I’ll admit it, I am a search addict. I search all day long morning, noon and night; on the move on my mobile, at home and at work.
Each day, 7 days a week, I spend no less than 4 hours conducting well over 150 queries, searching and scanning search engine result pages 2, 3, 4 even 10 pages deep. Organic results, I can’t get enough of them. Descriptions, domains, URLs, Titles; I’m sick and obsessed with them. I search at least 4 different search engines , 6 social media and bookmarking sites, 3 social news sites, 2 blog search engines and 3 comparison shopping sites every day. Web, images, video, books, you name it, I search it.
I search until my eyes hurt and are bloodshot, ’til I have a headache, my fingers hurt, my arms tingle with pins and needles, my elbows are sore and my legs feel numb. Then I search more, almost until I forget to go to the bathroom.
I search until my laptop crashes. I pull up my other computer and search until I’m hungry, skip eating until I can stand it no longer and then search with food falling out of my mouth. I wake up in the middle of the night, out of nowhere in cold sweats with great vim and vigor, to search something never searched before, and I squint in the dark quiet of the night at search results until my body shuts me down again. I go late to personal events so that I can search more. I miss important events, family milestone events, to search more.
I simply cannot get off this search thing. Why? Because it’s everywhere and I’m an addict.
I don’t want to give it up. I can’t give it up; I LOVE it. Why? Because it helps me live and keeps me vital. What does the addiction help me with and why is it so powerful?
- I conduct research on almost any subject and learn more to become well-informed.
- I discover products and services.
- I uncover good deals and better prices.
- I connect with new businesses and business solutions.
- I generate new business.
- I meet new people.
- I identify personal entertainment solutions.
- I decide which tools are most refined and best to feed my addiction.
- I learn more about my client needs.
- I understand more about competitive search niches.
- I become a better search marketer.
- I feed my need for search and get my fix.
I will never give up this wonderful addiction. Sometimes it’s painful and causes hurt and affliction, but it’s too good and too powerful and keeps me too happy to let it go. I will never give it up. I am search addict.
I wonder who else is an addict? And, how do you satisfy your addiction to search?
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Harness the Power of the Internet: People Power!
Jan 25, 2008 by Patrick Winfield | E-commerce, Search Engines, Social Networks
I remember when I first experienced the power of the Internet. I was in middle school hanging out with a friend. We decided to use the computer in my father’s office and got online to chat. Of course that led to starting trouble within the chat room and getting kicked out, but the feeling of connecting (even if it was very juvenile and idiotic) was lasting.
Well both myself and the internet have evolved since then (thankfully). We are in the midst of Web 2.0. I mean, look at who Time’s person of the year in 2006 was- it was me, or was it you?
Now you can sell your handmade t-shirts to someone in California, post a video so millions can see it, raise money for a certain candidate or cause or even connect with a classmate that now lives in Boston.
Lets look at few of these powerful aspects, some general and specific, of being online and postulate on where it is all going.
Facebook and MySpace. Social sites are amazing! They allow you to connect with potential clients, friends, 
employers or employees. Careers have been launched through MySpace with relative quickness, something that would have taken much longer through more traditional means.
Personally I have connected with some friends from school over Facebook and learned of developments within their lives as well as forging new venues and relationships for my work.
Digg. A giant content source! Easily the one and only place you need to go to find out what
is happening in your area of interest. Or simply stop by the homepage and see what is hot around the world. This has brought issues and ideas to the forefront and continues to prove that the masses will be heard. I am always inspired when I read through the Science section as well as Images. With the amount of people submitting content and rating you don’t get anything but the best.
StumbleUpon. I find new interesting sites and content all the time with this tool, right from the comfort of my browser tool bar. This social tool was built for discovering sites that are recommended by your like minded users. Jake just posted a great article about harnessing the power of local searching within StumbleUpon.
The site allows for networking and the toolbar allows for finding and discovering new great content on the web. This is a powerful combination of Internet function and social web.
YouTube. This community has amazing potential for sparking ideas and movements. Some very passionate people are creating videos not just for songs or commercials, those are great too, but for change and doing things many newspapers or journalists wouldn’t dare do.
Helping others is important. Do Some Good Now and Freerice.com have unique approach’s to the donation type of site.
For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.
Google. Where would we be without it? I have used it maybe 30 times today alone. The 
ease of differing to the search engine when a question or a need arises, a debate or thought has us stumped is amazing.My one friend, not the trouble-maker, would say “lets ask the magic box!” whenever we would get into a disagreement on something-anything. We don’t even need to own a dictionary or an encyclopedia these days.
Improving on our personal lives is another area where the web has excelled. Sites like Lifehack.org, ririan project and Zen Habits all provide information and resources to being more productive and improving upon our lives.
With so many personal opinions and voices out there, more able to reach a wide and diverse audience, we are having to rely less on corporate news and bloggers are being taken seriously. Blogging just may be the single best way to communicate and interact online. Public speaking for Internet. And did you know blogging is good for your health?
This may seem obvious, but with the ease and simplicity to buy products and services online more people are able to benefit. The elderly are especially beneficial because of mobility and health issues that may otherwise not allow them to drive their car 12 miles to the mall.
Consumer information and reviews is also a valuable addition to the shopping experience. The ability to find reliable reviews and ratings from like minded people makes your decisions and shopping more informed and accurate.
Sites like ebay and Craig’s List also create a huge opportunity for people to connect and exchange, sell or simply get together for events and activities. I have personally bought a good amount of film from Ebay and for a lot cheaper than if I would have bought it directly from a store. I also sold a computer and a couch using Craig’s List.
This is one of those resources that has tremendous value to educators and the arts. Access to information and images is so helpful to progress of education and culture. Some sites have vast amounts of additional resources such as podcasts, videos and photography in addition to text.
Look at one of my favorites, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You can view some of the exhibits and learn more with supplemental information.
With the progresses being made everyday within the fields of technology and social intelligence it would seem like brighter days are in our future online. There are many pitfalls and predators on the Internet and I would love to see more accountibilty put in place for users. Viruses, pornography, scams and stalkers are all bad things in my opinion for the Internet simply because age is not really distinguished. SPAM is another issue altogether that makes life difficult online, not to mention clogs up your inbox daily. Some people see real value in the Internet while others see liability.
I feel that the power of having the Internet at my disposal is such People seem to want to connect and learn from each other. Word of mouth is still the best form of advertisement. As our altruistic, whether your nice because you want to be treated nicely or not, nature grows online lets hope the rest of our lives off line catch up.
Now I ask you, what do you think is the best thing going for the Internet and why?
Thank you!
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Chris Winfield in The LA Times: ‘Mahalo, Call it a search-engine curator’
May 31, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Press, Search Engines
Yesterday I spoke with Alex Pham from the Los Angeles Times for an article she was doing about Jason Calacanis’ new “search engine” called Mahalo. The article was published today and I am quoted in it:
Calacanis, a New York native who lives in Brentwood, said Mahalo didn’t have to keep up with everything — just things that most interest people.
“It will take some time to complete, but when it’s done, it will be glorious,” he said. “Until then, we invite people to compare our results with any search engine out there. For results that we do have, they’re going to be five to 10 times better because humans have thought about them.”
Mahalo faces other challenges. With editors behind each search, there’s the opportunity for bias, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York search-marketing firm.
Alex Pham’s full article online at the Los Angeles Times: Mahalo, Call it a search engine curator
My other thoughts on this:
For awhile I have heard rumors about Calacanis’ upcoming search engine. One thing that I will say about him is that he is excellent at drumming up publicity. Will that translate to a search engine that is going to change the world or even make a dent? I doubt it.
The new project launched in alpha yesterday and is called Mahalo. Originally I heard it described as a cross between Google and Wikipedia. On the surface it sounds like an interesting idea. Why? Because right now many people actually look at Google’s results as a cross between Google & Wikipedia due to how often a wiki entry comes up at the top of a Google search. Jason has experience with creating content networks (Weblogs Inc), with getting paid editors (Netscape) and now has the backing (Sequoia Capital, Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban and more) to do it.
The biggest hurdles? Google, Wikipedia & Man Power
After looking at it just doesn’t really seem like a search engine to me. As Allen Stern put it:
I am not sure I get why this is a “human search” when it really is more of a “human directory” – right? Or am I missing something? Either way, maintaining those pages will be an ultra-bitch. What happens when new “gossip” needs to be added about someone, how will those pages stay up-to-date?
It’s an interesting concept but can it scale? It seems to me that this project would be extremely labor intensive. Why do people love Google so much and rely on it so heavily? Not because it returns the best result for the most popular searches but because most of the time it returns really good results for the obscure phrases. If you take a look at Google’s recently released Hot Trends you’ll see that people are searching for obscure terms as much as they are searching for popular terms. So for a search engine to be truly effective, it has to be able to return those results (the long tail phrases) just as effectively as the popular ones. Can you imagine how labor intensive that would be? Right now Mahalo is only returning results for the top 4,000 search terms (as determined by them) and hopes to reach 10,000 by the end of the year.
Also when you have a human edited search engine, you have to worry about things such as: objectivity (skewing search results based on the editor’s belief), corruption (editors accepting bribes for better rankings, mentions, etc – DMOZ anyone?) and retaining talent (editors being taken by competitors much like Jason did with Netscape and Digg contributors).
One thing that we will see is a lot of publicity around it. Aside from the mainstream media coverage, an interesting event took place last night on Digg when co-founder Kevin Rose submitted the new search engine. When Kevin Rose submits a story it is basically guaranteed to hit the homepage of Digg. As my friend Muhammad Saleem pointed out in a comment on Digg:
Very interesting to see that Kevin Rose would submit Mahalo (of Calacanis, ex-Netscape boss). We all know that Kevin-submitted means 100% FP. Is there something more going on here behind the scenes?
But it is going to have to be something really special in order for people to take notice (after the initial hoopla) and possibly switch from their current search engine provider. But hey, as Don Dodge from Microsoft said recently, 1% of the search engine market share is worth over $1 billion. But then again as Aaron Wall points out, Mahalo could just be:
- About.com, without topical expert guides
- Del.icio.us, without popular votes
- Wikipedia, with paid editors and rarely updated guides
- only focused on popular crap
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robots.txt: People Don’t Always Want Search Engines to Crawl Their Content
May 18, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | SEO, Search Engines
What goes through your mind when you read about the silly lawsuits against Google accessing portions of your website? What do you think when you visit the Internet Wayback Machine and find hundreds of pages of your site in its full form (almost)? Most of you wonder what is going on in the minds of these clueless people. Don’t they understand how the web works?
That’s right, folks. In case you’re not in the know, the web works in a certain way. A brand new site generally does not get indexed in search engines for a period of months. Over time, the search spiders find your site and your interlinked pages begin getting crawled. Eventually, someone will search for something and your website will hopefully come up.
Not everyone is happy with these search results, and oddly, some people just don’t want to be found. In fact, on websites that are relatively large, the spiders crawl so many pages at once that people have defined the silliest robots.txt files. For example, check the hilton.com robots.txt file (which I learned about during the robots.txt Summit at Search Engine Strategies last month). Note their first two lines.
# Daytime instructions for search engines
# Do not visit Hilton.com during the day!
Dear hilton.com webmaster: Search engine spiders have no understanding of English. Look at the picture that accompanies this blog post. The spiders run through a site, grabbing pieces of data to spin into a web — the World Wide Web — and then it moves on. It does not pay attention to your personalized messages (but on behalf of the spider, thanks for the attention). Spiders do not understand anything. Spiders are robots.
If you want more information about robots.txt, you can visit one of the premier sites for the Robots Exclusion Standard. Understanding the implementation is important. If you have personal information that you don’t want the search engines to find, you can block it out.
Simply use the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mysecretdirectory
This code blocks all search engines from accessing content in “mysecretdirectory.” This is also helpful if you have concerns about duplicate content. The typical example is if you have printer-friendly versions of pages on your site, but you don’t want to be penalized by Google for having these pages available on your website. You could create a robots.txt file with the following code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /printer-friendly
You’d obviously be replacing the /printer-friendly directory with the directory your printer-friendly documents reside upon.
There are additional applications of robots.txt. Some search engines, such as Google, will now let you specify the path of your sitemap in the robots.txt file as such:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
You can also be selective and block off certain search engines, including the Internet Wayback Machine, as discussed earlier. This way, old versions of your site will no longer be accessible.
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
There are a variety of other bots out there that crawl your site on a regular basis. It’s not just about Google, MSN, Yahoo, or Ask. You can get an idea of what works and what doesn’t by experimenting. Note that if you plan on blocking content, it takes time for it to drop out of the search results if these pages were indexed already.
Fortunately, in my post about the Google Webmaster Central tool, I mentioned that you can change the crawl rate of the Google spider. Unfortunately, you can’t be any more specific and invite the spider only during late night hours. But you can set the speed for the spider to crawl your page at a slower rate so that it doesn’t negatively impact your web server or website performance.
Two helpful tools on robots.txt are the Robots.txt Generator and the Robots.txt Builder Tool. You are also encouraged to read the additional helpful documentation at the Google Webmaster Help Center.
Before you get mad at the search engines and start frivolous lawsuits, realize that it is your responsibility too to prevent the searche engines from accessing your web page, if that’s your desire.
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A link for Image Results for darrent williams is the first link you see. Right underneath it lies three pictures of Darrent Williams. Think about the traffic those sites are going to get as a result of people clicking on those images and then through to their sites. The lesson – optimize your images.
For more information on optimizing images for search engines take a look at Grant Crowell’s recent post on SearchEngineWatch appropriately titled Optimizing Images for Search Engines.
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France and Germany Split to Create Competing National Search Engines
Dec 21, 2006 by Tamar Weinberg | Google, Search Engines
It may be impractical to start a search engine in the US with Google’s stronghold within the country, but other countries are aspiring to become national search powers, with French President Jacques Chirac’s acknowledgment that “We must take up the challenge posed by the American giants Google and Yahoo.” Initially dubbed as a “European search engine,” Germany and France are parting ways to create their own search engines. Germany will have a search engine called “Theseus,” and France’s search engine will be called “Quaero.”
The year 2007 will be interesting to follow with these competing engines, especially in light of China and Japan doing the same. Has Google already reached its peak? I’d say so.
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Actually, if they do, it’s news to me.
But I found this comment on their blog about Black Friday extremely interesting:
Start by typing “Black Friday” into Ask.com’s Blog & Feed search. You’ll find blog postings everywhere about Black Friday sales. See a blog you like? Just hit that pull-down menu and subscribe to it on your preferred service. We let you subscribe via Bloglines, Google, Yahoo, even AOL… it doesn’t matter to us. We’re uniters, not dividers.
We’re uniters, not dividers?
Where were you when the sitemaps standard became the norm? How come I haven’t heard that Ask.com is adopting the same standard as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google? Do they unite only on certain fronts?
I’m really confused.
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Google Still the Top US Search Engine, but Yahoo and Ask.com are Growing
Nov 21, 2006 by Tamar Weinberg | Search Engines
The October search results are in. According to Nielsen//NetRatings report on the Top US Search Providers, Google is still on top. Of searches within the US, Google has 49.6% of the search engine market share and a 23% increase from last year. In second place comes Yahoo! with 23.9% of all searches but a 30% growth index over the past year. Ask.com, too, went up in usage over the year — 25%. At 2.8%, Ask.com is at #5 behind MSN/Windows Live Search and AOL, but the 25% jump is pretty significant. (My guess is it had to do with its aggressive commercial campaigns.)
MSN, on the other hand, seems to have seen an 8% decrease over the year — which is unfortunate because it’s working on improving itself. I’m interested in seeing how this will play out over the coming months.
With Yahoo! showing larger growth over the course of the year and being right behind Google, will it ever catch up to Google’s good fortune?
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Google, Yahoo, Microsoft: The Competition Unites for Sitemap Submission
Nov 16, 2006 by Tamar Weinberg | News, Search EnginesOftentimes in the SEO business and even in personal website endeavors, we run into the question of why only some pages are indexed in the search engine results and others not. Waiting is a big deal — returns just never seem immediate. We wonder how to make our pages indexed faster and consider submitting directly to the search engine to expedite the crawl. We wonder when the site is finally partially indexed if Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft will ever reach those pages that are clearly linked on a page that was already indexed.
We realize that there’s more we can do but wonder what format in which a site should be submitted to each individual search engine, and we curse under our breaths because the format requirements were different for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (Didn’t we just design a site and already deal with formatting inconsistencies between Internet Explorer and Firefox? Why this?!)
While not a cure-all and not an on-demand tool, Sitemaps, which are XML files that list the URLs of a site, have come to the aid of webmasters, facilitating communication between them and the search engines. Previously different across all search engines, the Sitemaps protocol will now be consistent across the three search engines, making submitting your website much easier. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have already posted blog posts about it.
Thankfully, if you already have a Google sitemap created, you need not do anything — Microsoft and Yahoo will be using the same standard.
The official page discussing this unification is located at Sitemaps.org. While these three search engines are currently the only participants, other search engines are invited to participate under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License, which encourages sharing and redistribution under certain conditions.
The announcement was made today at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. Danny Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Watch, has posted the official announcement.
This is a great stride for search engines and is excellent news for the webmaster who has had to be overly concerned with different standards. Hopefully, we’ll see more standard unifications in the future.
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No More of These Google Newspapers, Google Radio, and Google Cell Phone Advertisements — Let’s Offer Users Incentives
Nov 14, 2006 by Tamar Weinberg | Search EnginesGoogle is everywhere. From its desire to publish ads in newspapers to its move to position itself in the radio market to Eric Schmidt’s statement that “Your mobile phone should be free” (since Google ads will pay for cell phones, of course), one sincerely wonders where Google is headed next. Are we in for an ad-based world where every media element that surrounds us is infiltrated by Google?
Google is a search company, but from its recent announcements of saturating traditional media, it is also a serious marketing company. There’s no doubt that they want to monetize anywhere and everywhere. But where should the line be drawn? With Google positioning itself so firmly in everyday media, it’s questionable where they’re headed. What’s next? Popular books with ad excerpts by Google — because it’s simply possible (and because they’re Google)? Will Google create another ReviewMe? They certainly have the capital to fund and compete well with the recently-launched service and can compensate their participants well (the YouTube deal closed today for $1.775 billion, not the original $1.65 billion), including providing their participants with products they’d want reviews from. That essentially allows Google to kill two birds with one stone…
Google is making marketing moves that really question the end of innocence. A clean ad-free world is long gone. My favorite part of Back to the Future II touched upon this when Marty found himself in the year 2015 and the billboards literally jumped at him. It’s already here and it’s in our reading habits, our listening habits, and our web browsing habits.
With over 60% of searches being performed on Google, it is in a position to be powerful and could change the way its users use the web (plus gain a huge increase of users) if it offered incentives for its loyal user base besides search results coupled with ads. That’s where I suppose newspaper ads, radio ads, and cell phone ads come in. But why not take it to the next level?
I think that Google should actively participate in its users’ ad programs besides simply featuring the ads on its website. Right now, Google is a portal and a means to an end. It has its websites, it is firmly settling itself in other areas of advertisement providers, but it could do more — and none of these other advertisement agencies can match it: it can learn what a person wants from his browsing habits and offer him incentives based on ads geared to his targeted search. Google can offer serious freebies with the goal in mind to spread a product or service via word of mouth. What better advertising is there really than word of mouth? Ultimately, it’s the recommendation from the reliable source that drives people to buying something. That’s why Social Media became so popular. This isn’t much different, and Google can maintain a stronghold on its brand — even increasing this a bit — because psychologically, people are driven by incentives and it will likely increase usage of its search engine.
Blingo already does something like this, though its search is based on Google’s search engine and nobody really knows about it. It was popular for awhile among my peers, but nobody I knew won anything and everyone ended up going back to Google, even though Blingo was using the same engine for its results. This illustrates how powerful www.google.com is and how Google really is the only search engine in the position to offer this kind of incentive to its users.
Truthfully, what could be better than Google providing services to people who are looking for the service — on its own dime? Google should put the freebie link somewhere within its search results to the product/service it is offering, which also encourages Google surfers to really read the content of its search results (search results and ads to be digested instead of ignored). Everybody wins.
Google can continue going in the direction of marketing in traditional media, but it can always do better within its own search results and benefit its advertisers and users in the process.
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