Last week, Google was doing a different Doodle each day in honor of Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary. A couple days I missed their logo since I usually just search directly from my browser. Since I don’t always get to see the google logo I kind of wanted to see what they had done and while I was searching for what they had used for their various logo doodles through the week I came across an interesting link. I thought this would be a fun break from the recent diet of rogue antivirus removal…..

I found the google doodle archive. This is the archive of all of their logos and what’s really neat is that you get to see where they had the logo displaying. So, that means you can see the customized logos they used to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall for instance, or Korean Thanksgiving, etc.

I never realized before how many doodles had been used and that they targeted them for specific countries and regions.

Interesting – it looks as though Google may be limiting the number of results in their hottrends search page to just 40 now from the 100 that they used to. I’m not very surprised really…. in the last few weeks I’ve been using the hottrends to see which rogue antivirus was the biggest pain in the neck of the moment, but in doing so I see many rogue sites that are using the hot trends to cash in on the traffic by serving up malware. At one point 6 of the top 10 sites in the results for one of the rogue applications were malware and I’ve seen malware served up from sites that weren’t computer related searches either. I’ve seen one person speculate that it’s based on search volume and they trim it to 40 when there are fewer searches being made. Maybe it is a temporary change.

I just suspect they figure there’s less of a chance for it to be gamed if they give out a bit less information. Despite that it’s been fascinating to watch the hottrends. (I’ve even spotted a number of news stories developing there WELL before seeing it on the cable news networks.) So, what are your thoughts? Should they trim it down to cut abuse? Should they expand it? (Should they give us the option to seeing the top x queries where we can specify however many queries to browse?) What do you think?

By the way – similar services are Yahoo’s Buzz which only shows the top 20 searches, but can show you the searches by category. Listing of this and other similar services at searchenginewatch. Another here at about.com. ask.com

I’ve seen some updated information that ties this shrinkage of the hot trends to a tie in with google search. Apparently on the hot trending topics google is now introducing a box with the trend information, related search etc. Cutting the number to forty officially is to avoid overwhelming users that are new to the information (although the article said the box would show up for the top 100 searches anyway….) and a “side effect” is going to be thinning out some of the spam that chase trends. I’ve seen MANY pages that do nothing but take rss feeds of the trends on a page and the way their algorithm works for “QDF” (*query deserves freshness) when a search is that hot it will ring in new “chatter” on the topic which usually includes these rss feed splogs as well as many keyword stuffing pages designed to target nothing but the volume traffic. (No content on the topic – kind of a web based bait and switch.) This is typical of the rogue antivirus scammers that were throwing up pages that in the search results appeared to have information on a top search term, but redirected to their “scan” and suggestions that your computer is infected with blah blah blah – please download and install “our scam software of the day” and pay us to remove the problem…. Unfortunately that will still take place, there will just be fewer search results for the scammers to target.

Anyway…

Other places to see trending searches…

Bing has xrank which is similar and you can dig deeper than 100. Here’s an interesting take on pulling up bing search results for the google top 40 trend searches.

The internet is an amazing place you can learn about most anything from carbon nanotubes stopping bullets to a duvet cover. In the last few weeks I’ve learned a few things over at Google’s hot trends page. Basically, about once an hour there is an autogenerated list of the top 100 things people are searching for right now. What I’ve found interesting about it is to see tomorrows news headlines being searched for today. Several times I’ve seen searches in the top 100 that I had no idea what it related to until I saw the news the following day, then it all made sense.

I’ve also made use of the hot trends in deciding which rogue antivirus software is the most problematic at any given time. Google is using this kind of information in a unique way as well. To give a good reading of what flu outbreaks look like. They say that using searches to track a flu outbreak can give about a 2 week advantage over other outbreak tracking methods.

So the bottom line is that if you want to know what people are looking for, google can tell you! (oh and by the way, it looks as though facebook is down this evening judging by the searches…)

I see a google hot trend right now is searches for AntivirusOnlineScan 6 and many of the results seem to be incoherent sites talking about antivirusonlinescan v8. It makes me wonder if we’re seeing the rumblings of the next big rogue security software push. Sure enough http://antivirusonlinescanv8.com/ is flagged as an attack site and has been registered in the last 2 weeks. Fortunately the server is not responding right now. I guess we’ll see tomorrow if it’s the next big thing in rogue antivirus.

Yes, Gmail was down today, September 1, 2009 for a stretch this afternoon. Really it wasn’t more than about two hours at the most from what I saw and from what I hear IMAP/SMTP access was working although the web interface was down. I found out a few interesting things during the outage though. …

1) Twitter is a good source to check if gmail is down…. The technologizer gives us this nifty twitter search to see if there’s buzz about gmail being down.

2) Google has a nifty cool apps status dashboard where you can track … well the status of google apps and when issues are expected to be resolved.

Really, let’s face it google apps will go down from time to time just like any other piece of technology. They certainly try to minimize outages to gmail and other services, but things happen. I was expecting an email at the time or I might not have noticed the outage myself. So, I was logging into gmail to see if it was there yet and got the 502 error message and retried and retried and managed to see my inbox, but got the message that it had trouble communicating with google and then managed to see an email, but then it gave an error again, etc.

Tonight everything seems fine.

Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….

First off, the setup went VERY well…. I was able to get a number in my local area that contained my initials which I thought was pretty neat. Verification of the home and cell phones went well and setting up an outgoing voicemail message was easy and worked great. My first few test voicemails the transcriptions were absolutely fantastic.

Other voicemails I’ve received have had less then perfect transcriptions, but for the most part they’re passable. In the online interface you can tell the parts that they have lower confidence in since they’re printed with a shade of gray. You can also rate transcriptions of voicemail. Incoming, outgoing and missed calls are logged and you can also annotate calls (and voicemails.) I like that, it could give me a chance to put in details about what was discussed if I’m dealing with a call or caller that I feel as though I need to document more carefully what is talked about.

The transcriptions are relatively fast and I am definitely enjoying receiving a notification by email and text when I get a new voicemail. Given that they’re already doing the transcription side of things it WOULD be interesting to see an option to leave yourself a message ala Jott, which could then plugin to another service (like calendar or gmail or tasks) Now, you can of course jerry rig together a way to do it… for the cellphone you can cut off the option to automatically go into the voicemail menu and set a custom outgoing message for that number, but you still won’t be able to make it automatically add a calendar entry or send an email (okay you might could rig up an email filter, but that would be a kludge…. get out the duct tape!)

Of course, this is a free service, so…… don’t take the above as a complaint. Of course, you will pay for international calls, very good looking rates though. I don’t have the need to call internationally usually, but it looks like they have some of the best rates around. Yes mobile phones that you have are configured to land you in the “login” menu of your voice mail. You do have to enter a pin number (good default.) Also you can make outbound calls by logging in, pressing two and then dialing.

One thing that I thought was interesting is that with the call screening feature off (this is when you answer it announces who is calling and let’s you answer, listen in or send to voicemail) with the feature off for all or some of your callers their message will go to the voicemail of the first phone to answer (I wonder what happens if none of them have voicemail(?)) If I recall my telephony…. this may be something that they are stuck with due to the structure of call handling although it would be interesting to see a workaround for that which could bounce the caller back to the GV mailbox.

One problem that I’ve run into is that my number was not able to be reached by one local exchange. I tested on two lines, I tested both my and my brothers new Google Voice numbers (got them the same day.) Both gave a message along the lines of “we’re sorry but your call could not be completed, please try again.” I tried other numbers in the same prefix exchange and they worked (non google voice numbers) and I have also tried from several other cell/land lines and not seen anything similar. Unfortunately that would be the one contact that I had given my number to as my new number. I’ve sent two feedback items to Google on this, but it may just be a local phone switch needing an update/reboot (?)

So far that’s the big complaint…. Now for some less crucial ones. SMS messages – online services that do email to SMS gateway sending can’t get a message to you. This is one that I REALLY would like to see fixed. If this is about merging our communications media and simplifying with 1 number, then…. SMS email gateway inbound and MMS needs to happen in the near future.

I’m eager to see what future levels of integration they look at…. I think the idea of prowords to trigger a gmail message or calendar/task list item would be a good kind of integration and really start to rival some of the other services out there. In reality, this is a free product that is still in it’s beta stages and in this case, the beta label is probably more applicable than it has been with Gmail for the last however many years. It has great potential to change the way we use our phones (if not for the way cell phone calling plans may be pressured by this… I mean if your gv number is one of your “friends and family” do you really need to pick another 5 or 10 since that can be your outbound gateway to anywhere?)

Oh, another thought – although technically at this point in time the only kind of sipphone you can forward to is a gizmo5 number, I found a way to forward to most anything. With a gizmo5 free account you get the inbound gizmo5 number which you can find in your profile. You can also set gizmo5 to forward your incoming calls to skype, google talk or just about any other sip-phone or landline. So, I added my ekiga sip account in the gizmo5 setup, my gizmo5 number as a new phone at google voice, authenticated it and that seems to work pretty well. (My test call had about a 1 second lag – I’d like to test at some point and see if there’s less lag by doing gizmo5 directly… but that’s not a high priority for me right now.)

–update–

I had a chance to test out the following idea last night. Since Google Voice can forward calls to your gizmo number and since gizmo can forward all calls to either skype or another sipphone client – I decided to forward my gizmo calls to ekiga and test. I tested by “dialing out” via the Google Voice web interface where they first connect to your number (in this case ekiga) and then attempt to dial the receiving party. I tested this chain last night about 3 to 4 times and each time the call dropped mysteriously after about 30 seconds (not quite long enough to get to the voicemail beep – or if someone answered not quite long enough to explain what you’re doing.

So, today I did several tests taking one link o the chain out and went straight to my gizmo # (cut off all gizmo forwarding). This worked out fairly well and I’ve now had several successful calls this way. I don’t know if I had a call longer than 5 minutes, but I did have one that I thought was a bit longer (although I didn’t check the call timer.) It seems as though this is another angle that google voice could change things as I noticed that I was essentially using gizmo to call landlines without using gizmo credit. (Google voice calls my gizmo account, google voice calls the other person.)

–update 7-18-09 –

I’ve had a chance to make several calls now using the web interface at Google Voice. One thing that’s strange is that calls initiated this way do not make it into your placed/received/missed call log. You would think they would show up in the placed call log the same as if you dialed up your GV number and then pressed 2 and dialed someone else, but…. they simply don’t get recorded. That seems to be a strange oversight. Also, I’ve read that one of the reasons that some exchanges may not be able to call into the GV numbers is that the blocks of numbers were so recently acquired the phone systems equipment may not have been updated with the information to route calls to them. It’s the responsibility of the carrier that manages the exchange that is unable to call in to update their routing lists. This has nothing to do with it being a Google Voice number, but with it being a “brand new phone number”. Essentially these are phone numbers that didn’t exist 4 months ago.

I guess by now you’ve noticed that I’m not keeping up with the 1 post a week rate that I had for a while there. I’ve been thinking that at this point I’m going to be getting in one a month or so. More if the mood strikes, but from what I’ve been seeing that should be more than enough…. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with getting good google rankings for search phrases and thought I would take a moment to give some details…. Maybe I should back up a few steps first though for some background….

December 2005 and January of 2006 were fantastic times for this site. I was getting a great amount of traffic each day. It seemed that all I needed to do was title a post with good keywords and it would promptly show up tops in google within a day or so. February was about the time their “big daddy” upgrade went live across the entire system and the bottom fell out of my traffic. I got maybe 10% the traffic I had previously, and it seemed like I couldn’t rank well for ANY keyword, not even my name (which is in the domain name and SHOULD be EASY to rank for.)

So, I spent a lot of time reading and trying to get an idea of what I needed to do to reclaim good rankings for various search phrases. The bottom line advice that I kept running into was you need more inbound links. I read complaint after complaint of other web masters saying they had lost the majority of their traffic, in the google sitemaps group it seemed like there was a fair amount of give and take, but almost every single one (that was not doing something silly like having obvious paid gambling links at the bottom of a page or something else completely irrelevant to their site)… almost every single one was advised to go and get more backlinks for their site.

A backlink is essentially another website making a link to your content. It’s an idea that makes the world wide web what it is. It’s the concept of citing other content with a link which, if followed takes you to more information on the subject. At that time I didn’t have time to invest trying to follow the advise of more inbound links. In fact, I didn’t know exactly WHERE to start.

The last six months or so though I’ve finally started implementing that advice and have seen dramatic improvements in search rankings and traffic. Among the things I’ve learned. 1) It is possible to just ask for a link from another site owner and get it. 2) Social bookmarking site links can be effective (both for social traffic and the link value that google sees), however the link value may decline over time as the link is deeper and deeper in the social site. 3) forum signature links can work dramatically 4) directory links can be effective. 5) Links from squidoo, qassia or other article directories can be effective. 6) The most valuable links are couched in content text. 7) Most importantly, the anchor text (text that is the actual link) is VERY important.

Say for the sake of argument that you are a self storage business. There are lot’s of keywords related to self storage. There’s mini storage, storage buildings. There are locations (I understand location (read: proximity) is the primary factor in most people’s decision to choose a particular storage facility. There are also security features of storage facilities to consider, space, the size of storage spaces and the price per month of a mini storage unit, initial costs and more keywords than you can imagine. But, if you wanted to rank for self storage in Greenville, you would want a link JUST like what I’ve placed in this paragraph. You would certainly want the page to be designed to talk about the things that are important to your site, self storage units, the size of self storage units, price and location of the storage units, etc. But, if those factors alone didn’t turn up good search results, you would want to see if you could get more inbound links with those keywords in the anchor text.

Many people make the mistake of using their domain name as the anchor text. This is okay, it still passes along a certain amount of reputation from the referring site, but ultimately it’s not been “tagged” with anything important keyword wise. I think ultimately, google’s genius is that they have realized that ultimately people “tag” objects. After all, we call a car “car” only because the majority of the population agrees that’s the name for the thing…. (Think about how many refer to a copier as a xerox….) Language is about “tagging” objects, and so are text links.

I’ve certainly glossed over a lot of things here, there are “brakes” so that if a site get’s too many backlinks too quickly with a certain anchor text there’s actually a penalty that kicks in. Primarily though if you are able to get any kind of inbound links at a reasonable rate you should be fine as long as the anchor text corroborates what is on the actual page linked to. (Anchor text snowshoe for a page that talks about nuclear physics would probably trigger the anti-google bomb penalties earlier than if it were used for a page talking about winter hiking equipment.)

I’ve also glossed over the value of various types of inbound links (some are much more valuable than others even though everything I listed above can be effective.) I’ve also ignored in this discussion the possibility that there are other sites building the same kind of inbound links. If you would like to see more stories about SEO and search rankings you might be interested in stopping by the earn money blog where you’ll find more stories like that as well as talk about entrepreneurship and how to make money online.

================

Update 3/16/09

I just checked – the site that I linked to above moved from the low 40’s-mid 50’s on the 12th and as recent as the 15th to #3 for that search phrase with the link above on March 16th. The power of one inbound link! In this case, many of the competing sites did not have direct inbound links at all (much less search term optimized links.)

Update 3/31/09

The last several days the site I linked to above has been in the #1 spot for the search mentioned. One thing that’s important to note is that the context of the paragraph where the link is has a part to play as well as the link. After all, relevancy is one of the things the search engine is trying to provide and so it only makes sense that something out of context or irrelevant wouldn’t weigh as much as a link within a relevant context.

I just logged into my analytics account over at google and had a strange new view. It showed all the sites in my account with a summary of the code working, traffic up or down and percentage. It looked quite nice, so I tried changing the view so I could see all of my sites and …. it went away. I’m back to the old view. So, I started looking around and found this analytics blog post that talked about new features being rolled into the accounts. The new features include that new account management dashboard. I hope that returns soon to my account because I would LOVE to have a nice “at a glance” view of all my sites.

I figured out what I was seeing – I have two google logins, both of which have access to my analytics account. One can see the new beta features, the other can’t.

For a while with Google’s webmaster tools they’ve reported to you which url’s they get 404 errors when spidering your site. Now with the sitemaps and webmaster tools utility they’ll show you where the link was woohoo…. I’m glad to see that I’ve been running into a few 404 errors from time to time and tracking them usually involves trying to skim through referral logs and it can get a bit messy. Here’s the official announcement.

Google Search Insights – a great tool from google that can give you detailed information on what people in different areas are searching for. Find out what the popular search terms are, where they are more popular, etc.