Google Talk Takes Swipe at Skype

With the launch of Google Talk, Google has simultaneously jumped into the instant messaging and VOIP marketplace.

With a slick, simple signature Google style interface - it is a nice-looking, unobtrusive piece of software. It even includes the GMail notifier, which means that you aren't adding another program to your start-up list so much as switching one for another.

The one feature I can't test is the VOIP features - my main PC is a laptop, and I don't have, nor do I want any additional wires and gadgets hanging off of it.

I am not sure how they plan to monetize the chat / talk features, though the chat account is based on a GMail account, and of course, GMail users are show contextual advertising.

I think this is more about eyeballs and users. Nothing could be more annoying than Yahoo's IM client, which puts itself in the foreground every ten minutes, followed by the MSN instant messenger's irritating advertising banners - all reasons why I have been using Trillian for 3 years. Trillian allows you to have AIM, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN (and multiple accounts open simultaneously) all under one chat client. It also offers chat logging and other features that make it a great instant messaging client - and there are no ads, and there's a full-featured free version.

Google Talk is a nice addition, but I think it's going to take several months, if not years to build up the user base and "brand loyalty" that AOl, MSN and Y! have been accruing for 6 years or longer.

By the way, sorry about the 1940's-esque headline - I could not resist ;)

Google Sidebar Desktop Search

Google has rethought their desktop search tool and attempted to create an all-around useful tool, called Google Sidebar.

The new Sidebar integrates a RSS reader, new mail notifier (works with Gmail and Outlook), custom weather, custom news headlines, custom stocks, image search, and Quick view - a list of frequently viewed documents and files, and, perhaps, the handiest feature - a little scratch pad to jot down notes - how many times have I opened notepad from the command line to do just that? - all presented in "skyscraper" format. In addition, Google has put out an API kit that will enable developers to create their own plug-in modules that can be added to Sidebar.

All in all, the new Sidebar desktop search tool looks pretty good. I am going to have to pass though - I had an issue with Google's desktop search tool permanently archiving all my old spam emails, which made my email search useless - and was the primary reason for using desktop search. Google didn't have a way to undo it - even the Google reps at Pubcon were stumped. Also there were some issues with CPU consumption - the Google desktop search put my laptop into overdrive during idle times.

I finally had to switch over to MSN's Search Tool, which allowed me to remove the spam email folder from being indexed, and seems to be a little gentler on my laptop's CPU.

If you haven't tried installing desktop search yet, I would highly recommend it - it's amazing how much more productive it makes me. For now, I am going to stick with the MSN product - even with all the new features, I just don't see the need to switch.

Google Update Cutts

Google definitely seems to be shuffling out a new index, and some of the changes seen in Google Update Bourbon seem to have been rolled back.

The main thing I've noticed so far is that one of my sites that has had a double listing for years, and lost it in Bourbon has suddenly shown up in its serps with a double listing again.

Since this is the 3rd Google update of 2005, (the previous two were called Allegra and Bourbon), I am jokingly referring to this as Google Update "Cutts" in honor of the fact that this update rolled out in time to allow the Matt Cutts Blog to break out of the "sandbox" and start ranking.

Naughty, naughty Matt - rolling out an update just so that your own blog can start ranking.... I can only blame DaveN for this. How quickly people turn to the dark side once their own site is at stake. ;)

Yahoo's 20 Billion Web Doc Index Kerfuffle

Recently Yahoo announced that their index now contained over 20 billion "web objects", specifically 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files.

At first this number was blithely accepted, but within hours, the impact began to sink in... 20 billion is a lot, and far outstrips Google's current claim of 8,168,684,336 web pages. Google pushed past the 8 billion mark last November in a flurry of spidering that everyone noticed.

No one has been posting about Yahoo's slurp hammering servers. In fact, to my irritation - I noticed that Yahoo has been spidering and caching my sites' CSS files. What the heck is that about? How is the spidering/caching a CSS file useful for the average user? Should I start optimizing so I can rank for p{font-size: 12px;}?

Why do I have to waste my time changing my robots.txt files just for this stupidity from Yahoo anyhow?

Anyhow, soon Google co-founder Sergey Brin weighed in to GOOG share holders (well, actually at the New York Times), stating:

"The comprehensiveness of any search engine should be measured by real Web pages that can be returned in response to real search queries and verified to be unique, we report the total index size of Google based on this approach."

The article continues by citing a survey done on Sunday by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, which found that Google returned an average of 166% more results over Yahoo in a random survey of over 10,000 search terms. The survey also found that Yahoo only beat Google's raw overall results numbers in 3% of the searches.

Where's the proof Yahoo? Can they be counting duplicate content, CSS files, RSS feeds in multiple formats and all the other dregs of information that make up the human useless "better that it stays invisible" web? All I can say I that I have a couple sites that have yet to be deep crawled by my friend Slurp, yet G and MSN's indexing count is in the thousands for these same sites.

Sorry Y!, just because a deep crawl is on your "to-do list" doesn't mean your url crawl list should count towards the index numbers.

Hand-edited Results in Yahoo Point To Algo Failure

There have been suspicions for months that Yahoo has been hand-editing results for competitive search terms, however I recently stumbled across a pair of search terms that essentially prove that these suspicions have foundation.

When searching for a particular popular commerical single word search term (over 400K searches a month, according to the Overture keyword tool) and a two-word related term (66K a month), the top 10 results are *exactly* identical.

Well, not only are the odds of this happening extremely unlikely, but reversing the two-word search term (33K a month), not one of those top ten results is in the top 20. In fact, the results are pretty darn... "spammy" - cloaked pages, keyword stuffing, shady redirects, the works.

Yahoo has never claimed to exclusively use algorithmic solutions like Google does, but it begs the question - Are human-edited results on such a vast scale viable? Sure, Yahoo has a whole staff of professional editors from the Yahoo Directory just waiting for those $299 directory submissions to trickle in, so it certainly makes sense to occupy them improving the Y! search experience and knock out the bad results, or, as it appears, actually selecting the top 5 or 10 results.

But what happens if the top ranked site changes hands or content, as often happens in the internet world? How will these hand-edits withstand the test of time? Let's see what these Yahoo hand-picked serps look like in 6-12 months, if, in fact, these sites are "permanently" lodged in the top 5, as people have suggested.

All in all, I suspect that Yahoo's decision to hand-pick search results is a short-term fix. In the end, even though Yahoo's results for high visibility search terms are very good, I believe that the volume of overall search terms makes their manual adjustment of the search results untenable. Yahoo's hand-picked results do not, nor could they ever, extend to the tens of millions of search terms that constitute the Long Tail of Search, and that is where Google and MSN's use of automatic algorithmic solutions will ultimately prevail.

Matt Cutts Blog

If you attend the Search conferences like Webmaster World's Pubcon, chances are you've met Matt Cutts, one of Google's principal software engineers.

He is not only a nice guy that always has a moment to listen to a webmaster's problems, he's now started his own blog where he has promised to publish some of his most frequently asked questions.

I think it's a good thing when a company like Google has employees go "public" so to speak it helps people remember that there *are* humans making decisions.

Two comments for Matt: 1) Why did you choose Wordpress over Google's own Blogger? 2) Why haven't you taken Googleguy's advice and set up your domain to redirect non-WWW requests to the WWW?

:)

Just kidding, but I am looking forward to see future posts, and have already added the MattCutts.com blog feed to my.yahoo.com - cough cough. :p

Yahoo and MSN VS Google

With 3 major news stories in this week, one on the imminent launch of Yahoo's contextual advertising program and then today's news about MSN's paid search program, and finally the announcement of Ask Jeeve's CPC program, it's obvious that everyone is gunning for a slice of Google's advertising pie.

What will Yahoo Publisher Network, a competing contextual advertising program, do to Google's AdSense program? For the short term, not much - I am sure a lot of AdSensers will adopt a "wait and see" policy, or conduct limited testing of YPN on sites that may not be performing well with AdSense. However, the long-term potential harm to Google's bottom line is vast, depending on how badly Yahoo wants Google's publishers. A price war, and more flexibility for publishers is definitely on the near horizon. Good news for publishers.

The announcement of MSN's keyword program is actually worse news for Yahoo than Google, since MSN has been using Overture paid listings for years. However, it is obvious that Bill Gates is taking the threat of Google seriously, and even says so on a regular basis. The more legitimate places there are to advertise, the smaller the overall advertising pot will be for Google. If a business has a $10,000 per year online advertising budget, they aren't likely to increase it 30% to advertise with MSN, they're going to do some test ads and reduce their budget in Y and G's programs in order to spread their exposure.

The truth is there are plenty of businesses with limited capacity - in the lodging industry for instance - if you have 20 (or 200) rooms available, you book 21 (or 201) rooms, not ever. That's where Yahoo and Google can be hurt - there are many, many more advertisers with finite capacity than there are with infinite capacity. Not everyone is selling ebooks and other digital products.

The news about Ask Jeeves CPC is not unexpected, but interestingly, Jeeves will be keeping Google AdWords ads in conjunction with their in-house ads program... Jeeves loves having its cake and eating it too.

Duck and Cover, G - they're coming after you with everything they've got.

The War Against The Scraper Sites

Martinibuster recently made an interesting post in his blog: Scraper Sites are Good for You - Surrender Your Content. I've pretty much been on the same side - as far as I am concerned, scrapers are just another free link to my site.

The latest Yahoo update and a mini-update at Google both seem to be targeting the oft-maligned "scraper" sites.

We know that Google is definitely targeting the scrapers - Googleguy made a few comments about it in WW, that the Y! update is also targeting scrapers is more speculation on my part, but here's some proof:

What Y! has done, it seems so far, is to increase their offpage requirements for ranking. Scrapers had been having having a field day in the search engines, Yahoo and MSN especially, by having nice snippets of keyword rich text which act as giant keyword nets, ranking for thousands upon thousands of non-competitive terms.

Yahoo had been notorious for ranking sites based on on-page factors alone, but this latest update seems to have changed that.

This means that everyone, scrapers included, is going to have to work a bit better to get authoritative links pointing towards their sites if they want to rank well in Yahoo!