Entries Tagged 'Google' ↓

I just saw this pop up on my MacBook.

I didn’t realize I’d installed any Google stuff so I was pretty confused. “WTF is this?”. Turns out its something the OS X AppEngine thingy installed.

Anyways… ya, that’s the big update. Sorry I haven’t written in a while… blame twitter

For the last 2 days I’ve been getting errors when trying to view reports in Google Analytics.

Anyone else seeing this stuff? Hitting “refresh” or clicking back and selecting the report again usually works. Just wondering if anyone else was running into this issue…

I was just checking the weekend Search Engine stats for Craig’s Little Buddy and saw that I got more hits from Yahoo! than Google.

My site doesn’t get a ton of traffic or anything so this isn’t some amazing metric but I gotta say I’m pretty shocked. The queries from Yahoo! actually seem better as well. Here, check ‘em out:

Yahoo! Searches

1. custom sz520 for sale craigslist
2. 1963 buick 401 carb replacement for rochester
3. 1977 aeroglass trihull boats
4. 90k mile tuneup for nissan pathfinder
5. aquasport boats for sale
6. craig’s little buddy
7. craigs list waverunner houston
8. craigs list zodiac yamaha
9. craigslist denver co\used 1989 toyota corolla le\for sale by owner
10. craigslist little buddy
11. craigslist pontoon boats
12. craigslittlebuddy
13. ecs 945gzfm
14. ernie ball music man silhouette guitar peizo
15. extend-a-truck™ hitch denver
16. menzari wheels sacramento
17. vw cabrio for sale in lake charles, louisiana

Googel Searches

1. craigslittlebuddy
2. search all of craigslist little buddy
3. craigs little buddy
4. http://www.craigslittlebuddy.com
5. craig’s little buddy
6. craigs search buddy

Kinda crazy huh?

It looks like everyone coming in through Google is just too lazy to type in the browser’s address bar and is performing a search instead. Its pretty hard for me to even consider those “searches”. On the other hand the Yahoo! queries are the actual queries I want.

I’m no SEO pro but when doing titles, H1’s, URL’s etc the Yahoo! queries are pretty much what I was shooting for. Some of the queries rank well on Yahoo! & some don’t. I’ll look into the ranking voodoo and try to make that stuff better but I am encouraged that I’m getting hits for these queries.

Pretty interesting stuffs

I was just checking analytics and saw a visitor come thru to this blog using the following query on Google:

how the fuck do you sync a rented itunes movie to your fucking ipod

Pretty sweet! Writing about Apple products while using excessive profanity has proved to be rather valuable. Who’d-a thunk it.

Why does Google Analytics do this?

Check out the “Referral Path”… if you can’t see it click on the image for a bigger view. The path in incomplete! Analytics reports /forum/viewtopic.php but that’s wrong. It should be something like /forum/viewtopic.php?t=threadId.

I like visiting referring sites and seeing what they’re saying about my site. There’s links to some BC Rich guitars for sale on The BC Rich Players Forums and I’d really like to see the context in which my site was mentioned.

So, to figure out what they’re saying about my lil site I have to go to the forum, sign up, wait for the admin to approve my registration, finally login, search the threads & finally check out what they’re saying.

Why do they chop of the query string? Without it some of these referral URL’s become 100% useless. Bleh

I’m pretty much on the verge of dumping my.yahoo.com for iGoogle. I’ve used my.yahoo.com for years now. I was pretty stoked with the new BETA. Hell, I even did a usability study there ’cause I actually gave a shit… but no more. Why?

This is why:

Why are there fucking ads on this page? Some douche sitting at Yahoo figured that people like me would click on it twice a year and $.05 x a lot = enough money to justify pissing loyal users off.

Eh, I’m sick of it. All I really used was the Yahoo Mail preview anyways and there’s a shitty Yahoo Mail widget for iGoogle. Its ugly as sin but, hey, no ads.

I’m killing some time before I head out to see Nothington at the Bottom of the Hill so I decided I’d blow a few minutes on YouTube. As I started clicking through some videos I notices their new, bigass ads.

What the fuck is this shit? I dunno why, but I feel all violated. I always felt that one of the highest value parts of the page (obviously, after the video itself) is the box where you can read the description, see who posted it and get your hands on the HTML you need to embed this thing somewhere else.

This placement is stupid for a few reasons:

• Like I said, they demote the contributor. Especially if this is original, user generated content… aka UGC (i hate that acronym BTW). If I was posting some original content I’d be a bit upset.
• It pushes down the EMBED code. This is their viral stronghold; why would you fuck with that? Ya, some people “know” the site now and will assume that real estate has moved but there’s a ton of newbies (my dad for example) and not-so-smart people out there that will trip over it.
• The “More from” and “Related Videos” sections got pushed down too… again, more valuable stuff got “demoted” and possibly pushed below the fold.
• plus its this big fucking eyesore

I guess you gotta start making $ off your $1.5 billion investment but c’mon. This is stupid.

Here’s my suggestions… move that fucking thing. I dunno where but somewhere, anywhere. Maybe text-link ads under the video instead of some video ad that I don’t wanna see slapped right next to the video I’m trying to watch.

While you’re at it…. You know those “Related Videos”… sometimes they’re not so related. That’s fine… but what would rock is if they’d put an AJAX driven search field right above those suggestions. See you’d get this:

While I’m watching my video I could do some searches and essentially create a 4 or 5 item playlist, on the fly, before the initial video’s even done playing. Now, that’s value. I’d love that. That could increase time on site quite a bit… then maybe, with more time on site per user, you’ll have a different story to monetize and can ditch those eyesores.

Thanks!!!
xoxo
Arin

That’s my prediction… guess, whatever you wanna call it. I’m no analyst and, hell, I don’t claim to be the first person to have come up with this WAG. I’m just a dude. But, while thinking about it during my ‘lil stroll to pick up some smokes it seems to make sense and fit their plan for global, information domination…
Google is going to buy Tivo.

Here’s the backstory:

Yesterday I was given a golden ticket to sign up for GrandCentral. Having an account at GrandCentral is pretty much like having your own, personal call screener & message taker. Its a great service. They give you a new phone number, people call that number and the GrandCentral service gives you a bunch of control over who, when and how people can call you. Here’s their feature list.

Anyways… GrandCentral was purchased by Google around June giving them yet another means to acquire and classify information about you.

Google wants to know everything about you. Everything! As stated on their site:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

from: Google’s Company Overview

OK - let me ramble off a few more things before I bust out my “Google’s going to buy Tivo” reasoning.

With their corporate mission in mind lets take a look at some of their services and see what info your usage of their offerings provides The Big G:

• Google Search
  This one is obvious right? They know what you’re looking for. By clicking on the links in their search results they know what sites you’re visiting and when. We see this manifest now if you’re logged into a Google account while searching. If you click on some results, come back to Google & redo the exact same search you’ll see your “last visited” time next to each result’s title in light grey font.
• Google Ads
  Same kind of thing here. You click on an ad and they know it. But now they have extra reach b/c Google’s ads reside on tons of sites.
• Google Checkout
  They know what you’re buying.
• GMail
  GMail gives them a ton of info about who you know & how well you know them. When I was at Spoke we had an Outlook plugin that would automatically populate your online address book and based on the frequency & length of your back and forth communication we’d score the strength of your relationship. Same thing is possible with GMail. They’re the mail client & server. They know who’s writing you, how often you write back, if you save their messages in a special folder, how long you take to write back etc. They also skim the emails and know what you’re talking (writing) about. By “knowing what you’re writing about” they can infer the type of relationship: casual, friend, business, famil etc.
• OpenSocial, Orkut & Google Talk (the IM thing)
  Again, this is obvious. This gives them a bunch of info about who you know and what you guys talk about.
• Google News, Shopping & Blog Search
  Pretty much like search except its a narrower vertical of info.
• Google Reader
  Same thing - but with RSS and “friends”. What are you reading? What are you sharing with friends (helps them know more about your friends’ interests) bla bla bla.
• Feedburner
  This one’s interesting. Ya, you can search Feedburner for stuff to read but a ton of people use it as a way to syndicate their site’s/blog’s RSS. This give the sydicater metrics around who’s subscribing to their blog and other nifty stuff to know. Well, Google knows this too. This gives them knowledge about how many people read your blog/site regularly. They probably know who these people are and based on your account’s email and/or just by scraping your site they know who you are too.
• Google Analytics
  This is similar to FeedBurner but even more rich with info. You get a free service and Google gets to know how popular your site is. Its a basic concept but the possibilities that information provides are pretty endless.
• Google Finance
  This site’s not the most popular in its space but if you use it (or the iGoogle widget) they can make inferences about your financial situation. Your portfolio doesn’t guarantee you own those stocks but its still chalk full of data they can use.
• Google Maps
  Based on GEOIP they have a good guess as to where you live. Their maps product can strengthen that algorithm and on top of that they know where you’re going. Some of the YellowPages like functionality there also helps them gather more info about you; ie they know you’re constantly looking for pizza places etc.
• Google Docs
  With these apps (word processing, spreadsheet & calendar) you could theoretically be handing them access to everything you used to do with MS Office. Now, most haven’t abandoned their desktop productivity tools for a web version but there’s huge potential there.
• GrandCentral
  They know who’s calling you. Also, based on the feature set they are in a position to infer quite a bit about your relationship with each person that dials you up.
• YouTube & Google Video
  They know what you’re watching.

I’m sure you get the point. I’m definitely not the first person to bring all this up. I’m sure a ton of people having been thinking about the information connection points of all the free Google products and the potentially insane applications of all this personal data.

But what’s this have to do with Tivo? We’ll besides YouTube and Google Video they don’t know what you’re watching. Television and the internet video stuff still have a disconnect. You can’t watch every Sopranos episode on YouTube - or Lost or 24 etc. You get the jist. Some networks are starting to put episodes online but those are usually on their own sites. That puts all the online-tv-watching data in multiple places.

Google could indeed (through analytics, search etc) start gathering this information. They could start talking to networks and try to ink some deals to get their content on their properties. iTunes’ store is an indicator here: Even for money - not every show from every network if available on the net. Another approach could be to develop some software/service that would enable these networks to host their episodes on their own sites and gather metrics through that. But, I highly doubt networks would be cool with this data just flowing away to a 3^rd party. This data’s probably not something they’d want Google to have.

So, if Google really wants to “organize the world’s information” they probably want to know what you’re watching and sitting right there in your living room with you would be a pretty sweet way to gather that data. They could license the OS out to other DVR providers & TV services too. This way they’d only have to ink deals with a handful of folks (cable, satellite providers etc) instead of 100’s of networks.

So, that’s my reasoning. I don’t think its too insane of an idea especially given that Tivo’s only trading at around $7.19 (sunday 1/13/08) and that this would do a pretty good job of rounding out The Big G’s information pool.

I use Google Analytics to track stuff for this blog and we also have an analytics account for Fuzz. Today I figured I’d login to Fuzz’s account and grant my personal account access to Fuzz’s stats. I figured this would be way better than logging in and out a bunch of times each day… sounds good, right?

So, logged in to analytics and added my personal email in Fuzz’s account dashboard then logged in with my personal info. assuming I’d see both sites listed and I’d have the ability to flip/flop between the two at will. Wrong! The entry for phatduckk.com disappeared and all I saw listed was the info for Fuzz. Did my stats all just go away? WTF!!??!! I logged back in to the Fuzz account, removed my personal email from Fuzz’s account section, logged in to the phatduckk account and my site’s stats came back.

Pretty disappointing huh? Isn’t it a fair assumption that this should have worked? Why the fuck do they let you grant access to a separate Google account if its gonna screw up that accounts original access? Do I really have to have multiple Google accounts?