I ran a search today. It was a real search. In other words, this search wasn’t something I was researching as a search professional. This wasn’t a search for one of the high keyword value phrases. This was just me … being an ordinary user … wanting to find some information. And what I discovered was that Google failed me, big time, with absolutely nothing in the first ten results that was of any relevance to my query.

Now at first, I assumed *I* was the problem. After all, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if you don’t give us the answers we are looking for, then we must have asked the wrong question. And just as I was about to figure out how to rephrase my query, I decided to do something else first.

I decided to run the same query in both Yahoo and Bing.

And guess what happened?

I received relevant results!

Now, to be fair, the results weren’t perfect, and they didn’t fully answer my question, but both Yahoo and Bing proved that they at least had a basic understanding of what it was I was looking for! You, Google, on the other hand, seemed utterly clueless.

So what was this question of mine? Well, I was daydreaming about moving to some exotic locale in which one could live quite well for relatively little money. And I was wondering where such locales might be. So I entered in this long-tail query:

[countries where one can live well with little money]

Go ahead. Tell me it’s my fault and please educate me on how I could have worded that query in such a way as to help you understand what I want. In the meantime, I’ll take a second and third look at Yahoo and Bing more often. (If you want to compare, here is that same query in Yahoo and Bing.)

Oh, and just so you don’t feel too badly, Google. You should know that before I even tried this query on your search engine, I first tried to get the information from Wolfram|Alpha. I thought that since it involved currency, countries, and numbers, it would have great answers. Unfortunately, like everything else I’ve tried to get out of Wolfram|Alpha (which is a terrible name, btw, but that’s another topic for another day), I got nothing but the same old message, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” So, to your credit, Google, at least you guessed … even if your guesses were painfully wrong.

Sincerely,

A frustrated search user

WTF? A poop-free chicken waterer? What??? Wait, I don’t even want to know.

I mean, seriously… wtf??

Today I receive this email from someone by the name of Joel Drapper:

Hey,

I’ve got a little problem.

The other day, I had this great idea to make a single PHP file that downloads, and extracts WordPress to make installing it much easier, and faster. So after I coded it, I asked a few of my friends for suggestions on a name. Most of them said EasyWP which sounded pretty good so I went ahead with it.

That evening, I put together the website (http://easywp.9milesMedia.com), but wasn’t going to launch it till the next morning when I decided what I was going to licence it under, etc. and was tweeting through this process. Then @smashingmag asked me if I could send it to them. I DMed them a link to the website that I’d set up, telling them that I wasn’t launching it quite yet, but they could see it early.

Moments later, my friends told me that he just Googled EasyWP and someone else (you) had made a similar file. I decided that it was probably a good idea to go ahead with my version anyway as I wanted to do a lot more with it then I could see you had done (I wanted to do an ftp version, etc. too in future update), but was going to change the name to something else because you had already used it for your file.

Unfortunately before I could do this, @smashingmag had tweeted a link to my version, and that link has now been retweeted over 100 times. It also ended up getting over 100 delicious bookmarks, and multiple blogs writing about.

I have a method of informing users of updates to the script, and I can set up 301 redirects, etc. but it’s going to be really hard now as it’s so well branded as EasyWP. I was just wondering if maybe you would allow me to keep the name? As I said, I can change it if you really want me to, but I’d rather come to some kind of agreement on this.

I’m sorry for not checking that the name was free earlier.

Thanks for taking the time to read this email.

I look forward to hearing form you.

Have a great day!

The script this guy wrote, at least in it’s current version, is slightly inferior to mine, does the exact same thing, came out a year after mine, and he gave it the same name. The only difference is that he got lucky enough to have @smashingmag to tweet the link for him. As a result, his script is getting a ton of attention. Despite that fact that he discovered that his script, including the name, was basically a direct rippoff of mine, he decides to continue to promote the script:

Since he did state that the whole situation was an accident, I suggested to him what I felt would be the right thing for him to do at this point:

Joel,

Ok, for starters, please stop promoting/tweeting your product until we have hashed this out. Your claims of this being an honest mistake seem much less sincere the more you promote this using the EasyWP name. Honestly, the fact that you didn’t issue a public apology for not researching the concept and the name the moment you discovered that you were plagiarizing, even though you claim it was accidental, surprises me a little. 19 minutes after tweeting that you discovered that the script had already been done and the name used for that exact purpose, you start promoting your script using that name, and you never stopped.

You said that you planned to go further with your script that I did mine, but as it stands currently not only is your script not really any kind of improvement over mine, but additionally it is lacking a couple of features that mine already has built in (such as checking permissions or allowing the user to upload their own version of wp, should they not want to go with the current one). Seeing as that is the case, and seeing as I released mine almost a year ago, this is what I think should happen from here:

1) I think that you should write an apology post for not doing any research before releasing your product, explain how the name was already being used for a near identical script, and how the original script actually has features yours does not. I think you should include in your apology your reasoning, whatever it was, for not letting people know right away and why you instead continued to promote your product without even mentioning mine.

2) Since my script does in fact offer things that yours doesn’t, I think you should simply 301 your current download page to mine.

3) You should ask Smashing Magazine help you get the word out about the original script, seeing as if you actuality did tell them that it was a sneak preview for their eyes only then they should not have tweeted it.

4) In the future if you do write a script with more/better features than mine then yes, I do hope that you use a different name.

Now Joel, obviously I cannot make you do anything, and you will of course do whatever you want. Only your own personal set of ethics will dictate what happens hereon out with this. It’s up to you.

Peace.

-Michael

Joel, however, is unwilling to give up the attention that comes with getting a mention from someone with the prestige of Smashing Magazine’s Twitter account, and all of the subsequent blogging that results from that. He claims he will give it another name, and come clean about what happened, in a few days after he updates the script. I asked him why he wouldn’t fess up now, but he really couldn’t give a good answer for that one, so he just replied that they were “taking this seriously and are actively coding updates, and sorting out the hosting”.

Do I know for a fact that Joel didn’t find my script and decide that passing off a similar one as his own was a good idea? Nope. No way to know those kinds of things. I do know that it took him almost 24 hours to contact me, and that he only did so after the script started to get tons of attention on Twitter. I also know that he refuses to make it right while there is still a large amount of buzz about it. I think that most responsible adults with any concept of business ethics would immediately own up to what happened, drop the script, and find some other idea to develop.

The problem is, Joel Drapper isn’t a responsible adult… he’s a 16 year old kid that is part of a group of 9 other kids aged 13 - 16:

9miles Media is a small, unique graphic & web design group comprised of nine creative teenage entrepreneurs (age 13-16) from all over the world. We adore what we do, and you’ll adore what we can do for you.

So, what do you do in a situation like this? Give them a pass because of their age? Trust their word that it really was an accident, despite their refusal to make it right? Having a hard time figuring this one out myself.

Although a change to AJAX technology would only make searches milliseconds faster, those milliseconds add up, allowing people to do more searches, faster. And that would let Google grow even more, eating up percentage points along the way. - Sarah Perez

However, what was missed by many in all of this is that when Google implemented this “fix” to retain the referrer, it wasn’t actually fixed in the way that they described in their blog post. What Brett Crosby highlighted in his post was the referring url itself that webmasters might start seeing in their traffic logs, and how it would be retaining the q= parameter for analytics packages to make use of, and nothing at all about how they were actually accomplishing this. He omitted these details even though he qualified the post in the opening by saying that they were writing it “for the most geeky among us”, and real geeks would want to know the nuts and bolts of what was happening. What neither he nor Google spokesperson Eitan Bencuya mentioned when discussing this is that the magic of retaining the referrer was not accomplished by simply coming up with a new url structure… due to the way that all major browsers function, just changing the url won’t fix the issue. Google engineers, to the best of my knowledge and generally speaking, are smart people. They know this. It simply cannot be done. Therefore what they did is to create a second, interim landing page that users are funneled though when they click on a link in the serps. This page then loads some Javascript that is processed, which when complete fires either a Javascript driven redirect or a meta refresh in the users browser, eventually bringing them to their final destination page.

If you happen to be getting served these new urls, you can see what the Javascript code on these new pages looks like by right clicking on the url and choosing to save the target. If you then view the file in a text editor, you will see code similar to this (there are a couple of variations on what code they are testing, apparently):

<script>if(parent!=window&&parent.google){parent.location.href='http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/';location.replace('about:blank')}else{location.replace('http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/')}</script><noscript><META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/"></noscript>

which was generated by saving this url:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bad-neighborhood.com%2F&ei=YVbnSYraM5CNtgevkpzLBQ&rct=j&q=bad+neighborhood&usg=AFQjCNH7sp5nWWhaVsJafdeL1Rw8-TTXxA

Why does this matter? Well, remember, the gain that Google is getting from doing this switchover to AJAX is, on a per-search basis, minimal at best. It is in the area of milliseconds. Now to correct something that it breaks they are adding in two additional slowdowns to the navigation process… the delivery of more html, which although tiny does involve time itself to connect to the server and deliver the actual code, and the processing time of each browser to either interpret the Javascript or trigger the meta refresh. This not only nullifies any benefit that would be gained by switching to AJAX in the first place, in many, many cases it will actually cause the searches to be slower than if Google had just left things alone.

Google is aware of this too. Matt Cutts mentioned again the other day how he wished there was a better solution:

The problem is, of course, the better solution is to not make the changes. Unless all mainstream browsers recode the way that they handle url fragments after the hash mark (#), and Google waits until everybody in the world upgrades to those versions, it’s just not going to happen.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that Google is actually cloaking these new urls that they are delivering to people? If you happen to have your status bar turned on, and you mouse over a url in the serps, it shows you the final destination page instead of the actual one:

However, if you click on the url (even a right click), the true target suddenly appears:

Not that big of a deal, I know, and nothing that they haven’t done before, but still. Between that and the “don’t bother reading this post, it’s just for geeks” intro on the Google Analytics blog post it almost seems like Google is making an effort to not have these new changes noticed. If this change is such a great idea, I would have to wonder why that would be.

Shortly thereafter, the tests appeared to have stopped. People stopped thinking that Google was linking to them from their homepage, and in very short time the buzz died down about it.

Yesterday afternoon, someone pointed out to me that the subject came up again during Matt Cutt’s keynote address at PubCon South. According to Lisa Barone’s live blogging efforts the conversation went something like this:

Brett: How about the JavaScript test.

Matt: That was really funny. The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible. JavaScript makes the search results a lot faster. Suppose you do a search for flowers, as you’re typing flowers, they can do a query from the back end and fold search results right into the page. You’re still in Google.com and they can pull in the results automatically. It doesn’t give you the referrer. He says the team didn’t think about the referrer aspect. So they stopped. They’ve paused it until they can find out how to keep the referrers.

Ok, fine. So they didn’t know about the referrer issue (and didn’t give me credit for pointing it out to them before it was more than just a test, *cough* *cough*), so they stopped until they can figure out a way to fix it.

Less than 1 hour after reading that, I happened to notice an over-abundance of url’s in the serps that were getting redirected though Google’s url redirection service. For those who are unaware of what I mean by that, it is a tool that Google uses to enhance their own behind-the-scenes tracking of user behavior. You can see it most consistently when Google displays sitelinks. They redirect the clicks through their own tracking mechanism first, so that they can determine how many people are actually using those extra links. Instead of going directly to the page in question, it goes through a link like this:

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm&ei=in…

If you view one of those links using a header detector, you can see that after doing whatever tracking they do on their backend, they then redirect the user via a 302 Redirect onwards to the final destination page:

User-Agent used to fetch header:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051206 Firefox/3.0

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:44:42 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Length: 247

Occasionally you will see these Google redirects in the normal serps as well, although usually not. The thing is, I was seeing them on every search I performed. It struck me as odd, until I suddenly realized that every search was being done via AJAX:

Here’s the problem, Google. That will not fix the referrer issue, which is what the issue is with every non-Google analytics package that exists. Without that, then the traffic coming from Google cannot be accurately analyzed (unless, of course, the analytics program has access to whatever it is that Google’s redirect script is recording). For one, a 302 redirect passes on the referrer of the original page, not the one of the tracking script, and for another there are no unencrypted keywords included in your tracking urls. It doesn’t take pushing the test to the live servers to figure this out, either. The engineers had to have known this beforehand. This means that if Matt was correct, and Google did indeed stop the testing until they could make it work with analytics, then the only analytics package they were worried about AJAX serps working with is Google Analytics.

Lisa Barone wrote a piece talking about personal brands and false idols on the web. In it she wrote the following paragraph:

Don’t support personal brands built on smoke and mirrors. Make people work for the brands they’re trying to create. Don’t let them scoble their way in. Don’t accept that someone is important just because they act like they are or someone told you they were.

Apparently Robert is the ultra sensitive type, and didn’t take too kindly to her choice of wordage. Here is his reply:

Wow, Bob. Way to identify with the lowly masses out there.

Maybe a little too intelligently, actually. I think that it might be trying to send me messages. I logged in to submit a story, and was wondering (naturally) whether or not it would go hot. At the last step I was presented with this almost prophetic message from Digg, seeming to tell me exactly what the chances of the story hitting the front page actually were:

So, what exactly is it that you are trying to tell me here, Digg?

FLASH NEWS: Pam Scott, N.Y., made $1,000,000 on FOREX!

19 y.o. housewife, using $99 Autotrading program-robot, made $1 million in only 2 weeks! READ FULL STORY..

The copy itself was bad enough to make me simply ignore the ad, but still… something about it kept drawing my eyes to look again.

Finally after staring at the ad long enough, it almost jumped out at me:

I was like, whoa! How did I miss that the first time? Yeah, sure, they cleverly hid the subliminal message in the background to the ad, in the image itself, but I like to stay abreast of the marketing industry and am usually on the lookout for these kinds of messages.

For those of you who can’t see the message in the original screenshot, here is a zoomed in version, without the surrounding html:

Much more obvious now, isn’t it?

In case you didn’t know, subliminal advertising is actually illegal in the US and other countries. The FCC has this to say about subliminal messages in advertising:

The Commission sometimes receives complaints regarding the alleged use of subliminal perception techniques in broadcast programming. Subliminal programming is designed to be perceived on a subconscious level only. Regardless of whether it is effective, the broadcast of subliminal material is inconsistent with a station’s obligation to serve the public interest because it is designed to be deceptive.

Deceptive advertising itself is illegal under 15 U.S.C. § 45.

If for some reason you can’t see what I am talking about in the above screenshots, here is an even further zoomed in version, with most of the ad copy cut out so you can see more of the background image itself:

Unbelievable, isn’t it? I mean, there it is, staring you right in the face. This is a big deal too. Very, very big.

Still don’t see what I am talking about? Here’s a copy of the zoomed in image, but with most of the pic grayed out, highlighting only the subliminal parts:

Yup. That’s right. They modified the sign in the background to plant the word “money” in your subconscious mind. Obviously they wanted anyone looking at that ad to be thinking that they would be getting their hands on great… big… HUGE… piles of money just by buying their product. I know financial times are hard, but I just can’t believe what some people will do just to sell their software sometimes.

While those things would definitely be affected in at least the short term, there is a much greater impact from Google switching to AJAX. All of the issues mentioned involve a very small subset of the webmastering community. What actually breaks if Google makes this switchover, and is in fact broken during any testing they are doing, is much more widespread. Every single analytics package that currently exists, at least as far as being able to track what keywords were searched on to find your site in Google, would no longer function correctly.

The reason this breaks is core to the way all of the browsers handle referrer strings, which is how the browser tells the web server how it got to your page in those cases where it does send that information. Sending the referrer string is optional, and can even be turned off, although by default it is on in all of the major browsers that exist today. Analytics programs, whether they are log based (programs that go through the server logs reading the referrer strings) or Javascript based (such as Clicky, the built in tracking in MyBlogLog, and Google Analytics) use that referrer string to determine what it was that that someone actually searched on, assuming that they found your site via a search engine, before reaching your site. For Google, they analyze the querystring portion of the referring url, and look for the “q={keyword}” parameter. So for instance, if you were to find the following url in your logs:

then you would know that someone had gone to Google, searched on [troll defense], and then clicked on the link to your site. If you were running some form of analytics program, that program would then register and track that search for you, so you knew what was and what was not sending you traffic from Google. If you run Google Analytics, you can even hack it to get the full referring url and get even more information from the referral.

However, if Google switches over to AJAX none of this will be possible. Unfortunately this isn’t even something that could be accomplished with a simple recoding of the analytics packages either… it would require completely rewriting the browsers themselves in order to track referrals from the new Google AJAX searches. The new AJAX url, as I mentioned in the earlier post, is driven by parameters that come after the hash mark (the number or pound sign in the url). Browsers do not include that data in the referrer string, and it is never sent to the server. Therefore, all referrals from a Google AJAX driven search currently make it look as if you are getting traffic from Google’s homepage itself. Now, while this kind of information showing up in your tracking programs might be quite a boost to the ego if you don’t know any better, and will work wonders for picking up women in bars (”guess who links to me from their homepage, baby!”), for actual keyword tracking it is of course utterly useless.

On Friday I set up a couple of tests to demonstrate this, so I could show the results in the server logs, MyBlogLog tracking, and even in Google Analytics itself. I found a phrase that I was ranking for, that I knew that no one was searching on, [bad neighborhood vandemar], and sent myself some referrals. In every case the method I checked showed Google.com itself as the referring site. You can see this in the server web traffic log:

in MyBlogLog stats reporting:

and even in Google Analytics:

I don’t know if Google has considered these ramifications in making this switch over, or if this testing is something that they are actually interesting in pursuing. I don’t know why they would be testing a change of this magnitude in the first place, though, unless there was a good chance that they would eventually go live with it.