Not something Google has mentioned (at least that I know of), but Robert Clough took a screenshot of AdSense ads on Search Engine Guide, which looks like there is an eBay favicon next to the eBay listing.

Luckily I already created an annoyingly bright favicon file which is ready and waiting to be used :)

Graphic text ads. hmm. To me it seems like it would make sense for Google to make ads on other sites look different than ads on Google to keep people clicking away at the Google.com ads for as long as they possibly can.

The more graphical Google makes ads on other sites the longer it will be before people become blind to text ads.

Google Hijacked in Google:
Official Google AdSense site bit by a meta refresh. hmm. Low quality site? more at ThreadWatch

For those who spin all the ethics stuff, do you think Google knew of the problem and was lying when they said it was no big deal? If so, is it ethical for them to tell blatent lies? If not, how is it that SEOs know more about their search engine than they do and they generally disocunt the whole concept of SEO?

Yahoo! Q Challenge:
whats up with a $5,000 prize - that surely is not much payout for the value they could create with that contest. I might need to create a similar marketing program for myself. hehehe

Exalead:
Michael Nguyen posts about some of their search features.

Novice Spam Tool:
I have not tried it, but someone promoted this site http://searchpr.info/test.php, via forum spam of course.

Yahoo! Public Site Match:
Nothing more than a PR stunt? It sure smells the part. A while ago they promoted that program a good bit, but it sure is hard to find information about it nowadays.

Masochistic Behavior:
reading IHY forums. I don't know anywhere else where a single comment can return pages about what a horrible person you are. SEO is doomed. We are all evil. hehehe

Lots of good ones in that rant thread, but one of my all time favorite Doug quote:

Most journalists I know of at least fall on one side or the other.

Another scary thing with that thread is I find myself agreeing with Glengara!

Open Source Rank Checker:
I have not tried it, but a friend pointed me to this software. I am not sure how it plays with Google, since they have been blocking some automated software.

OPD Should Close Shop?
Danny Sullivan weighs in on the ODP's recent site submission status closure.

Black Market Porn:
UK bans selling porn DVDs over the web. UK prostitution market to soar ;)

Funny:
There is a website that qualifies you and prints out your ordained ministor certification in under a minute. A person today tried to justify me giving away my business model to them because they spent the minute to print one out.

Evolution of Yahoo! Search:
article about Yahoo! creating their search service. thnx to RC

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about smaller upstarts and the web challenging the business models of of big time academic publishers. It will be interesting to see how far advertising can take search companies before publishers get squeezed to the point where they revolt or make demands that spread to a critical mass.

In other, somewhat related news, Bill Moyers addressed the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis about a week ago.

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "Now" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

he continues...

These "rules of the game" permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading. ... Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

Later he comments on the Journal:

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million.

In other related news, Friday Ask Jeeves announced they bought out Excite Europe.

Any way you slice it, there are going to be a few gatekeepers to this thing we call the web, and to most media outlets in general. The more there are the better it is for consumers, and for that reason I might start trying a bit harder to use Google and Yahoo! a bit less.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out, but anyone who knows about SEO should see it as a personal responsibility to make sure people find what issues you feel are important.

Earlier today a friend of mine told me of a site he was creating about an ongoing, rarely covered, & brutal civil war.

Not entirely SEO related, but the stock market is another information system which is often manipulated.

Not that I have much money, but recently I read a book called Trim Tabs Investing by Charles Biderman. On a macroeconomic level it looks at the stock market in terms of volume of shares, their overall price, and the money chasing those shares. Rather than stating that forward earnings drive the stock market they believe the short term stock price can best be described using supply and demand.

It breaks down the money chasing the shares into the following groups:

• insider and corporate trading (smart money)

• general investor trading (dumb money)
• foreign investor trading (dumb money)
• margin debt (dumb money)

In the short term the money from the typical investor can power the direction of the stock market, but the stock market inevitably goes in the direction of the insider and corporate trading. Peaks in the stock market (tops and bottoms) are often associated with rapid changes in margin debt.

People are emotionally attached to their investments, and tend to believe the future actions of the stock market will follow the recent past. People take out loans to be fully exposed to the market near tops. People also lose hope and cash out at a loss near bottoms. Foreign investment is also another lagging contrary indicator.

Insiders have access to better data, and their actions are thus inclined to be more representative of actual market conditions. Their ability to control the float (number of shares on the market) gives them an unfair advantage. Also sometimes they will forcast a lack of guidance while the stock market is doing bad so they can actively rebuy their own shares for prices below their actual value.

I thought it was a pretty cool book. For small investors he still recommends just dollar cost averaging or using buy and hold, but for those who are rich (some of the early SEO gods are probably sitting out mounds and mounds of cash right now, as early Google workers likely are too - hi Matt) and seek larger gains, liquidity theory may help them do well in both good and bad market periods.

A new free tool allows you to enter a zip code, a radius, and a few keyword phrases and it automatically generates keyword phrases based on your keywords and the locations within your radius.

The output looks like:
pizza "town name"
pizza "other town name"
lasagna "town name"

A few things that would make the tool cooler are:

• allow people to enter multiple words to make up more phrases based on those various words (like GoogEdit or ThePermutator do)

• allow output to match various match types (like broad, phrase, & exact)
• allow people to create "location + keyword" and "keyword + location"
• optional format the output to allow people to enter max bids and let the search terms drive the URL.

Pretty cool tool for free. found from a thread on SEW.