About google news and tips

2007-04-14T14:39:00.000-07:00

The results are in -- and they're slightly depressing. We asked readers to vote for Silicon Valley's hottest startup, from a list of nominees taken from various forums; and then ranked the companies by votes.

Facebook, the college social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg, topped the list. There are a few surprises.

I hadn't thought of Jingle Networks, the free 411 free directory assistance, which was runner-up, as having particular heat -- particularly not since Google entered that market.

Kiva, the person-to-person loan company, is an interesting concept; but is the venture, which ranked fourth in our poll, really doing that well?

Here's what's depressing: many of these companies have been around for years: shoe retailer, Zappos, was founded in 1999, for instance.

And none of them, with the exception of Facebook and Joost, maybe, look world-changing.

[By the way, a special prize to Tesla, Boxbe, Bebo and iStockphoto, the four companies which mobilized their employees or users to blitz the poll: we removed them from the final count, but they deserve credit for the enthusiasm of their campaigns. There is no appeal.]

valleywag.com

Google Links Tool Shows Other Sites’ Links, Too

2007-02-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

The new backlinks checker of the Google Webmaster Tools has a bug that lets you see all the backlinks of unverified sites, too. This allowed me to check all backlinks for Google.com, for example, and download the links table as CSV file. Even though I don’t see a security issue with this (the links are public to begin with), and even though the details of this bug have been posted on other sites, I’ll omit the specifics for now and rather alerted Google so they can fix this. But here are a couple of backlink counts I retrieved:
Google.com: 1,432,908 backlinks(in comparison, the “link:” operator shows a backlink count of 1,750,000)
Yahoo.com: 1,431,186 backlinks(in comparison, the “link:” operator shows a backlink count of 1,990,000 )
MSN.com: 839,927 backlinks
TechCrunch.com: 268,732 backlinks
Digg.com: 492,480 backlinks
BoingBoing.net: 920,345 backlinks
SearchEngineLand.com: 25,841 backlinks
Waxy.org/links: 79,428 backlinks
MicroPersuasion.com: 195,541 backlinks

/blog.outer-court.com/

The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores

2007-01-26T10:40:00.000-08:00

The following is a list of the Internet’s eight biggest Google AdSense publishers. The information was compiled from interviews and articles found on the Internet. Whenever possible, I list the source of the information.
I apologize in advance if I missed anyone on the list. If you make more than the people listed, please send me proof of your Google AdSense earnings and I will add you on the next time the list is updated. This is a list of individual site owners - people just like you and me. Big corporate AdSense publishers like AOL are excluded.

1: Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month

Markus Frind is a local Vancouverite who is turning the online dating world upside down. His site, Plentyoffish.com is the biggest free dating site on the Internet. Plentyoffish.com receives up to 500 million page views per month and make over $10,000 per day for Markus, who runs the site from home.
You think a site this big would be staffed by a hundred people but the only employee that Markus has is his girlfriend, who helps to answer the emails. Markus coded Plenty of Fish all by himself. The site is lean and mean and requires only four servers to handle all that traffic.
Doubts about Makus’s Google earnings were silenced when he posted this $900,000 check from Google. According to Markus’s blog entry, the check represented two months of AdSense earnings.

2: Kevin Rose: Digg.com - $250,000 per month

Kevin Rose started Digg in December of 2004 with just $1000. Today Digg is one of the biggest news sites on the Net, with over 400,000 members and over 200 million page views per month. According to this article from Business week, Digg will make $3 million this year from a combination of Google AdSense and Federated Media ads. Unfortunately, only Mr. Rose and his accountants knows how much came from Google and how much came from Federated Media. I can try to take a guess based on the number of times I have seen a Federated Media ad vs. a Google ad on Digg but, being in Canada, it’s almost 100% Google ads.
Whatever Google’s share of Digg’s $250,000 per month in ad revenues may be, one thing is for sure, it is not small.

3: Jeremy Shoemaker - $140,000 per month

If ever anyone can be considered an Internet marketing superstar, ShoeMoney would be near the top of the list. Jeremy Shoemaker is a search engine marketer who knows how to take advantage of both Google AdSense and AdWords. In the above photo, you see him with the biggest Google AdSense check he has ever received from Google. The income was earned back in the month of August 2005. Since then Mr. Shoemaker has moved to wire transfers. No doubt, he got tired to dealing with the bank tellers when trying to deposit $100K plus checks every month.
Unlike the other Google whores on this list, ShoeMoney, as he likes to be call, does not own just one site. He makes his enormous Google checks using hundreds of sites and thousands of domains.

4: Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. - $120,000 per month

Before Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs, Inc to AOL for $25 million, he got the network of blogs making over $4,000 a day from Google AdSense. So impressive was his AdSense performance that Google used Weblogs for a case study.
Now that AOL controls Weblogs, you can bet it is making a lot more than a measly $120,000 a month.

5: David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard - $100,000 per month

According to this Washington Post article, David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, claims they make $100,000 a month from their site, Freeweblayouts.net, which gives away designs that people can use on MySpace.
The only problem with the revenue figure is it is not 100% AdSense. Free Web Layouts use other advertising networks in addition to Google. However, with a claimed $100,000 per month in revenues, I am fairly confident that the AdSense portion is higher than our next Google whore.

6: Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com - $30,000 per month

Tim Carter is a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show. He also makes frequent television appearances. He founded AsktheBuilder.com in 1995, The primary focus has been catering to an avid following of fellow builders on the site. According to the Google case study, Mr. Carter did such a good job tweaking the Google ads on his site that it now makes $30,000 a month.
Tim’s AdSense revenues now average $1400 a day and growing. Overall, Carter is enthusiastic about AdSense: it allows him to focus on content development, and gives him built-in tools to measure ad performance and make changes to maximize revenues. “People come to me for help,” says Carter. “They get what they need from my columns and advice - and also from ads delivered by AdSense.”

7: Joel Comm - $24,000 per month

Joel Comm is get rich quick guru. He wrote the best selling e-book, What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense. The e-book, along with the website that promotes it has a screen shot of Mr. Comm AdSense earning from November 19, 2005 to December 15, 2005. Whether or not Mr. Comm still makes this much from Google is anybody’s guess.

8: Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month

Back in January of 2005 the New York Times had an article about AdSense, featuring Shawn Hogan, founder of DigitalPoint. The article states that Mr. Hogan makes $10,000 per month from Google AdSense using a very unique revenue sharing model.
Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads, said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.
Mr. Hogan said he started the revenue-sharing approach in 2004 “as kind of a marketing gimmick.”
“But everyone seemed to think it was a cool idea,” he said. “I saw a lot of other sites doing the same thing maybe six months later.”
DigitalPoint have grown a lot since that article and while Mr. Hogun would not say anything, the DigitalPoint forum members speculate that he is making at least twice that amount now.

/www.johnchow.com/

Improving your Google Adsense Performance

2007-01-07T03:54:00.000-08:00

After running adsense for a while, you may still question why the performance of the ads on your site is still under expectation. This is quite a common question that I recently recieve. Hence, I decide to write this post to provide some sort of hints and tips in order to unleash your Adsnese potential. I use the word "unleash", simple because I do think everyone should have high potential to generate great revenue through Adsense. I hope, after reading this post, all of your Adsense potential can be unleashed and maximized.

1. Make Best Use of URL Channels
Use AdSense URL Channels to determine which pages are making you the highest CTR, CPM, and earnings. Focus your efforts on building pages like those. Channels enable you to keep track on the performance of each of your ads. However, Google only provides 200 channels and may not enough to satisfy those Adsensers with many sites and ads.

2 . Blend your ads with background
Blending your ads with the background of your site. Apart from the color, font size of both your ads and background fonts should also be the same. Another method of camouflage is to remove all the borders on your AdSense ads. The border have no paricular use buit will make your stand out. It is also a way to boost your CTR and increase your revenue.

3. Use Blue Links
From my experience, set the color of the link of your ads to blue color may help. Your visitors will think these blue links are just your content links but not an ad. The reason behind is that people have become used to those clicking blue links.

4. Large Ads outperform small ads
From my experience and the finding from other Adseners, both large and wide ads perform better; while small and narrow are underperform. Of course, it is subjected to your template and layout. The Large Rectangle Ad format (336x280) should be the best ad unit among all.

5. Integrate Ads with Content
Visitors come to your site becuase they want to find those information they want. Integrates your ads as close to your content as possible to ensure that the visitors will also look at your ads. Taking my blog as an example, I have implemented my ads into each post, and the result is quite fruitful and have recieved higher CTR.

6. Don't Compete for Other Peoples High-paid Keywords
Everybody know what are the high-paid keywords are. If you are using one of the high-paid keywords, that means there will be more than thousands of spammers are already competing for that keyword. People are getting less easy to access your website. Do not follow such list closely. There is no money in being one of the crowd.

7. Do Compete for Your Own High Paying Keywords
Use channels to let you know what keywords are the best. Monitor your AdSense URL channels to determine which keywords are making you the most money. Compete for those keywords. Build more pages optimized for similar keywords. Get inbound links for those keywords. Spend your time and efforrt on the keywords which are making you money.

8. Increase the Traffic to Your Site
In long run, the best method to boost up your AdSense earning is to build regualr and constant traffic to your web site. This issue has been thoroghly in my previous posts. You may probably refer to those articles by clicks relevant topic on the right.

9. Place Ads Above the Fold"The fold" is industry jargon for "the part of the page that the user sees without scrolling down". This will vary depending upon the resolution of the users screen and the size of their browser window.Place as many ads as possible above the fold. Ads placed below the fold are seldom seen and seldom clicked.
/www.daadsensecode.com/

Google Myths

2007-01-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

I've heard many inaccurate things about Google this year, and most of them are spread by word of mouth. Maybe Google should do a better job at explaining things that may seem trivial to computer experts, but difficult understand for other people.

1. Google Desktop indexes your files and uploads the index to Google servers.

No. Google stores the index on your computer. If you enable a feature called "search across computers", Google will securely send copies of your indexed files to Google servers. The feature is disabled by default.

2. Gmail indexes your emails and makes them available for everyone. (Darbacour)

No. Google indexes your messages so you can search them. This feature is now available in other webmail applications (Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Mail). Google doesn't make your messages or the indexes public.

3. Google doesn't delete my Gmail messages.

In order to keep your email safe, Google needs to have multiple backups of your data. "You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account. (...) Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems." (Gmail Privacy Policy)

4. Google doesn't improve search anymore to increase its earnings from ads.

You may not perceive too many changes in Google search, but Google tweaks its algorithms often to improve search results quality, removes spam sites and tries to add more fresh results. On the visible side, Google added search refinements, more direct answers, malware warnings and address recognition.

5. Search results should be ranked by people, not by algorithms.Google uses the links from other pages the determine the importance of a page, and those links were placed by humans. Google also monitors user's clicks to determine if the search results are relevant.

6. Google is spyware.

"Spyware is software that reports on your activities or gathers personal information about you and sends it via the Internet to third parties without your knowledge or consent." If you use software like Google Toolbar or Google Desktop, some features may send personal information to Google, but most of them are either turned off by default or require your explicit approval. Google also uses cookies to save your preferences and records queries, clicks, usage patterns to deliver better results. The problem is not that they record it, it's what they do with it. And Google tries to protect it from third parties (like US Government).

7. Google Earth shows real-time images.

No, what you see "are photographs taken by satellites and aircraft sometime in the last three years".

8. Google is the best search engine that will ever be built.

Google is far from a search engine that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want". But its goal is to reach that state. (Google's philosophy)

9. Google favors Wikipedia, Technorati, blogs.

Well, not exactly. These sites happen to have many backlinks, and oftentimes quality links. I know many people that link to Wikipedia to show an explanation for a concept or an acronym, link to Technorati to tag their blog posts or link to blogs because they are infectious.

10. Google will take over the world.

Those who control information, control the world. Hopefully Google will be a benevolent dictator (guess what? I linked to Wikipedia).

googlesystem.blogspot.com

hakia vs google ???

2007-01-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

hakia is a new search engine that tries to understand more from the web pages and focuses on information rather than web pages. "The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match - similar to the human brain's cognitive skills - rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms."For simple queries like [panda] or [Napoleon Bonaparte], hakia shows galleries: a big list of results grouped by topics that try to answer to many possible queries. For Napoleon Bonaparte, you'll see these clusters: official websites, biographies, pictures, news and interviews, fan sites, awards, speeches, myths, controversies, resources, innovations, statistics, bibliography, filmography. So it's like an automatically-generated Wikipedia page, without a coherent story.Like other search engines, hakia shows snippets for each result, but these snippets are bigger and try to highlight a possible answer to your query. Unfortunately, hakia is not always on the right track and when it fails, it fails completely.hakia works only for English queries, doesn't recognize spelling errors too often, doesn't have advanced operators and it's a bad choice for navigational queries (the first search result for [google] is google.org).The search engine will get out of beta this year and its founders predict it will be the first engine to use ontological semantics that enable it "to perceive concepts beyond words and retrieve results with meaningful equivalents".

googlesystem.blogspot.com

What should Google trim next?

2007-01-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

Google Base? 27.9% (300 votes)

Dodgeball? 21.4% (230 votes)

After the mercy-killing of Google Answers, the expert advice marketplace that never matched Yahoo's equivalent, what should the search company close next? Even after Answers finally shuts, Google will still have 85 web apps and other products. Which doesn't really matter, because the sale of text ads against search results is such a goldmine that Google is easily forgiven its time-wasting hobbies. But, in the interest of neatness, if not financial survival, what should the search engine company trim next?
valleywag.com

Another chance to crash Google's holiday party

2007-01-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

Ladies!
That kinky Google genius wasn't right for you? His ad's down from Craigslist, anyhow. Here's another opportunity to sneak into Google's holiday party. This advertiser, a Google engineer, is also looking for a date for December 1st. He guarantees: gourmet food, finely crafted adult beverages, and exceptional company. This Google sophisticate appreciates the finer things in life, which I think is datingspeak for fully vested. A screenshot of the ad -- and, yes, like much else on Craigslist, it may be a spoof -- after the jump.

valleywag.com

The Google aftermarket

2007-01-02T09:57:00.000-08:00

Say what you like about Dave Winer, the irascible popularizer of blog publishing, web feeds and podcasting, but he knows how to spread good meme. Winer notes that web startups feed off Google's valuation, act as sales reps for Google ads, and live off the inventory they create for those ads, concluding: Web 2.0 is nothing more than an aftermarket for Google.

valleywag.com

Google's miniature swimming pools

2007-01-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

Shawiz, on Flickr, has a good shot of the miniature pools on the Google campus. The recreation area is typically used by geeks fattened up in the Google snackrooms, rather than the hot sales and marketing women that the search engine has been hiring in the interest of diversity. Our research shows that, in that case, you'd prefer a picture of the twin pools, deserted. A historical note: Sergey Brin promised to install swimming facilities once revenue passed a particular milestone. He didn't specify the dimensions.

valleywag.com