All About Content

KinderStart, the company that sued Google for deindexing its website and is trying to get others to join it in a class action, is getting its day in court.

In advance of the hearing scheduled for June 30, KinderStart put out this very funny press release:

At 9:00 a.m. on Friday, June 30, 2006 in United States Federal Court, 280 S. First Street, Courtroom #3, San Jose, California, a drama will play out between KinderStart.com (a site for kids zero to seven and their parents) and the giant of the Internet, Google, controlling up to 80% or more of ‘Net searches worldwide.

The hearing is open to members of the press and the public. Cameras are not permitted in the courtroom.

If the Federal judge rules in favor of KinderStart on any of the nine counts, sunlight will finally begin to lift the dark and secret shroud that covers the Googleplex.

Google’s co-founder Larry Page declared that a search engine should be “like the mind of God.”

“It’s clear Google is acting like god as they determine what we mortals shalt and shalt not see,” stated Victor Goodman, Founder of KinderStart.com.

Goodman continues, “Is this company that censors speech and ideas in China now doing it in the USA? Google decides what news we get, what sites come up, and what sites disappear—in effect, what we buy and think. This case is about far more than Kinderstart; it is about our freedom to know, speak and choose without a self-appointed Gatekeeper.”

KinderStart.com is the lead plaintiff in a class action filed in Federal court on March 17, 2006.

Oh, how ridiculous is this, let me count the ways. Let’s just overlook the hyperbole and melodrama of the copywriting, and skip right over to:

1. Google is not the Internet, it is a company with a proprietary product. It owns the product and the intellectual property of that product. Although it is available for free (if you don’t count having to look at ads), it is not a public good.
2. There is no such thing as an inalienable right to be indexed. Do alcohol and tabacco companies sue Target because Target “acts like a god” by choosing not to stock those products?
3. “Censorship” is when the government interferes with freedom of expression in the public sphere. Otherwise it’s called editorial discretion. The Chinese censorship issue is not only a red herring, but also a false analogy.
4. And, anyway, what are they trying to accomplish here? On the off chance that they win the class action and Google is forced to reinclude all the de-indexed sites, it will open the floodgates to so much spam that it can’t possibly benefit any legitimate sites.

For background:

• http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1736677,00.html?gusrc=rss
• http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=10593
• http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060322KinderStartAndGoogleDifferOnOpinion.html

Nielsen/NetRatings just released its May marketshare figures for the search market. According to Nielsen, Google pulled in just a little over 49% of last month’s searches (down from 49.8% the previous month), or roughly 2.8 billion queries. Yahoo followed with a 22.9% share and 1.3 billion searches. MSN Search, with 600 million searches, lagged in third place with 10.6%.

Total number of searches, however, was up dramatically for all of the top search engines. Yahoo, for example, handled 34% more queries than it did 12 months ago and says the battle for search industry dominance is just getting started. “We’re three steps into a marathon,” according to Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz, the company’s vice president of product strategy.

MSN is second-best, even in its own eyes, according to a hilarious post by Philipp Klöckner, in which he sets out to prove, successfully, that MSN Search results are so easily manipulated that anyone can outrank the MSN site search.msn.de on a search for the term search.msn.de.

Source: Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped

There are now more web documents online than there are people on the planet.

Americans keep their computers on 9.2 hours a day, TVs on 8.9 hours a day, says the Harrison Group says. (I, of course, keep my computer on 24 hours a day — but that doesn’t mean I’m actually on it that much. Usually when my TV is on, I’m actually watching it.)

Rosner Research says that 30% of 18-24-year-olds worry about getting harassed or stalked online. Meanwhile, 78% of young people have a personal web site or blog. (And 85% of people 25 and older are sad to learn that they are no longer considered “young people.”)

HitWise said recently that Google sends about 1% of its traffic to eBay. In turn, 2.7% of Google’s traffic originated on eBay.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising on newspaper web sites rose nearly 35% in Q1 2006 from Q1 2005, while print ad revenue rose 0.3%.

Bill Tancer of HitWise postulated that general keyword searches in the main index make up about 80% of all Google traffic, followed by image search at just under 10%.

Some other interesting stats on ZDNet’s IT Facts blog.

Oh my. Apparently the entertainment industry has embedded bloggers now. Let’s just hope these embedded bloggers don’t give away any information that could harm this country’s most important economic product, lest we play right into the hands of those anti-U.S.-cultural-domination zealots. Now if I could only make myself care.

According to consulting firm McKinsey, about two-thirds of all economic activity in the United States is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service. And on the Internet those shared opinions are reaching more eyes and ears than ever before.

“More than 90% of large companies believe that consumer recommendations are important in influencing other consumers’ purchase decisions,” said Emily Riley, a JupiterResearch analyst. “Yet many large companies are not focusing efforts on managing the conversation among consumers.” Of small companies, 66% monitor word-of-mouth (WoM) on a regular basis, with large companies only doing so 33% of the time.

Jupiter says large companies, if they are following word-of-mouth, “are more likely to assign WoM management to PR and marketing groups or third-party agencies, a practice that largely insulates employees from the affects, both positive and negative, of the feedback and means missing key opportunities.”

Obviously monitoring word-of-mouth alone isn’t going to be very effective in the long run. Instead, companies need to actually be able to shape and influence those discussions.

A conference starting tomorrow — Word of Mouth Basic Training (WOMBAT) organized by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) — addresses this topic in more depth.

Which brings me to a subject I want to blog about in the future: Astroturfing.

For every evolution of the Internet, new types of spam are born. Wikipedia even has a whole article series about different kinds of spam. If you aren’t familiar with tagging and the ways it can be abused, learn a little about tag spam here and see a somewhat amusing example here.

I’m seeing more Google weirdness: the other day, I was doing a vanity search on Google the other day and noticed that there were three results from this blog on the first page.

This is unusual because Google will ordinarily only display 2 results from the same domain on a single search results page, and group them together. It will display the higher ranking page according to where it fits algorithmically and display the next ranked page from that site indented underneath the first.

So if you have pages that independently would rank #1 and #7, Google will display them as #1 and an indented #2. If you have pages that alone would rank #2, #3 and #10, Google’s search engine results page will only display #2 and #3 (indented), giving the #10 spot to the next result that is not on your domain.

For searchers this is useful because you don’t need to skim hundreds of listings from the same site. It’s significant for SEO because it means you will always need multiple domains if you’re tracking to dominate the entire first page of results for a given search — any one domain will yield at most 2 positions.

(Each results page does this independently, so if you have spots #10, #11 and #12, you’ll still see your best listing in the #10 spot, with #11 at the top of the second page and #12 indented below, leaving opportunities to gain more spots on subsequent pages — assuming a standard results display setting of 10 results per page. If the user has Google set to display 100 results, however, then you’re limited to a total of 2 spots in the top 100 positions.)

I’ve seen multiple indented listings from the supplemental index, but never the main search results. If, however, this wasn’t just some flukey thing and Google is thinking of displaying more than two sites per domain per results page, that could impact an SEO strategy that relies on multiple pages from multiple sites being optimized for the same keyword. Even if the new limit were 3 instead of 2, that means in theory you could dominate the entire first page using only 4 domains instead of the 5 separate domains currently needed. You would still need to optimize 10 pages total, but 10 pages on 4 domains might be easier to optimize than 10 pages from 5 domains. Might be. Might not. Either way, that would be an impressive feat.

Hitwise released search engine marketshare figures for the month of May: Google reeled in 59.3% of all searchers for the four-week period. Yahoo took 22% of search queries, while 12.1% of searches were conducted using MSN Search. These numbers refer to U.S. search activity.

Let’s catch up on news from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to their latest studies, home broadband adoption has become mainstream:

• Internet penetration has now reached 73% for all American adults. At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, 40% increase over last year.
• About 60 million Americans say that the Internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years (what votes to cast for American Idol, for example)¹
• By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002 (which is also the year American Idol premiered). For a group of “high-powered” online users — early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest Internet users — the Internet is their primary news source on the average day.
• And 48 million Americans — mostly those with high-speed at home — have posted content to the Internet.
• Overall, 35% of all Internet users have posted one or more of four types of content to the Internet: having one’s own blog; having one’s own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.²
• An even higher percentage of home broadband users — 42% or about 31 million people — have posted content to the Internet. They account for 73% of home Internet users who were the source of online content.
• Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content. Overall, 36 million Internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of Internet users. Home broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.

fn1. When I first published this post, I had accidentally deleted this bullet point — which made the paranthetical in the third bullet very strange indeed. Now that I’ve added it back in, it should all make sense again. Relatively.

fn2. And let’s not forget profiles on online dating sites. According to Pew: “Some 11% of all Internet users and 37% of those who are single and looking say they have gone to dating websites.”