Archive for Google
Web bots - There’s no magic
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a follow-up to my previous article about the web bot. In that article, I briefly explained what the web bots are and if they were able to predict anything. I strongly suggest you read the article but it’s not a prerequisite to this article. In that first web bot post, I made a slight mention of the “2012 prophecy” and guess what? Most of the comments are about the 2012 prophecy and whether or not the world will end in 2012. I won’t be talking about 2012 in this article but I will focus on the limits of the web bots because there’s a really important concept we all have to understand: Web bots scan man-made information. This article might look similar to my previous one, but is shorter and more focused on limits of web bots. It is a reminder of the core concept of web bots.
Web bots scan man-made information
This is the most important concept of web bots because it sets the limits to what the web bots are able to predict. This also explains why it’s impossible to predict any end of the world prophecy. Why is that? The main goal of a web bot is simply to crawl the web the same way Google would do it to extract important information from websites. That important information is usually the most relevant keywords on a website put with a certain algorithm that is able to get the meaning of the sentences the keywords are used in. This information is then put in a large database and the final goal is to compare similar topics to determine if they each point towards similar conclusions.
So, if we put all the pieces together: The web contains information written by humans, the web bots crawl that information, find correlations and make predictions. If the web bots take its information from man-made sources, then what can it predict? Only things humans can predict or have control over. Does that includes the end of the world? No. There’s nothing super-natural in web bots. It’s computer technology at its best: Gather, keep and interpret information the human brain can’t.
Sure someone can argue they sometimes predict the stocks market, but I know people who are damn good at this too. They can try to predict a whole lot of stuff, but it cannot go any further than what we can predict.
We have to be careful here, because web bots do have a power we don’t have: to merge all that information across the web and try to find a correlation. So, they can go a little further than what a single human can do, but they can’t go any further than what’s possible to predict by humans.
If it was really possible to predict incredible stuff, Google would have the answer to every question. Wait a minute…They do! Seriously, it’s possible to extract relevant information from the web but it has a limit. Google use the data it collect to do a lot of other stuff than giving you search results, but they wouldn’t be able to predict things humans don’t have control over if they tried. That’s the same thing for web bots, except it’s much more smaller than Google.
Put everything in perspective
Web bot is a really nice project but I think it’s going to be one more argument for doomsday prophets in the future. It already started with videos about the end of the world and web bots predicting it would happen in 2012. There are certain things we don’t have control over and we have to accept it. There are certain parts of our lives we don’t control and we have to accept it. Computers are useful but they’re not God. I think the web bot project has a nice future but always keep in mind the web is man made and the bots crawl the web: there’s a limit to their capacities, it’s no magic.
Some examples
What’s best than a couple of concrete examples?
Could the web bots predict:
- Natural disaster: There’s not much chances, unless it’s a natural disaster we can predict. We sometimes know in advance of a tornado and are able to predict the disaster. In that case, a web bot could do the same by gathering information from websites talking about a possible disaster on a certain date.
- End of the world: Unless it’s a very obvious situation or caused by humans’ actions, no.
- Terrorist attacks: Yes. at least it can help.
- Stocks markets: Yes it can help.
- You get the idea.
Hope it’s clear
I hope it clears everything up so that it’s now obvious that it is impossible for a web bot to predict things humans have no control over.
10 Easy ways NOT to make money online
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I’m really sick of all these “How to make money online”, “10 steps to make money online”, “How to monetize your blog” stuff because it’s always the same story over and over again. There’s no science to make money online: Write QUALITY content, update regularly and get involved in your niche/social networks! Crap = No traffic & Quality = traffic. I’m amazed there’s not much articles about what NOT to do in order to make money online. That’s what really matters, you can do a lot of stuff right, but are you doing a lot of wrong stuff? So here’s my list of 10 easy ways NOT to make money online:
- Blog for money if you are not an experienced webmaster: You’ll spend more time thinking how to monetize your website than to add quality content. It’s a sure fail.
- Write because you’ve fixed yourself a X post a day quota: Trust me, you’ll loose more readers by writing a crappy article than you’ll loose just by waiting one more day to write a quality article. Don’t write if you don’t know what to write about, it’s a bad article guaranteed.
- Spend the entire day watching your Adsense Account: Stop refreshing your Adsense account every 2 minutes in the hope of earning a couple more cents! Spend that 1 hour you loose on Adsense everyday to write.
- Assuming your blog design is not important:Your blog design is important! Not more than content, but that is what will give your blog a unique touch and will help people to remember you. Make it look professional.
- Spend your day on Digital Point for tips: 95% of users on Digital Point don’t make a single dollar per day and are there because they think making money online is easy. You’ll mostly get as an answer to your tips requests: “Get in the finance/medical to make money”, “Get involved in a more paying niche”, “Fill your site with Ads”, etc. False, just be the best at what you do and the rest will come.
- Not getting involved in social networks: Social networks are full of webmasters and making friends in your niche is what will make your website earn credibility and a good reputation. Contributing to the community will ensure you a strong position and people will want to link to your website. Don’t underestimate the power of social networks.
- Build links to build links: Stop thinking only about backlinks! It’s true it is important to get good rankings in Google, but write quality content, get involved in social networks and backlinks will come.
- Steal content: If you have to steal content to write your articles then you will never get a top player in your niche. You can quotes other websites, get article ideas from other websites but write your own content. That’s the only way to be a top player: Having something unique to offer.
- Fill your page with Ads: Until you can earn really decent money from your website, don’t fill it with ads. What’s the point of ruining the user experience for 1$ per day instead of 0.50$. You’ll have trouble earning credibility with that kind of approach.
- Don’t talk about your website: You have to think your blog/website is the best in your niche. With that approach you’ll feel confident to talk about it, refer people to your articles and spread the word about how your blog is the best thing since sliced bread. Talk about your website, that’s the only way to get traffic!
I hope this helped and that it sounded a little bit different that what’s available on every “Make money online” website. These are really honest tips from a honest blogger. I’ve made some of these mistakes and it doesn’t pay off.
Be clean, play fair, be a leader in your niche.
The future of Internet Advertising
Posted by: | CommentsI posted an article about the future of Internet advertising on my technology blog Adopt A Packet and I think it might be of interest for a lot of persons at Daily Common Sense.
Internet Advertising has reached a certain limit and Google experienced it recently. They’ve recorded a drop in the number of clicks on their banners displayed all across the web. Even if they say it’s because they’ve increased the quality of their ads, which means they’re more targeted, they have to face the reality: There are more “ad blind” people than 5-10 years ago when Internet Advertising all started. Continue to read The future of Internet Advertising - AdoptAPacket.com
Google: Don’t be Evil…For now.
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been saying it for the past year and I think this year is the year Google will start its first Evil year. The point is that Google’s shares are now crashing. Until now, Google was getting revenue fairly easily from their advertisement business and was spending without limits. Google’s reality is different today. They have share holders to satisfy and a board of greedy administrator looking for constant growth of the company. Google is already huge and by far dominating Internet advertising business. With their current situation, growing more can’t be done without a little bit of an evil touch. They have to flood you with ads a little more to show revenue growth and for that it means you’ll start having Google ads on cell phone when they fully gets in the business and shortly on YouTube. They are already scanning your Gmail account to show you relevant ads. Also, today Google acquired DoubleClick, another Internet advertising business. The deal wasn’t seen as a good thing for competitors as it would mean a total domination from Google, but it was concluded anyway. That’s the kind of thing you can expect in the next year: more controversial decisions by Google and a larger presence on the Internet which has to be accompanied by a little evil touch. The greedy administrators will expect constant revenue increase and Google will have to invade the Internet a little more each time. They are very creative and will do it in a very cleaver way I presume, but still, it’s a big corporation.
Google is still one of the most ethical company in the business, but I think their motto “Don’t be Evil” might loose significance over the next couple of years. This is mainly because Google is now a big corporation and a monster in internet advertising with a board of greedy administrators.
How does Google make money?
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the question I often have to answer is: “How does Google make money?”. They don’t sell any product, everything you use from them is free and on top of that they seem to be very active in the “open source” community. So how the hell can they cash-in?
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Advertisement, that’s how Google is making its money. Every time you do a search on Google, you’ve probably noticed that there was a section called “Sponsored Links”. Every time you click on one of those links, Google charge a certain amount of money to the website for the click. When you go on a website you’ll notice advertising from Google too. Daily Common Sense has ads from Google. Same thing happens here, when you click, Google charge a certain amount of money to the website you clicked on and part of that money is given to the webmaster publishing the ads. This is called AdSense and is an enormous source of income for Google.
How much does Google charge for a click?
The price advertisers pay for a click depends on a lot of factors and this is where Google is playing smart. They use some sort of bidding system. When you want to advertise with Google, you select keywords you are targeting. Let’s say I own an online guitar store and I want to bring potential customers to my website. I’m going to bid on the keywords “guitar” and “buy guitar” for example. The price I’m going to pay will depend if there is other companies bidding for that keyword. The more companies are fighting for a keyword, the more I’m going to pay for a single click to my website. The price can vary from 0.01$ to 100$ and more. Not to bad for a click hey? You can imagine that for highly competitive keywords like finance and health it can cost quite a lot of money for a company to advertise with Google.
No production cost
Google doesn’t sell any tangible product and that’s the beauty of their business. They sell something that doesn’t really exist. They really sell traffic. It mostly comes down to this: They get paid for sending traffic to other websites. That’s why Google seems to be everywhere now: They have to show substantial growth to their stakeholders and to do that they have to drive more and more traffic to provide more and more advertisement. That’s also the reason they’ll be jumping in the cell phone industry, so they can make a bit of money from all the web traffic that next generation cell phones are going to drive in the next couple of years.
Expect to see Google around more and more in the next couple of years…
How Does Google Rank Websites?
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Everybody use Google and it’s by far the best and most popular search engine on the Internet. Have you ever asked yourself how does Google decide which site ranks first and which site appears on the last page of the search results? Of course, it use your keywords to determine which site is the most relevant to your query, but how does Google decide between two sites with the exact same title? You can even push it further: How would Google decide which site to rank first between to sites with the same content and same title?
Google ranking algorithm is called PageRank and was developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University. This is the core of Google’s ranking even if a lot of other aspects will influence the rankings. Here’s how Google define their PageRank algorithm:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
So there you go, the more back links a website has, the more chances it has to be highly ranked. The quality of the websites pointing to another also has a lot of influence. I think it’s probably the best technique so far as your search will return you the site that seems to be the most popular for the query you entered. This is where it gets tricky as more popular doesn’t necessarily mean best quality. Let’s say you build a new website about technology with a lot of quality content and that is built with the highest standards of the industry. Now you write a new website about the new MacBook Air hoping to get some traffic when people search for MacBook Air on Google. Even if your website is the best available for that keyword, it will be returned on maybe page 15-20 of Google search results. Why? Because you don’t have any links pointing to your website, so poor PageRank. It might be also almost impossible for you to rank on the first Google search results page because you might be competing with websites having millions of back links.
That’s where Google ranking gets tricky. Most of the users don’t go any further than 30 results and sometimes you could be surprised by the quality of the links you would find on page 7-8. The websites might be a little less popular but that doesn’t mean they don’t offer quality content. It’s hard work today in the Internet industry to get a good rank on Google because you fight with people and companies that wants to be first on Google and have full time employees whose job his to optimize the rankings. There’s a lot of techniques to improve your rankings other than back links and it’s called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is out of the scope of this article though.
So there it is, that’s how Google works and how it decides which site should be ranked first for specific keywords. It has a lot of advantages but at the same time, smaller websites with quality content struggle to get decent traffic. That’s the downside.
The day only computers will understand CAPTCHA
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It’s starting to get annoying and I’m talking about CAPTCHA. What is CAPTCHA? It’s the little annoying ‘text’ images you see all around the place when you register/sign up to something on the Internet. It usually looks like the images around.
I’m really sick of all that CAPTCHA thing as I think it’s really ruining the user experience and most users don’t really understand the use of it. So what is it for really? CAPTCHA is actually a technology to detect if the user is a human or a computer. Without that kind of technology, it would be easier for someone to develop a software that could automatically create accounts on Hotmail or Gmail for example. With that kind of image, it’s hard to write a program that can detect the text in it. So this way, you ensure the sign up comes from a human being. The problem is that it’s affecting everyone and most people don’t give a damn about automated sign ups. They just want to register to a service without the pain of having to guess what the text inside the image is.
Let’s face it, it’s not always easy to guess what’s in the CAPTCHA image. It’s not rare to try 2 or three times without success and it’s really frustrating. The problem is that CAPTCHA is becoming more and more complex to read because of people being able to develop software capable of reading complex CAPTCHAs. Soon enough, you’ll need a computer to decode the true meaning of CAPTCHA, no longer the human will be able to read and decode it. That kind of spoil the whole purpose of CAPTCHA…
Lets all agree, CAPTCHA is a pain. There’s a big need for something better and not annoying for the regular end user who doesn’t give a damn about automated sign ups. At least, Google understood and has a readable and uncrackable CAPTCHA text. It’s still a really annoying piece of technology but a company is making a step forward to a better CAPTCHA.
Google comment on Microsoft’s “hostile” bid for Yahoo!
Posted by: | CommentsAn interesting post was published today on Google’s official blog and it’s written by
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
I encourage you to read the full post here: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet
Of course Microsoft answered to that and it’s quite a reasonable answer. In a statement, Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith said:
The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising, the alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.
Smith argues that Google already has three-quarters of the paid search market and about two-thirds of U.S. search queries and 85 percent in Europe.
While I really like Google as a company and a service, I find it quite strange that they publicly criticize the potential deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft. I must say I agree with Microsoft’s answer. Since Yahoo! received the offer from Microsoft, it considered a partnership with Google and I don’t see it to be a better thing. That would obviously raise important antitrust issues and they would have to play with the definition of “partnership” for that to happen. Google has a fixation on Microsoft and while it’s really funny that they go out publicly and say Microsoft is evil, they have to be careful with that. Google is now one of the biggest company with a lot of influence on the way information is spread and they have to act like it.
Overall, the best thing for everyone is not Yahoo! to be bought by anyone. With a Microsoft deal you get that Microsoft philosophy being the biggest Internet portal and I don’t like it. On the other hand you get the biggest search engine already dominating the Internet take control of the biggest Internet portal. The best solution is to leave Yahoo! alone and keep a third competitor.
Microsoft and Yahoo potential deal
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Microsoft has just made an offer to buy Yahoo in a effort to intensify its presence on the internet already dominated by Google. It’s kind of funny that such an offer is made a couple of days after I wrote my article Why Google succeed where Microsoft fails.
Microsoft is offering $31 a share for the internet company, in a cash and share combination for investors. This is valuing Yahoo at $44.6bn and is offering a 62% premium compared to Yahoo’s share last night’s closing price of $19.18.
There’s still possibilities of the deal not taking place as it’s only a proposal and it’s not the first time Microsoft and Yahoo talk about such a transaction. But now it seems to be made a bit more seriously than usual. I guess we’ll see in a couple of days where this proposal leads.
It’s definitely in the best interest of Microsoft to acquire Yahoo because they really struggle to beat Google. Yahoo is also falling behind Google in term of search engine but they offer a great alternative to Google in term of News/entertainment/Search/Finance/etc. We have to remember that according to Alexa, Yahoo is still the number 1 in terms of traffic and that’s an interesting thing for Microsoft who is in position 4 and 5 with msn.com and live.com. That would increase their presence significantly.
I personally don’t see it has a good news if it was to happen simply for the good reason that Yahoo was a really good alternative compared to Google and Microsoft. They had a different perspective about the web than Microsoft and Google and that wasn’t bad. If it happen it will come down to a Google vs Microsoft war and I don’t like it. It’s nothing personal with Microsoft or anything but I felt pretty good with having three option: Live, Yahoo and Google.
Anyway, we’ll see where the deal goes I guess!