I had a few thoughts flowing into my mind this week  - it had a lot to do with things going on in the background of my life, and of my experiences lately with an organization I belong to.

Here’s my thought - for what it’s worth - more, so I can write it down before I completely forget it.

I’ve noticed a lot of corporate work is not really about getting anything, in particular done - actually, it’s more about justifying one’s position; positioning.

One of the things I’ve noticed about myself, I really don’t like that kind of circumstance - the one that’s all about positioning - but not about really doing anything, much.

Now, in a way, I’m thinking that Social Media doesn’t seem to be on the top of anyone’s marketing list, lately, even though there’s been some pretty good case studies that say it’s effective, if done properly.

I don’t know - we’ll know  Social Media will become important in organizations when there will be people who will justify their existance by it (ha, ha, ha - haven’t heard anyone yet, being able to do that).

I was pretty excited by Google’s Search Wiki, launched the other day, and now a Google Experiment - as it might be the way to gradually make Social Media, the Wisdom of the Crowd, Collective feedback, as something that will drive organizations to start seeing ROI here - but as a Google Experiment - I’m not sure if the Google Search Wiki will get enough content to make it all that valuable - but then again - if even 1% of all Google Searchers have the Google Search Wiki Experiment enabled, maybe that’ll be enough.

By the way -here’s the posts I’ve written lately about the Google Search Wiki - Personalization and Google Search plus I’m liking the Google Search Wiki though some others, don’t and Google Search Wiki becomes one of Google’s Experiments

The other day I wrote a post titled-

End of an Era and … The Man Who Won as Others Lost - Plus Social Media doing Good in the Recession?

In my post I mentioned that …..

“…..What if Google started laying off people? Then you’d really know it’s bad.   Well, I predict, that’s going to happen - maybe not next week - but I bet, it’s going to happen within the next year.   It makes sense, the only thing they make real money on in AdWords and AdSense -everything is advertising based.  Can you imagine if Google fired a bunch of marketing people - it’s not so far fetched.  But what does that say about the rest of the economy.   I shudder to think - I don’t think we want to know - but, unfortunately, we probably will start finding out soon.

Guess what?   We don’t have to wait that long - Google is already contemplating laying off some of it’s employees - according to Silicon Alley Insider Henry Blodget -  probably the Ad People I mentioned…… Google: Yes, If Revenue Craters, We’ll Fire People

read this analysis from Blodget::

“…. Last week, we posited that Google might eventually have to start firing people to offset slowing revenue growth, shrinking profit margins, and a weak economy. Sales chief Tim Armstrong recently suggested that the company is, in fact, prepared to do that:

[L]ast week Tim Armstrong, president-sales and commerce, Americas, told a group of travel advertisers that the company is “watching the economy closely and making sure our expenses and revenue are very much aligned.”

Tim didn’t specify firings, and, in truth, we imagine that Google’s people would be the last costs to go. Google has grown so quickly and is reportedly so undisciplined on internal cost controls that we imagine the company could find hundreds of millions to cut before it let a single Googler go.

That said, we don’t think a small headcount reduction would be such a bad move.

I know that anything can be spun an number of ways - and honestly, Henry Blodget is right - Google has so much extra money that it could get rid of a lot of the “fringe” expenses before having to lay off anyone …..

…but ….. much of what makes Google the kind of company it is …. are those fringe benefits - and the culture around them - mark my words  - it’s all about the culture …. about Google and Manifest Destiny (the same force that drove immigrants across America to travel west, dislocate the Indians, and settle the country during much of the 1800’s.

Part of the reason Google is an attractive place to work is that it seems to defy the laws of physics and make money when everyone else is losing it - that it seems to defy the odds and expand when everyone else is contracting ….. all of that because the minds of it’s engineers are superior, that it’s search engine is superior, that it has covered all the bases, even at NASA and the US Goverment.

However, what if ….. in an Obama Administration, which is looking more and more likely, Google and other search engines, but mainly Google is “Regulated”?

Well, at tonight’s BrandHacker Meetup in Manhattan (http://marketing.meetup.com/277/calendar/8539631/) Kevin M. Ryan said that

“…… it’s a certainty (inevitable) that within the next two years Google will be subject to some kind of regulation that will disrupt part of it’s business model.”

That’s right - even if the economy doesn’t take down Google a few notches - the Government, Democrat or Republican, will - people will - there’s more and more, a perception that Google needs to be regulated (much as the Wall Street needs to be regulated, much as Banks need to be regulated).

Google’s “Search Equity” is more “real”, if you think about it, than the Sub-Prime Mortgages that aren’t good enough to wrap fish in (to mark an old expression) which in turn was regulated by a “Shadow Economy” that took up credit swaps.

In a lot of ways, Google operates above the law - it makes it’s own rules and defies gravity - but not for that much longer - it’s inevitable the age of Google’s infallibility will end, probably sooner than later.

I can almost … almost see it now … the very same minds that built the Financial Algorithms (Computer Models) that ran Wall Street - many of them, are of the same elk that program Google’s Search Engine (another set of Computer Models).   Take this post by Saul Hansell in the New York Times Bits blog - How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers:

“….. The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough.

Top bankers couldn’t simply ignore the computer models, because after the last round of big financial losses, regulators now require them to monitor their risk positions. Indeed, if the models say a firm’s risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its bets or set aside more capital as a cushion in case things go wrong.

In other words, the computer is supposed to monitor the temperature of the party and drain the punch bowl as things get hot. And just as drunken revelers may want to put the thermostat in the freezer, Wall Street executives had lots of incentives to make sure their risk systems didn’t see much risk.

“There was a willful designing of the systems to measure the risks in a certain way that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks,” said Gregg Berman, the co-head of the risk-management group at RiskMetrics, a software company spun out of JP Morgan. “They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and portfolio managers would be stable.”

When the story of the Financial Meltdown becomes more and more solidified - much of the blame will fall on the “assumptions” that were overly optimistic, programmed in a way to mimic human financial behavior - but were unable to predict what happened last month - or correct for it - with an estimated 60 Trillion dollars of Reverse Credit Swaps out in the World Economy, not to mention all the Sub Prime debt that’s also bad (which it turns out is the least of the problems we have).

Now…. let’s spin this forward a little - we know a lot of people are afraid of Google, the resent Google for taking unfair advantage, for being, in a way, monopolistic, but most of all, people of jellous of Google’s success.

As the Financial Downturn continues - and people become more aware of the Financial Computer Modeling that enabled the Banks to fail - together with resentment that is already solidifying against Google …. where do you think the anger will point to …. in the future …….. who of all corporations is most like Wall Street?

Google.

In a way, if Google were even smarter than smart, they’d anticipate the upcoming changes and take themselves down a few notches - in other words, humble themselves more - open up in other ways than those they’re accustomed to.

Sure, Google has done a lot to make certain things they do more transparent - such as Google Webmaster Tools - but that’s only on Google’s own terms - they don’t actually ever want to have a conversation with anyone where they may end up being on the wrong side of it - and I suggest, they should allow themselves to be wrong more often.

And hire customer service people for Search - people you can talk to, for anything.    Look - we’re getting sick of dealing with Computer Algorithms - look what happened on Wall Street.

You know, people, as dependent as they are on Google, can easily morph a hate of willful manipulation that wiped out their savings and retirement funds - largely caused by a series of computer programs that were programmed, or over programmed - to Google, which runs on much the same kind of algorhytms for Search - both paid and organic.

Don’t think it can’t happen - people are going to be getting very emotional - in the not too distant future - there will be alot of angst to go around - some of it may end up on Google’s doorstep - and I suspect, some of it, belongs there, too (at least, that will be the perception).

Was quoted by Valeria Maltoni on How to Measure Attention recently; it’s interesting how and idea grows, takes flight, and evolves.

As I sat in at a DoubleClick vendor session today at SMX East about Spotlight tags and how they could be used to track cross channel conversons (and have been, for the last 10 years, or so) I keyed into Valeria’s response to a reader where she writes:

“…Google tracks a lot of movement online. It would be fascinating to see how and if the information converges between Analytics for blogs, DoubleClick for ads, gmail, maps, and all sorts of other products they have. I had a demo of the maps capabilities at a recent conference and was blown away at the interactivity one can build in 3D.”

Google, via DoubleClick would be able to tell that an visitor who came to a site (cars.com) and did a site search and then came back again and did another, more detailed search, for example, according to Valeria, the person would have engaged with the site:

“….if the same searcher came to Cars.com and put in the search “new sedans” then later, came back and put in the query “reviews of new silver sedans” that searcher is engaged, she is definitely paying attention with an action in mind.”

I suspect, and I may be wrong here, that DoubleClick handles what happens to a visitor till they arrive at the landing page (in this case, the site search page) and then, site analytics, such as Google Analytics, tracks past this point to the final destination pages on the site.  If so, there may be a missing link between what DoubleClick picks up and what Google Analytics sees - and if we had that gap bridged, we’d be able to do, for sure, what Valeria suggests.

Getting back to the physical representation of “attention”, there’s only on platform that actually shows it much the way I suggested, only it does it for sites, not keywords (hey, that’s an idea, maybe Compete.com should adapt the idea they apply to sites and make it work for keyword phases).

Compete.com considers the measure of attention as  “….all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site.“   But what if we changed that definition to “…all the time visitors collectively spent on a website and then determined how much time was spent on a given keyword phrase“. Then we might have something.  Unfortunately, we can’t do it via visitor yet - but Google Analytics, were it to use the DoubleClick data, depending on how the data from DoubleClick is used, could track individuals coming to my site, searching and then searching again.   I’ll do the next best thing and talk about site behavior as a whole.

So…let me try it - just playing around - my site, www.webmetricsguru.com had 5,964 visits last month (September 08) at an average visit length of 45 seconds per visit.  Taking 5964 * 45 = 268360 seconds were spent on my site, in total, by all visitors in September.

Taking the keyword “Radian6″ as my start point with 15 visits last month and an average visit length to my site of 31 seconds = 15 *31 = 465 seconds.

So, what percentage of all the time spent on my site last month was spent on the keyword “Radian6″?  (465/268360 = 0.173%)

So, if we wanted to calculate “attention” for a keyword phase (which is part of what Valeria is talking about) we’d take that same formula and apply it to that same keyword, but in August, July, June, May, and then make a chart, for example, and see if the slope of that attention is up, or not.

August = (188/92870 = 0.202%)

September = (465/268360 = 0.173%)

There wasn’t much activity in August and July and June haven’t been tracked this way, so according to this example, the attention might be going down for that term.

Also, even at this level, Google Analytics does not show you other keywords used as a result of “radian6″, though it seems that data ought to be pull able.

So… we can’t actually go all the way with this example Valeria Maltoni came up with because we’d need additional tracking.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist - says 25% of search queries a day, Google has never seen before. Avinash is on Board of Advisers of Click Equations. He had 50k visits and 9.5k keywords.

Head and Long Tail Searches but if you don’t get an enhanced listing, your not focusing on it enough.

Avinash said most people are spending money on the head of the Long Tail instead of the tail. In fact, at the tail, people haven’t been convinced yet, while those at the head, know who you are.

Avinash said hire interns and give them a few head keywords to obsess over; he goes over a few Google Analytics reports.

Interestingly, Avinash Kaushik is on the advisory board of several companies, beyond Click Equations (that’s an interesting place to be, because he has an indirect, but real stake, in what gets developed by these companies.

Attribution - (days and visits to purchase report)

Wister Walcott - Marin Software - Search Marketing Analytics

- set search strategy and design around visitor patterns. Look at volume and spending trends.

- manage campaigns

Marin application, a number of filtering options. Next comes Snippet Analysis, this is clearly something which an automated tool would do, but Marin’s Software will do the analysis across ad groups and creative.

If a lead is worth ten bucks but some keywords that do better, you can do a scatter chart and take the extra money and the competitive leads that cost more money.

Look at the elasticity of your terms (if you pay more, will you get more traffic)? If you build a chart, only take those in the same positionsfor a 1000 impressions or more.

Richard Zwicky - Enquisite
Segmentation is the key part of analytics. Everything you do with Analytics starts with research and then segmenting based on listening to your customer.

Do you want an exact match, or just contains the words, starts or ends with.

By using Geo targeting properly you can eliminate most click fraud.

note: I have to admit Richard is saying nothing new, nothing I haven’t heard today.

Discover new opportunities, audit and adjust. If you can’t glance at your analytics and know whats happening immediately, if not, you haven’t set it up right.

Need to pay attention to new key phases each month. You also need to see how your keywords perform in each session.

Then you need to audit your selections, adjust, lather, rinse and repeat.

Andrew Goodman - Traffik, Page Zero Media

Measuring Success in your Google AdWords Account. What is your approach to the world.

Quality Score of your keyword (1-10) that indicator of the effectiveness of your campaign. If quality scores start to degrade call your rep.

CPA data of Long Tail Keywords need to be studied as a unit.

I briefly met Nicolas Carr earlier this year at a Search Conference, I think, back in March, and have a copy of The Big Switch somewhere at home, but never read actually read it - who has time - I get a lot of books and find I can’t really get into that many of them - I just don’t have the bandwidth anymore - I guess I’m skimming - just like a lot of us do now - and according to Nicolas Carr, we’re starting to think like the tools we use - namely Google.

I don’t think thinking like Google is necessary a bad thing - but as this clip from the Colbert Report shows, many typically are processing information so quickly that we can only know a little about a lot of things or a lot about a few things.

It’s kind of one way, or the other - there is not that much middle ground here - because there’s so much information hitting us at any one moment - that we have had to learn to “skim” through it do decide what we want to focus on.

Does it get us to the point where we can’t focus on anything meaningful?  Is that what Google is doing to us, for example?

Or is Google and other search engines just creating for us that which we want, anyway - sorta like a cat chasing it’s tail (or is it a dog chasing it’s tail - forgotten).

I bet we can chart, and this is where the analysis comes in, the amount of information (”messages”) bombarding us over time, say in the last 30 years, against attention span, and come up with a downward slope - that’s my premise - what I’d expect to find if I did take a closer look.  Using the same “skimming” that Google now makes possible, by the way - here’s an interesting chart I came up with, or should I say, mashed up with my post here.   In other words, I gave up something, and I got something in return - the question is how you use that information, not if the trend, itself, is good or bad:

” ..By running a regression analysis across this data we can model a response curve to show how the effectiveness drops off with the increasing number of messages. It can immediately be seen that this is not a linear relationship – the effectiveness drops off quite sharply after the first few messages. Each additional message serves to negatively affect the overall delivery, with the greatest ‘damage’ occurring when there are relatively few messages to begin with.

This chart doesn’t really address the time span, but it does address attention span - we can’t take in too much information at once - and that fact has been  used, quite successfully, to blinsight us, particularly in Electoral Politics (ie: for example, John McCain’s campaign invites medical doctors in for 3 hours to examine 1000’s of papers about his medical history - that are almost impossible to process - without the ability for doctors to take any notes, or just massive barriages of information that are meant to mislead and confuse us - so we can’t actually get the nuggets of real information from the noise that bombards us).

We’ve put up filters to tune out noise, and often, good information is in with the noise, and we tune that out too, and as I’ve maintained, some campaigns exist just on that - flood us with information that gets us to the point of being stupid - so we can’t process anything new - even though we should and new to.

From the same Measurement Matters blog post - I came up with another chart that ties in the number of information, stories that media can track well:

We brought together data from more than 200 organizations to see if there was a correlation between the number of messages that were tracked and how successfully those messages were conveyed in the media. While we were expecting some kind of pattern, we were surprised about how definitive the relationship was. Organizations with six or fewer messages were more than twice as likely to see those messages delivered as those with more. For those organizations with even fewer messages (one to three) it was even more profound – message delivery was on average three times more effective than those with more.

Put it another way, the reason Republican’s have won more consistently is that their messages have tended to be fewer, more primal, more focused then Democrats (it has nothing to do with weather the messaging is correct or fair, it’s often not), that had much larger constituencies - communicating what you stand for is harder when there are a lot of voices talking -especially when there there is so much “noise” to filter out.

Even in the debate last night, McCain sought to emotionally connect and stay on just a few themes - it just so happens he’s on the wrong side of most of them - but that has not prevented candidates   from winning - especially if they can exploit the overloads of information.

However, the same trend that decreases our attention span also enables us to have a lot more information to think about, to write about, too.

I think, having so much information at our disposals, provided you have a point of view, should make it fairly easy mash up information, come up with new insights, that could not have happened, otherwise.

What I have noticed, however, is that there’s been a proliferation of information that is essentially duplicated, with little added value.

For example, if I look at information on a prescription I’m taking - or even a herbal medicine, you can often find the same thing repeated, but with almost no added information.

The News is often that way too - last night I watched the first Presidential Debate and got a headache - The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won and I feel that i could have passed on it - I already know who I’m voting for but for all the talk - little information from either candidate that was new, even on the eve of the largest financial bailout in history, the largest back failure in history, the beginning of a long recession, perhaps a depression, little information from either candidate.

And when you look online, the situation is not much better - what’s in the New York Times and Washington Post, about the same stuff, and cable / tv news is just repeating every couple minutes, the same things.

And even with all the 1000’s of cable channels which I can now choose from, on Time Warner - or for that matter, almost any cable provider - there’s often nothing to watch.

Why is that?

I think I know why; relative to consumers of information (all of us)  there are not that many people that produce it, and many of those who are, are looking at each other for information, there’s actually little original.

And here’s where Google could help, but doesn’t - this would be the positive side.  Yes, Google did try to suppress duplicate information for some time, but ….. due to the nature of using textual data and links (and some metadata) they can’t really distinguish the quality of information independant of the backlinks/reputation and text in a page/site.

In order to make Google and other search engines better, they’d need to be more “Social” and process the information from your friend and community - to resurface the information - and they’ve been working on it, Google has, I know they’re experimenting with a “Friendfeed” type of interface - that will allow for commenting on search results, will rerank search results, etc.

So I think, it’s possible that what we’re coming to is not a bad thing - we’re losing individual concentration and knowing a little about a lot of things, but not that much about much of anything - but … our “group” can, our “friends” can - and that’s what I think we’re moving into - that, to me, is the Big Switch, and technology can now enable that to happen, globally, where it could not have, in the past.

I wrote three good posts today but haven't had a chance to write anything here - so I'll talk about the Analytics Guru posts.  In

Microsoft BrowseRank favors Social Networks

I keyed into Aaron Wall today - and noticed he had a writeup on BrowseRank that tests it and finds it's better for Social Networks, and probably not that good for Google, which favors links over search behavior.

Then I read another post about

The Bloggers guide to SEO looks pretty good

..from SEObook, and decided to write about that … with the goal of not overusing these strategies - because, let's face it, if you do it too much - you'll bring down a penalty from the big G.

And then

house content is favored by the Google algorithm - further proof that Google stacks the cards in their own favor

….  talks about Google Knol and how it's ranked over duplicate content that was created somewhere else (off of Google).  I think this post is quite revealing.

It's Google, and there's trouble again, this time with "virtual tresspassing" - take a look

I like the graphic associated with the post in Google Operating System - The Unlikely Integration Between Google News and Digg - it's hard to see where Digg would be used to re-rank Google News once Google acquires Digg.

More likely, the real reason Google is buying Digg is ….to interface it with Google's organic search results - though you'd think, in true Google fashion, if they were going after Digg's success they'd just copy/clone Digg instead of buying it.

Perhaps there is a patent issue involved here - or something that limits what Google can do with it's new Search Interface - Future of Search Engine Optimization - Google’s New Search Interface.

BTW, I wrote about …some other news the other day and I'd like everyone who reads this blog to also subscribe to www.theanalyticsguru.com RSS Feed, for the reasons I outlined in that post.

To be perfectly honest, I've been pretty critical of Google in the majority of posts I've written here over the last two years - but this one post I'm going to write about today is 180 degrees different.

First of all, Google's new, "experimental" "Digg like" Search Interface is not only the future of Search, it's also a lot of fun and a 100 times more interesting, in my opinion, than anything else they've come up with in the last 4 years.  The new search interface is also a "logical" evolution of Social Media, Social Networks and Search Technology and what I've seen in the movie below is almost exactly the vision I have for the Future of Search - and it can't come fast enough because the search of today, on Google, or any other Search Engine, sucks compared to what it could and someday, will be.

TechCrunch's post by Michael Arrington Is This The Future Of Search? has the most detail, yet, of this fairly new development in Search - that has just hit the blogosphere over the last day or so.

What excites me is not, so much, the "Digg" part, which is probably going to end up being "gamed" by "Google gangs" just like "Digg Gangs" did/do now - though it's still an improvement over what we have now, and this new "Digg like voting" is much more "democratic" than Google's current Search Engine which gives all the power of ranking and determining what gets into the search results to the computer engineers and scientists who program the search engine.

What excites me is the "FriendFeed/Twitter" part of this new Search Interface and ranking system, which allows the wisdom of Searchers to mix in, rate, and comment on the Search Results - this is truly the future of search - and it allows the users the control and transparency that Google and the other Search Engines have deliberately withheld. 

But now, all the Search Results, in all the Search Engines, are so lousy, overall, that even Google, spending all it's time now patching up it's failed Pagerank system, it's failed back link, it's failed spam filtering, and everything else that has evolved, finally, is ready, to share control of the search results with the users of it's search engine.

We're not talking about some dials - the stuff they gave us a few years ago (both Google and Yahoo had versions of this feature), we're talking about Personalized and Social Search merged in one interface that will allow anyone to see comments on the Search Results (and I guess, Google will study those comments and re-rank the results - using their "semantic" technology - perhaps the right place for automation, at this point - since there's going to be so much commentary on the search results, no army of humans could possibly  read it all in time to act on it - before a ton more comments are made.

In my follow up post on The Analytics Guru -

Future of Search Engine Optimization - Google’s New Search Interface

I'll envision the future of Search Engine Optimization once the new Search Interface is fully rolled out, probably anytime between the 18 months from now, and five years (it'll depend on how "aggressive" Google wants to be here - setting this new interface as a Google Experiment is OK for now, but to get the full interaction, at some point, they will need to take the plunge and make this new innovation, the default interface for Google Search - the sooner the better, in my book).

Read an interesting post on Smackdown about Why The Google Keyword Tool Is Useless For SEO, Even With Exact Numbers :

'"..if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time. At worst I will be seriously wasting my time. By analyzing the referrers on the clicks generated during this test we can easily see why this is so."

Recently, I wrote the current crop of Keyword Tools are almost useless for Social Network, user conversations, viral marketing - because they don't really target conversations, or what's really hot.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Roundtable is of the opinion The Google Keyword Tool is Useless for SEO, and Here's Why

Michael VanDeMar wrote an interesting post on his blog about the uselessness of the Google Keyword tool for SEO. He explains that while we reported that the tool is showing keyword numbers, it still isn't helpful. His rationale is that the numbers refer to PPC search behavior only, not overall Google.com search behavior, and then he explains how past research has given him this perception. He writes:

For instance, for [birthday poems] the tool gave a number of 27,100 (which would be an average of 903 searches per day) and bidding on that keyword for 3 days gave me 2,411 impressions (or 803 impressions per day). This is fine and dandy if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time.

I've noticed that a keyword's demand and/or position in Search Results, esp on Google, rarely generated anywhere near the traffic I expected.   On the other hand, when I happened to write about something interesting and provocative, and it was a subject in the news anyway - I recently got several hundred visits to my Webmetricsguru.com blog an hour.

That doesn't happen any more though - Google took care of that …. they don't like anyone getting too much traffic - in this case, they penalized the entire Know More Media network - but it was never explained, officially, why (there were "unofficial explanations, though).

But at any rate, the idea of publishing actual keyword search numbers in the External AdWords Keyword tool is not about accuracy - it's about convincing people to run advertising.

I've been thinking about a presentation I'd like to do at Search Engine Strategies someday - not this time, in San Jose, but maybe the next time I get to speak, about all the things in "border-color: initial; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: transparent; font-family: serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; position: static; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-transform: none; color: green; text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; background-position: 0% 0%; border-width: 0pt; border-style: none; padding: 0pt; margin: 0pt" id="gtbmisp_83">algorytms Search that don't work - stuff the search engines do try to get better results often backfire.

I wrote a post about that last week - Reputation and what we associate with it where I examined how Google's way of evaluating TrustRank, based partially on who a site links to, was wrong.

But… I didn't explain my point as fully as I'd have liked to.  What I meant to add, was - much of the way we deal with bits of data is based on the way we deal with objects in a 3D World - based on direction (closeness/distance/proximity), direction, size, and so on - yet data that is used to evaluate ranking is really of entirely different dimensions and qualities - using algorithms based on our physical reality often give results that are garbage (I guess I do have a can of garbage next to food - see the photo below)

To me, the computer scientists who work at Search Engines, I believe, are using methods to sort and qualify data based on concepts honed in the physical world we all live in- but the analogies don't work that well - putting my food next to a garbage can surely makes me not want to eat it anymore - but it doesn't make the food bad - but according to Google, linking out to sites it thinks are "bad" makes yours more likely to also be "bad" and you may find your ranking much lower in Search results because of this.

The point of this post is that tools Google gives us and tools they use to decide the quality of your content - are based on what they believe, what easiest for Google to handle - it's not necessary created to make your life easier - even if it appeared to be done for that reason - like the AdWords External Keyword Tool - which gives you data that isn't really useful for Search Optimization - not the way you think it would be.

And maybe, that's the way Google wants it.