All About Content

Ask Jeeves is going to increase its staff by about 20%, Ask Jeeves head Steve Berkowitz says. According to TheStreet.com:

The search company has a storied history, of sorts. Ask Jeeves (NASDAQ: ASKJ) shares quadrupled on their first day of trading in 1999, only to crash when the Internet bubble burst. Now the company, which became part of New York-based IAC in a $1.9 billion deal completed in July, is expanding both its operations center and its corporate headquarters staff.

AskJeeves.com is growing market share at a better rate, 77%, then the other engines. Still, it lags Google, Yahoo and MSN Search by a wide margin having at this point less than 3% of the search market. So the 9-year-old site needs to differentiate itself from its competitors, with or without its butler mascot Jeeves. That’s what Berkowitz hopes to do by adding, among other things, suggestions for searchers on how to refine their queries. That’s something Yahoo already does but Ask Jeeves users tend to search very differently - with Ask’s users tending toward natural language queries phrased as complete sentences or questions.

p.s. Ask Jeeves is rumored to be expanding into Germany.

The story broke earlier this month that Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny sells links on his personal blog without using nofollow attributes. Matt Cutts of Google, on the other hand, has for month been championing nofollow tags on all paid links.

The story that’s playing out is that Zawodny was “caught” doing this, as if underhandedly, with bad intentions, polluting the sacred ground that is the World Wide Web. But it’s not like he pulled a Wordpress stunt by hiding the ads.

At issue, to simplify it for those of you who don’t know, is that the current generation of search engines, starting with the invention of Google, count links to a site as “votes” of sorts in their algorithm and that paid links are basically fake votes. A while back, at the urging of the industry, the engines said they’d obey a “nofollow” tag, which webmasters can apply to an entire page or just one link at a time. Those links would then not be weighted in the PageRank (or equivalent) calculaton. Hence the call to put nofollow tags on “unnatural” links.

Just to be contrarian and for the sake of debate: I find it strange that Google’s algorithm is now dictating how the Web should be structured. Paid ad links existed long before any algorithms were created that factored them in.

I guess I just don’t see how it’s my responsibility to keep search engine results relevant (by their definition) by catering to their algorithms - that’s their job. If they think advertising shouldn’t count as part of their equations - well bully for them. Advertising goes way back - it’s part of how commerce work. And the Internet, like nearly everything else, is governed by economics. If the engines don’t like paid links, they should, can, and for the most part have, figured out ways to discount those links.

Basically what we have is a great example of the tragedy of the commons. And I’m just not inclined to blame the individual herder for adding more cattle to the field as long as there aren’t any rules against it. And for now at least, there aren’t. As easy as it is to forget these days: Google is not the Web.

Get background on this nofollow debate. Check it out, even if only for the Link Condom parody site.

Top news, of course, is that Google paid $1 billion to acquire a 5% stake in AOL, beating out the other competitor for AOL’s affections - MSN. Other interesting things going on this week:

• Does Google deal set AOL up for IPO?
• Google teaches AOL how to SEO
• Brief History of Sponsored Search
• Yahoo PPC Ads Being Truncated
• Paid search as information-seeking paradigm
• Yahoo tying RSS into its social media services
• New look for Yahoo SERPs
• Google testing Firefox extension that displays outside blogger comments
• Eight predictions for tech, including why Yahoo’s expansion of search will hurt Google
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Google, ads and technology
• Interview with Andrew Goodman, author of 2 books on Google AdWords
• More AdWords goodness from SiteMaps
• Yahoo shortcuts for even faster searching
• Typo-squatters making money from Google

In addition to these worthwhile SEO-related stories, also check out “What I’m Reading” in the left nav of the homepage. Those are recently surfed links to things that I thought were interesting. The list is powered by a super-duper, extra-secret app being developed by a very smart friend of mine.

I reported earlier that Gates prophesized search engines will be paying Web surfers to use their services at some point. He’s said it again, and people are reading between the lines to conclude that he’s hinting MSN Search will do this soon.

WebProNews says another spokesperson, however, said Microsoft had no immediate plans to start paying users. And consulting company Ovum reminds us:

Payment for viewing ads is a tactic that has been tried before, and is fundamentally flawed. There were in the tech boom a number of attempts to make this model work, including in the US offers of low or no cost PCs for users prepared to view lots of ads and/or click though on them. The fundamental flaw is that the advertisers want people who have money to spend on their goods and services. This generally excludes people who are prepared to spend hours on their computer viewing ads and following clicking-throughs.

Gates said in an earlier interview that MSN makes about $50 per user. How much would MSN be willing to pay out for customer acquisition? How much would a search engine need to pay you to switch?

A bunch of search engines have released their annual lists of top search terms in 2005. Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews bemoans what they say about the collective mind of the searching public:

So I’m an Aristotelian pretentious egghead iconoclast jerk. Sue me. But at the end of every year when various media rehash what was on the collective mind of my compatriots, I tarry near weeping - okay, so that’s dramatic, but have you seen what the kids are searching for on the Internet these days?.

But he declines to wax philosophical and just leaves it at this “rough translation” of a saying he attributes to Aristotle: “the massess are asses”!

The top 10 from meta-search engine Dogpile:
1. Music Lyrics
2. Paris Hilton
3. Google
4. eBay
5. Yahoo
6. Mapquest
7. Games Cheat
8. Games
9. Dogs
10. Top 100 Baby Names

Top 10 searches inYahoo:
1. Britney Spears
2. 50 Cent
3. Cartoon Network
4. Mariah Carey
5. Green Day
6. Jessica Simpson
7. Paris Hilton
8. Eminem
9. Ciara
10. Lindsay Lohan

Most popular queries according to AOL:
1. Lottery
2. Horoscopes
3. Tattoos
4. Lyrics
5. Ringtones
6. IRS
7. Jokes
8. American Idol
9. Hairstyles
10. NASCAR

Top searches by Lycos users:
1. Paris Hilton
2. Pamela Anderson
3. Britney Spears
4. Poker
5. Dragonball
6. Jennifer Lopez
7. WWE
8. Pokemon
9. Playstation
10. Hurricane Katrina

Google is notorious for not wanting to share specific data, so there doesn’t appear to be a 2005’s Top Searches list; but you can get a sense of what’s hot (besides Paris Hilton) from its Zeitgeist list, which tracks weekly and monthly trends.

Ask Jeeves does something similar with top gaining queries. A9 goes with the “that’s random” route and lists the top 99 searches that contained exactly 9 letters. And MSN Search publishes its list of current 200 top search terms, although in random order.

Update Dec. 20:
Google’s Zeitgeist for the year was just released.

Google Analytics, used for tracking site traffic data, earlier this week allowed me to add new websites to one of my accounts. It did not give me this option for another Analytics account I have, and signups by new users are still suspended.

Google Analytics stopped accepting new accounts almost immediately after making its service free in mid-November. The system was overwhelmed with so much demand that it stopped functioning for its existing (paying) users.

Google has added music search feature than can be accessed via its regular search interface. The search engine is now supposed to be better at telling the difference between music-related searches and regular searches that just happen to contain words also found in lyrics.

“You might be thinking, ‘Why can’t I just type in an album name or a song name and get the same music search results?’” wrote David Alpert, search quality product manager at Google, in a blog posting.

“There are many album names and songs which are also plain English words,” he added. “Sometimes users are looking for music information related to those words, and sometimes they aren’t.”

Supposedly, the “the results are displayed with a musical note next to them” and “will provide more information about artists, album cover art, reviews, and links to stores where users can download a track or buy a CD, according to a Red Herring article.

When I tried right now, it only worked when I was looking up popular artists, not song lyrics or title or smaller bands. Instead of a musical note (did they mean note as in symbol used for musical notation?), I see a thumbnail of cover art, with some info and a link to take you to specialized search results; it is not very clear that the first link takes you to another set of search results and not a page, but the music SERPs look good. Uncluttered, sortable by release date and popularity, album details and, in a separate column, links to the artists’ official sites.

Once you’re on one of those music SERPs you can restrict your search to just a music, but there is no intuitive way to do that from the regular interface, like you can with images and news (toggle using the links above the search box) or Book Search (currently there’s a link at the bottom of every regular search results page). The pages on which you can restrict your search to just music aren’t branded with a Google Music beta logo, so it doesn’t look like it’s a full blown specialized search function. But you can backward engineer the URL — http://www.google.com/musicsearch — and bookmark it.

But for my money, Yahoo is ahead of the game on this one with its Yahoo Audio Search (use the link above the search box), which lets you search for music or podcasts, and provides links to samples, single-song downloads and a bunch more useful info.

Let’s address one of my biggest pet peeves on the Web and anywhere - awful and pointless writing. When they say “content is king” they don’t mean slap a crown on a troll and call it Your Majesty. (And when they proclaim that the king is dead, ignore them. They know not of which they speak.)

It’s time to break out an oldie but goody. This article from 2002 would be a clich&eacute if it weren’t still so damn necessary. 10 Tips on Writing for the Living Web highlights qualities that will make or break a personal blog.

My favorite tips are:

• Write for a reason - If you don’t really care, don’t write, because we won’t either.
• Write tight - Omit unnecessary words.
• Let the story unfold - See yourself as a storyteller, create a narrative arc.
• Stand up, speak out - If you know your facts and have done your homework, you have a right to your opinion. State it clearly. Never waffle, whine, or weasel.
• Be sexy - Sex is interesting.
• Relax! - Don’t take yourself too seriously.

This comes from A List Apart - a site “for people who make websites” - which has an archive of all sorts of things that’ll make your site better. I also like the more recent article Attack of the Zombie Copy, which not only pokes fun at corporate speak but actually helps you identify and fix it. And How to Write a Better Weblog, from which I pull this quote:

Great writing can’t be taught, but atrocious writing is entirely preventable.

There are, in fact, rules—even online. Rules are not restrictions. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, rhythm, focus, syntax, and structure aren’t especially romantic terms, until you get to know them. Writers want to make sense. They want to move the reader. It ain’t never gonna happen if you got busted paragraphs, mistaken punctuation and, bad rhythm, not to mention kreative spelling: see? Clarity is key. Learn the rules. Break ’em later.

The best rules can’t be stated, but you can learn them by reading excellent writing. Develop an ear. If you know what works, you’ll start to emulate it. Conversely, it’s good to study truly horrendous language, stuff that makes you embarrassed for those responsible. You’ll find yourself mortally afraid of—and automatically avoiding—the same mistakes in your own writing. Hemingway said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built–in shock–proof shit-detector.” (They’re cheap if you haven’t already got one.) This is especially important for web writers, most of whom are publishing without the benefit of editors.

It’s snowing in Washington, DC, but on Yahoo the SERPs are doing a little dance. It is reported that Tim Mayer (author of the Yahoo Search Blog) confirmed an algo update last night. Take a deep breath, don’t panic… and wait here while I go check my rankings!

Darren Rowse, the man behind ProBlogger.net, has 11 tips for getting visitors to stick around your blog a little longer. I recommend starting with #11.