Tag: search engine

The Factory Is Online

There was no ribbon to cut, no bell to ring. Our little business website, auditionfactory.com, is online.

We need to get the word out. First step is Google’s AdWords. I turned that on late this morning.

Holy cow – it’s confusing! There are so many choices to make, and who knows which is the right one?

My friend Bob, who’s in the ‘search engine optimization’ business took a look at some early ads and fired off an email telling me how wrong I am. He’s right, but I’ve just jumped in the deep end and need a little time to float back to the surface.

We’ve gotten one click so far. I’m now into Google for 34&#162. Oh – the click was from my friend Bob!

The days of a store opening and pasting their first dollar to the wall are over. Now you screen capture your first Google ad.

Second Thoughts At Google

More than nearly any other large company, Google has had a mostly good reputation. It’s a company made of smart people who revolutionized Internet search.

It’s no exaggeration to say Google has changed the Internet. They did it all through innovation. After all, they weren’t the first search engine, coming out of the blocks against already established players like Yahoo! and AltaVista.

Have I spread enough honey? My last few Google posts were more pointed and brutal. Like many others, I was quite upset by Google’s loosening their principles in order to operate in China.

Tonight I read this from Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense.”

In other words, maybe we shouldn’t have done what we did. I would feel better if this change of heart came in the abstract, but it looks like China has been limiting or totally cutting off access to Google within China.

If that’s the case, selling out hasn’t produced any gains – just awful publicity. And, like the old joke, the argument is no longer whether they’re whores but just dickering over price.

Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google’s rivals accommodated the same demands

It’s Not Smart To Be Clever

You see the title of this web entry: “It’s Not Smart To Be Clever.” It’s working against me.

After you read the entry, you’ll understand what I’m getting at. In the abstract, it means nothing. But, it reads ‘clever.’ That’s why it’s here.

In the ‘good old days,’ clever counted because we found stories in print or on TV by accident. You picked up the paper or turned on TV news and then saw what had been prepared for you. Oh look, there’s something about Britney.

Now it’s often knowledge on demand. To use an old phrase in a very different way, you’re asking for it.

Let’s face it, altruistic as I wish to appear, I like it when more people come to my website. And, I know from looking a my logs and other breakdowns that a huge portion of my daily readers get here, not because they’re regular readers, but because they searched for something (mainly on Google) and were directed to this site.

Among the most important ‘tags’ the search engines consider on a webpage is its title – the afore mentioned: “It’s Not Smart To Be Clever.”

People might be searching Google for ideas on search engine optimization, or how to make a more effective website. My title will never match up with those searches. Yet the page and its name are absolutely germane to search engine optimization.

I work in TV. We ‘tease’ all the time. It’s those little readers we do before a commercial, for instance. They’re put in the show to try and get you to watch longer (for a story you want to see – we’re not totally heartless).

On the Internet, those teases have zero value!

It is easier said than done. I want my website to look clever and witty. Writing a title that’s ‘just the facts’ is often anything but. “Clever Titles Are Less Effective With Search Engines” just doesn’t have the same zing to humans – though it’s more pleasing to Google.

I compromise. When I can I will try and incorporate the searchable essence of my entry in the title, but mostly I revert to what looks clever – and lose because of it.

There’s more on this in today’s New York Times. I guess I’m not the only one who thinks about ways to drive traffic.

WEEK IN REVIEW | April 9, 2006

Ideas & Trends: This Boring Headline Is Written for Google

By STEVE LOHR

News organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results.

With the month of April about a third gone, this website has served approximately 10,000 pages. Could that be brought to 11,000 or 15,000 just by changing my titles? Believe it or not, probably. Search engines are that important to traffic. And titles are that important to search engines.

Oh, the title in the Times article – very ineffective.

I’m Not Google… But If I Were

By now you’ve probably heard about Google’s capitulation to the Chinese. The Chinese government asked Google to limit (aka censor) certain search engine requests and Google said, “OK.”

If you’re in China, trying to find information that the government feels is inappropriate, too bad. Google won’t help.

I suppose it’s their prerogative as a commercial outfit. It’s the decision many company’s would make under similar circumstances. I’ve heard of media companies that provide ‘adult’ content here in the states, but tone it down in their Asian distributions.

In fact, Google has recently taken a stronger stand here in the United States, objecting to our government’s request for information on personal search requests. That’s laudable. It doesn’t take Google off the hook.

Companies often adapt their business practices to please the host country. And, there’s no getting around it, China is a huge host country with loads of profit potential.

Here’s why Google’s decision is so vexing to me. It has to do with their own corporate philosophy… their own declaration that they’re different. It’s number six of the “Ten things Google Has Found to be True.”

You can make money without doing evil.

Those are their words. I cut and pasted that right from Google’s corporate site.

Their site also used to ask:

Does Google censor search results?

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.

It doesn’t say that anymore. The page that held that info has been removed. I was able to retrieve a copy of what used to be there from Google’s own cache! I’m not sure how long that will be around before being revised, or deleted, which is why it’s a ‘picture’ of the page, rather than a link to what’s there at this moment.

This decision on Google’s part is evil. I can’t think of any other way to parse it. Google is subjugating their principles… my principles… in the pursuit of money. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Google hadn’t have gone out of their way to claim they would never be ‘that’ kind of company.

There are many things, good and bad, this country can export. Freedom of information – the freedom to explore all ideas, is among our most precious and powerful. It’s so much better than exporting pop culture and fast food.

I have often heard an expression (which I will paraphrase here) that someone can be “F. U. Rich.” That means they’ve got enough money to do what they wish and not worry about the consequences. Isn’t Google in that position now? Don’t the Chinese need Google more than Google need the Chinese?

Where are Google’s principles?

Blogger’s note: Google provides the one source of income for this blog through its AdSense program. In essence, they pay my server costs. Google is also the largest source of traffic to this site.

Addendum – This entry was originally called “I’m Not Google… But If I Was.”

the header in your blog should be.. i

So, What Brings You Here – Website Analysis

Nice to have you reading my prose. My website is here to be read, so you’re scratching my itch, so to speak.

Often I ask, why does anyone care? Are you a Geoff Fox stalker… God, I hope not. Is my life so interesting? Probably not. Yet on any given day, well over one thousand pages are read on this site by not quite a thousand people.

This has never been mentioned on the air at my television station (though there does seem to be a link to this site from their site). How do people find it?

I have logs. They are immense, taking up megabyte of space every month. Looking through them can make a grown man twitch!

I often look at an overview page. In fact I have a number of overview pages I look at and each gives me a slightly different insight into what’s going on here.

The page attached to this site says 236,238 unique visitors have been here so far in 2005, looking at 1,572,912 pages. That is the most misleading set of stats I can post!

Because of the way my pages are set up, one can sometimes count as two. And then there are the pages read by robots, scouring the Internet for who knows what. Some are friendly, like the search engine crawlers. Others… well I have no clue what they’re doing, but they pull down pages and images and take them somewhere.

A more accurate reading comes from a company I can’t mention (or maybe I can. I’m not totally familiar with my contractual agreement with them). They say, this year, there have been 435,466 pages read.

That’s a more realistic number, because it excludes robots and the like. I consider that an impressive number, 1,258 per day, for a personal website. Whether it is or isn’t, just humor me.

Recently, I’ve added another service which looks at this website. Among the things it looks at are referrals, to find out where viewers are coming from.

It didn’t take long to see Google is my friend! Less than half my daily traffic comes to my home page! The rest go directly inside, because they’ve been sent here from elsewhere.

What intrigues me are the search requests that bring people here. Enter “Blue Angels Video” on Google and this is your second hit! People come every day to see my Blue Angels video&#185.

Stranger are the off-the-wall requests. Some was here looking for “John Mayer Marijuana,” “inappropriate commercials,” “Who is the Monopoly guy?,” “Darlene Love on David Letterman&#178,” “Todd Gross WHDH&#179.” When Elena Demenieva does well in a tennis tournament, people come looking for her pictures (I took some excellent shots at the Pilot Pen Tournament in New Haven).

My favorites always have to do with “Carrot Top shirtless.” It’s a long story, but that’s a subject that has been dealt with here.

Over time, as this site has amassed an archive, the number of search engine hits has increased. Maybe this is a good time to remind myself, be careful what you write about. It’s around forever.

Not only are some requests weird, they’re from everywhere. It’s not unusual to look at the plots and see people coming here from India, Thailand or Peru.

So there you go. Maybe you find reading ‘me’ interesting. Probably not as interesting as trying to figure ‘you’ out.

The following list is ‘live,’ meaning what you see is current – not something canned when I wrote this.

&#185 – I have added a better version of the Blue Angels video, but so much traffic goes to the old one, I can’t remove it.

&#178 – Every year, I wait for the show before Christmas when Darlene Love sings on the Letterman show. Do not miss it. Tape it if you must. I believe it will be next week.

&#179 – Poor Todd was fired after 20+ years at his station. I wrote about it.

A Former Teacher Finds My Blog

How do you describe a blog to someone who hasn’t read one? It’s like a diary&#185.

Forget all this political mumbo jumbo and the (false) promise of blogs as the new journalism. Blogs are diaries. Some might be political, but many more concentrate on Britney Spears or the emotional traumas associated with high school.

This is my blog. It concentrates on what’s important to me, without the controversial stuff that would prompt my boss to ask me to stop.

Here’s where a blog differs from a diary. Diaries are private or only read by a select few. Blogs, on the other hand, are available to anyone, and once indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest, become a contextual part of the Internet.

That indexing is very important. Stupid, insipid things written by me and others… relatively unimportant people, can gain weight when they concern an esoteric subject which isn’t often discussed.

Take Junior High School 218 Queens, aka – Harold G. Campbell Junior High School. On the Internet, I’m considered a source for JHS 218Q. But how many people care, or more importantly search for Campbell Junior High? So it was a surprise to read the email I got this morning

I was at the club this morning (Saw Mill River Club in

Mount Kisco, NY. I prefer the Powerhouse Gym on

Francis Lewis Blvd. but it is 39 miles away), working

away on the elliptical when I thought, “Why not go to

a search engine and type in Harold G. Campbell JHS?”

So I did (when I got home).

Your name and the Kennedy assassination article

appeared. I started reading it when I was shocked to

see my name. I then read that the day after,

Saturday, we went to a show. I have no recollection

of that but if you say it, then I must have gone.

Here’s that Google link. My website is the second citation.

The shocked man is my former 8th grade teacher, Harold Friend. He was Mr. Friend then, he is Dr. Friend now. The academic elevation doesn’t surprise me. He was very smart.

Dr. Friend was mentioned when I wrote about the Kennedy assassination. It was his classroom I was in when we got the word from Dallas.

How cool to get this email. How strange for him to search the Internet and find someone talking about him. The indexing power of search engines is a luxury of our times that never existed, or was even contemplated, as recently as 15 years ago.

After reading the email, Helaine said Dr. Friend must be old now. If he was 30 in 1963, that would put him in his early 70s now. Of course he could have been 25, or 45. To me, in the early 1960s, he was old. I was a kid. But, being in his 70s now doesn’t seem to make him as old as it once would have.

The fact that his story begins in his gym means, however old he is, he’s really younger.

Once again I have to ask myself, who reads this… and why. I can tell from my logs that most of my traffic isn’t to my home page, but people going to inside pages – archived material I had written about earlier which is pointed at by the search engines. It just boggles my mind that anything I write has any impact on anyone.

I’m just a guy who likes to write. Like all bloggers, all I bring are my own experiences and insights. It can be read, but that doesn’t make it special.

&#185 – Be careful on the spelling, because it’s certainly not like a dairy.

Blogger’s addendum – It has been established, in further communication, that he doesn’t remember me.

Google Doesn’t Trust Gmail

This is very strange. I’m a fan of Google’s search engine and I also subscribe to some of its notifier services. If Google comes across a link which mentions my name or the name of a few of my friends or even the company I work for, I get an email. It’s painless and part of the true power of using the entire Internet as a relational database.

The notification emails come to my geofffox.com email account. I thought it might be easier to move this activity to a Gmail account, which is really set up for sorting and making repetitive email tasks easier.

Gmail is an offshoot of Google. As it turns out, I have a Gmail account (don’t ask how many email accounts I have because I don’t really remember… a lot is a good answer). It is currently in beta, though there are probably millions of us testing the service.

So I went to Google, found the preferences tab and went to change the email address. I was amazed to get this response. Google’s service is not accepting Gmail addresses! Is Google no longer speaking to Google?

My Very Strange Readers

When I look at the logs for this website, I can often see what brought readers here. Sometimes it’s a bookmark or a link from another site (I am always grateful when others link to this site – though, as you see, I don’t have permanent links to other blogs here). Many times, it’s a search engine leading folks here.

Just to give you an idea, so far in June Google has sucked down 26.5 MB of bandwidth as it indexes this site. MSN, whose search engine is just ramping up, has pulled down over 100 MB! Nearly 1,300 visitors in these 11 days of June have come from search engines. At the moment, Google brings in 3 times as many readers as Yahoo, 10 times as many as MSN.

If you come from a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, the actual search query you entered is logged for me and it’s often fascinating info. For the past few months, many strangers have come here because of things I’ve written, or photography I’ve posted, about John Mayer and his road manager Scotty Crowe (Scotty has many fewer web citations, so I come up very high on a search for his name). They have been the 1 & 2 most popular search terms for months.

Now, joining them on the hit parade is “Carrot Top Shirtless.”

I don’t which is scarier – people are looking for Carrot Top – shirtless, or the fact that there’s content in my blog that makes geofffox.com show up in the search… in the second spot on Google!

Silence of the Ram(s)

I love my little auxiliary computer. It’s the one that runs Mandrake Linux and sits next to my main (though less powerful) Windows XP machine.

It started life as a Pentium II 300, but thanks to a ridiculous mail order sale, it is now an Athlon XP 2400+. Of course changing the motherboard demanded a new power supply… and it really needed more memory… and there was this CDRW that was only $10 after rebate. You get the idea.

I’ve got Mandrake running nicely… well, nearly nicely. I might reinstall it, again. Anyway, I’ve got it running. And I do use the machine. But there is a continuing, nagging problem. When I turn it on, it’s like standing next to a 747 as the engines get run up!

I know what the problem is. Buying the motherboard, CPU and fan on a ‘deal’ meant the components were low end. For the internal CPU cooling fan, that meant very noisy.

I had heard about Zalman cooling solutions and how they were often nearly silent. I decided to try one. I think it’s interesting that Zalman sounds like an Eastern European name – since it’s a Korean company.

I read a lot and settled on the CNPS3100-Plus. It is a two stage cooler, with a pure copper heatsink shaped like a flower, and a fan. The fan, which isn’t mounted directly atop the heatsink as most are, comes with a “noiseless fan connector.” That’s a clever way of saying a cable with resistor to drop the fan’s voltage and speed.

I went to Google’s price comparison search engine and found the best deal. “Froogle” is a good idea, but is often confused when many items are listed together. It took me a while to find the right item and price. I ordered two. One for the auxiliary and one for the main computer.

For the past week, these two hermetically sealed “Quiet CPU Cooler” kits have sat in my office. Tonight, I finally installed the first.

I removed the original heatsink, a fan attached to a honeycomb of copper. Because it was held by tension, I used a screwdriver to stretch it a little more and pull it off the CPU socket’s pins. The kit came with a tube of thermal grease, which I spread over the area where the CPU and heatsink would touch. Then I replaced the original fan and heatsink with the copper flower. I hung the new fan from the screws that hold PCI cards on the motherboard.

When I fired the computer up the first time, it swung right into action. But, when I went to close the case and try again, the computer let out with a steady tone and shut itself down.

Modern motherboards monitor the fan that cools the CPU. Maybe this one was judging the slower fan as not sufficient? I readjusted the BIOS settings so it wouldn’t monitor the fan anymore. The computer booted right up.

Amazingly, most of the racket the PC had been producing was no longer there! There was still noise from the power supply fan and the new CPU fan – but it was worlds away from the racket I had heard before. I was able to heard the chatter of the disk drives as they accessed data. Earlier, that noise was masked.

Later tonight, or maybe tomorrow, I’ll install the second cooler on my main computer. So far, I’m very impressed by what I haven’t heard.

I’m Watching You Watching

On this blog, some entries are better written than others. Some entries are meaningless to anyone but my immediate family and friends. Sometimes what I write is insightful and full of a worldly understanding (Hey, no one else is going to say this about me. I might as well).

Like a good geek, I go through my logs from time-to-time (All right, I’m obsessed – so shoot me). It’s interesting to see whose coming here and what they’re reading. You couldn’t do this with a Google sized site, but most of the time I can track a reader as he decides where to go next. And, I’ll admit to doing a few “whois” searches to see who owns the IP address doing the browsing.

Looking at my log, I know that at one time my largest source of hits from search engines came about because I had misspelled he name of the comedian “Carrot Top!”

I’ve just started seeing a significant flow of traffic over the last few weeks to two IP addresses at Microsoft (65.54.188.40 and 65.54.188.42). Though AWStats doesn’t see them as a search engine spider, I believe that’s what they are. This month I’ve had over 20 MB in bandwidth and 1,600 hits go to those two addresses (and mine is a little, personal site with only around 220 MB of content – much of that in photos). This is probably the beginning of Microsoft’s push to unseat Google as the search king.

Just as interesting to me, and noted by some other users of Movabletype, my blogging software, are hits in the referral log from sites that aren’t referring readers to me! Though&#185 http://paris-hilt0n-video.blogspot.com, http://www.hummer.c0m, http://blog.j0hnkerry.com, http://outd0orsbest.zeroforum.com/zerouser are listed as having sent browsers this way, searching those sites shows no reference to me at all.

This ploy, and ‘comment spam,’ are new and insidious methods for trying to game the system by having your link land on lots of blogs, using their ‘good name’ with the search engines to elevate yours. I can’t believe I’m the only one looking. What else do people see?

&#185 – To prevent these folks from profiting again, I’ve replaced one letter in each URL with the number “0”.

Searching’s Not Easy

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about search engines – sites like Google and Yahoo and Alta Vista. Yahoo, which used Google’s search engine, has now switched to another supplier. Microsoft says they’re going to go into competition with Google. This is not as easy as it seems.

First, an admission. I like Google. While the other search engines were becoming more portal-like, and more commercial, Google was keeping true to its purpose. Searches on Google seemed, to me at least, to hit the mark more often.

As tough as it is to believe, Google is the little guy! Yes, they will soon be going public for billions of dollars (no joke) they are pipsqueaks compared to Microsoft. Heck, their first day valuation will probably even fall short of Bill Gates alone.

Here’s the part I don’t understand. If these others are going to try and unseat Google, don’t they have to search just as thoroughly?

My website’s software provides an easy view of the spiders that crawl through. The chart below this text shows January 2004’s activity from the search engines. There is Google and there is everyone else. No one else even comes close.

And, imagine how large their database must be when they’re looking at 85+ mb of my stuff!

Who Came Here in 2003

I don’t have an incredibly long history as a webmaster. So, for me, it’s often confusing and at the same time interesting to peek at the inner workings of this site. I have owned the domain name geofffox.com for a few years, but it’s only been since late July that I’ve mounted this blog and photo gallery.

My webserver is actually located in Chicago, and run by hostforweb.com. It is shared with other small websites. I have access to most of the server’s guts through shell programs.

In order for you to see what you’re reading now, I have to upload all the files and images and programs from home. There are a number of programs, like the one that produces the weather forecast meteograms that run on clocks and execute a few times a day. I had to write the scripts to do that too.

Running this website has forced me to learn a little about a bunch of computer disciplines, like php, Perl, bash shell scripts, html and a veritable alphabet soup of minutiae. It’s been challenging and like Blanche Du Bois, I am often dependent on the kindness of strangers. The more I learn about computers, the less I realize I know.

With the year over in less than four hours, I though I’d summarize a little of what’s gone through this site in 2003. Since it was only born in July, the stats are (hopefully) less than what I’ll get to publish in 2004.

7.76 GB That’s the total amount of data I’ve spit out. It melts down to 10 CDROM’s worth… or a few DVD’s. The majority of my hits go to the United States, but most of Europe and the Pacific Rim are represented as well.

271.69 MB That’s what Google slurped up. Loads of spiders and crawlers moved through the site, picking up the data that goes into search engines. Google took down nearly 5 times as much data as the next biggest search engine and was responsible for 6711 page views by users. I have chronicled elsewhere my rise in the Google rankings – a feat which both intrigues and fascinates me.

Giblet gravy That’s the most used search engine phrase that sent people to the site. They must have been disappointed because I used the phrase to illustrate a point that had nothing to do with cooking. The next most requested phrase was Scotty Crowe, John Mayer’s road manager.

Thanks to everyone who’s written to ask me for John’s email address. Even if I had it, I couldn’t give it out. You will be glad to know your admiration is not misplaced. There’s a whole lot to admire about John. I don’t think he’ll be spoiled by success.

I’m not sure how or why, but people searching for dangerous Internet cafes in las vegas nv and she had to remove her shoes airport ended up being sent to geofffox.com.

My cousin Michael and his wife Melissa in Sunny Southern California became blog readers. More than anyone, Michael made me realize I could use an editor from time-to-time. I try to spell and grammar check, but you need a dispassionate eye too.

My dad reads the blog every day. That pleases me more than he’ll ever know.

From time to time I’ve looked at my logs, seeing where readers are coming from. There’s someone at NBC in NY who reads pretty regularly, same at the vendor of our station’s weather equipment and Mississippi State University, where I’m taking courses. Most readers are connecting through residential addresses, but I’m amazed by all the different companies and universities that are listed.

Once, I made reference to probes of my home computer by a virus ensconced in a PC at a San Fransisco Honda dealer. I made an analogy that used the word ‘doorknob’. A few days later a computer at a doorknob manufacturer downloaded a significant portion of this site. They’ll be as surprised as the giblet gravy crowd.

In 2003 approximately 17,000 separate viewers came calling to this site. Collectively you visited 30,000 times, downloading 872,000 files. My page counter now sits just north of 60,000.

Every word I write is read, re-read, edited, punched up and perused again before it goes online. One of the more pleasant surprises of blogging is how challenging and how much fun it is to write. I never felt that way about writing before.

Often it is a cathartic experience, allowing me to get something off my chest. Other times it’s fun to let you in on something I observed and want to share.

My family puts up with this to a point. I reveal a lot in this blog, but not everything. A friend wrote to tell me he was surprised to see this ‘warts and all’ self assessment. If there are warts here, they are a small portion of my own personal wart colony. Like most people, I keep a few skeletons in my closet.

Thanks for reading. It really means a lot to me. Really.