Google Blogoscoped

Thursday, November 3, 2005

Google Files Personalized Results Patent

Google filed a patent for “Personalization of placed content ordering in search results.” Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal has more. (Ignore some of my comments in that post, the article text has changed in the meantime and there seems to have been a bit of a misunderstanding.)

Wikipedia Criticism

Which place would be more suited for an article titled “Why Wikipedia is not so great”... than Wikipedia itself? [Via Joho.]

16-Year Old Japanese Girl Poisons Mother, Blogs About It

Leo Lewis in The Times Online today reports:

“A high-school girl has been arrested for gradually poisoning her mother to the brink of death and keeping a blog of her progress – all done as a grim homage to a British serial killer whom she idolised. (...)

The girlÂ’s blog has been removed from the internet but extracts apparently copied from it survive on other Japanese websites.”

Yahoo Local Maps Beta

Heh, this looks just like Google Maps (it’s Flash, though). [Via Waxy.]

Google Down This Morning?

It seems several Google-sites were down this morning. I couldn’t reach Google.com myself at approximately 2 AM GMT. Other sites at the same time cold be reached fine. A few minutes later, everything was back up. Today, other people in the forum report similar.

(Of course, this wouldn’t be news at all if not for the fact Google is practically never down.)

Update: Google told me, “A small fraction of Google users on the west coast of the US may have had trouble accessing Google.com for a short period of time late last night due to a piece of malfunctioning network hardware. Within minutes, service was fully restored to all affected users. At no point was Google.com down and no other Google services were affected.” (Hmm, I’m in Germany though and couldn’t access Google.com.)

Make Your Google Logo

Creating the Google logo in Photoshop is actually really easy.

Responsible Spam

These messages of responsible “bulk emails” (by Tom Bartlett) are funny. Like this one:

“Hey, you, I’m blond, gorgeous, and I just turned 18! I set up a webcam in my bedroom so people could watch me 24/7! However, the more I thought about it, the more the whole thing seemed kind of creepy and demeaning. So I scrapped that idea.”

[Via Kottke.]

Google Listen (Humor)

Google announces Google Listen (Beta), a music player competing with the iPod. Google co-founder Eric says, “We are in the process of converting all the music in the world into gmp3, Google’s new music compression format.” (OK, that’s a hoax.) [Via Dagger in the forum.]

Dilbert Blog?

Is this blog really by Scott Adams? [Via Piaw Na.]

Similar Font Size For Best AdSense Results?

The official Google AdSense blog reports on the ad optimization of website Engineeringtalk. Quote (my emphasis): “They found the biggest influence on CTR [click-through-rate] was the similarity between the AdSense type (size and font), and the main body text of the page. The more similar the type, the higher the CTR.”
I’m certain this tip, and many other AdSense optimization tips, can be wrapped up by saying “make the ads look more like your normal content.” However, some of these approaches – certainly not using a similar font, but e.g. putting the ads right inside the content – can turn into barriers for reading the main content. And of course, that hurts the site (and ads) in the end.

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