When A + is Not A Plus

It would seem that receiving a +1 on Google Plus is no great benefit in raising your profile in Google's search rankings.

As a social metric the number of +1's you receive may be heart warming but doesn't mean that you will be discovered online any better.

Matt Cutts,  the head of Google Web Spam team confirmed in a ‘Power Searching With Google Hangout on Air #2’ that this was the case.  This is not to say that +1's won't become more important in the future but right at the moment Google is more interested in 'authorship'.

"In the short term, we’re still going to have to study and see how good the signal is, so right now, there’s not really a direct effect where if you have a lot of +1s, you’ll rank higher. 

But there are things like, we have an authorship proposal, where you can use nice standards to markup your webpage, and you’ll actually see a picture of the author right there, and it turns out that if you see a picture of the author, sometimes you’ll have higher click through, and people will say, ‘oh, that looks like a trusted resource.’ So there are ways that you can participate and sort of get ready for the longer term trend of getting to know not just that something was said, but who said it and how reputable they were."


So perhaps the main lesson to be learnt is that you need to have Google Authorship enabled on your site. Your online visibility will improve with the number of results your achieve as an author,within the results pages.

First A Wave And Now Barely A Ripple

How was your Google+ post shared and  how influential was it?

Google have just introduced Ripple which graphically displays how Google+ post activity unfolds.

Another nice touch is the ability to see how these conversation develop over time by clicking on the 'watch the spread of this post' icon.

Towards the bottom of the screen are the influencer and demographic charts.

To get started, just find a public post that interests you, and select “View Ripples.” From there you can replay its activity, zoom in on certain events, identify top contributors and much more. Remember a public post has to have been shared to create a "Ripple"

Here is another method, albeit more convoluted than the above. Follow these steps:

1. Go to your post and select "link to this post"
2. Copy characters after "/posts/"
3. Go to this url: https://plus.google.com/ripples/details?activityid=HotNjLexB1u and replace activityid parameter value with your post id.

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The World's Most Private Search Engine?

Image by kevindooley via FlickrMost people know that every time they use a regular search engine their search data is recorded. Search engines capture your IP address and use tracking cookies to make a record of your search terms, the time of your visit, and the links you choose.

They store that information in a giant database.  There is in reality a vast amount of personal information about your interests, family circumstances, political leanings, medical conditions etc.

According to this StartPage, this information is modern-day gold for marketers, government officials, hackers and criminals - all of whom would love to get their hands on your private search data.

There is no denying the truth of this statement as and marketers such personal information is extremely valuable.  If you are still in doubt remember the 2006 AOL debacle where three months' worth of aggregated search data from 650,000 of its users was accidentally released, with all the details published in an online database.

Believe it or not, this database is still searchable. Using a tools such as AOLStalker enter a query and find out who searched for it.  Once you have done this click on the "User ID" and find what else this user searched for.

So if I was the manufacturer of say 'Einstein Bagels' and wanted to see who has interested in my product, I could do a quick stalker search and then click on the "User ID" to get a better idea of my prospective customer's other interests.

Social media is also a fertile ground for companies wishing to make a buck out of search.  Try Spokeo, a search engine that uses email addresses to find people across the social Web.

Give Spokeo your log-on information for Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo Mail, or just upload your personal address book and  Spokeo will scour 41 social networks and collect all information associated with each email address. Blog entries, Linked In profiles, Flickr photostreams, Twitter tweets, Digg comments, Amazon wish lists - and a whole lot more - all on one page. And every time these people add new content, Spokeo lets you know.

In other words, for under $10 per month Spokeo lets you to stalk these strangers in new and unusual ways.

And as Digital Inspiration points out, should you ever wish to determine the geographic location of someone who has sent you an email (and who you have never heard from before) use a visual trace route tool.

Open the header of the email and find the lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.  Copy and paste this into the tool and bingo!

The issue of online privacy refuses to go away but maybe, just maybe, there are alternatives.

StartPage claims to be the world's most private search engine. Under the hood is Ixquick; in fact they are the same beast in slightly different clothing.

The engine's capabilities include an Advanced Search, a global search and power refinement and the integration of a phone directory search is a nice touch.

Picture search presented the results cleanly with image sizes clearly identified

The privacy guarantee from StartPage is their stated promise not to record your IP address. But your chances of becoming the 'Invisible Man' online are in reality remote, as data (e.g. Wikileaks) can always be found or made available.

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Waving Goodbye

Hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread, Google Wave was set to revolutionise our lives.  Now the plug has been pulled.

A number of these big ideas miss the mark because they do not meet a market need; they are clever ideas with nowhere to go.

The functionality of Google Wave is of interest but it should always have been part of a larger application suite, not a release it its own right.  Its cleverness masked its purpose, users couldn't grasp the concept and it withered at the vine.

When even the company finds it difficult to explain a products purpose in life (it was meant to make email obsolete) you know it is going to have problems surviving long term.





Liane Cassavoy of PC World in her article Google Wave Flops: What Google Service Will Go Next? predicts that Google Buzz and Google Fast Flip could be next to go.

She may well be right as I for one will not be "buzzing" this article.

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Me, Me Me - Just How Well Are Your Sites Connected?

Substantial sums are invested in web sites and social media.  But just how effective is the inter-connectivity of your sites?

As the aim is to drive traffic from one to the other, building search rankings and the Buzz, this intelligence is important.

Google's Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers.  It measures site connectivity and shows:

• your other sites that are connected to the URLs you entered.  These are known as "me" links. 
• a 'Score' column that demonstrates how well-linked each is - green for fully linked, red for just one.
• 'Possible connections' -  a list of other sites that link to your URLs with 'me' links.

Try also the My Connections application.  It shows the list of web URLs that are connected to the ones you entered. The first section lists all contacts you've linked to. Below that is a list of all contacts who have linked to you, using relationships like 'friend', 'kin' or 'colleague'.

You Are What You Tweet

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University has written a thought provoking article in the New York Times. 

The focus is "how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing - where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever"

And the primary lesson to be learnt is that everything you ever put online can come back to haunt you!

There are sobering examples of job applicants never getting out of the starting gates after the content of their tweets and Facebook rants have re emerged to haunt them.

As the recent press coverage of Wikileaks demonstrates, the web is also the platform of choice for the disaffected. On the positive side whistle blowers have a global medium through which they provide balance to an orchestrated PR positioning. And people are genuinely interested in the recent information posted on the site with Google Trends recording Wkiileaks as the #1 ranked "hot topic", even out pacing the Clinton wedding.

But there are few reliable ways to comprehensively verify information and even searching through reputable sources can have its problems.

Take the Chocomize story as an example. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land in his article about the Google Sewerage Factory says "The pollution within Google News is ridiculous. This is Google, where we’re supposed to have the gold standard of search quality. Instead, we get “news” sites that have been admitted - after meeting specific editorial criteria - just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article causing the term “chocomize” to be popular, polluting the news results and along the way, earning Google some cash."

So if, as Jeffrey Rosen has written, the web means the end of forgetting are we finding and remembering the right stuff in the first place? The search results may be garbled but the data is there forever.

If you really want to mask your identity from any future employer you may wish to take the advice of Michael Fertik, founder of ReputationDefender, and Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado.  The New York Times article covers questions of Internet privacy with practical advice on how to make online commentary untraceable.

Meanwhile Google maps is making it even harder for a company to run from a bad reputation,  They are now using sentiment analysis and pulling content from non traditional sources like newspaper articles and single blog entries that appear across the internet.

Writing in his blog, Mike Blumenthal sees a marketing research opportunity in this new development -  the ability to discover review sites in your market:


"Go to maps.google.com and simply type the domain that you identified into the Maps search box ie, blogto.com You might want to include a local modifier. Maps will display an array of Places listed in which the site you identified has been mentioned. You can verify that they are a review source by then examining the review section of the Places Page"

He adds "This new capability will dramatically increase the reach of hyperlocal blogs, change how businesses manage the review process and could, over the long haul, change how and where reviews are generated and aggregated.".

Clearly this is a reputation management challenge that businesses need to be aware of.  Not forgetting that what happens on the web, stays on the web.

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The Next Bing Thing

Traditionalists amongst us tend to stick with Google search and I am one of these folks.  However Bing is most definitely on the up;  it already powers Facebook's search and will shortly do the same for Yahoo search.

Secondly Bing has had a spring renewal of interface design which is a lot more appealing and easier to navigate with the Quick Tabs feature.

Brian MacDonald, the Corporate Vice President of Bing  indicated that they had decided to invest in the entertainment area, based on the findings of user research.

Music, gaming TV and movies have extensive offerings and a new portal for those who want to go direct.  There are currently  5 million free plays in the music offering.

Yusuf Mehdi, Bing's Senior Vice President explains: "As the content on the web has exploded, it has become difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for. In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.

So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions -- from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love."

The business application of Bing is of greater interest and they have beefed up  investment profiling.  The much vaunted finance portal which is meant to be at this URL http://www.bing.com/finance is currently redirecting to the search engine front page which suggests that all is not well?

Bing General Manager Derrick Connell discusses the latest changes made to Bing's design and experience in this video.

I gave Bing  a try when it was first launched and stopped using it shortly after.  On the strength of these improvements I am willing to give it a second chance.

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