Do you want to see more or less Google+ across Google’s various products? Let us know in the comments.

Wheaton, probably best known for his roles on Star Trek: The Next Generation and in the film Stand By Me, currently has a show called Tabletop on the Geek and Sundry premium YouTube channel.

The feature was only a Google experiment, and it’s very likely that only a few people actually saw it. We spoke with a Googler about the feature. Here’s the official statement: “We’re always experimenting to help users find, watch and share the videos that matter most to them, on YouTube and across all of Google’s products including Google+. Depending on user feedback, some of these experiments may become options for users and some may not.”

Here’s that it looked like:

Google does run experiments all the time. That’s nothing new, but we also know that Google is very serious about making Google+ a much bigger part of the larger Google. As CEO Larry Page described Google+ during the company’s latest earnings call, Google+ has two parts: the social destination (what most people think of as Google+) and the social spine (the social layer that is spread across most of Google’s products). While the former part will no doubt grow and get more feature-rich as time goes on, the latter part is the one that seems really crucial to the company, and with its recently consolidated privacy policies, Google should have more freedom to use users’ data from product to product. Like say, from YouTube to Google.

So, while this particular experiment may never see the light of day as a full-blown feature, it seems likely that Google will continue to look for more and more ways to integrate YouTube (or for that matter every other Google product) and Google+.

I found Wheaton’s rant about the feature interesting for various reasons. For one, he’s an avid Google+ user. It would be one thing if he wasn’t, but he is. He has 1,377,525 followers. He likes Google+. It’s not about that. Another reason is something he said in his blog post about how this could cost his video upvotes on YouTube. It’s a pretty good point. Not all YouTube users use Google+. YouTube has established itself quite well over the years. It’s often cited as even being the second largest search engine, after Google itself. A whole lot of people use YouTube every day. A lot more than use Google+, the social destination.

“The only reason that matters is because it’s part of how Google will decide who gets another season of the shows they’re sponsoring,” Wheaton tells WebProNews. “I want to be very clear about this: when I made my post on Tumblr, I wasn’t even thinking of that. I was thinking about how Google is forcing people who don’t want or need Google+ to sign up and use it.”

We asked Wheaton what are some ways he thinks Google could integrate Google+ and YouTube without pissing people off.

“Give users an option, and respect their choice,” he says. “Make G+ so incredibly amazing, people don’t want to ignore it, but if they do, leave them alone and quit messing with their existing user experience.”

“G+ and YouTube are both great on their own. They don’t need to be integrated,” he says. Still, when asked about what Google+ features he’d like to see on YouTube, he says, “More meaningful and intelligent comments from users. I have a G+ circle that’s called Smart People, and it’s one that I have a hard time keeping up with. It would be nice if ‘YouTube comment’ wasn’t a punchline.”

We asked Wheaton more generally, if Google should push Google+ more into its other products.

“Only if they want to alienate even more users,” he says . “There’s a reason so many people use browser extensions like Disconnect; not everyone wants to be social on the Internet.”

“This is where Google is making a huge and annoying mistake,” he adds. “You can’t force people into something that’s social; it’s like telling someone, ‘I know you were going to enjoy a quiet night at home reading this book, but before you can turn the page, you must go to this party and mingle with people, whether you want to or not.’”

This seems more like a comment on the increasingly social nature of the web at large, but there’s no question, Google is pushing this kind of social mentality.

“I was infuriated by this thing I saw on YouTube because it was yet another example of Google forcing people who use its products — which are great products, by the way — to join G+,” Wheaton tells us. “As I’ve made clear, I love G+, and I love a lot of Google products, but if Google wants people to join, embrace, and enthusiastically use G+, they should make G+ awesome and compelling. What they’re doing now — forcing people to sign up by crippling a user experience with an existing product — is just going to make people resent G+, and never give it a chance. That’s a shame, because G+ is a great product that doesn’t need to be force fed to people.”

Again, the feature was only an experiment, but it’s not like Google is going to stop looking for ways to increase Google+’s presence throughout its products. You can already see a lot of the integrations, if you go here.

• YouTube integrations, specifically, include: seeing videos your friends like, watching videos together in hangouts, sending videos to Circles, and +1ing videos.
• Search integrations include: personal results, profiles in search results, and the related people and pages feature.
• With Gmail, there’s: finding emails from people in your circles, sharing photos, and seeing things shared by people in your circles that you got emails from.
• With Google Maps, you can send directions to people in your Circles.
• With Google Earth, you can send images of places to Google+.
• With Blogger, you can share posts to Google+ whenever you publish them and use the +1 counter on the dashboard.
• With Android, there’s: Instant Upload of photos, group chat, video hangouts, and the nearby stream.
• With Chrome, theres: the Google +1 button extension for recommending sites and pages, and the Google+ Notifications extension to check Google notifications off of Google properties.
• With Google News, you can keep up with specific authors by following them on Google+, as they’re displayed in News results. You can also see articles people in your circles have +1′d in the Spotlight section. Just this week, they announced that they’re showing content from your Google+ circles in “Top Stories” and in a new realtime coverage section (a far cry from the realtime search feature they used to have, I might add, which included realtime tweets).

Clearly, there are a lot of useful ways Google can integrate its “social spine” into its various products, and there will no doubt be plenty of more, but as the experiment Wheaton wrote about shows, it’s all in the implementation.

“I’m thrilled at the opportunity that I have as a content creator to release videos on YouTube,” Wheaton tells us. “I couldn’t do Tabletop without Google, and I’m grateful for the opportunity the company has given me. As a user, and as a creator, I want Google to keep making awesome products and making it possible for people like me to work outside of the traditional mainstream. I don’t want Google to turn into another Facebook that just feels icky and intrusive.”

Speaking of Facebook, that wasn’t all he had to say on that. We asked Wheaton if he think Google+ is capable of achieving Facebook-like user numbers.

“Probably not, but that isn’t Google’s fault,” he says. “Facebook has a significant head start, and has effectively captured a generation. Facebook is also demonstrably evil, though, so if Google offered a truly non-evil social network — a real and meaningful alternative to Facebook — it could probably attract huge numbers of people.”

“Just think of the free publicity every time Facebook does something that intrudes on the privacy of its users, when Google can say, honestly, ‘yeah, over at G+ we don’t do that.’ Unfortunately, as an advertising company, I don’t see Google ever embracing that idea.”

And Google is already facing pressures in advertising after two quarters in a row of substantial CPC declines. Revenue, however, was up 24% last quarter. It’s also worth noting that Google hasn’t even put ads on Google+ (the social destination) yet.

Do you think Google+ is making Google’s products better or is it being forced? Let us know when you think.

We were hoping to get a some in depth discussion about Google’s recent Penguin update, but apparently that wasn’t a major point of conversation. Daniel Waisberg liveblogged the discussion at Search Engine Land, and Penguin only came up briefly. Here’s the relevant snippet of the liveblog:

Danny talks about Penguin and asks how it is going from Google standpoint, are search results better? Amit says that in the end of the day, users will stay with the search engine that provides the most relevant results. Google’s objective was to reward high quality sites and that was a success with Penguin. One of the beauties of running a search engine is that the search engines that can measure best what the users feel is the one that will succeed more.

From Google’s perspective they use any signal that is available for them, more than 200 of them. They have to make sure they are accurate and good. They will use any signal, whether it is organic or not.

Google’s Matt Cutts also recently said that Google has considered Penguin a success, though plenty out there disagree.

If you want Google’s advice on Penguin recovery, check out these videos Matt Cutts says to watch, these tips he endorsed on Twitter, and of course Google’s quality guidelines.

How dependent on Google is your business? Let us know in the comments.

The article was written by Sage Lewis, who made one statement in particular, which I think is worth reflecting on a bit:

“It is very possible to build a business without Google traffic.”

It may not seem like it sometimes, but I believe Sage is right. Do you? Can you run a business without Google traffic?

It may mean doing some things differently than you’re currently doing them. In fact, if you were hit by the Penguin update (legitimately), you’re definitely going to want to rely on tactics that don’t involve gaming search results. It’s just not a sustainable business model. Even if you weren’t hit, and you’re managing to get away with something, it could be only a matter of time. If you think Google launched this Penguin update and that’s the end of it, you’re living in a dream world. If it’s anything like the Panda update, we’ll see numerous iterations of it. Google launched 2 Panda data refreshes in April alone – bookends for the Penguin update.

It will be interesting to see how often we even hear about new Penguin updates. Since it’s designed to hit spammers, I don’t expect we’ll see the amount of complaints we’ve seen with Panda, which is more about content quality.

Of course, even if you were not hit, and you aren’t spamming Google, you still shouldn’t be putting all of your eggs in one basket, because Google does make over 500 changes to its algorithm each year. There is always the possibility that Google will make a change that starts ranking other things above you.

By the way, when we’re talking about Google traffic, we’re talking about organic search. You can always buy AdWords ads. Lewis mentions a handful of other online marketing strategies, like AdCenter, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, display, social media marketing, content marketing that brings visitors directly to your site and email marketing (which still has tremendous effects, by the way).

The good news is that if you run your business, and your content as if you’re not worried about Google, you’ll probably find a lot more ways of driving quality traffic. Furthermore, if you are creating the kind of traffic that does well for other channels, it’s likely that Google will take this into consideration too, and you’ll have a variety of traffic sources, which end up including Google anyway.

As you’ve read over and over again, it really is a matter of providing worthwhile content and products (or just content, if your content is your product). If it’s high quality, and has something to offer that people aren’t getting elsewhere, it is more likely to be shared across various social networks, talked about, and linked to. These things can drive traffic on their own, but it’s also the content that Google wants to rank well.

Google’s advice is not to worry about specific algorithm changes so much, and focus on good content. Sure, it’s possible to play to certain signals Google uses, but that piece of advice really is more than just hot air from Google. There really is a great deal of merit to that mentality.

Still, it nerver hurts to keep up with Google’s latest algorithm changes, and be aware of what’s going on.

Do you think a business can survive without Google traffic? Let us know in the comments.

Google has said on multiple occasions that it thinks the Penguin update has been a success. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

PageRank And The Web

WWW, as you may know, stands for World Wide Web. It’s a web because it it’s connected by links. Sites all over the web link to one another, creating a path for users to click from page to the next. Often those pages are to different sites. This is the way it has worked for years. Just think what it would be like if sites couldn’t freely link to one another. The web would be broken, and users would suffer.

When Google launched with its PageRank algorithm, it was a revolution in search. It seemed to be a better way of doing search. It gave a rhyme and reason to the ranking of search results. Today, Google uses over 200 signals to rank its search results, which are becoming more personalized than ever before. PageRank still matters, but it’s far from the only thing that matters.

Yet, it is PageRank that has given links on the web so much power to influence the visibility of web content. Now that just about everyone is on the web, everyone is fighting to have their content seen. Once upon a time, you would have thought: the more links the better. More links can only lead to more chances people will see your content. Now, somewhat ironically, people are finding that that the links they have out there are making their content less visible. In some cases, they’re making it practically non-existent in Google, or at least so buried, it might as well be non-existent.

Freak Out Time?

Google’s Penguin update has been a major wake up call to webmasters about certain kinds of linking practices. The update was designed to target sites violating Google’s quality guidelines. Among those guidelines are: “Don’t participate in link schemes” and “Avoid hidden text or hidden links.”

Some of Google’s guidelines are obvious – avoid obviously unethical practices. But in the link schemes department, things can get a little blurry. Just ask WPMU.org, which got hit by Penguin over a few questionable links (interestingly enough, after seemingly benefiting from Google’s Panda update, designed to reward higher quality sites).

A lot of webmasters have taken to the forums and blogs to complain about the Penguin update, but Google has, on more than on occasion, deemed the update a success. We’ll also be seeing it come back around every so often, much like its Panda predecessor.

Even before Penguin, Google was sending out tons of messages to webmasters alerting them of questionable links. All of this has gotten webmasters in to a frenzy to clean-up their link profiles, and reduce the number of links Google considers to be of poor quality, in hopes that their content can find its way back into Google search visibility.

Legal Action Over Links?

Some webmasters have even gone so far as to threaten legal action over sites that are linking to them. We referenced this in another article after Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable mentioned that this was happening. Now, Greg Finn at Search Engine Land has pointed to a specific example where PSKL got a DMCA take down notice from LifeShield, after writing a positive review.

Now, to be clear, this DMCA takedown notice is not in reference to any content theft or content use. It’s about links. It threatens legal action. It says:

I request you to remove from following website (pskl.us)
all links to www.lifeshield.com website as soon as possible.
In order to find the links please do the following:
1) If this is an online website directory, use directory’s search system to find “LifeShield” links.
2) If there are hidden links in the source code of website, open website’s main page and view its source code. Search for “lifeshield.com” in the source code and you will see hidden links.

It also says:

LifeShield, Inc will be perusing legal action if the webmaster does not remove the referenced link within 48 hours.

Jeremy at PSKL actually shares the entire conversation around the matter, which did include an apology, indicating that PSKL shouldn’t have been on the list of sites that received a notice. Jeremy, however, took issue that there was a list of sites getting such notices. Throughout the conversation, it is revealed that LifeShield had a site “cloak lifeshield and generate over 700K back links” without LifeShield’s knowledge, and that “Google stepped in and slapped” them with a penalty, which led to layoffs at the company.

Jeremy responded with, “So you’re saying that somebody went out and bought 700K back links for you, knowing that it would get you penalized by Google? So does that mean you had (Company name) send out 700K DMCA notices? Talk about throwing good money after bad. Report the linkspam to the spam team at Google, then spend that money on an SEO expert rather than on trying to bully people with intimidation.”

The response was actually longer than that, and included the metaphor of putting out a house fire with manure, but that was the main gist.

I suggest reading Jeremy’s entire post. It’s pretty interesting.

Is This Where The Web Should Go?

He does make another important point in this: A party creating large quantities of backlinks to a site in order to generate SEO (or, in this case, destroy SEO) is unethical. It is not illegal.

While many may not have a problem with such practices becoming illegal, it’s the idea that the law could intervene with linking in any form that could lead to greater problems. Just consider all fo the gray area there already is in fair use law. There will always be different interpretations, and that can get dangerous.

For the record (granted, I’m no lawyer), I wouldn’t expect any legal action, such as that threatened in LifeShield’s DMCA notice to hold much water in a court of law. Finn also points to two cases (Ford Motor Company v. 2600 Enterprises) and (Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.), where the legality of linking prevailed.

But even if things like this have to go to court, it’s going to be a major inconvenience, and legal fees will have to be paid. If sites practicing legitimate, ethical linking habits get caught up in this, where will that leave the web?

Is this what linking on the World Wide Web will become? Will you have to worry about getting sued because you linked to a site, and that site may or may not find your site to be a strong enough site to desire a link from? Could you get sued because your page didn’t have a high enough PageRank, and not enough link juice to help the site you’re linking to in its search engine visibility?

LifeShield seems to be targeting some very specific webspam, but sending out notices to a whole list of sites. It’s likely that LifeShield isn’t the only company panicing and resorting to such action. It’s unfortunate, for the company if some negative SEO (it’s unclear if this was from a competitor) was able to have such an impact on its business, as Jeremy suggests, this may not be the best way of trying to resolve the issue.

Let’s Give Google Some Credit.

You can point to Google’s guidelines and its algorithm updates, which clearly do cause some to think this way, but just the same, Google can’t be held entirely to blame for this kind of mentality either. The company has said in the past that people shouldn’t obsess with PageRank, and that it uses over 200 signals to rank content. PageRank is not the only thing that matters. In fact, the company puts out huge lists of signal changes every month.

It shows the power over society that Google really holds though. It shows how much businesses rely on Google search that they will go so far as to threaten sites that are simply linking to them with legal action.

Should such legal action ever lead to a victory in court, that could mean very bad news for the Web as we know it, and people could be afraid to link. I would imagine that would spawn more issues of sites not getting the credit (and possible referral traffic) they deserve.

Do you think Google’s guidelines and penalties can have an influence on the law? Now that would be power, and made even more ironic still, by the fact that Google is constantly under scrutiny of its own.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image: Batman Returns (Warner Bros.)

Do you think this site deserved to get hit by Penguin? Let us know in the comments.

We spoke with James Farmer, Founder and CEO of Incsub, which runs the site. Farmer maintains that WPMU.org engages in no keyword stuffing, link schemes, and has no quality issues. In fact, the site has actually done well throughout Google’s series of Panda updates.

Farmer tells WebProNews, “We did great after Panda, it was like that update recognized we were decent folk… you can’t win them all huh?”

“Apart from not being able to guess what Google was going to do in April, 3 years ago, we haven’t done anything wrong,” he says.

Last week, Farmer received some second-hand info from Google’s Matt Cutts, who reportedly spoke with the Sydney Morning Herald about WPMU.org. According to Farmer, Cutts provided three problem links pointing to the site. These included a site pirating their software and two links from one spam blog using an old version of one of their WordPress themes with a link in the footer. Farmer reported that Cutts “said that we should consider the fact that we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as these.”

It’s pretty interesting that if such links were the problem that it could have such a tremendous impact. It’s no wonder there have been so many discussions about negative SEO (competitors attacking each other with these kinds of tactics) since Penguin launched.

The site has over 10,400+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers, 2,537 +1s and 4,276 FeedBurner subscribers, according to Farmer. Apparently not enough to outweigh some questionable links from third parties.

“How could a bunch of incredibly low quality, spammy, rubbish (I mean a .info site… please!) footer links have made that much of a difference to a site of our size, content and reputation, unless Google has been absolutely, utterly inept for the last 4 years (and I doubt that that’s the case),” Farmer wrote in his article on the matter.

When asked how many links he has out there just from footers for WordPress themes, he tells WebProNews, “Given that we stopped adding links years ago, actually not that many at all.”

“However, the challenge is that given that we provided themes to a lot of multisite installs, which have since become overrun with splogs, there’s an enormous amount of links from not that many actual root domains,” he adds. “I’d guesstimate 1-2K, 99% of clearly low quality sites.”

We asked if he’s heard from other WordPress theme creators, having similar issues.

“Actually no, although that doesn’t surprise me that much,” he says. “Not many folk are as open as us, and in this field they probably have good reason to be. WordPress terms are very, very competitive so I wouldn’t be surprised if 9/10 competitors had something to hide!”

Like many webmasters, Farmer just doesn’t know what to expect from Google, in terms of whether or not Google will consider the site to be one of the innocent casualties of Penguin.

“I have no idea, I would love it if they did. I guess the thing I’m begging for is some sort of qualitative mechanism (NOT the manual webspam web, faster approach) that allows quality operators, like us, to survive and carry on providing Google users exactly the kind of helpful content they need!”

Google does have a form users can submit to, if they think they’ve been wrongfully hit by the Penguin update.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently told Danny Sullivan that Google considers the Penguin update a success, despite the large number of complaints from those commenting on blogs and in forums. Of course, the Penguin update, much like the Panda update, should be periodically coming back around, giving sites a chance to make fixes and recover. That also means however, sites will also have more chances to get hit.

We asked Farmer if he thinks Penguin has helped or hurt search results in general, outside of his site’s issues.

“Especially in the WP field they have gone wild,” he emphasizes. “For example our flagship site WPMU DEV – if you go to search for that now a competitor writing something ridiculous about us and copyright appears above our massively popular Facebook page. It even looks like our YouTube channel has been demoted. Crazy stuff.”

We’ve certainly seen some other questionable search results following the update, and others have complained aplenty.

Do you think the search results have improved since Penguin? Should WPMU have been hit by Penguin? Share your thoughts.

Do you think Google is significantly better than it was five years ago? How about two years ago? One year ago? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Google has done a whole lot in the past five years. In the past year and a half or so, they launched two major algorithmic changes in Panda and Penguin, designed to surface higher quality content and reduce the clutter of webpsam. There have been a lot of complaints about both updates, but Google seems to think they have been successful.

Page spoke at Zeitgeist 2012 this week, talking about a number of things, and wearing the famous Google glasses (or glass, if you prefer).

“I think that’s a really big area of focus for us,” Page said, regarding search. That’s good to know. Google is still focused on search (in case you’ve been distracted by fancy future glasses, cars that drive themselves, and that sort of thing).

Page spoke about the ways Google is getting better at search (though I’m not sure everyone completely agrees on that, based on many of the comments we see on a daily basis).

“It’s an area where, you know, I think if you used Google from five years ago, you’d be astounded by how bad it is. Or how bad it was,” Page said. He then talked about things like Google’s Search Plus Your World personalized results and the recently launched knowledge graph.

Search Plus Your World would be referring to Google’s big personalized search push, launched earlier this year. It draws heavily on the user’s Google+ connections, as well as various other social connections (though missing valuable personal data from networks like Facebook and Twitter).

Knowledge Graph is what Google a launched last week, designed to help users find the things they’re actually looking for without having to click over to other sites (and to distinguish between queries with more than one meaning – such as Tesla the scientist vs. Tesla the car company vs. Tesla the rock band).

While we’ve seen plenty of complaints about Search Plus Your World, I can’t honestly say I’ve seen many about Knowledge Graph.

“Search has gotten a lot better,” said Page. “You don’t always see it, because we change it every day, and we try not to distract you too much with changes, but I think one of the things I’m most proud of that we did recently is that I have a friend at Google named Ben Smith, and that’s a very common name in the U.S. You know, Smith’s the most common last name. And it was very difficult to find him before. But now actually, with Google+ and with our understanding of all that, when I search for ‘Ben Smith,’ I actually get the Ben Smith that I know, and he actually appears in the search box. There’s a little picture of him, and if that’s not the Ben Smith I want, I can, you know, delete him, and put a different one in. But I’m actually searching for that person, rather than the sting – the combination of letters, and that’s a really big deal for Google.”

He says they’re calling the Knowledge Graph boxes “knowledge panels.”

“What we’re really trying to do is get to the point where we can represent knowledge, and we can do much more complicated types of queries,” said Page. “What are the 20 deepest lakes? What are the highest market cap companies? Whatever. Things like that. Things where we really understand what that query means, rather than just give you the exact text that matches best on some webpage somewhere, and so we’re really looking at synthesizing knowledge, and I’m incredibly excited about that.”

Synthesizing. Perhaps the Moog doodle on Google’s homepage this week was more symbolic than anyone thought.

Interestingly, since the Knowledge Graph was introduced, there seems to be less emphasis on Google+ content from Google’s SERPs in some cases. For example, before, with Search Plus Your World, a search for “music” might have brought up the Google+ profiles of random artists in a box on the side, but now, that query will bring up knowledge graph results for people. From there, you can click on the artist you want, where you’ll be directed to a different SERP specifically for that artist.

When you are on the SERP for a particular person, however, you might see Google+ profiles. This is the case with Mark Zuckerberg, for example.

Some users have complained since SPYW launched that there is too much Google+ in search results now, but Google also made an algorithmic change in March that may have toned that down a bit too.

Google is tasked with quite the balancing act in trying to use its properties to grow Google+, while not sacrificing search relevancy in the process.

Do you think Google’s results are the best they’ve ever been? Do you think they’ve improved in the past five years? Let us know what you think.

“I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a picky eater,” writes Google software engineer Dan Zivkovic on the company’s Inside Search blog. “If I’m choosing a restaurant, I want to know that it has good reviews, that they’ll have food items I like, that it’s not too expensive, and all that. With the new changes to the local listings in search on mobile devices, now I’ll be able to see more details about places quickly and make decisions more easily — whether about restaurants or any other type of place.”

“For example, if I search for [restaurants dallas] on my mobile phone now, I’m presented with a list of local results as usual,” says Zivkovic. “Now, if I click on the name of the place, I instantly see a summary of the business, with reviews, photos, and more details, similar to the local information you see when searching on your computer. Okay, this place looks fine, but what about the other results from the list? With a simple swipe of the page left or right, I can see the local result before or after this one, to quickly compare the different options and make a decision on where to eat.”

Google has recently made some adjustments to how it handles local searches in general. Earlier this month, Google put out a list of algorithm changes it made in April. Several of them had to do with local. These included: more local sites from organizations, improvements to local navigational searches, more comprehensive predictions for local queries and improvements to the triggering of Google’s public data search.

It’s getting closer to the end of May, so before too long we should see Google’s big list of changes for this month. It will be interesting to see how many of these are related to local searches.

Earlier this year, we looked at a story about Washington State University chemistry professor Aurora Clark who claimed to have adapted Google’s PageRank algorithm for use in moleculaRnetworks, which is designed to enable scientists to determine molecular shapes and chemical reactions “without the expense, logistics and occasional danger of lab experiments.”

In fact, we also interviewed her:

More recently, a study, published in the Public Library of Science journal Computational Biology, looked at improving outcome prediction for cancer patients by network-based ranking of marker genes, using Google’s PageRank concept. The abstract for the study says:

Predicting the clinical outcome of cancer patients based on the expression of marker genes in their tumors has received increasing interest in the past decade. Accurate predictors of outcome and response to therapy could be used to personalize and thereby improve therapy. However, state of the art methods used so far often found marker genes with limited prediction accuracy, limited reproducibility, and unclear biological relevance. To address this problem, we developed a novel computational approach to identify genes prognostic for outcome that couples gene expression measurements from primary tumor samples with a network of known relationships between the genes. Our approach ranks genes according to their prognostic relevance using both expression and network information in a manner similar to Google’s PageRank. We applied this method to gene expression profiles which we obtained from 30 patients with pancreatic cancer, and identified seven candidate marker genes prognostic for outcome. Compared to genes found with state of the art methods, such as Pearson correlation of gene expression with survival time, we improve the prediction accuracy by up to 7%. Accuracies were assessed using support vector machine classifiers and Monte Carlo cross-validation. We then validated the prognostic value of our seven candidate markers using immunohistochemistry on an independent set of 412 pancreatic cancer samples. Notably, signatures derived from our candidate markers were independently predictive of outcome and superior to established clinical prognostic factors such as grade, tumor size, and nodal status. As the amount of genomic data of individual tumors grows rapidly, our algorithm meets the need for powerful computational approaches that are key to exploit these data for personalized cancer therapies in clinical practice.

The Author Summrary says:

Why do some people with the same type of cancer die early and some live long? Apart from influences from the environment and personal lifestyle, we believe that differences in the individual tumor genome account for different survival times. Recently, powerful methods have become available to systematically read genomic information of patient samples. The major remaining challenge is how to spot, among the thousands of changes, those few that are relevant for tumor aggressiveness and thereby affecting patient survival. Here, we make use of the fact that genes and proteins in a cell never act alone, but form a network of interactions. Finding the relevant information in big networks of web documents and hyperlinks has been mastered by Google with their PageRank algorithm. Similar to PageRank, we have developed an algorithm that can identify genes that are better indicators for survival than genes found by traditional algorithms. Our method can aid the clinician in deciding if a patient should receive chemotherapy or not. Reliable prediction of survival and response to therapy based on molecular markers bears a great potential to improve and personalize patient therapies in the future.

I’m not going to pretend like I understand the ins and outs of this complex study, and try to dissect it here, but if you want to dig through it, you can do so here.

(via txchnologist)

Considering Microsoft’s massive size, it makes sense for them to outsource this kind of work. Going after infringement via search engine results is surely a tedious job, the kind such delegation was made for. That’s all fine and good. The rub, however, comes when a takedown request is issued to Google, but the same result remains in the Bing search index.

Mind you, Google heeded the request and removed the search result in question.

With that in mind, when the company issuing the takedown request still has the result in its own search index, it comes off as negligent, incompetent, or hypocritical. The question is, which one applies to Microsoft Bing? The reason this question comes up is due to a discovery made by TechDirt, which finds the following takedown request for an Xbox game called DiRT 2 from a site called TorrentRoom.com. The URL in question is as follows:

http://www.torrentroom.com/torrent/3664273-DiRT-2-XBOX-360-RF.html

When a search is conducted in each engine, you’ll find the link has been removed from Google–the Chilling Effects report indicating as much–but, as of this post, it still remains in Bing:

Or maybe Marketly could point this out to their clients, allowing Microsoft to remove the very result it’s asking Google to remove. Whatever the case, if you’re going to ask other search engines to get rid of content that infringes on your brand, perhaps you should check to make sure your search results are up to par, as well.

A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews: “There hasn’t been an update since the first one.”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Of course, one Googler recently said that Google didn’t even have anything called Penguin, so I guess you can never be 100% sure.

That said, I’m pretty confident that this particular Googler is right. Even the speculation about the possible update has been mixed. Some are attributing traffic dips to the holiday weekend.

There’s also the fact that Google makes changes every day. We should soon be seeing the big list for the month of May.

In the meantime, you’d probably do well to focus on making your site and content as good as they can be, and keep it all within Google’s quality guidelines. Also, try to make sure if you hire an agency to do your SEO, that they’re not engaging in any paid linking on your behalf.

You can still expect Penguin to be coming back around sooner or later.