WebConnoisseur

Google snaps up another Web 2.0 company. This time it is Jotspot. Jotspot is a wiki platform allowing for groups to colloborate, including via spreadsheets, calendars, email and more. In my opinion, wikis have a promising future. Wikipidedia has already proven the model, but once wikis become popular in smaller niches we’ll really see what their potential is. Though I don’t know the terms of the deal, this was a smart purchase by Google (can’t say the same about YouTube).

If you look at Google’s purchases, most of them would be deemed software purchases rather than content purchases, which is good. They are products that help people find things or enable them in some way. When Google starts purchasing content sites, I’ll be worried. Who wants their content finder to also be the content producer? Its like the many AOL users who don’t realize their is a whole “Web” to discover outside of the AOL blinders.

Of the major search engines, Yahoo seems to be most inclined to buy content sites. Google base was a project where Google came close to being a “publisher.” The project has changed over time and I must say I was unimpressed with it. Spending 5 minutes in base, you’ll easily see why most people choose to go to the existing leaders in job listings, real estate, autos, hotels, recipes, etc.

It is no surprise that George Bush uses Google, but what is funny in this Maria Bartiromo interview is how George refers to Google. He calls it “The Google.”

Click on the image to view the video on another site.

He mentions using Google to look at satellite images of “The Ranch.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Intelligence uses web maps as well. I remember when I was in the financial industry, brokerage companies were complaining that their employees were using Yahoo Finance instead of their own in-house tools. It serves as a reminder that users will often choose usability over the quality or quantity of data.

After a couple months of pondering, search industry leader Danny Sullivan announced his future plans. Judging from his post, Incisive media is paying Danny to help them transition SES to a new chair. Danny will chair SES New York in April ‘07, co-chair SES San Jose in August and will be a speaker at SES Chicago in Dec. ‘07. For Search Engine Watch, Danny’s last day will be November 30th.

By working together, Incisive will do a better job of keeping the SES business going and Danny bought himself some time to develop a new publication and events. According to his post, Danny will be creating a new search blog and will host events on his own.

As one of many people who begged Danny to continue doing what he is doing, but for himself, I’m glad to see Danny finally announce his plans this morning.

Nielsen//NetRatings just released September ‘06 search data. Here’s the data (I added the ”all others line.”):

Obviously Google is the big winner here. Yahoo, Ask and My Way received healthy growth Y/Y, while MSN, AOL, iWon and Dogpile are suffering. Backing the data out, I estimate a year-over-year increase of 16.9% increase in total # of searches. If I had unique visitor #s to go with this data, then we’d know exactly how much to attribute to increased search activity per user, but my hunch is that much of the 16.9% can be attributed to increased activity.

Rand posted a fun article on comparing website analytics with competitive intelligence metrics. Being in the search and analytics fields, I found his data very interesting. However, I’d argue that these sites are not ideal for comparing the two. Non-SEO focused sites might have higher correlations between the two sets of data because SEO folks are more likely to play tricks with links, Alexa, Technorati, etc.

Regardless, I thought I’d take Rand up on his offer to post new information given the data he shared. The first thing I did was to hone in on the sites that get at least an average of 100,000 visits. I wanted to eliminate the noise of sites with 1-79k pageviews per month, which might be skewing the data. This leaves me with 8 higher traffic sites to measure upon. The correlation results I get using the same method Rand did results in this:

1. Alexa Pageviews (0.70)
2. Technorati Rank (0.53)
3. Alexa Rank (0.49)
4. Ranking.com Rank (0.32)
5. Yahoo Links to the Domain (0.23)
6. Bloglines Subscriptions (0.121)
7. Number of Technorati Links (0.120)
8. Yahoo Links to the Blog URL (0.119)
9. SEOmoz Page Strength (0.04)

The rest had negative correlations, with NewsGator Subscribers being the worst indicator among the bunch. By focusing on the higher traffic sites, we see different correlation scores.

Then I thought to myself, “there must be a better measure.” So I thought long and hard and came up with the following formula: 100-[character count]

The character count is the # of characters in the URL for each site, meaning sites with less characters to type in will receive a higher score. SEOmoz, with 22 total characters in its full url string, would receive a score of 78, while SEJournal would only receive a score of 65 (35 characters in the full URL).

Matching up my new character-count competitive intelligence measurement, I receive a correlation score of 0.90, beating out all the other measures presented!

Advice to any SEO hoping to obtain traffic to their blog: simply go with a shorter URL.

I’m back from a much-needed 2.5 week vacation. I apologize for my lack of postings thus far and promise to keep the blog fresh going forward. I suppose it is better to slack on your blog when your readership is next to nothing, then when it has a greater following.