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To work at Google is to believe in the power of automation. "We've found the best approach to search is algorithmic, it's the only thing that works at scale," said Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google responsible for keeping spam out of search results. "We want to use computers all the time."

The obvious reality that never seems to come up quite as often is that even algorithmic Internet search is very much driven by humans. Computers and algorithms may be what handle incoming queries and generate search results hundreds of times a second, but just as Porsche engineers design their engines with slightly different requirements than Ford engineers, Google engineers are constantly tinkering with the recipe for search results that can make or break Web businesses.

Earlier this year, Cutts said that Google "tends to make a change to our core search algorithms at least once a day." In a recent interview with CNET, he reiterated that that pace continues: just last week Google search engineers met to consider 27 separate changes to the more than 200 factors that Google uses to rank search results.

In many ways, this is a natural evolution of Google's quest to organize information. The Web changes quickly and dramatically, and a Google search recipe left unaltered would quickly grow stale and choked with spam. Yet the constant tweaks show that the internal debates conducted by a relatively small number of people can have a significant impact on the way the Internet is presented to millions.

Cutts and Google representatives wouldn't disclose exactly how many people work on search quality at Google, but he did say there are "hundreds" involved in the process at a company that employs more than 20,000 people. They are entrusted with making sure Google keeps its place atop the search world, which affords the company a steady supply of cash allowing it to pursue a seemingly limitless number of other interests.

They range from someone like John Mueller, a Webmaster trends analyst who patiently answers questions from confused site owners in Google's Webmaster Central forums, to Udi Manber, a legendary engineer listed next to Google executives such as co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the person "responsible for core search." They must balance the desire to provide the most accurate results with the griping of Webmasters knocked down a peg by algorithm changes: not to mention the constant battle by spammers to infiltrate search results.

The Webmaster forums are the first level of Google search where human representatives of the company make their presence felt. A lot of the content in the forums involves tips provided by volunteers for getting your site to rank within Google's search index, Google's trademark approach to customer service. However, representatives like Mueller wade into the discussion threads to provide a more official answer to questions about site tags or inbound links.

Mueller and his counterparts (Google is trying to keep the forums staffed around the clock) also serve as an early-warning sign for engineers higher up the food chain when considering what changes might need to be made to the way Google ranks sites. Cutts considers this a competitive advantage for Google, in that it has a constant human "debugging" system generated by the number of people who care passionately about where they rank on Google as well as engineers who closely monitor feedback in the press, social networks, and Google's forums.

Most of the time the feedback comes from those who could use a basic lesson or two in site design, ordinary small business owners who may know their business cold, but are out of their depth when it comes to search-engine optimization except that they know it's important to rank high in Google results. But on a fairly regular basis, issues generated by complaints from the outside world work their way up to Google's weekly search quality meetings. (Wired ran a good article on the behind-the-scenes process earlier this year.)

Before any such changes are formally proposed, they are tested among small groups of searchers to gather data on the impact, an essential part of the decision making process. A committee then discusses the impact of those changes: at the last meeting, 16 proposed changes required formal discussion while an additional 11 were considered uncontroversial enough to hash out over e-mail.

Each of those changes has the potential to affect search results in a big way. Take for example a recent change to present more results from a single domain when processing a search query like "apple iPhone." Google now presents results from Apple.com sites as six of the crucial top 10 results, believing someone searching that query demonstrated intent to find Apple-affiliated sites, whereas before it wanted to encourage "diversity" within that first page of results. Reviewers, retailers, and others with relevant content related to Apple's prize product suffer the consequences of being pushed farther down the page, or onto the second page.

Those affected by changes to Google's algorithms can file a "reconsideration request" if they believe they've done nothing wrong in seeing their rankings plummet, or if they've made changes to bring their sites back into compliance with Google's antispam rules. That, of course, requires a human to review the site in question and make a determination about the viability of the site.

So behind every algorithm, and therefore behind every search result, is a team of people responsible for making sure Google search makes the right decisions when responding to your query. Obviously, there's no other way it could have happened: Google is a living example of what's possible when brilliant people devise a smart algorithm and marry it to limitless computing resources.

But it also means that search results are dictated by far more than unemotional machines. No Googler sits there and responds to individual requests for "wedding venues in Lake Tahoe." They do decide, however, how Google's algorithms consider content to be relevant to such a query, and which sites are eligible to be presented in those results.

Source: CNET News

Google has longed to purchase mobile and social networking game developer SocialDeck, and finally achieved this at the end of August 2010. Taking yet another online company to the checkout.

The purchase was announced on the SocialDeck website, and marks the fifth buy for Google in August.

Within the last 5 weeks, Google has already snapped up companies including:

• visual search and recommendation firm Like.com,
• a social networking app-developer,
• payment firm Jambool,
• social gaming company Slide.com.

All of the buys so have been in the social networking and gaming arena, and SocialDeck exception.

SocialDeck develops games that run across platforms, letting users of different sites and handsets compete against each other. Earlier this year it announced one million downloads.

"We are excited to announce that someone found our social games as much as you have. SocialDeck has been acquired and we've joined the Google team," the firm said.

Google UK said that the SocialDeck team will be integrated into the business in Ontario where it will continue to work to its strengths.

"We are pleased and excited to welcome SocialDeck to Google, where they will be joining our engineering team in Waterloo and working with them on the social and mobile web," the firm said

Five years ago, one of the last things an entrepreneur with a hot consumer internet startup wanted to hear was "Google is launching a new service just like yours." It's 2010, and that has changed to

"Facebook is launching a new service just like yours."

But that's precisely what Dennis Crowley, the founder of the increasingly popular location-based service Foursquare, recently heard.

With Facebook Places, Facebook wants in the growing market for 'check-ins'. 'Checking in', of course, is an increasingly popular way for consumers to share information about themselves on the social web

today. And it also happens to have some monetization potential to boot.

Given Foursquare's prominence in this space, it's not surprising that some have questioned if Facebook Places will be the death of Foursquare.

There are two possibilities:

- Facebook will, for the average mainstream user, make it all but pointless to use standalone services like Foursquare, leaving these services to compete for niches within the broader market.

- Facebook will accelerate the mainstreaming of 'check-ins' and grow the market for the Foursquares of the world.

Which is most likely? That's anyone's guess. But if history is any indication, Foursquare, like Twitter, which also had to deal with competition from Facebook, will still be here next week. But the real question for Foursquare is what sort of changes it will have to make to compete effectively against Facebook's encroachment. When Twitter caught Facebook's attention, Twitter was far more popular than

Foursquare is today. That means Foursquare may find it more difficult than Twitter to deal with Facebook.

For his part, Foursquare's Crowley doesn't seem too worried. He says that Facebook had to make Places "a little bit generic" given the massive audience Facebook has to please, and that Foursquare, which is popular but still much, much smaller, can afford to be fun:

Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that's the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don't mean too much to users but I really think that's the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.

There's some truth to this, but Crowley can't have it both ways. If Facebook has to be "generic" to appeal to a large number of people, Crowley would necessarily have to believe that Foursquare will need to ditch some of the game mechanics and "snarkiness" if it too wants to appeal to a broad audience. Certainly Foursquare's investors haven't poured lots of money into the company at a rich valuation believing that it would remain a service relegated to first adopters.

Which brings us back to Twitter. One of the reasons Twitter is still thriving despite Facebook's presence in its market is that Twitter's brand has always been flexible. Even today, Twitter is very much what you make of it. Foursquare, on the other hand, can't ditch game mechanics and snark without ditching the core of its brand. Whether that brand will continue to rise will depend a lot on what combination of utility and entertainment consumers are looking for when they check in.

Source: E-consultancy

Search engine optimization is the least expensive method of getting visitors to a website, Ralph Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today, told the audience at the SES Conference and Expo in San Francisco Tuesday.

In a presentation on SEO basics, Wilson outlined tips on how to get the most out of SEO.

He also mentioned several mistakes commonly made in website design, even by professionals.

First, website owners must conduct keyword research, Wilson said. They must not only look for the main keywords people would search on to find their product or service, but also synonyms, plurals and misspellings.

It's best to use keywords the person in the street would use, rather than the technically correct terms.

"I was doing some consulting for a software firm and it used the industry term on its website, it didn't use the term people commonly used," Wilson remarked. "They wondered why people weren't finding them."

Next, website owners must analyze keywords and phrases, identifying the main competitive keywords, then finding less competitive two- to four-word keyphrases.

"People who are ready to buy use more keywords in their search," Wilson explained.

For SEO, website owners can start with four to five keywords.

Also, go for a niche description rather than a general one, Wilson advised.

"Competition for keywords gets very expensive," Wilson pointed out. "It's very expensive to optimize for common keywords like 'insurance,' so don't go head to head with the big companies; choose your niche."

Free tools for keyword analysis include Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.

Use keywords in the first and last paragraphs on a Web page, and hyperlink the important keywords, Wilson said.

Websites identify themselves to search engines by their titles, Wilson told his audience. The title of a website is entered into the title tag in HTML.

However, businesses should not use their company names as their titles.

"People don't want to search for your company name, they want to find what they're looking for," Wilson pointed out. "Make the title descriptive, provocative, use the important keywords that are on the page in your title. This one thing will change your keyword rankings."

Website owners should also make sure their site designers know how to use the heading tags.

"The H1, H2, H3, H4 heading tags are the clues in headings and subheads, and search engines often look for these," Wilson explained. "Your website designer may well have used the class such as 'big type' rather than the H1 heading tag. Make sure the designer uses the heading tag and then defines that in the style sheet."

One of the mistakes even professionals make is to have a splash page on a website, Wilson said. The splash page is the initial page before the home page, and is often written in Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash, with dancing logos and branding copy, he added.

"Having a Flash page is not too smart," Wilson remarked. "Get to the meat."

Flash and JavaScript, which is also commonly used on Web pages, make things difficult for Google searches, Wilson said.

"Google can't read JavaScript or Flash for search purposes, so it won't be able to find other pages on your website," Wilson explained. "Make sure that all your sectional pages have an HTML link from your

home page and all the pages in a section have hard HTML links to the first pages in those sections."

Long URLs, which many content management systems use, are another no-no for websites, Wilson suggested. They make a website too complicated, and sometimes Google will not index a whole site, he warned. Most modern content management systems use search engine-friendly tags, Wilson said.

The ranking of a website or Web page on Google depends strongly on the number of links pointing back to it, Wilson said.

Some of the ways to get links pointing to your website are to provide great content, get listed in directories and request reciprocal links.

"Yahoo Directory is the best directory, and it costs (US)$299 a year to get listed there," Wilson said. "Currently, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) is in alliance with Bing, and what will happen to the Yahoo Directory a year from now remains to be seen."

Another option is for website owners to submit their links to the Open Directory Project. Links are vetted by human editors, so it takes a long time to get listed, Wilson said.

"If you don't get listed immediately, don't submit a link or you'll go to the end of the line," Wilson warned.

Website owners should avoid link farms, which "have links to everybody in the world," Wilson pointed out.

"Don't even go there because Google will think you're trying to trick it, and it's been known to penalize companies that have tricky linking schemes used to defraud it," Wilson said.

Another no-no is to purchase text links to your site.

"If Google finds you've done this, it could penalize you and hurt you big time," Wilson warned.

Google AdWords has launched Enhanced CPC, an automated bidding feature that allows marketers to maximize conversions by adjusting their CPC automatically based on their track records of conversion.

In short, AdWords' Enhanced CPC will adjust your costs to the likelihood of conversion, thereby boosting ROI - and, yes, conversions too. AdWords said the new tool also "detects attributes such as the user's location, language settings, browser, and operating system and analyze how these attributes may impact the likelihood of your ad converting."

"Advertisers set their bids, and our system simply 'enhances' them by either raising or lowering their bid for each auction depending on the likelihood of a conversion," Lisa Coffey, product marketing manager told us.

Google began previewing on Wednesday a spruced-up API to access Google Analytics configuration data.

Google Analytics gives users insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Described as a significant new piece of the Google Analytics developer platform, the Google Analytics Management API offers read-only access to Google Analytics configuration data and consists of five new Google Data Feeds that map directly into the Google Analytics data model, said Jeetendra M. Soneja, of the Google Analytics API team, in a blog post on Wednesday.

Read-only access is offered to account, profile, web property and goal data as well as to advanced segments.

While the previous API returned all configuration data at once, which could be inefficient, the separate feeds enable developers to request only needed data, said Soneja.

"Many developers have asked for a faster, more powerful way to access Google Analytics account configuration data through the Data Export API. We've listened and today we're releasing a preview of the new Google Analytics Management API," Soneja said.

"The API will change, grow, and get better over time. We recommend developers who aren't committed to making updates to their applications only experiment with the new API and continue to use the Account Feed as their primary source for configuration data. We will strive to give you at least one month advanced notice of changes to this API," Soneja said.

While North Korea was last month threatening to deal out "the severest punishment no one has ever met in the world" to its southern neighbour, the country's government was also quietly opening up a new front in the propaganda war - an official Twitter account.

Using the Twitter username @uriminzok - Korean for "our people" - North Korea has taken to the microblogging site as part of a rejuvenated digital PR campaign. Last month the country's government also opened a YouTube account, uploading 78 news clips in four weeks.

The regime's first tweet roughly translates as: "Website, 'our nation itself' is a Twitter account."

In other tweets posted so far, the account links to past speeches praising the regime's "dear leader" Kim Jong-il, and a denunciation of reports the country's military sank a South Korean navy ship.

The move should not be seen as too surprising, said Professor Hazel Smith, a North Korea expert at the UK's Cranfield University.

"It's very interesting because North Korea is not a technologically underdeveloped country. It's extremely poor but by no means the image portrayed as totally isolated," Smith added. "For at least the last 30 years they've been investing in IT-related training, so it's not really a very big development for them to do this."

The problem for North Korea in communicating, Smith said, is not the means but the message. "They clearly realise that they're not good at PR and so they're looking at ways to get the message out from different sorts of media and they're aware of the impact different forms of media can have, because they [government agencies] go abroad as well.

"The problem for them is not so much the use, it's the content because they're still politically stuck in a timewarp where they're going to - at a propaganda level - give out a stock, old-fashioned almost farcical interpretation of the reality.

"It's not the technology, it's how to make them compete with each other in terms of content. And they're fully aware of the impact of being able to access this type of content."

Gilles Lordet, the chief editor at press freedom body Reporters Without Borders, said North Korea's move into social media is the natural extension of government propaganda.

"For people inside North Korea this makes no difference at all. I don't consider what they're going to say on their Twitter page as honest or objective, so it's not something we can welcome," Lordet said.

"This is about the abroad image of the country. Now they're trying to work on the image of North Korea outside of the country because they have the possibility of the tools, that's what is new.

"Now, with the access to the technology it's easier to do, like with access to Twitter. Perhaps there is a need to get across its own image more, because of events like the sinking of the South Korean boat."

Relations between the two Korean states are at their lowest point in recent years after the sinking in March of a South Korean warship, which was blamed on North Korea.

Tensions have been further heightened by a series of naval training exercises undertaken by the US and South Korea, which prompted threats of retaliation from North Korea.

Last week North Korea seized a South Korean fishing boat for an alleged violation of its exclusive economic zone

Are you considering the implementation of a marketing strategy into your website design? If you are, congratulations! Delivering an organic web presence is one of the most imprtant processes you need to deliver in order for your site to start to generate revenue.  

Over the comming week we will be discussing the four main objectives you need to consider which makes your investment worth it.

CreativEdge are always a pleasure to work with and I'm more than happy to recommend them to anyone. We use them for a multitude of graphic design requirements in conjunction with our National and Local Marketing departments. They effortlessly interpret our specification requirements into a creative and well branded design. 

We are always impressed with the speed and attention to detail of the CreativEdge team and they are always ready to respond to any support requirements of the Vision Express design studio.

Keep up the good work.  

Studio Manager
Vision Express