The guys and gals over at Google are always working hard to make things better.  For a while now they have been trying to integrate local information into the Google search results.  It makes sense when you search for “new york city plumbers” or “90210 realtors”.  Those are likely to be search attempts for local providers and not someone looking for general information.  But in my humble opinion I think Google has pushed it a bit too far. 

When I searched for SES NY, I wanted to double check the dates of a search engine conference and not have Google show me businessed in NY that match the word SES.  Of course it is easier to complain and point out I things that are broken.  It is much harder to figure out a solution. 

I do not see an easy fix for this.  You can create a list of keywords that will trigger the local map and its matches to appear on the search results.  But this will surely miss good keywords and thus underserve some users who are looking for local answers.  If you keep the system as is you frustrate some users who are NOT looking for local answers.  I guess my suggestion would be to leave the system as is and overserve the local answers and collect usage data.  Once you have enough data go back and turn off the keywords where the local map and business matches had a low CTR.  That would be an efficent way to determine what are search terms that people want the local map and when they do not.

Until Google fixes this we can all have a fun time and take screen captures of funny/frustrating Google serps. Here are some of my current favorite search results with Google providing helpful local data:

• drug dealers ny
• strippers ny
• homeless ny

As I was playing around at www.MSN.com I randomly searched for ”sdsdf“.  I like to check out weird keywords like that just to see what the search engines are doing with non-competitive keywords.  Let me tell you I am glad I did that this time. 

I was surprised to see that MSN had not just one but the top two ranking results being pages that return the status code 404 error not found.  I know no one is probably ever going to search for “sdsdf” but still MSN should not have 404 error pages being included into their index.  Makes you wonder a little bit about what is going on over at MSN’s search engine.

Here are the some facts from Google’s Q2 2006 SEC Filing

Google made a significant profit (Q2 2006 $721,077,000) and 98.9% of their revenue is from online advertising.  Of all Google advertising revenue 41% (Q2 2006 $996,567,000) was generated by the Google Network web sites which are sites not owned by Google by rather third parties. 

According to the SEC filing, the traffic acquistion cost Google paid their network of sites was 78% (Q2 $785,200,000) of the advertising revenue they raised which leaves Google with $211,367,000 of revenue from their network of sites to pay operating and marketing costs. 

Which leads me to assume/guess:

20%-30% of all Google profit is from Adsense.  This assumes that Adsense makes up a majority of the Google Network web sites and that Adsense operating costs are less than 30%.

Previously people speculated that Google shared 50% of revenue to sites participating in Google Adsense.  Their traffic acquistion costs which is 78% of advertising revenue suggest that they may be paying more than 50%.  Google does have some private deals which could also explain why the traffic acquistion cost is much higher than 50%.

Assuming Adsense is the lion share of Google’s network sites and that Adsense has operating costs of 30% then if click fraud is:

Please remember I am just a simple webmaster who is not into finance or SEC filings.  These are just my personal assumptions and guesses based on what I saw in the SEC filings.  Let me know what you think.

Best of the Web (BOTW) is an often overlooked source of traffic.  BOTW only deals with legit sites, so if you are a spammer who is churning and burning, you can stop reading now.  For everyone else who is struggling to get their real sites traffic read on.

You probably have heard of them but never took the time to find what they are all about.  I guess that is partially because the BOTW crew are fun people who often buy people drinks WITHOUT forcing them to listen to a sales pitch. Not that you would remember any sales pitch after drinking all of the free booze they offer.

Sugarrae did an excellent interview with them and posted the BOTW interview on her blog.  It is a definite read and also make sure to check out Best Of The Web.  Their directory can help give a good boost to your site.  Their service does cost money but it also delivers results.

So last night I started thinking about some weird going ons at Google.  These are not widespread but they also do not appear to be rare occurrences.  First the site: searches at Google (which are supposed to only return pages from one domain) returns pages from multiple domains.

Then I notice Adsense site diagnostic report (screen capture below) is telling me that my site is not letting it crawl some pages.  Upon a closer look I notice that Adsense thinks msncache.com is part of my site.  (Sidenote msn.com robots.txt allows it to be crawled it.  Adsense crawls the msn serps to discover as many pages of your site so it can better classify it and show relevant ads.)

Don’t panic just yet.  This is not a return of the 302 hijacking issue.  This is something different.  It does not appear to be hijacking more like a simple reporting bug.   I am still trying to figure out how this reporting bug could occur.  Hopefully this is not a bigger issue of Google not being able to tell proper ownership of sites.

Thomas Bindl has found another new Google layout and blogged about it.  Basically this version replaces the indented second listing with an indented list of multiple subpages (url only, no snippets). 

I am not a fan of this as I think the snippets that go along with the urls in the serps are very useful to searchers trying to figure out if the page is what they want or not.  It sure would be nice if Google would post a a nice explanation on all of these different layouts and let us know when they have finalized these changes HINT HINT.

News anchor Stephen Colbert tackled another serious issue which he calls wikiality.  This refers to www.Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to add, delete or change its encyclopedia entries.  Wikiality is when reality is recorded by uniformed people or people seeking to purposely mislead people.

No longer do you need to be an expert or even informed to be able to contribute to this online reference that some schools and universities direct their students to.  All you need is an Internet connection and motivation to change history.  This has led to a growing amount of commercial abuse.  For example, the wikipedia entry about online poker is now heavily moderated since many poker companies tried to turn it into a free advertisement section for them. 

There was a more alarming problem with the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entry.  This entry was originally created by some people that were clearly not the best informed.  Danny Sullivan, one of the leading experts who is recognized by every major search engine tried to modify wikipedia’s SEO page.  His changes were deleted and he was warned not to abuse Wikipedia.   Eventually reason prevailed and his changes were re-instated.

All of this just shows that allowing the general public to write encyclopedia or any other reference material that people may use for educational purposes is dangerous.  You need to ensure that people can prove expertise otherwise wikiality will become reality and people will learn truthiness and not what is actually true.

In case you haven’t noticed, ThomasB blogged this weekend about Google is no longer indenting multiple site listings in the serps.  Matt Cutts then commented and confirmed it they no longer indent when the first listing has those special links.  I love when things get explained so quickly.  Nice find Thomas and thanks for the confirmation Matt. 

Regardless if you are running your own servers or if you have a hosting vendor, it matters where your hosting is physically located and where you have backup hosting.  It is generally smart to setup a small backup hosting account and get that info included in your domain records.  Here are a few reasons.

Search engines look for clues to determine which country index your site should be included.  If they see that your site is hosted in Canada they will be inclined to include it in the Canadian results.  If you want UK traffic you should go with UK hosting.

Also you should worry about backups.  In case there is a power failure you should have your backup located on another power grid.  In America there are 3 grids (Eastern, Western, Texas).  Most big hosting vendors do have generators and should not be impacted by power failures.  But stupid things have happened like a hosting vendor having a power surge which automatically switched it to the generator.  Since it was not a power failure no one realized the system was being powered by the generator.  The generator ran out of fuel and crashed everything.  In other words if you believe in backups you should make it as safe as possible.

Also by using backup hosting that is physically located far away you will not be at risk for the ever dreaded backhoe failure.  In case you don’t know what a backhoe failure is, that is when a construction worker using a big machine called a backhoe digs in the wrong spot and rips out the cables that data is transmitted on. 

Yesterday Google Sitemaps announced a big round of improvements and tweaks which were based on user input.  Congrats to the Google Sitemaps team on a job well done.  Here are the highlights.

New verification method - Google now will allow you to verify ownership of a site by adding a meta tag to your homepage.   SITE OWNERS TAKE NOTICE.  Most sites don’t need to worry.  But this could open up certain sites to be verified by non-owners.  If someone verifies they own your site they can see alot of interesting data from Google about you.  Here is an example of what to look for.  meta content=”4rfv5tgb6yhn7ujm8ikm” name=”verify”

New layout - The old design was not bad it just needed a few tweaks and that is what happened.  They have a nice cleaner layout which helps people who are in a rush and not paying attention (like me).

Spam Violation Notice - If you have verified ownership via Google Sitemaps, Google may display an alert if you violate some of their guidelines.  I expect Google to be careful revealing information hear because they don’t want spammers to use this tool to determine the spam filters.

Spam Reporting - Collaborators rejoice, you can now use Sitemaps to submit a spam report which will get more attention than the normal report.  Why?  Because you need to be logged into Sitemaps.  So if you are lying they know who you are.  If you are thinking of submitting a spam report on your competition think twice.  Does you site have any violations that need to be cleaned up?  Do you really want the Google spam police looking at your industry?  Generally I find it is better to reverse engineer what your competition is doing and just do it better than they are.

If you have any questions or comments the Google Sitemaps team is very open and very active in participating at http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps.

[tags]google sitemaps, spam report[/tags]