What search engines do punters use, no loyalty!

A NielsenNetRatings report out today shows that the majority of search engine users are into trying more than one search engine

Although Google naturally comes out top for individual usage

Nielsen//NetRatings also reported today the latest rankings of online search engines based on the number of search query volume. A search is defined as a query conducted at a search engine and excludes internal site searches (e.g. searching for a stock symbol). Google Search led with 47 percent of all online searches, followed by Yahoo! Search and MSN Search with 21 percent and 13 percent,
respectively.

More than 80 percent of all searches were conducted at one of the top three search engines

There are a lot of punters using more than one search engine

According to the latest custom research from Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, 58 percent of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, MSN Search and Yahoo! Search

And with the other two Search Engines

The use of multiple search engines is not limited to Google’s searchers. Nearly 71 percent of those who searched at Yahoo! also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, and 70 percent of those who searched at MSN also tried their luck at one or both of the other two.

So it tells us what we already knew, that Google gets over twice as many searches as MSN and Yahoo combined, but it does show that the punter is becoming increasingly savvy in using more than one source to get information. One suspects the day when the punter just accepted what Seach Engine was on their computer when they bought it, has gone.

Good thing too, if they find a Search Engine that gives them better results than they are getting with their present favourite, then they will be off to the new favourite, faster than a ferret down a warm pair of trousers.

Right now there is really very little difference in the results, but once one of them takes the plunge and cuts the garbage then one suspects the great shift will take place

Bloggers and Spammers work 9 to 5 now

Back in the "good old days", when the web was a frontier town, and we all did it for the hell of it, everyone worked or played at it all hours.

Today the web has become, for better or worse, "professionalised". Bloggers and spammers work office hours, and probably in an office as well. None of this working from home, with a beer or a coffee by your side. None of this jeans and a sweater, they even wear suits these days.

This WebMasterWorld thread explores when to, and when not to, post on the web if you want anyone to actually read your rubbish.

According to worldtime.com, it is 6:40am in San Francisco at the time I start this message. Why is that important? Because it means that a majority of the hardcore internet professionals on this planet are either showering right now, or already struck in traffic jams. In other words, they are logged out right now.

And the guy is right. The professionals that hog the mainstream of the web do not work weekends, certainly do not work nights, and are spread around the globe. I am in Europe, but things are fairly quiet until New York wakes up arund lunch time here, and things do not really buzz until the West Coast wakes up some hours later

Over at ThreadWatch Nick Wilson makes the point

Monday: Lots of people online, but not much posting
Tuesday: Less than monday, but more posting
Wednesday: Things start to heat up - lots of posting and reading
Thursday: Hottest day of the week for new posts and discussions
Friday: All hands on deck! Drunk posts alert!

and goes on to say

RSS and Timing

If you post a lot, as we do here - typically 10+ items a day on the main RSS feed then you need to really get your timing right for the important posts.

Quite often i have to jig the date on a particularly good post that just got posted at the wrong time and bump it up on the RSS so it looks fresh (rss spamming? heh..)

There is definately an art and a science to timing with RSS and forums type posts in general - particulary if you want a great discussion - gotta check the hourly logs and work out when the "critical mass" times are..

So there you have it, a window for those important posts open for 4 or 5 hours a day from Monday to Thursday. In Europe it's from late afternoon to early evening.

The spammers, the movers and shakers and even the poor sods that lap the stuff up are elsewhere at other times. Heaven help us, I have even stopped getting many spam emails over the weekend.

Me? I still live on the old frontier. The boundary between work and play is blurred. It's 7 pm on a Sunday night - time to knock off and go out for a meal with my wife. But depending on my inclination , may or may not return to the computer afterwards.

Bugger the Punter, we are all here to make money

Bit cynical perhaps, but true. There is so much money sloshing around on the web right now, that everyone wants their cut.

Traffic has become the name of the game. You acquire traffic, either for free because the world beats a path to your website's door, or you buy traffic through AdWords or other PayPerClick programs.

Those punters that have ended up on your website are all "yours", to be monetarised in whatever way you think fit and in whatever way will maximise your profits.

There are no "good guys" on the web, we all are here to make money. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The punter wants information or wants to be entertained, we supply that information or entertainment. But the punter would be naive to think any of us are doing it from the goodness of our hearts. Web sites cost money, the punter has proved reluctant to pay to enter websites (except porn), so the money has to be found elsewhere.

Microsoft (through their Operating System) and Google (through their control of searches) have created fiefdoms that monopolise vast chunks of the web. The world has been wary of Microsoft for some time, and now Google was thrown of the "Mr Nice Guy" image to control us with their Toolbar tricks.

But everyone is up to manipulating the punter, from made for AdSense sites that are nothing but feeds of hotel data bases, to the purchasing of links to enhance search engine positioning of your site. We are all like Pavlov's dogs - a set of rules is given, and we all react to make money - as much money as possible.

It is possible, but not probable that the web will evolve to decent content sites giving the punters what they actually want. The more probable scenario is that the big sites will become bigger and the small sites will become insignificant.

The guy that invents a new soft drink is never likely to outsell Coca Cola, no matter how good it is.

Spyware

Spyware and other unwanted software is becoming big business today. Even Google with their squeaky clean image have hit a lot of flack with their magic toolbar re-directs - basically you are looking in Barnes & Nobles web site for a book, clicking the ISBN number of the book will take you to Amazon. Google can send you anywhere they like with this toy which is Classic Spyware

Spyware and other unwanted software gets into your computer and performs certain tasks without your consent. This may include gratuitous adverts, sending you to web sites you did not wish to visit or collecting personal information about you. To monitor and eradicate Spyware get yourself a program like AdAware to , but what are you monitoring anyway, what is Spyware?

So if you have got this stuff, how do you know. Well the sort of signs you look for are

• Your Home Page (that is the page your browser opens at when you turn it on has changed to something that you certainly never set yourself
• Pop-up adverts appear even when you're not connected to the Web.
• A new toolbar appears in your browser, you didn't put it there, and its very difficult to delete
• Your computer starts crashing (more than usual!) and takes longer than usual to do things
  

Running AdAware or Microsoft have a anti-spyware program to remove the stuff. But how did it get onto your computer in the first place? My its nature, its very sneaky and you probably do not realise that you are infecting your computer yourself. Typical ways get spyware onto your own computer are.

• You install the spyware software during the installation of other software you want such as a music or video file sharing program.
  
• Whenever you download any software, make sure you carefully read stuff like the license agreement and privacy statement. Sometimes the inclusion of spyware in a given software installation is disclosed, but it may appear in a license agreement or privacy statement
• The really bad ones, do not even hide it in the small print, they just install it with your download
  

And how do you stop yourself getting it in the first place

• Get all the security patches. Windows is legendry for its failings, and allowing hackers into your computer. Frequently Microsoft issue free "patches" to cover the hole in Windows. Use their auto system to notify you when patches are available
• Tweak your browsers security tabs to try to exclude such attacks
• Use a Firewall. Most spyware comes hidden with other programs you download, some spyware can actually be placed on your computer remotely by hackers.
• So as most spyware comes bundled when you download other programs, the best defence is not to download it in the first place.
• If you want to download something, a good tip is to input the name of the program and the word spyware into a search engine and see if anything has been reported
• New click on words like "OK" or "agree" if a site asks you if you want a window or popup closed
• Be very wary of "free" music and movie file-sharing programs. Basically there is no such thing as a free lunch
  

So back to where we came in, if Google is now running spyware, does this mean that its OK, and is out of the closet? NO WAY, its merely Google wanting to sell your details for commercial gain, just as much as other sleazy operators have done in the past

Lastminute.com

It is reported that Lastminute dot com have "lower than expected losses"

Recent acquisitions have helped online travel agent Lastminute.com to unveil lower-than-expected losses for the last three months of 2004.

Lastminute is now one of the dotcom booms last survivors and struggling, I never could work out why the world was prepared to value it at around 800 million in the first place.

Profitability seems always to be "2 years from now", and never seems to materialise. They have consistently posted losses

However they have made several bricks and mortar acquisitions with funds, which makes them less reliant on the web.

I guess most of feel a bit aggrieved that I never made it to the stock market before the bubble burst!

This was followed by takeover speculation, this from the Telegraph on 12th Feb

Lastminute.com gathered pace, with the shares rising 2 to 115p on heavy volumes, as dealers speculated online travel agency group Expedia could be running its slide rule over the business.

And by 22nd Feb the BBC report an anonymous fax questioning Lastminutes finances

Online travel firm Lastminute.com is to ask the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to investigate an anonymous fax questioning its financial situation.

Shares in Lastminute.com closed higher on 10 February after the results were released, but lost about 5% of their value when the fax started to circulate in the City last week.

He (the Lastminute CEO) said the company was in no danger of running out of cash as the writer of the fax claimed.

Lastminute "suffered" from being the one that did more than anyone else to burst the dot com bubble. They were awash with money following their float, and have invested well to move away from reliance on a web site that was worth very little to start with.

However they still find it difficult to make money, have piled up large cumulative losses, and appear to be under active consideration by at least one company for a takeover.

Pop Ups are still popping up

If you think pop up adverts had gone away, I'm sorry to tell you they are still alive and kicking.

Last August Microsoft launched a comprehensive security toolkit for its Windows XP operating system, including a blocking facility. Whilst this is currently keeping pop ups at bay for MS Explorer users, there has been a switch to "pop unders" by the spammers. A pop under opens itself, would you believe, under the browser and fools the browser into believing that it is not a pop up, as it uses different code.

One would have thought that it would not take a team of geniuses to sort the problem, but they have still not managed it.

Now around 30% of all US house holds have ad blocking on their computers. One suspects that sooner or later the lucrative income stream from AdWords on Google could come under threat. Basically the consumer wants to avoid adverts wherever it can, and summarily pressures dictate that adverts must be pushed.

It will be interesting to see who wins. The dynamics of the web dictates that there is unlikely to be a cut and dried final battle with one side winning and one losing. Too much money is at stake, and skirmishes will undoubtedly continue for years

Travel on the Web - SERPS

I actually started this blog to talk about travel. Hotel and tourism marketing web sites is what I am all about. So let's start with the results that the browser gets if they try to get information on a hotel in London on Google

Of the 1st 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 1 is a hotel, and one is a hotel school
Of the 2nd 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 2 are hotels
Of the 3rd 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 2 are hotels
Of the 4th 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 2 are hotels
Of the 5th 10 results 5 are mainly spam, 5 are hotels

Result for any poor user is that they find it virtually impossible to find a hotel, and are forced into wending their way through bucket shops, that are offering in the end the same product.

In other words there are only 4 or 5 big wholesalers offering booking facilities, and everyone else is a sub agent of these 4 or 5. Many of the sub agents have nothing to offer the user, other than a position in the Search Engine results page.

End of the day frustrated punter.

My point comes into even sharper relief if you try to find say "London Airport Parking" . Now there are only about 5 sites offering parking in and around Heathrow Airport London, but hundreds of sites are offering information on then. They are all affiliates of the 5 physical car parks, but the browser has no idea of that and gets frustrated as they try to find somewhere to park their car

So Search Engines, what is the answer, do you slam all the feeder sites. How can you possibly have a machine algo that will separate the good from the bad. Right now Google puts a load of old rubbish on its results pages if one looks for a hotel. The links mainly lead to bad sites, who spam links and anything else to get search engine positioning. Rarely are these sites of use to the user. Somebody needs to do a hand sorting job in spam areas like "hotels" if the user is to get any real use from that search engine.

The cynic might feel that the search engine's only role in life is to make money, and stuff the user. In which case we will continue to get bad results...until another company comes up with a better business model

Blogging can get you into prison

Global blogger action day called acording to a BBC report .

The global web blog community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day".

Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

Blogs are free sites through which people publish thoughts and opinions. Iranian authorities have been clamping down on prominent sites for some time.

The long article then supplies commentary on the above self appointed Committee to Protect Bloggers and blogging in general, but nothing about the bloggers in Iran who have been imprisoned.

A better researched article in the Washington Times tells us that

The blogging phenomenon has exploded in the Islamic Republic. Today an estimated 75,000 Iranians maintain online Web logs, or "blogs," for short, that engage in a brisk virtual dialogue despite an Orwellian government that has a monopoly on public news media.

A lengthy article details the background to blogging in Iraq, and tells when the crack down started

The sudden arrest of online journalist Sina Motallebi in 2003 confirmed the mullahs have wised up. Motallebi, the first blogger ever imprisoned by a government, was charged with "undermining national security through artistic activity."

A petition circulated around an international network of bloggers attracted enough media coverage to bring about his release 23 days later.

And this has followed with further arrests recently

Tehran has harshly cracked down on the online press as of late. Nearly 20 people have been arrested over the past three months, and two Web journalists, Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad, remain in prison.

In January, Iran's prosecutor-general ordered that a number of major reformist Web logs be blocked by Internet service providers. Dozens of others have been banned, and Web journalists continue to be harassed, illegally held in solitary confinement and even tortured for offenses the government deems "un-Islamic."

But in spite of this Iranians do not want help (American help) anyway

"Obviously you have no real understanding of the Iranian psyche," wrote one blogger at the peaceiran.com blogspot. "We would rather live and die under the Mullah's flag than to get 'liberated' by Americans.

So back to "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day". I am all behind freeing these two bloggers, but I am not so sure on the motives of the "Committee to Protect Bloggers". And I certainly support those bloggers that do not wish to be "liberated" by America.

The Open Directory Project

If you have never come across the Open Directory Project a bit of background

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

And they have high minded ideals

Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

And further

The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of a volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web.

However in reality ideals are never as high as they are in the abstract. On the one hand the ODP has indexed "over 4 million sites" and has around 67,000 editors listed. Of these only 6000 or 7000 are active editors. And it begs the question as to who first of all wants to become an editor, why they want to edit and who approves them for the job.

The end result is that a motley mixture of editors exist, from the knowledgeable to the amateur, from the altruistic to the downright corrupt. As someone said "there is no such thing as a free lunch", and this tends to apply to ODP editors.

Consider the management hierarchy. A common or garden editor can only edit in a small portion of ODP, then as their number of edits grows, then they tend to rise in the hierarchy, getting a wider area of editorial responsability, until they become an NCO (Editall and then Meta) . That's as far as volunteers get. Next stage up is officer class, confined to paid managers from ODP's owners, AOL.

Problem is AOL acquired ODP, when they took over Netscape. AOL are not too interested in ODP, and little money or staff resources have been put into it. Hence ODP has been allowed to drift for a number of years now. And the NCOs can descend to Lord of the Flies type of behavior when left to their own devices.

So a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. A real pity that they could not get their act together, and make ODP work for the user, rather than being allowed to lapse into something that has become of little relevance to anybody today

Mark Jen - from the Google PR department

I don't know if you have been following the saga of Mark Jen. The story goes that he:-

1. Joined Google, from Microsoft, on Monday 17th January
2. Made a number of blog posts vaguely critical of Google.
3. Was made to remove them from his blog by his employer, Google
4. Was fired on Friday 28th Jan after 2 weeks with Google

He then stops blogging for a while and reappears on Friday 11th Feb

hi everyone. It's been a hectic two weeks but i'll have some new posts ready soon. if you want up to the minute updates, just subscribe to my RSS feed. in the meantime, to take advantage of the traffic, i've added adsense to my website on the sidebar. don't worry, all proceeds will be going to charity :).

And follows this with

on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content - the comments on financial performance and future products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest about communicating to users and customers, i'm not insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i would have.

There then follows a few entries over the next two weeks which are bland in character, and appear to have been written by a PR man from a large company who needed to fill space and had little to say

Note that Mark Jen has added Adsense, and later Amazon to his site with all proceeds going to charity. Given that at this point he is supposed to be an out of work techie, why on earth would he give the money to charity. If he was genuine, he would need it himself. However if the originator of the "Mark Jen" saga was a hoaxer, but with blue chip credentials, they would be anxious not to be seen to be making money from AdSense

The whole "Mark Jen" thing stinks of a wind up. I am not sure who is behind it, but no doubt the perpetrators are looking for masses of PR (and LINKS galore) one they decide to out themselves.

Hopefully the poor sod in the PR department who is having to fill the site on a spasmodic basis is looking forward to the freedom he will get when his employers allow the Mark Jen site to die.

Welcome To Utter Bollocks

Why have yet another Blog? For no good reason other than everyone is up to it. A lot is to do with spamming and getting the maximum number of links out there for your own web sites, and annoying the hell out of other bloggers, like me, by posting spam and other rubbish on blogs

So that's why its called Utter Bollocks. The aim is not serious, though I can be riled as easily as the next man. More to demonstrate the sheer stupidity of publishing my thoughts on the web. Who wants to read them, I really have no idea. Who wants to spam them, well I'll be interested to see who is daft enough to try to add pointless URLs here.

Any that are not relevant will be removed. So its a little futile your wasting your time and mine adding them. However the spamming industry is so sophisticated these days that spamming can be done automatically. Anyway, friendly warning don't do it, its not worth it.

Spam is universal today, a guy has just been arrested for Spim , Spim is the new word for spamming IMs.

Anthony Greco, 18, was arrested Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport, where prosecutors said they lured him from his upstate New York home for what he expected would be a meeting with the president of MySpace.com, a popular social-networking company whose users Greco allegedly spammed.

Greco had threatened to tell other spammers how he sent the unsolicited instant messages to MySpace users last fall if he wasn't given an exclusive marketing contract with the company, according to a sworn investigator's statement filed in Los Angeles federal court.

A great place to catch up on Bollocks is at ThreadWatch where better writers of "utter bollocks" than I are to be found. Perhaps not at weekends, when the good, the great and even the slightly dodgy, are taking the weekend off from making the web a better place - or at least a more profitable one for themselves.