Schlagwortarchiv für: Google

Google Base: Social Networking?

Its alive and breathing: Google Base just launched as reported by the official Google Blog and is… well I honestly don’t know! The plan is to enable the users to search for items which have been submitted by other users for free use. Is this Google’s new method of becoming a part of a social network?

Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We’ll host the items and make them searchable for free.

In my opinion, the validity and integrity of the data provided has yet to be prooved. In fact, I can submit anything I’d like and give false information just as if I’d write the most illogical things on my blog? I’m not sure if Google Base is such a useful tool as its maker say.

However, the ability to submit your own content and your own academic work seems to be a fair argument for the use of Google Base as a tool to publicize your thoughts.

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Google für 4,99€

Zu allererst habe ich ein wenig stutzig geschaut, aber der Fischmarkt fragt sich, ob das Publikum für die Nutzung von Google zahlen würde. Ausgegangen wurde von einem Preis von 5 Dollar bei 37signals, was einem meistens einfach aufbringbaren Betrag pro Monat entspräche.

Foto vom Fischmarkt (bisher ohne Genehmigung)

Wer kann sich das aber leisten?
Für ein Unternehmen ist dies sicherlich ein erschwinglicher Preis, um die Mitarbeiter tatkräftig zu unterstützen, jedoch für Einzelpersonen ist dies ein wenig zu teuer. In meinem Haushalt nutze nicht nur ich das WLAN mit nur einem PC, sondern wir haben unsere zwei Laptops und den stationären PC. Zusätzlich gibt es auch Bekannte und Verwandte, die bei Gelegenheiten wie dem gegenseitigen Computerspielen oder bei akademischen Arbeiten gerne und häufig das Netz über unser WLAN durchforsten.

Sollte der Preis sich aber pro Nase binden, und nicht von einer Gruppe der Konsumenten genutzt werden können, wendet man sich eher von der Idee ab, für sein tägliches Googling Geld zu blechen. Jedoch wenn die Familie also, was meine Freundin und sämtliche Besucher unseres Haushaltes einschließt, das vorerst fiktionale Angebot „Google für 4,99€“ unter einem Account nutzen dürfen, kommt es schon in Frage, sich darüber Gedanken zu machen, für einen Service diese Pauschalpreispolitik mitzumachen.

Was ist das für ein Produkt?
Ob ein damit verbessertes Produkt auf dem Markt ist, oder doch nur das alte in einer neuen Verpackung, ist fraglich! Neu ist an dem Produkt Google nichts, der existierende Service wird nur verteuert angeboten und ist nicht mehr frei erhältlich. Google würde nur ein altes Produkt (in neuem Gewand und Preis) anbieten, auf einem Markt, der an sich alt ist. Diese Marktdurchdringung haben sie aber schon hinbekommen durch Implementierung von zahlender Kundschaft in die Google Service Reihe – Werbung, AdWords, AdSense, Ad ad ad ad!

Wo ist denn hier die Diversifikationsbildung?
Sobald ich für etwas bezahle, sehe ich die Notwendigkeit für Premium Content. Das wäre für Google ein neues Produkt auf einem neuen Markt, der sich wie eine weite Wiese voll frischem Grün ebnen würde. Bei einer Suchmaschine wie Google bedeutet dies, dass der Service von Google sich insoweit vom aktuellen Angebot unterscheiden muss, dass der Suchindex keinesfalls die Inhalte in der Art und Weise anbietet wie bisher gängig:

  • Echte Ergebnisse
    …ich möchte keine vorgefertigten Seiten vorfinden, bei denen zahlende Kunden in den ersten 3-4 Ergebnissen der Suchergebnis-Seite auftauchen, relevante Inhalte aber nicht auftauchen.
  • Werbung Adé
    …sämtliche AdWord Angebote oder ähnliches gehören ab dann woanders hin.
  • Seriösität
    …unseriösen Kram wie Pornoanbieter oder Linkfarmen will ich auch nicht mehr sehen.
  • Deep Web
    …ist der Schwachpunkt von Google, und ohne die Referenzen des Deep Web bringt Google nichts.

Das Geld, wovon sich Google all die schönen Services für seine User leistet, würde wegfallen und niemals von einer Pauschaulgebühr von einer Hand voll Dollars oder Euro gedeckt werden. Mit diesen Denkansätzen schließe ich das Thema um „Google für 4,99€“. Die Anforderungen an ein so innovatives Suchmaschinenprodukt sind zu hoch, um sie mit dem bisherigen Google zu erfüllen. Das einzige, was sich Google leisten kann ist eine weitere Marktdurchdringung mit seinem Suchsystem.

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Google Blog Search

As previously reported by John Battelle and Darren Rowse, Google not only announced but published their own Blog Search. The system which is of course a beta works in two different categories as you can separate between searching only Blogger.com blogs or all (rather independent) blogs.

It disturbs me greatly that they still list my old blog upon searching for my own name. And that even if it has the noindex parameters. This is absolutely idiotic, and I’d expect a lot more from Google instead of categorizing their old index. I cannot embed a robots.txt file on that server, and I’d rather prefer to keep the spiders to follow to this blog instead of disabling all of it.

After all, Duncan published a first review of the service, and my own overall experience from using Technorati and IceRocket tell me one thing: Google can’t keep up with their advantage yet. And I hope that none of these good services are going to be sold to Google. I believe that many users would jump off just for such move. ;) The index of Google Blog Search is too small, and the fact of ignoring my own personal preference of opting out with my old blog and still listing the outdated version just annoys me. Grrrrowwwgle Blog Search doesn’t make me happy at all!

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Google Pagerank: Down or Off

Perhaps its just me again, but I cannot determine the current Google PageRank for any website via their Toolbar service. Must be the morning and the lack of caffine, and my love-ramblings probably did the rest ;) And now after yesterday’s re-categorization, I don’t even know where to file this entry. For now, it’s in „Software“, but would „Alerts“ be more useful and userfriendly?

Update
Now its back alive. Am I too fast with these things? I should be more patient and at finally learn to wait five minutes for an internet service to get back online. But then, it is Google? I do believe they have reliable servers – unless the backbones in Germany had to deal with an intense load.

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Website Owners click on Adsense

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As far as I remember, the majority of professional website users apparently hate to see free content being compared with advertisement banners. But in the end, we all have to pay the bills, and a little income from selling ads even on one’s blog can be worth every buck. Sadly, the MikeSchnoor.com doesn’t produce a profit worth to mention. Hardly noone ever clicks the Google Adsense links which are visible below each entry or on the category and main websites, and on the sidebar. But for testing purposes, I’m on the run with them.

However, Markus Klöschen explained in his recent article why he chooses to click ads. As a website owner, one may not violate against Google’s Policy of Adsense by clicking your own ads, but we can choose to click other people’s ads whenever we like it.

I’m bannerblind. I will in no case click on any colorfull, animated or blinking banner. Since I do visit pages which are using advertisements like that, I pimped my firefox and installed an ad-blocker. This works very good. But I don’t see the ads on my page any more, so I don’t see what some of my visitors see. Therefore I removed the adsense-expression from my adblocker to get the adsense again. From that time on I do see the adsense links and what shall I say, they are relevant.

Relevant… yes, I saw various ads coming from the Google Server and I felt obliged to click and read the advertiser’s website. I found a few things on Business Ethics and some other nice gadgets, added the URLs to the bookmarks and had a good day. One can argument that this does not help the advertiser and is just another cost factor if people click their own Google Ads or are motivated to click ads, but if it’s relevant? I don’t click „Sexy Voice Chat“ ads, but rather those that keep my curiousity engaged, those that keep me interested. If ads are being relevant for me, I will click them on other people’s blogs. That’s what I see as some sort of honorable mission in order to say „Thank you for all your free content.“

Update: Edited due to Markus‘ comment – that’s one for the morning and the lack of caffine. ;)

[via Light Within]

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Blogspot – The Spam Domain

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This morning I read a nice post by Google Blogoscoped: 60% of all Blogspot blogs are spammers. They tested 50 random blogs, of which 30 were spam blogs or had spam related content.

Marty Kay made an interesting comment in regard to Splots (spam blogs) on Google’s Blogspot.com:
„Funniest thing I saw was a bunch of comments on one spam/link site, that was totally irrelevant but pointed to ANOTHER spam site. The spammers are spamming each other.”

This is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever. You are a spammer and try to get money, but you’re being spammed because you’re too dumb to install counter-measures on your own spam blog. But here’s the deadly trigger for Google’s Blogspot domain. With approximately 7,500,000 individual blogs hosted on their domain, approximately 4 million spam blogs exist because of them. However, a second test of another 100 blogs changed the numbers, estimating 42% of the blogs are solely spammers. I wonder how the Blogspot users will react to this…

[via The Blog Herald]

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GMail for free!

No more invitations, no further posts questions about having another 50 free invitations. The internet got freed from Google’s webmail service GMail. The Googleopus allows anybody to get a GMail account by confirming you are a „real person“ via your mobile phone. GoogleVideoPhone as next after GoogleTalk?

[via GoogleBlog, Basic Thinking]

Update
You will not receive an invitation to GMail from me. You can do whatever you want, but you won’t get one. I will not help you, I will not support you because I’m not some Google Support guy. And if you want something at all, leave some correct and realistic email addresses for me to get in contact with you, or nothing (NOTHING!) will happen.

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„Google Mail“ known as german G-Mail

Quite a nice tidbit to know that the german version of Google’s G-Mail has now been re-named into „Google Mail“. Background to this kind of change is a ligitation in german law relating to the use of names. The phrase „G-Mail“ is obtained as reserved name by Daniel Giersch (Giersch-Mail) prior to the introduction of Google’s mail service. Besides this, anybody who needs an invitation – I may distribute yet another 50 accounts for free. ;)

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Mögliche Verluste bei AdSense

Am Samstag fielen einige Unregelmäßigkeiten bei Google auf, die sicherlich a) bei manchem ein Schmunzeln hervorrufen, b) anderen den Frust beim täglichen Googleing immens steigern und c) so einigen Webseitenbetreibern das Einkommen durch AdSense schmälern konnten. Wer also seine AdSense Auswertungen noch nicht angeschaut hat, sollte lieber diesen Monat auf den Kauf der neuen Home-Cinema-Anlage verzichten. ;)

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12 Reasons against nofollow

As featured on NoNoFollow.net, a new discussion has centered on the recent matter events caused by Google’s plan to implement the method of filtering links for their pagerank and searchindex systems.

As the argument rel=“nofollow“ will only restrict the robots to continously follow links, any blog can contain further spam as the filtering for spam can only be implemented in the blog software manually, via a plugin or directly on the side of the blog service provider. Almost too easy, an automatically created link can be formatted with the nofollow argument. This can be done secretly in any message system or bullitin board software without noticing the users. It may be used to restrict the number of links within html pages and might affect the pagerank of your own website if you use generic tools like this blogsoftware. On top of this, a human being will not be interested in the differences of normal links and the nofollow links as human beings are usually able to determine whether the link leads towards relevant content or spam.
The whole argument causes the filtering of link, the discrimination of users, changing the idea of the web, the discrimination of weblogs, the dissemination of free speech – all of this is based on the development by only search engine companies and not the W3C (World-Wide-Web Consortium) who should be responsible and decidable in concern of these matters.

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