Posted on April 19th, 2008
Today’s search podcast covers Google sending notices to advertisers about a proposed click fraud settlement later this month; Microsoft saying there’s more work to be done in search; Microsoft’s planned step into personalized search; Microsoft’s new celebrity guide to local places and more!
Tune-in by listening to thisMP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadioat 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via ourOdeo channel or through iTunes via thislink (or use alternative iTunes instructions explainedhere) or though our Yahoo Podcastschannel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See theDaily SearchCast FAQ.
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Posted on April 14th, 2008
I did a post a while back here in which I talk about how much traffic search engines are sending me vs how much they are indexing me. It was a fun and interesting stat (to me) but as people commented it really doesn’t meant that much.
Going from the last 5 months data (Jan-April) I took it a bit further I calculated all the bandwidth each bot is using (using webalizer) vs how much organic traffic I am receiving that converts to a sale (using Google analytics). So I averaged this to a daily breakdown. (keep in mind that Google is using gzip and caches now so it should actually perform better over the next 6 months). This site has no contextual ads so only completed shopping carts are conversions.
Now we have a true cost analysis- This is purely organic stats and a true ROI for spiders vs conversion over a 153 day period broken down per day.
Ask COSTS me $7.90 per day.
MSN Gives me $29.85 per day.
Yahoo Gives me $124.23 per day.
Google Gives me $227.44 per day.
Now I like ask.com but cmon… improve your fricking bot already. You are chewing the most bandwidth from me yet you give craptastic returns.
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Posted on March 10th, 2008
Ahh, now you all understand what I meant when I said YouTube is a moat, not a revenue generator. By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft (who were, truth be told, getting damn close to matching Google’s quality). And it does it in a way that Yahoo and Microsoft will not be willing to match. Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results? I can’t. That’d be the equivilent of sending traffic to a competitor. It’d be what I advocate at this point, but that explains why I am a stupid blogger and not some multi-millionaire executive.
Anyway, Google just distanced themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft. And they just provided a way to monetize YouTube videos.
I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own.
Truth be told even I didn’t quite understand just what an impact that the YouTube purchase would have. It’s all very clear now. It also is even more worth putting up with billions of dollars of lawsuits.
If I were at Microsoft now I don’t know what I’d be advocating. Ray Ozzie really has his work cut out for him.
Google just put Microsoft’s Internet strategy in a box. It also explains why Microsoft has put so much effort into Silverlight lately (they need that to build a platform to get out of the box) and, might even explain why the lawyers are sabre rattling about open source. The execs at Microsoft don’t like being put into boxes. That isn’t a place they’ve ever been before.
If Google were playing chess I think they just said “check.”
And you wonder why the rest of the industry is talking about FOG (Fear of Google)? Exactly.
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