engine's cache of the page.

Finally (saved the best for last) you should install the Web Developer Extension (made by the same person who created the User Agent Switcher).

Basically the web developer extension is a powerful toolbar that has a number of developer shortcuts that are invaluable in the website creation, testing and debugging process.

The web developer toolbar is broken into 14 major categories:

• Disable: allows you to disable a number of different things - javascript, images - very handy for testing purposes



• CSS: allows you to view the stylesheet of a page instantly, allows you to impose your own stylesheet on any page, and edit the CSS directly from the dropdown menu.



• Forms: Another set of powerful tools, allowing you to populate the form fields, get the form information, and much more



• Images" just about anything you want - you can display the image paths, dimensions, put a special outline on images that are missing attributes like the alt tag, find broken image tags and much more.



• Information: Use this drop down button to show link paths, anchors, ID and class details, show response headers and a whole lot more.



• Miscellaneous: Has a mixed bag of stuff - allows you to clear cache, set all links as visited or unvisited, delete domain cookies - and even more.



• Outline: Allows you to highlight table cells, frames, and in addition to a number of other features, you can even customize to highligh your own elements.



• Resize: Use this to reset your browser window to 800x600, display current window size, and more.



• Tools: My favorite tab - validate CSS, validate HTML, validate links, view download speed, and more.



• View Source: view source, just like you'd expect, but available with a single click.



• Options: Adjust your settings, change from new tabs to windows, and a whole lot of adjustments for each major tab category.



• Standards Compliance Mode (checkmark icon): bright blue when the viewed page is compliant, greyed out otherwise - a variety of options avaiable with a click.



• Javascript Validator: white when no errors found, Javascript Console opens on a click.



• Disable (arrow head icon): Disables the web developer toolbar buttons.

Have fun, play around - good luck.