Here’s a great historic photography archive. PhillyHistory, at http://www.phillyhistory.org/, currently features only 25,000 images of Philadelphia dating back to the 1800s, with more images coming at the rate of 2000 a month.

From the front page you can search by street address or by neighborhood, but not by search term. From the search page you can do a keyword search or narrow it by year. A simple search for billboard found eight results, five to a page. Results include a thumbnail as well as a brief caption and description of the page.

The detail pages are terrific; they have a much larger picture and — this is the neat part — a map of the neighborhood and the place where the picture was taken. On the detail page you also have the option to buy glossies of the pictures — the one I looked at was $10 for a 5×7 and $20 and 8×10. On all the searches I tried I got results that spanned several decades except the search for fire; that one found several pictures of fireworks for one particular year.

I found when I did some simple keyword searching that not all words would get me many results. Results for car and truck were pretty disappointing; factory actually had no results. However street brought over 200 results. Do some experimenting here.

In addition to the archived photographs this site also has a Historic Streets Index (search by name) as well as a nice Philadelphia-oriented link list and a blog. Plenty to see here, but you might have to try several different search terms.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Edited version, please see note at the end of this post.

Andy Beal from MarketingPilgrim talked with Adam Lasnik from Google this Friday about Google’s stance on paid links and the discussion about the usage of the nofollow attribute.

What Google looks for are patterns that suggest money is being exchanged for links. ….

… However, links from one relevant site to another, would not likely cause a reaction from Google (although they would still prefer you to use a nofollow tag). 

Loren, here at SEJ reported about it and I left a comment, which was followed by a very similar one from a fellow affiliate marketer with the name Wendy Piersall who earns money from affiliate marketing on her “eMoms at home” site and blog.

I find Google’s attitude both dangerous and based on faulty logic. Just because a link is paid for on a site, certainly doesn’t mean that it should be valued less. What about an affiliate link that points straight to a site? What if the site I’m linking to is relevant?

I deserve to be compensated for the benefit that my advertising client gets for the traffic that I send over.

I PAY to get these visitors to my site in the first place (via PPC, advertising, or long hours spent on content creation, PR and promotion).

Is there something wrong with advertisers wanting to earn better rankings from paid links? Google certainly benefits from this business model, why shouldn’t advertisers?

I wrote more than once about the problems with the nofollow attribute. I illustrated what links are and what they are not and why I supported the nofollow tag in the case of Wikipedia or actually pushed actively for it for months. Something that does not seem to make sense, because I became a complete opponent of the nofollow attribute over the past 15 months and actively call for the abolishment of the use of nofollow by Search Engines.

I also provided ideas and recommendations how to come to a solution for the problems.

No, I have not developed a new algorithm that will solve all the problems. I only pointed out things that should be considered in one way or another by any attempt for an alternative method of how to evaluate and treat links.

During the whole discussion, did I notice something?

Google does not get it or does not want to (I think the latter is closer to the truth). In addition, Search Marketers have a problem of grasping the complete magnitude of the problem for Affiliate marketers because of the conflicting nature of Google’s statements if applied to affiliate marketing.

The recommendations might be suited or acceptable for the application to advertising space on websites and paid product reviews a la PayPerPost and similar services, but it is certainly not for Affiliate marketing.

The SEO community freaked out over statements by an unimportant PPC/SEM that SEO is not rocket science and by statements from a VC who is a Web 2.0 evangelist that SEO’s are (for the most part) scumbags and worthless.

They had at least the curtsey to say that to the SEO community straight into the face and not by talking about you in third person to somebody else while you are standing right next to them.

That is what Google is doing about affiliate marketers with statements like this. The core and origin of affiliate marketing is about generating income from your site by providing content and information about things you like or know and receiving a commission for referring a customer to a merchant or service provider who sells the stuff you are talking about.

Not passive Ads sitting in a separated section of the site where you can say:

“It’s advertising so I don’t have an opinion about it. It might be crap or it might be great. Find out for yourself and leave me alone”.

No, grass root affiliate marketing is about taking the responsibility for WHAT you promote or advertise and HOW you do that.

Sure, you can make a quick buck by recommending crap to people, but you can only do that once, because your reputation is down the drain. Not such a good way of building a long-term affiliate marketing based business, I guess.

Let me use some SEO terminology, which might help the search marketers to understand the core of the problem.

Affiliate marketing has also the problems, just like SEO that black sheep’s or BLACK HATS that use questionable methods to generate money via the affiliate marketing channel give the whole industry a bad name, but the existence of those Affiliate BLACK HATS does not make all Affiliates bad and to black hats as well.

Making an affiliate link nofollow (a WHITE HAT affiliate link), is like you optimizing a clients site perfectly for search engines and then have the search engines come along and forcing a User-agent: * and Disallow: / to be added to the robots.txt file.

Confused? Yeah, search engines would not spider the site anymore. They think its junk before even looking at it, because an SEO optimized it. Therefore, it must be junk (if Search Engines would think that what they probably not). They would not say that of course, but have the site owner add the little tags to the mostly unnoticeable little .txt file in the website root.

Now if that would happen and I would be a SEO, what would I think about this?

I cannot speak for other people, but I would probably be very upset, to put it mildly. It would be a direct threat to me means of generating income to support my family and me. I would certainly not just do nothing and sit it out.

It’s already bad enough if somebody comes up to you and tells you right in the face that he thinks that all SEO are the worthless, a waste of time and money and only a fake that does not provide any value whatsoever. That everything I do will not even be worth the time looking at and check, because it must be worthless too since it comes from somebody that is worthless himself.

Is anybodies blood reaching boiling temperature yet?

Hey at least you would have gotten it said right into your face instead of learning about it indirectly during a conversation between the Search Engines and your client , where you are physically present but treated as if you are not in the same room. You would be considered so worthless that SE would not even let himself down to a level to even acknowledge your basic existence.

This is what is happening here. If “selling a link” means receiving ANY rewards or financial gain from the existence of the link, then every affiliate link must be using the nofollow attribute, based what we heard so far from any Googler that at least touches the subject nofollow

That on the other hand means that an affiliate has to give up its own integrity and authority to degrade a link to something that the link is not.

Google cannot tell very accurate, which affiliate is a thug and which one is honest.

The thug is only in the game for the quick bucks and does not care about his or hers long term reputation and permanent damage from doing dishonest referrals.

The honest affiliate on the other hand stands behind the referral with his or hers entire authority and puts his or hers entire reputation on the line and tries to build a long term trust relationship with the people its referring to different advertisers.

It seems that the current choices Google offers to an honest affiliate today are two.

The first choice is, getting screwed by penalties because of paid editorial links to an advertiser without marking them nofollow. Something similar to what Google does to with the BLACKHAT affiliate that puts up links that pay the most on scraped or no content whatsoever.

The alternative is to admit guilt before doing anything and give up authority and reputation by flagging links that are honest recommendations with nofollow, which signals to the Search Engines the complete opposite of the actual intention, lie and hence proof that they are thugs too and only have the monetary rewards in mind.

Great choices, risking sudden death when becoming a number in the false positive statistics due to detection of a large number of affiliate (paid links) without flagging them nofollow or commit suicide by lying about the intent of the link and adding the nofollow tag to ruin your websites linking structure and patterns. Many pages of the site now appearing in shiny red when accessed via Firefox with SEO for FF plug-in and nofollow highlighting enabled.

Editor Note:

I edited this post heavily because of some references to the horrific events in Nazi Germany during World War II. Several readers of the SEJ community completely misunderstood or misinterpreted my references. I provided detailed clarifications in my comments but realized that this was going too much off the actual topic of my original post. Search Engine Journal is not a political blog and thus not the right place for discussions of that nature.

I made the full original article (which is very much stronger in tone) and the original first five comments available on my personal website.

I would like you to invite to read the original unedited post and more importantly the comments that followed.

I believe that the discussion is very important and that it provides the opportunity to discuss things, usually not talked about in public, in a resourceful and educational manner.

Be warned, the tone of the post is very explicit and the second subject is very sensitive and hard to discuss without bias and emotional attachment. The discussion about the problem with nofollow and affiliate marketing shall continue here at SEJ where it belongs.

Carsten Cumbrowski March 3^rd, 4:30 pm (PST).

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Affiliate Marketer and Entrepreneur

Which Linux Distro is right for my needs? I have a couple old
computers at work that I want to use just for Web browsing. They were actually too pathetic for Ubuntu, and I was having some problems getting Xubuntu to run correctly,
so they’re at the moment both running Puppy Linux.

Badger! Make RSS Badges with Yahoo Pipes.

Toolbar (Firefox and IE) for finding government information.

New feature from the National Library of Scotland: Medical History of British India.

USA Today getting big remake. Details.

History of African-Americans in Chincoteague being compiled into database.

CHEST, The Cardiopulmonary and Critical Care Journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, has a new extended online archive, with issues going back to
1946. Announcement and details here.

Interesting blog! Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local.

Princeton preparing a digital archive of Chinese coins.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Oh great, now I have to remember how to spell “abbreviations”. Stands4 has bought the Abbreviations.com domain name and has relaunched under that name and with some new services.

From the front page ( at Abbreviations.com , natch) you’ll see an abbreviation category browser or keyword search. You can also do reverse lookup if you want. A search for PERL found ten results (Physical Education Running Lads?)

In addition to finding abbreviations, the site also has resources for conversions, zip code lookup, and what appears to be a mirror of the DMOZ directory. Yick. Why are sites still using that? You’d think that someone out there would build an extractor script that crawls Wikipedia and turns THAT into a searchable subject index.

There’s also an “expressions” search at Abbreviation.com. I was particularly interested in this because I have my HH. The little HH on my driver’s license means I’ve got my Hick Homilies certification in this state. They give you a big booklet to study, and you have to be able to identify the meaning of at least 20 homespun phrases on a test, and then use at least five of them in a conversation without laughing or making the other person’s head explode. The advanced certification, which I took, also requires that you be able to whistle the theme to the “Andy Griffith Show” and know all the words to “Ramblin’ Man.”

(The HH doesn’t confer many practical benefits, but I am entitled to free sweet tea at 500 locations throughout the southeast and an annual cookbook of kudzu recipes.)

So I figured I could find some useful expressions here. Unfortunately this directory is a little thin (790 entries), and sometimes the definitions didn’t make much sense to me (The definition for “Bear Market” had me very confused.)

Users are invited to become editors of the directory — applications are here. Editors get a free t-shirt.

The abbreviations are fine as frog hair. Unfortunately, the expressions section needs a lot of fleshing out, as sure as a goose goes barefoot.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

United Press International has teamed up with Digital Railroad to make an archive of over 300,000 UPI images searchable and available for licensing. You can search the archive without payment at http://www.upinewspictures.com/. I talked about a UPI archive back in 2003 but that one only had 100,000 pictures available.

There are several ways to view the archive, but you can start with a simple keyword search. A search for Paul Simon found over five dozen results, but the interesting thing is that a bunch of them weren’t of the singer himself, but rather of tributes, awards shows where he also received an award and that was noted in the caption, etc. The further back you go (photos are initially organized with the newest ones first), the more relevant the photos get. The photos for that search go back to 1997.

A nav on the left of the results page will allow you to narrow the search down with additional keywords, date the pictures were taken, photographer, and more. The pictures themselves are good-sized thumbnails with a little information. Detail pages provide good-sized pictures (watermarked all over the place) with lots of picture details.

If you register for an account (this is free) you’ll have the opportunity to save pictures to a lightbox, as well as create keyword-based RSS feeds of UPI images, which would be cool if I could get it to work. I went to photo feeds, was prompted to create a custom feed, then was asked to log in. Logged in, was kicked back to the home page, chose photo feeds again, was prompted to log in, and around and around and around we go.

There’s a lot here, but I wish I could have gotten the photo feeds to work!

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

(Philipp Lenssen and I started talking about cloaking in a corner of the web, and I figured it would make sense to talk about cloaking in a separate post. Consider this a me-typing-this-quickly post, but better to get something down than to not get a chance to talk about it.)

Cloaking is serving different content to users than to search engines. It’s interesting that you don’t see all that much cloaking to deliver spam these days. If you see people doing spam, they tend to rely on sneaky redirects (often via JavaScript) more than cloaking. For example, a blackhat might make a doorway or keyword stuffed/gibberish page plus something like a JavaScript redirect to go to a completely different page.

Here’s the recent timeline of Philipp Lenssen talking about cloaking and WebmasterWorld (WMW) as I see it:
- Philipp wrote this post in late November: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-11-28-n23.html
The basic point was that if you searched for [php-based cms] and clicked on the #1 result (which was WMW), you would get a registration page rather than the page that Googlebot saw.
- I didn’t have the cycles to deal with it right then, but earlier this year I made it clear that WMW would be removed if it met the definition of cloaking when I tested it.
- I believe the administrator (Brett) of WMW made code changes to the site so that WMW would not be considered cloaking.
- I recently tested with the example Philipp originally mentioned. I did a search for [php-based cms], clicked on the #1 result, and got the same page that Googlebot saw with no registration page.

Those code changes address many of concerns I’ve heard regarding WMW (that users who click on the results don’t get what Googlebot crawled).

So I consider Philipp’s November article acted on. Philipp’s December post about it (http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-12-13-n85.html) cited the same search for [php-based cms], so I consider that acted on as well.

I believe that takes the timeline up to February. I’m aware of two other posts Philipp did on this topic, both in February. The first is http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-02-05.html which says that if you go to http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum44/1287.htm that you get redirected to a registration page. When I tried it just now, I got the actual page with a “Welcome to WebmasterWorld Guest from (ip address)”. The question I’d look at for this report was if you typed this url into Google, and then clicked on the result–does the user receive the same content that Google saw?

The other article that I’m aware of is http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-02-20-n47.html where Philipp states that sometimes Google allows sites to go against our webmaster practices. But that statement includes an asterisk; the disclaimer at the bottom of that post is “WebmasterWorld doesn’t always show the registration page; they sometimes show the content that was available in the snippet.” As I understand it, that disclaimer acknowledges that some of the time, WMW gives users what Googlebot crawled. When I get a chance to tackle Philipp’s most recent report, I’ll be looking at consistency: when a Google user clicks on a search result at Google, they should always see the same page that Googlebot saw. It will take me a little time to check out, because it’s a report of behavior that often meets our guidelines (e.g. cookies, referrers, IP addresses might all come into play), but I do intend to investigate this issue when I get the cycles. I won’t consider this issue closed until I have the time to investigate how consistently the return-the-same-content-as-Googlebot-saw behavior happens; it should happen for every click from a Google search result.

To sum up, we did take action on Philipp’s questions about WMW. I consider the issue in a much better state now, in that most (all?) Google searchers get the identical page to what Googlebot saw. But I still consider Philipp’s February posts open for investigation, and I will get to them, in the same way that I tackled Philipp’s first two posts about this.

Mozilla has announced a bunch of upgrades. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 has been released, as has Firefox 1.5.0.10. But the real reason I’m mentioning this here, as you can see in this announcement, is that security updates for Firefox 1.5 will be discontinued on April 24. so if you’re using Firefox 1.5, you want to think seriously about upgrading..

In other Mozilla news, two new versions of Seamonkey have been released. I’ve been using that on Puppy Linux and I like it pretty well. If you use Thunderbird, you’ll be interested to know that 1.5.0.10 is now available.

Reading about these other projects, I got curious about what’s going on with Penelope, which as you might remember is going to be the open source answer to Eudora. The short answer appears to be not much. The home page hasn’t been changed since mid-January and there don’t appear to be any releases available. I will have to be patient…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Gary Price of ResourceShelf points to an overview of Google’s subsidiaries that came with Google’s annual report:

And those starting with “Google”...

[Thanks Gary!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Bloggers, increase your ad revenue: make contextual ad networks compete (for free).   [Advertise here]

* Include punctuation marks and/or numbers.
* Mix capital and lowercase letters.
* Include similar looking substitutions, such as the number zero for the letter 'O' or '$' for the letter 'S'.
* Create a unique acronym.
* Include phonetic replacements, such as 'Luv 2 Laf' for 'Love to Laugh'.

* Don't use a password that is listed as an example of how to pick a good password.
* Don't use a password that contains personal information (name, birth date, etc.)
* Don't use words or acronyms that can be found in a dictionary.
* Don't use keyboard patterns (asdf) or sequential numbers (1234).
* Don't make your password all numbers, uppercase letters or lowercase letters.
* Don't use repeating characters (aa11).

The National Archives of Ireland are arranging for the digitization and indexing of the Ireland census records for 1901 and 1911. Dublin City and County 1911 will be available in the fall! Details here.

Hoover’s has a nice new blog, Bizmology. Kinda got an Andy Warhol thing going on with the decor…

YouTube hooks up with the BBC. Interesting…

Google and Ask: it’s shameless how they flirt. And no, Ask, didn’t catch the earthquake last night. Did catch the 55MPH wind gusts and the tornado watch. That was more than sufficient.

Corel releases WordPerfect Lightning in beta. Online and offline capability. Interesting but I’m afraid it’s several years too late.

Can we stop with the “Google Killer” stuff already? Better than Google? Fine. But Google is going nowhere unless it collapses under the weight of its own expansion.

The Ad Generator. Takes headlines and matches them up with photos for a fairly surreal experience.

Yahoo Pipes, now with yummy regular expressions. Drat you, nerd-crack Pipes…

Speaking of Pipes, Five Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash Your Data. Great article. More toys to play with!

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Busy week? Catch up on the best o' Lifehacker from the last 5 days, or subscribe to the Highlights feed for once-a-week updates straight to your newsreader. This week's best posts include:

• Geek to Live: Sync your address book via IMAP
  "...a Thunderbird extension called SyncKolab can save your address book to your email server over IMAP, so your contacts are available from any computer running Thunderbird."
• Alpha Geek: Copy DVDs to your portable media player
  "If you have a Creative Zen Vision, Microsoft Zune, Pocket PC or any other Windows-centric portable player that can handle video, get ready for some movie love."
• Hack Attack: Top 13 iTunes AppleScripts
  "Doug's AppleScripts not only plug obvious holes in iTunes' feature set; they also add functionality to iTunes you never knew you wanted."
• Geek to Live: Supercharge your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll
  "When it comes to heavy duty download jobs, Firefox's default Downloads manager just doesn't cut the mustard."
• Screenshot Tour: Share files with Firefox and AllPeers
  "The AllPeers Firefox extension adds drag-and-drop peer-to-peer file sharing to the comfort of everyone's favorite browser."
• Lifehacker Code: The Ly Detector (Greasemonkey user script)
  "If you're at all familiar with Strunk and White, you know that excessive use of adverbs - words that end in -ly - isn't a sign of strong writing..."
• Ning relaunches instant web community tool
  "In under 2 minutes I had a dynamic, user-based web site with registration, member profiles, a forum, video and photo sharing, and a blog, with a custom template."
• Firefox Tip: How to set up multi-parameter keyword searches
  "Find out how to compare 3 stock symbols or pit 4 words against one another with Firefox keyword searches."
• Google Maps traffic information
  "...if Google Maps is your go-to internet map, it's great to see traffic info baked-in."
• Cordless workspace redux, the Gina edition
  "...check out some photos of my new, cordless setup."

A new version of the Google toolbar now in beta testing sports a new look -- happy and sad faces that let toolbar users rate web pages. (...)

Google says that excessive clicks are watched for. Google also assures that it has mechanisms in place to ensure good sites don't get penalized by competitors voting against them.

Is this worth a 4.0 on the SEO Richter scale? Probably not. Just a rumble really, but oh how nothing shakes up the SEM industry and gets SEOs chatting like a nice bug in Google search results. Bring up the topic of the Supplemental Index and duplicate content, the story gets even juicier.

As has just been confirmed by Google's Vanessa Fox, there is in fact, something amiss with the current "site:" command, which is currently being rectified 'as quickly as possible', and this is merely the result of display issue that which shouldn't have any impact on search queries or ranking. (Special thanks to Vanessa, for working with us on sorting out this issue and finding a solution so quickly!)

But let's dig deeper in into why this is such a big deal in the SEO world.

Google launched a local Chinese book search. Interestingly enough, while this service doesn’t make its censorship explicit, it’s restricted to find less Chinese books than Google’s other localized book searches because it omits Chinese books published outside of China mainland – this is disclosed at the end of search results in italics, reading “These results only include works from Mainland China.”*

In other localized Google Book searches, like in Germany, Google allows you to find everything they scanned,** but this is not the case for Google.cn now. As an example, a search for “台独” (Taiwan independence) returns 76 books in both Google.de and Google.com, but only 53 books – plus the disclaimer – in Google.cn. This does not mean that Google China book search is restricted to Chinese works only; it does find English-language books, as long as they’re published within China, which I suppose restricts this to a more government-friendly selection. As an example, the query taiwan independence yields 1,152 results in Google Books Spain and 1,156 results in Google Books Germany, whereas the same search in China is restricted to only 10 books. Some result count flakiness can be expected in different localizations, but Google China shows significantly different counts, and Google’s disclaimer admits as much. Are these the kind of “growing investments” Google announced in early 2006?

*In Chinese: “搜索结果由中国大陆出版图书提供”. Possibly not coincidentally, the positioning and formatting of this notice resembles Google’s self-censorship disclaimer. Another result type in which Google doesn’t explicitly disclose their censorship is Google.cn’s News service.

**At least as far as I know they do show everything in other localized versions. The only difference being that sometimes, books that passed into the public domain are listed, but not fully readable outside the US.

[Thanks Xiaowan!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Bloggers, increase your ad revenue: make contextual ad networks compete (for free).   [Advertise here]

The Digital Inspiration blog spotted a (somewhat weird) new prototype of AdSense ad which is actually an interactive gadget hosted on Gmodules.com, Google’s domain for Google Personalized Homepage gadgets. You can play around with the gadget in above sample (and even add it to your personalized Google homepage). The gadget advertises Gmail and contains two tabs, “videos” and “secret tips,” both of which you can page through using the bottom previous/ next links. The gadget code was created by LabPixies.com, a site providing gadgets for Netvibes, the Google Personalized Homepage, Pageflakes and others.

[Via Google Operating System.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Bloggers, increase your ad revenue: make contextual ad networks compete (for free).   [Advertise here]

Gord Hotchkiss recently interviewed Matt Cutts in a discussion that focused on personalization and the future of SEO. Kevin Newcomb also comments on this in Search Engine Watch. I also think that personalization will have a significant affect on SEO. I suspect that there will be many other methods implemented by Google to improve their results.

Japan seems to have their own magazines dedicated to Google. Does anyone know more about these? Are they official or unofficial? Singular mags or recurring monthly?

[Photos by GoogleCn Fans with a Creative Commons license.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Eric Enge and John Biundo* put up a great in-depth interview with Google AJAX (and GData) API designer Mark Lucovsky. Mark explains how the AJAX Search API (released June, 2006) came about:

<<What I was interested in is that Google is known for search, and we have search across a wide variety of backends. Could we make search as easy to integrate, and as useful, as we have done with [the Google Maps API]? So that’s where I started from, looking at how do we get search on peoples’ web pages with the same kind of utility that they have with Maps. So, we set out to do this JavaScript based version of the Search API. Instead of saying that there is a search form and then results are laid out underneath the form, and what you are getting is basically chunks of HTML, we went a different way. We have a Search Control that you can put on a page, but we also have a two-tier system, where you have a very flexible UI in the Search Control, but underneath the Search Control are these core search objects for web search, blog search, news search, video search, local search. (...)

So, you can do a search, get a handful of results, and then you can decide, do I want to draw them on my page, or do I want to use the data in a slightly different way.>>

Unfortunately there’s no statement on how the Google SOAP API fits into this, and why Google decided it was in their best interest to drop the server-side SOAP model and replace it with their current client-side AJAX model. Yahoo, for example, delivers their search APIs as REST (XML) objects, which are easy to handle on the server-side to generate all kinds of output. Is the difference here that the AJAX API will get the chance to display Google ads which webmasters won’t be able to remove?

See the Google AJAX Search API.

*Eric and John previously co-blogged here to explain Google’s Custom Search Engine.

[Via Google’s blogs.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Bloggers, increase your ad revenue: make contextual ad networks compete (for free).   [Advertise here]

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube to allow 3 channels to showcase short clips of BBC content. This news comes hot on the heels of a New York Times article on Google’s quest for forming partnerships with smaller media companies as opposed to major studios and networks such as Viacom or NBC.

The BBC deal is an interesting one - to quote the Beeb itself:

The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube’s monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website.

They also hope to earn revenue from this deal, although that will greatly depend on the quality of the clips BBC can put up on YouTube and the sort of attention they will attract.

The NYT article talks about how many companies partnering up with YouTube are on nonexclusive contracts and are pursuing similar deals with YouTube’s competitors such as Yahoo Video and BrightCove.

In essence, organisations are still treating online video as an experiment and are looking for ways to harness the power of social media while trying to account for copyright agreements and what not. It’s a difficult job, and made more difficult by the fact that the real content that people want is often not shown on YouTube.

As I noted here on YouTube’s deal with football club Chelsea, if you’re not going to give people something they can value you are not going to be successful on YouTube (or in any other social media circle). Using YT for ‘teasers’ is not going to work too well, unless you can tie it in with a solid call-to-action and the ‘next step’ actually brings them closer to watching the video instead of having them register and pay for access.

One way to make this work is to allow visitors from YouTube a one-time free view of the video / clip / program they came for, and then require them for simple registration to view more content.

If companies learn to create viral videos that include a call to action AND provide value, then they have a great chance at strengthening their brand and online presence through such deals.

Otherwise, a dud is a dud is a dud, and they’re just wasting their own time.

Advertisement: Text Link Brokers Sell or Buy Text Links

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Google recently added page views statistics when you check individual gadgets from the “Google Gadgets for Your Webpage” directory (Gadgets, the former modules, can be included in 3 different places right now: your Google homepage, your PC – running on top of Google Desktop –, and other webpages, like blogs... it’s confusing though that Google didn’t consolidate this into a single directory yet). Google says “These numbers are approximations, representing the number of times each gadget is rendered across all places Google Gadgets can be viewed.”

Here are some fo the weekly page views for the most popular gadgets, according to Google:

• Google Maps - 4,861,113
• Google Calendar Viewer - 932,223
• Date & Time - 130,290,121
• PacMan v2.0 - 8,114,344
• YouTube Player - 32,787
• Digg - 3,228,599
• MyWeather - 519,294
• Mini Web - 47,483
• Google Calendar - 74,182
• Maukie - 244,117

Some of these numbers look quite impressing (Maukie, a cat that follows your mouse pointer, attracts over 240,000 page views!), though remember that gadget numbers tend to be inflated – a gadget loads with every page view, often included in the navigation of the page in question, or somewhere on the Google personalized homepage, and the view will count independent of whether or not the user even as much as looks at the gadget.

[Via Adam Sah.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google has become somewhat synonymous with “leader in a field”, Paul McNamara muses, sort of like “X is the Porsche of Y”... e.g. “Keep your eye on Ubuntu, it just may become the Google of Linux” or “Remember the yellow pages? The Google of the paper era?” [Thanks Paul!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Microsoft is reaching out to Hollywood studios to offer their assistance on anti-piracy efforts for its MSN Soapbox video sharing platform, currently in beta. According to a memo intercepted by Variety, MSN media and entertainment VP Blair Westlake said Microsoft is developing "what we believe content owners want and need: industry-leading notice and takedown ... practices, including tools that enable our content partners to more easily find content that is rightfully theirs and give us prompt notice so we can respond even more efficiently and expeditiously."

Those practices will not include filtering technology, such as that being asked of Google's YouTube by Viacom, according to the memo.

Andy Beal had the priviledge of a sit down chat with Google’s Adam Lasnik at the Australian Search Summit early this morning.

Beal and Lasnik discussed Google’s stance on paid links and the use of NoFollow (more information on NoFollow). Andy reviews the discussion in his post; Google’s Lasnik Wishes “NoFollow Didn’t Exist”; and here are the highlights:

• Google is “perfectly fine with people buying and selling links” but prefers them to use the nofollow attribute when doing so.
• It is difficult for Google to identify a web site selling the odd link, or a blogger adding a contextual link, in exchange for payment.
• Google looks for are patterns that suggest money is being exchanged for links. A casino site buying a link from a blog about gardening, would raise a red flag, said Lasnik. As would an influx of links in a single day.
• Links from one relevant site to another, would not likely cause a reaction from Google

Penalties for Link Buying:

• Punishments for buying and selling links vary.
• Sellers that offer lots of links for sale, could find their outbound links filtered on a page level, or site-wide.
• Buyers, purchasing links from dozens of locations, could trigger Google to filter out the value of their inbound links.
• In the case of linking schemes,the link seller to have their ability to pass PageRank stripped away.

Adam Lasink on the NoFollow attribute and Google’s preference for paid lnks to use this tag:

It’d be really nice if nofollow wasn’t necessary. As it stands, it’s an admittedly imperfect yet important indicator that helps maintain the quality of the Web for users.

It’d be nice if there was less confusion about what nofollow does and when it’s useful. It’d be great if we could return to a more innocent time when practically all links to other sites really WERE true votes, folks clearly vouching for a site on behalf of their users.

But we don’t live in perfect, innocent times, and at Google we’re dedicated to doing what it takes to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in search quality.

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In the spring of 1907 Kenneth Grahame sent his seven-year old son, Alastair (nicknamed 'Mouse'), the first of a series of letters telling the story of a group of animals and their various adventures along the river, in the woods and on the road. These letters, centering on the swaggering Mr. Toad, formed the first whisperings of what would become one of the best-loved children's stories of all time: The Wind in the Willows. (http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/news/2007_feb_23)

In an interview with Gord Hotchkiss published at Search Engine Land, Google's Matt Cutts all but sounds the death knell for black hat SEO, saying that the recent implementation of personalization of Google's search results should be seen as a "call to action" for SEOs that are focusing on reverse engineering search engine algorithms:

There's a fork in the road, and people can think hard about whether they're optimizing for users or whether they're optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing "new" SEO, or whatever you want to call it -- that's social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz -- those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract backlinks, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.

Cutts says that not all SEOs should worry, as long as their focus is on building good Web sites instead of trying to build sites to rank in a given algorithm:

I think the SEOs that adapt well to change and are optimizing for users are going to be in relatively good shape, because they're already trying to produce sites that are really pleasing and helpful to users. It's definitely the case that if all you care about is an algorithm, then the situation grows more complicated for you with personalization. But it's also an opportunity for people to take a fresh look at how they do SEO.

Hotchkiss also published a full transcript on his blog.

Before announcing his presidential candidacy, Senator John McCain asked Yahoo! users “What would you do to stop wasteful government spending in Washington?” on Yahoo! Answers, the leading Q&A site on the Web.

John McCain’s question has currently solicited over 15,200 answers with responses ranging from placing a limit on politicians’ compensation and tenure, to changing rules for lobbyist endorsements and taking a closer look at immigration policy.

Again, Yahoo Answers helps prove that social media is a resourceful and effective outlet of gathering the public’s feedback and ideas on issues which touch the people of our nation and world.

Senator McCain is the second 2008 presidential hopeful to post on Yahoo! Answers, following Hillary Clinton, who posted her question just over a month ago.

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By Steven De La O, Google Base Support

I get the impression that this site is meant to be used with Last.fm, but actually it’s a pretty good tool all by itself. Sleevenotez is in alpha at http://www.sleevenotez.com .

Sleevenotez allows you to search for musical acts and get information from several different sources on one page, including from Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube. And though sometimes it’s hysterically wrong, it also found me things that I hadn’t found before.

The front page will encourage you to log in, use Last.FM, etc. Ignore that. Use the artist search in the upper-right corner. I started with a search for Eurythmics. I got two matches — both Eurythmics and Eurythmics/Aretha Franklin. Choosing Eurythmics, I got a page of Eurythmics information. Starting with artist information from Wikipedia, the page also contained list of albums from the band, photos from Flickr, a discography, and videos from YouTube.

The Wikipedia article of course was right-on, and the list of videos was interesting (though by no means complete.) On the other hand the Flickr photos contained a variety of images, including a picture of a slug and a skyscape. There were also shots of Eurythmics album covers and a live appearance of the Today show, but it looks like Sleevenotez is just searching for Eurythmics as a keyword.

Professor Longhair as a search term worked both better and worse. Searching for that term found both the artist name and his real name (Henry Byrd). A listing for Professor Longhair also found the Wikipedia article, Flickr photos, YouTube, etc. Interestingly the Flickr photos were more relevant (including paintings and a shot of the sign at Tipitina’s) but the YouTube videos were all over the place. Some of them were Longhair performances, some of them were other artists performing Longhair songs, and one of them was a guy playing a Longhair song and singing the theme from the Dukes of Hazzard (this worked disturbingly well.)

Sleevenotez works best when the artist name is distinct. When it isn’t the system breaks down. Searching for The Peels found the correct discography and some interesting Flickr photos (unfortunately the Peels don’t seem to have a Wikipedia entry), but the videos were all wrong. Searching for techno artist Olive was hysterically funny — the discography and a couple of the YouTube videos were right, but the Wikipedia article was for olive-the-food, and the pictures of course were similarly-oriented. If the name of the artist you’re seeking is common, you might want to use a musician name instead.

I found this a great information aggregator; it introduced me to a lot of videos and photos I might have missed otherwise. Worth a look.

It’s billed as a “user-created reference resource” but I think that the range of articles available makes that too narrow a description. And while the content generated is described as “articles,” a lot of them seem to be too short for a thorough overview of a topic. But I like Helium anyway, at least as a beginning point.

Helium ( http://www.helium.com ) is a user-generated collection of articles (in some cases very short articles) covering a variety of topics from arts to travel. Articles are arranged in a searchable subject index, and are daisy-chained together through recommended and related articles.

The front page starts you out with topics related to news (”Why did the Dow collapse?”) and posts article teasers that direct you to a variety of other articles covering everything from health to car buying. I looked at an article on tax breaks for buying hybrid cars, which seemed to be comparing getting a tax break on a car to going on welfare. There were two more articles listed with this one that didn’t go much further with the discussion. I was looking for a state-by-state breakdown on incentives for buying a hybrid, thoughts on which hybrid to get, pointers to information on pending legislation — in other words I was hoping for way too much.

Other articles were better. You can browse articles by category or search by keywords. After wandering around a bit I ended up at a few articles on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — both overview and user experience with. Those were interesting. I did a keyword search for weeds (it’s almost spring!) and came up with several sets of articles. Unfortunately one of the most interesting ones was the hardest to read — it hadn’t been formatted with lines between paragraphs. Perhaps contributors should have some kind of template or style guide? (Perhaps they do and they don’t use it.) Members of the site are able to rank articles by usefulness — I found that the #1 article for a topic was not always my favorite, but generally at least the top three articles in any field of ten were useful.

Of course with user-contributed content Helium is looking for people to provide articles to the site (users can earn both fame and cash, though I suspect writing for Helium is not going to give you enough money to retire to Maui.) Users are encouraged to write to already-existing subject headings within categories, which explains why there are so many articles grouped under topics and why some of them are only marginally relevant (Helium says, “pick the title closest to your idea.”)

Most articles I looked at were not very deep, and one thing I’d like to see is link lists for all articles — where to go for more information. But if you’re looking for a topic overview, one that will perhaps educate you enough to give you more questions to ask a deeper source, this is a good place to start.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

A while ago I did a post about a site that was getting the malware interstitial on Google. They said “We don’t have any bad software on our domain” and I was all, like, “Psst, buddy, check out these urls.” But that’s not really a scalable approach.

Now the webmaster console team has added a “please show me some urls that Google thinks are bad” feature. Much more scalable, and it should be a big help to webmasters that might have gotten a few pages hacked. I’ve updated my original post and said:

Looks like the webmaster console team has now added example urls for sites that we think are hosting malware. This is a great step to give webmasters more tools to self-diagnose any malware-related issues with their site. As always, thanks to the folks who added this feature.

Not much more to say about it. If you do see that malware interstitial page for one of your sites, hit Webmaster Central to get more info. Barry’s got a bit more detail up about it over here as well.