Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Google Toolbar 2.0 Beta

For early adopters, the Google Toolbar is now available in version 2 (Beta). Additions to the current toolbar:

“Popup Blocker: Make surfing the web easier by stopping annoying popups.
AutoFill: Automatically fill in a form with the click of a button.
BlogThis: Create a weblog post pointing to the page you are visiting.”

Google Toolbar 2.0 Beta by Philipp Lenssen

Salon.com Speculates on Google’s Halo

Salon.com is going into great detail on the latest Google movements in “The Google backlash“* (by Farhad Manjoo, June 25, 2003) — especially considering it’s more of a mainstream news source. The balanced article covers GoogleGuy over at WebMasterWorld, googledancing Dominic, Cassandra and Esmeralda, blogwashing and the Google blog weight issue, the SearchKing law-suit, AdWords, the Microsoft Crawler, confused SEOs, and ranking shifts.

Image © Salon.com. Used with permission.

“To be sure, millions of people still love Google. When they step up to a Google query box, Web users are expecting one thing from the search engine — to be quickly directed to the one page that can solve some momentary, pressing mystery. Google provides such pages with remarkable consistency, and that accounts for its success — but it also points to a vulnerability. Google is so good that it’s now seen, in some ways, as an arbiter of truth, a kingmaker. What Google says about a particular subject, from “Iraq war” to “bookstore,” can have real political or economic import. That’s why so many people fight over Google’s results, and why, as the company grows, concerns about its influence will only get louder. (...)

For good reason, Google doesn’t talk about its ranking algorithms; if folks knew what Google was doing, the search engine would be easy to trick. But in the absence of information from the company, rumors, theories and groundless speculation run free. On the Web, Google has taken on the aura of a god — enigmatic, arbitrary, worthy of our fear and our love. Everyone’s watching it for signs of anger and of embrace; we know that whatever it does will affect us profoundly, and so people watch it, and they worry.”

Salon.com Speculates on G ... by Philipp Lenssen

Feedback? Feedforward!

These days, so many people have their own means of publishing discussion pieces on something, that all you need to do to find your feedback* is to use search engines — depending on the type of your site, this can replace the need for a guestbook or comments function. (Comments often fall prey to PageRank spammers. And in fact, some already proclaimed traditional comments to be dead.)
While no single search covers all, using different search engines will give you a good picture of what is being said in the online world. Here are the most important methods I use to aquire feedback on this blog, mostly from the blogosophere itself:

• Daypop Blogstats: This will generate a list of links. Unfortunately, various parts of the DayPop site (including the Blogstats tool) are often down.
  Number of References to this blog: 7
  Top ranking site with reference to this blog: Librarystuff.net

• Technorati Link Cosmos: One of the best link-trackers out there.
  References to this blog: 27
  Top rank for: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report

• Google “link:example.com”: This tool doesn’t work as expected, that is, give you lots of links to your site found online. Instead, it seems to filter out what it would consider unimportant links. Some have said this is due to Google Inc. trying to prevent reverse-engineering of their ranking algorithms. Whatever the case may be, this advanced search option is really lacking substance.
  References to this blog: 11
  Top rank for: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report

• Google “inurl:example.com”: This is almost like how one would expect Google’s “link:” feature to actually work, as it yields much more results. Many, if not all, are relevant.
  References to this blog: 156
  Top rank for: AOL Search: Results ...

• Google Groups search for “example.com”: This can be useful, unless you use your blog-URL in your signature and post on Usenet. In that case, the results will mostly show your own links to the site, as opposed to those by others discussing it.

• AllTheWeb “link:example.com”: Works better than Google’s version.

• Google Alert: You can set up a free account on this website to make them alert you of any news on a given search query. For example, I use “Google Blogoscoped” to be notified whenever new sites containing that string are indexed by Google.

• Weblog analysis: If you check the referring sites on your server-traffic log-files, you’ll often find the ones mentioning you. And if visitors arrived from Google, checking what search strings they entered is a form of feedback as well; are a majority of people interested in certain topics on your site?

What you are finding with these tools are what moveabletype.org calls “Remote Comments” (see “What Is TrackBack?“).
Since one expects others to know about these tools* as well, one can even participate in a discussion without ever directly pushing information to the other; that’s what “blogologue” is all about.

*Defined as “The process by which a system, often biological or ecological, is modulated, controlled, or changed by the product, output, or response it produces.”

**If you know of any more tools than the ones listed here, just let me know. If you feel like it, use your own blog to send the feedback.

Feedback? Feedforward! by Philipp Lenssen

>> More posts

Advertisement