Archive for January, 2010
Google Publishes 5 Privacy Principles
In honor of yesterday’s International Data Privacy Day, Google published its five privacy principles. They are:
- Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services. Search history informs personalized search, but users can opt-out.
- Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices. For example, you can chat on Google Talk “off the record” so the conversation isn’t saved.
- Make the collection of personal information transparent. Last year, the Google Dashboard was launched to show you what info Google is collecting on you.
- Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy. You can report privacy issues related to Street View. Google often blurs faces, for example.
- Be a responsible steward of the information we hold. Google doesn’t sell data to other companies.
You can view the published web document on Google’s privacy principles here.
Delicious Updates Viewing Options; Adds StumbleUpon-Like Feature
Social bookmarking site Delicious has updated the ability to filter viewing options - plus added a new way to browse your bookmarks that is very StumbleUpon-like.
First up, there’s a new display options menu tucked into the top right corner of your bookmarks display. This is for when you’re viewing “My Bookmarks” - not on the main page. Here’s what it looks like:
Delicious also gave the option menu treatement to the tags section on the right sidebar in “My Bookmarks.”
Last but absolutely not least, there’s a new option to “Browse these bookmarks.” Again, this is for your own bookmarks. When you click it, you’re taken to the most recent bookmark - but there’s a toolbar frame across the top. Click arrows to browse through your bookmarks. This is very much like the new StumbleUpon - except your just browsing your own bookmarks. It will be interesting to see if Delicious expands this capability to truly compete with StumbleUpon in the future.
Look for the “Browse these boomarks” link in a blue box in the top right corner:
Here’s one of my bookmarks with the Delicious browsing frame at the top (click to enlarge):
Connect with me on Delicious, screen name nlj.
More PROOF Jason Calacanis is a ____
Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).
But when you look at the sales material that Mahalo pitches to corporations, in the 19 page PDF reads like an à la carte menu of SEO services, rather than sales material from a company ignorant of of SEO.
It includes a slide which highlights how well Mahalo Answers questions rank in Google titled “SEO value,” as well as the following statements (followed by my comments):
- Questions are imported from Partners’ Answers Community into Mahalo Answers, enabling 100% share of voice and high SEO value. (filling Google with duplicate content)
- Category Selection Based on Keyword Intelligence and Customer Goals (doing keyword research, an SEO service)
- Community seeded with high-value questions and answers (does the word “seeded” mean asking fake questions?)
- By carefully policing the site, Mahalo keeps out inappropriate content, thus increasing engagement and utility. (no mention of the half million+ pages indexed in Google which contained scraped 3rd party content?)
- We can help our partners increase their search engine rankings with these high quality pages. (that is the actual text from their slide titled “HowTo”)
- Mahalo’s team of editors will find the most highly-trafficked search terms and keywords for your brand, industry or product and build corresponding high-quality pages that will rank well. (isn’t that exactly what “scummy” SEO companies do Jason?)
Given that Mahalo is now branded as an SEO play (in their own words), and that they scrape millions of content listings to publish on their pages, are creating tons of other duplicate content, have actively engaged in link farming, and are not above “seeding” questions based on keyword value, why should Google trust *any* of their business practices going forward? Especially when their SEO services enterprise was launched on the back of calling SEOs scumbags.
How can the Google web spam team members look themselves in the mirror each morning hunting smaller webmasters and ignoring operations like Mahalo? It must begin to feel arbitrary at some point, no?
6 Google Updates to Read this Weekend
Whether you’re snowed in or enjoying sunny weather this weekend, take some time to read up on these Google updates:
Google Custom Search has made some changes to the hosted home page.
Google Analytics has made annotations available for all accounts.
Google Maps now offers personalized suggestions.
Google Image search for mobile has added Popular Image browsing.
The Google Research team blogged about building cluster applications.
Google Books updated their Home Page and Library.
Why Mahalo (and Other Content Scrapers) Render Google’s Spam Team Flaccid
I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media’s CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: “what if google decides they don’t like you anymore?”
Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just “borrows” your content without permission and keeps all the cash.
In the past Google hated content scrapers pretty bad. How bad? Well a guy named Teeceo used to make scraper sites, and here is how Matt Cutts described his work:
In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find.
Imagine taking that approach to hunting search spam all day long, and then ignoring the *fact* that Mahalo is scraping millions of third party listings and using them as content with no editorial filtering.
Then I started thinking about why the Google spam team could ignore something as outrageous as Mahalo, especially when it was built by a guy who was a false anti-spam evangelist. Is it because Jason is a good guy? No. Is it because there is some actual editorial vetting of the content? no. Is it because Google is getting a cut of the AdSense revenues? Google doesn’t need the short term cash flow (look at all the affiliate AdWords advertisers they just torched), so that is too cynical of a view.
Yes Google wants display inventory (their biggest opportunity for 2010 according to the quarterly call), and these “content” websites have already given themselves over to Google as inventory. But it must be something deeper than that. So I started thinking about it from a longterm strategic level…
Google won’t penalize sites like Mahalo (even though they blatantly violate Google’s guidelines) because Google *wants* to use the works of companies like Mahalo, Demand Media, and Aol to lower the value of other content and bankrupt a lot of the traditional media companies.
Why would Google want to do that?
There is excessive duplication in the marketplace. The faster that duplication is driven out of the marketplace the more desperate companies will be to cut deals with Google. And while there is a down market Google can drive companies out of the market and just claim that it was the economy that did it (much like how Mahalo used the down economy as an excuse to fire most of their editorial staff and replace them with content scraping robots).
Once a lot of media companies are bankrupted, the market is far more efficient, and there are fewer mouths to feed, that means Google can squeeze greater profits margins out of the media ecosystem by getting a fatter cut of the ad revenue.
Currently this shift is risk free because almost nobody understands how the marketplace works. Sure Paul Kedrosky and Mike Arrington blogged about the search results getting spammier, but until you frequently read the above listed sequence on sites outside of the SEO industry there is no damage to the Google brand in them turning the internet into a cesspool.
Once it starts harming the Google brand then I suspect them to act quickly and decisively. And sites like Mahalo will see a sharp drop in traffic. Jason better milk it while he can. The clock is ticking.
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