Piggynap’s Blog

I love Google Insights. It tells me things like Barry Chuckle is more popular than Paul Chuckle, and that Strictly Come Dancing is more important to the Great British Public than the economic crisis.

Aside from the half hour I wasted today playing with it, what else is Insights good for?

The comparison feature obviously has its uses - X-Factor producers will be glad to know they get far more searches than Strictly for example. It’s the search trends over time that really fascinate me however…not just to learn what’s becoming popular, but to compare what was popular in the past and why.

Let’s take a look at London 2012. Back in 2005 Lord Coe and his friends were organising their bid and winning the contract and we can see a huge peak on the trends graph. In 2006 no-one cared, but the Olympics were a point of interest again in 2007, apparently when the horrendous logo was unveiled.

Insights really demonstrates how search behaviour follows offline events and I think search marketers should take note. Rising trends, the next big thing, the hot news story…it’s all reflected in the graph. If you keep an eye on current events you can probably guess what’s going to hit Google next - what you do with that information is up to you. Building a site all about the impending Olympics or deciding to fire Paul Chuckle…we’ve got all the justification we need.

The subdomain problem is a big one for Google and Webmasters alike. Google don’t want their search results to be dominated by lots of subdomains all owned by the same person, but Webmasters might have a legitimate reason for using a subdomain and they worry it’ll get ignored.

The last I heard, Google were linking subdomains with their - what would you call them? Canonical domains? So that if www.piggynap.com ranked for monkey toes, monkeytoes.piggynap.com wouldn’t rank separately. It would be indented and counted as one result and not two. This means that relevant subdomains still have a chance of ranking for a key term, (the main domain might even play the role of the indented result) but several subdomains couldn’t dominate the page.

I also thought that subdomains would find it a little harder to rank - given the choice Google would rather place a proper domain first. Obviously this isn’t the case with domains like wordpress.com where separate blogs are owned by different people - presumably Google make an exception for hosting solutions like these. They still have to be careful however and avoid showing many results from the same site so I thought that in general they held subdomains at arms length.

So where am I going with all this? Well, I first noticed that Google were ranking their own subdomain in the form of books.google.com. It seemed that Google had made an exception for themselves. Then I noticed that a lot of the results were subdomains, whether or not the parent site was an authority.

I know this is all a bit subjective, but I just wonder if Google have started to allow subdomains more power. If I had my tinfoil hat on I’d say that they’ve changed their tune since deciding to put books.google.com into the results. But I’ve got no evidence, just some observations and a wild imagination. In the Webmaster Guidelines they say “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content” so who knows. Maybe that line will disappear just like the advice they used to have about buying a listing in the Yahoo! Directory.

If you’ve noticed anything weird going on with subdomains, leave a comment. Let’s be confused together.

As a Google Adwords Professional I have my own contact at Google who sends me the Adwords Agency Update every week. This tells me about new Adwords features and help I can get from my representative - it usually says things like ‘have you tried the website optimiser?’ and ‘would you like to take part in our webinar next week?’. This week’s update however contained a load of information about other Google products:

Now this is meant to be an Adwords update, so why would I want to know about the Google news archive, Google Reader and Blogger Following (not to mention the US Elections!). Call me sceptical, but I imagine that a lot of Adwords users haven’t even heard of these other Google properties, which means this newsletter is acting as free advertising to a captive audience. Adwords users might think Google Reader is relevant to them - after all, Google are telling them about it in a special update!

With the launch of Chrome on their homepage it’s pretty clear Google aren’t afraid of pushing their products. Adwords updates are just the latest victim and I’m sure they won’t be the last.

There’s been so much hoo-ha over the launch of Google Chrome I thought I’d do a direct comparison with the power user’s favourite, Firefox. Chrome is a barren wasteland at the moment - it’s literally a browser and nothing more - whereas Firefox is riddled with add-ons and tools. So how can I compare them? Well, I’ve chosen some basic key features I think no browser should be without and picked a winner in each category. Read on for the results…

The Logo

This is probably a matter of personal taste but I’ve always liked the Firefox logo. It’s striking and fun and does exactly what it says on the tin.

The Chrome logo on the other hand looks uncannily like a Pokeball. Sorry Google, but I keep expecting Pikachu to jump out.

Winner of Best Logo: Firefox

The Address Bar

Firefox 3 gives you URL suggestions when you start to type in a web address. These include your favourites and pages you’ve visited recently. Unfortunately the top suggestions are never what I’m looking for so I’m not impressed with this feature. What is neat is if you type enough letters it gives you the exact page you want - great if you’ve forgotten the address but know what it was about (it records the page title for reference).

Chrome’s address bar on the other hand is also its search box. It has access to Google’s web results so offers you search suggestions as well as relevant web pages out of those you’ve already visited. Unlike Firefox it doesn’t just search the page title, it searches the whole page to find your phrase. This makes for fantastic results.

Winner of Best Address Bar: Chrome

Web History

Firefox’s history is functional. It shows web addresses or page titles in a neat little sidebar, so it doesn’t intrude on your browsing. It’s functional and practical - no complaints here.

Chrome’s history on the other hand is far more informative. You get the time of your visit, a cute little logo for each webpage and the links look exactly like links. There’s more space and you can see the full page title - Firefox offers a simple record but Chrome offers browsing options. The one letdown is the history appears as a separate page, not a sidebar - not good for multi-tasking.

Winner of Best Web History: Tricky one this, but from a usability standpoint I think Firefox wins. Chrome’s history offers maybe TOO much information

RSS Reader

I really wanted to cheat here because I use the Sage plugin and it’s fantastic, but I’ve stuck to Firefox’s inbuilt RSS reader. You access your feeds through the bookmarks folder and get a simple list of headlines. It does exactly what an RSS reader should do - gives you the info you want without interrupting your browsing.

Chrome also has an inbuilt RSS reader and just like Firefox you can access feeds through the bookmarks folder. Forget about sidebars or lists though - clicking on a feed opens the whole thing in
your browser, presented as a complete (stripped down) webpage. It’s pretty but intrusive and defeats the object of RSS. If it doesn’t save me time I’m not going to use it.

Winner of Best RSS Reader: Firefox

The Scores!

Firefox

Chrome

Even with Chrome’s stripped-back simplicity it just doesn’t deliver on convenience of use. Firefox wins by a hair!

Over on the Google Blog there’s a new post about how Map Maker helps users in rural India to map their local areas. People can add roads, buildings and create “…base maps where there were previously none”. Google’s vision is that by putting these places online “local commerce, tourism and investment” will all benefit.

By a wonderful coincidence, Squid has recently been using Open Streetmap to map Withernsea, a previously-unknown area of East Yorkshire.

Google are soon making their quirky Suggest feature live. Much like your Firefox toolbar, it offers search suggestions to help you find new content on the web. The cool thing is that you get a competition figure (i.e. number of results):

The question however is how to use this data. Should I start targeting ‘piggy bank’ and ‘piggymoo’? After all, Google are suggesting ‘piggymoo’ so a lot of people must search for it, right? Should I disard ‘piggy bank’ because there’s so much competition?

It’s been speculated that Google’s suggestions direct you to Ad-filled pages, essentially increasing your chances of clicking on an Advert and making Google money. If that’s the case, why don’t Google go a step further and try and keep users on the Google network? (They could!)

If Google are that cynical this information is pretty useless. It doesn’t reflect what people search for but what Google want people to search for. On the other hand, if it really comes straight from Google’s database it’s a goldmine of information. I think some serious testing is in order to find Suggest’s true potential - let’s hope I find the time!

I got back to work only to discover Google have changed their Analytics login page. You now have to click a button to enter your login details:

I don’t see the point to be honest! Isn’t it even good website practice not to require too many clicks?

I’m certainly not the only one interested in the rankings of Google Knols. Over at Search Engine Land there’s been a bit of research done into the Google rankings of entries that appear on the Knol home page - follow the link to see the whole article.

1/3 of the Knols rank well - this seems to indicate that they have an advantage over ordinary websites. Could Google deliberately not rank Knols? Now there’s a question!

Google Knol has just been opened to the public after being in Beta for some time. The idea is part Wikipedia, part Squidoo and part About.com, with ‘experts’ writing detailed articles on specific subjects, from their own point of view.

At the moment Knols have mainly been written by healthcare professionals - a glance at the front page selection shows the narrow range quite clearly:

Google states that Knols will appear in the search results, just like any other website. I’m reminded of Google Books, which appear for many search results regardless of whether you want a book. Presumably soon Knols will be appearing near (above?) similar Wikipedia entries.

MSN used to be the worst culprit for trying to keep you on their own network but it seems Google is going the same way. I’m all for healthy competition but when Google have such a monopoly on search they could quite easily rank their own domains before, well, real websites.