Sugarrae has a great post on how Google's policing of the web and pushing nofollow are undermining the social network and links that their relevancy algorithms are based upon. Worth reading from start to finish twice, then blogging about it. I would quote it, but a quote wouldn't do it justice.

The core issue is that Google places too much weight on domain authority and PageRank. Is The Wall Street Journal easy to trust? Sure...if they print garbage investors will stop buying their magazine. But even they publish garbage sometimes. Maybe Google could find a way to tune down domain trust and place more weight on other factors.

If Google decides that large networks should be trusted but that individuals should not be trusted much they are doing a bad job of encouraging web innovation. You only have to look at the entire history of mankind to realize that most innovation comes from individuals and small groups...not the large existing ones.

With as strong as Google is integrated into the web, if they are ever to fail their failure is more likely going to be due to an internal misperception than an external force. Great ideas are ignored, then shunned, then proven, then accepted. If Google doesn't make things accessible until step 3 or 4 they leave a big hole for competition in the search marketplace.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different. — John Dewey

Google recently added search volume estimates to their keyword tool. They also recently launched Google Trends, Google Hot Trends, Google Trends for Websites, and the Google Ad Planner. And now Google hits the competitive research market with yet another product - Google Insights for Search

Insights for Search shows the following search data

• relative keyword search trends for keywords (and A/B comparisons between keywords)
• top related keywords and hottest rising related keywords
• category based top keywords and category based hottest rising searches (and overall top 10 rising searches)
• category based keyword search volume trends, and the relative growth of a keyword compared to its category
• countries, states, and cities where a keyword query is popular
• you can also mash up many data points, like celebrity searches in New York in the last 30 days

Keywords are weighted such that their top volume day is anchored at 100, and other days are represented as a relative percentage of that search volume.

Just like their Google Trends tool, by default Google Insights for Search defaults to the broad matched version of a keyword, so a word like credit will show more volume than credit cards, even though credit cards gets more search volume (because terms like credit cards and credit reports count as search volume for the word credit). Credit vs credit cards pictured below:

This type of tool can also be used to see how related some generic concepts are to more specific related concepts, and how much news coverage and marketplace changes move the relative importance of different keywords in a marketplace. Public relations experts will be able to use graphs like the following to say "hey our brand is catching up with the market leader."

Rather than brand lift and PR lift being an abstract concept, we can compare brands in real time and see which markets resonate with our brands and marketing. When marketing is working *really* well you can consider boosting early success in the most receptive markets via offline advertising, social interaction, and live events. If I wanted to hold an offline seminar guess what state is most receptive to my brand? The one I live in. That's pretty cool. :)

And the problem with such tools? It is easy for me to lose days or weeks playing with them. What are your favorite search data tools? What creative ways do you use them?

Knol Off to a Quick Start

One day after Knol publicly launched Wil Reynolds noticed that a Knol page was already ranking. Danny Sullivan did a further test showing that 33% of his test set of Knol pages were ranking in the first page of search results. Danny was also surprised that his Knol was ranking #28 after 1 day. After citing it on his blog now that Knol page ranks #1 in Google!

Google's House Advantage

From the above data (and the aggressive promotion of YouTube content after the roll out of universal search) it is fair to state that house content is favored by the Google algorithm.

Another Knol Test

Maybe we are being a bit biased and/or are rushing to judgement? Maybe a more scientific effort would compare how Knol content ranks to other content when it is essentially duplicate content? I did not want to mention that I was testing that when I created my SEO Basics Knol, but the content was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com). Even Google shows this directly on the Knol page

Google Knows its Duplicate Content

Is Google the Most Authoritative Publisher?

Given that Google knows that Business.com is a many year old high authority directory and that the Business.com page with my content on it is a PageRank 5, which does Google prefer to rank? Searching for a string of text on the page I found that the Knol page ranks in the search results.

If I override some of Google's duplicate content filters (by adding &filter=0 to the search string) then I see that 2 copies of the Knol page outrank the Business.com page that was filtered out earlier.

Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm. Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source.

Hijacking Your Rankings via Knol - Google Knoljacking

Where this becomes a big issue is if a person...

• posts your content to Knol
• and buys/rents/begs/steals/spams/borrows a couple decent inbound links

they can get you filtered out of the search results - even if your site is an authority site. Bad news for anyone publishing copyright work online.

Google Knol Undermines the Creative Commons Spirit

Some new publishers decide to license their work via Creative Commons (hoping to be paid back based on the links economy), but Google wants no part in that! All outbound links on Knol are nofollow, so even if a person wants to give you credit for your work Google makes it impossible to do so.

Google Voids YOUR Copyright

Why do I get enraged by this sort of activity? I remember when one of my sites was voted against, and Google paid someone to steal it and wrap it in AdSense. The person who stole my content outranked me for my own content because a Google engineer thought that was reasonable and fair.

To this day someone publishes seobookopen.blogspot.com, a site dedicated to stealing and sharing an old version of my ebook. As the opening post on that blog explains

www.seobook.com very famous book from Aaron Wall its really good but paying $79 its really sucks so yesterday, I think why not to share this book to my friends etc openly in text by decompling Acrobat files

Can a casual mention get it removed? Nope. Can flagging it as spam and highlighting that it is stolen copyright content get it removed? Nope. I need to file a DMCA request to get it removed. (Or maybe they will remove it out of embarrassment after I hit publish on this post...we shall see!)

Google Pays Thieves

Google doesn't like lonely cheating housewives, unless it favors their business objectives.

Apparently Google is now pretty good at crawling flash.

Google launched a new version of Google Trends which includes website traffic estimates, and highlights....

• visitor locations
• top keywords
• related sites

You need to be logged into a Google account to get a numerical scale on the traffic graph, but you can still get the general trend graphs and other data without logging in. Google also allows you to compare up to 5 sites at any given time

Search Engine Land reported that Google Trends...

This tool bases its data off Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Those who wondered why using Google Analytics is a bad idea just got a taste of why it is a bad idea! Sure the data is only aggregated anonymously, but with Google owning 70% of the search market and having access to your analytics data you never know how deep they could decide to go through the data for competitive purposes. Is your site a keyword source for AdWords? How much of your data will appear on Google Trends?

You can't export the data yet and it only shows data for high traffic sites, but it is a great free tool for marketers.

• If sites do not show any data then they are probably either low traffic sites or penalized.
• The related sites feature lets you know how related your audience is to other sites, which is useful for determining how familiar their audience is or if you are reaching a new audience when buying ads.
• The top keywords shows you what competing sites are getting traffic from, and if those terms tend to be more brand oriented or more generic in nature...which is useful when thinking about the stability of a website you may want to purchase.

Fred Wilson did a review of Google Trends, comparing Google Analytics to Compete.com and comScore across 3 high traffic websites.

Since we are investors in these three companies and know what their internal numbers are saying, I can safely say that ComScore and Compete are lower but directionally correct. Google is like Alexa in that they don't report absolute numbers but even if they did, they are not directionally correct on this particular set of companies.

The fact that Google is even compared to the analytics firms with years of experience and algorithmic tuning shows how easily they could take a leading position in this market if they wanted it. Google will improve their accuracy, and at any point in time they could chose to expand the top 10 keywords to the top 100 or top 1,000.

The AP threatened to sue a blogger for quoting small passages, and at the same time the mainstream media is trying to redefine copyright for their own benefit. Eventually much of the mainstream media will start looking like eHow and Mahalo. Your content compiled and slightly rewritten by a third party. Your keyword list is their money list. Thousands of people are competing against you while you read this sentence. As your data leaks it is going to be tough to stay competitive unless you are often the topic of conversation. Public Relations is the only PR that matters.

I am probably a bit less pessimistic than Michael is at the moment, but firms are using G.P.S. data to create "reality mining" for offline analytics, predicting everything from traffic patterns, where to buy an ad, and where to place another store. A recent NYT article highlighted some such services:

Tony Jebara, also 34, the chief scientist and another co-founder of Sense, said, “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”

The idea of staying competitive through obscurity is obsolete. So you may as well be a loud mouth, encourage users to be loud mouths, and build a big brand that helps protect your plot from competitive market forces.