Search with Design

It is becoming more clear every day that big corporations simply aren’t equipped to keep up with the pace of the internet at large. Yes, they may have access to all the latest hardware and software, and the ability to hire some of the best talent, but their implementation strategies leave much to be desired.

Not that it’s anything new. Since the early days of the web, corporations have struggled to find their place among the throngs of people browsing the web. But like the Amway salesmen at your backyard BBQ: they’re all push, no pull.

This irreverent look at the internet in 1996 helps to set the scene for how far behind major companies are and will be (go ahead and read that page through, ‘karjalae’ does a great job of lampooning the cavemen of the internet age).
The inexorable march of progress hasn’t made things any better for the heavy hitters in the commercial world. As any tech-savvy person knows, giving tools like Flash, Actionscript and SQL to the technologically un-evolved CEO of a major organization is like handing a monkey a flamethrower: it’s funny until he turns it on you.

Once the craze of just having a webpage was over, the tech-leaders began blogging. And although it took a few years for the bigwigs to catch on, catch on they did. This time, WalMart got caught up in a scandal, hiring a marketing agency to ’spin’ the idea of a couple who RV across America, staying overnight in WalMart parking lots. The outrage of internet users was surpassed only by the absurdity of the PR firm “that truly gets social media” (Edleman) being called out by BusinessWeek (whose web team doesn’t even have a proper www to non-www redirect working).

So WalMart gets another point in the ‘evil’ column and the internet continues to find new ways to entertain millions, and confound commercial entities.

The latest attempt to substitute corporate dollars for internet know-how comes to us from the Spice Girls, the quintet of British harpies, based on ‘diversity’ and backed by a marketing engine that would make Ferrari whimper. If anyone could leverage social networking into a crowd of screaming fans, they can, right?

Yes and no. Corporations are just now finding out that fan sites make money (a trick internet marketers discovered right around the time the iMac was released), and that you can ask people to vote for where they want bands to appear (how much exposure has Eventful had already?). Meanwhile, internet users are congregating at places like Fark, Digg and Reddit, and web designers and internet marketers are running ahead of the pack, trying to create the next social empire.

So when Big Spice asks folks to vote for what city they should play in, of course the internet’s equivalent of punk-music is going to suggest no other city than Baghdad, Iraq (Fark.com always runs the risk of being NSFW, but the first screen seems sterile).

But when the other shoe drops, we all need to remember that money talks, and in that conversation we’re playing in the corporate sandbox.

The bottom line is that the Spice Girls are going to play any venue they please, whether or not social networking votes them on to Mars.

But it doesn’t mean that they “get it”.

(On a side note, I came across this little gem during my research. Thanks, Dan!)

So I opened a free Stumble Upon account awhile back. And then forgot my password.

No problem. Forgot password link, type in email, boom, inbox(1) new message. But it’s a temporary password. Something I’ll copy and past once, and then immediately change to something I’ll remember. Done, right? Wait for it, wait for it. Nope. Wrong.

Here’s what SU has to say:

“How do I change my password?
Select Change Password from the dropdown meny on the StumbleUpon toolbar (a small, inverted triangle indicates the location of this drop-down menu). Stumbleupon recommends that for security reasons you should choose a password unrelated to those that you might use for Banking or e-Commerce transactions.”

WHAT!?! Download the toolbar? Are they kidding? What drunken CTO dreamed this gridlocked downloading traffic jam up? But no, it’s about buy in. About guilt. About them telling me, remember your password, or get our ugly step-daughter and then, if you want your Princess Password back, download the TOLLBAR, the Toilbar, the toilet-part, the troll-grrarr!

Thank you Stumble. Clever. But poor. Tricks don’t get customer’s to treat you better. Open email to SU tech department. Sure, more troll-grrarr downloads. But is it working to build screaming fans? Honestly, I’m just curious.

so there.

Its the same as My Google, which I don’t use. So perhaps this is an effort to convert non-My Google users by pegging the popular “i” in front of their logo. iGoogle’s first noticeable difference is the tabs.

Now you can have tabbed tabs if you are a power firefox user. Or, if you are a superhero firefox user, you will already have set your default homepage to a folder not a single webpage so that on each load of Firefox the browser pulls up all your favorite and necessary websites.

The other trendy addition are themes. Each pre-built theme allows a bit of personalization to the otherwise sterile and milky homepage that is synonymous with Google. The theme changes the font color, heading colors and backgrounds, and main portion of the screen where the Google search box and your admin controls live. This portion has always been my gripe with My Google iGoogle, too much real estate given to their search box, and not enough to my selected content and information. Smart product development though, it keeps Google literally front and center above all your stuff.

I’m heavily anticipating a mac announcement about iapple.com.

Every day I stare at 1 Tens. You know what I mean.

But what if, instead of doing 10 of the same thing, I did 10 different things once a day for a month.

Think of what you could accomplish. A mile a day. A chapter a day. A new recipe, a compliment, an email to an old friend, an hour extra of sleep. Whatever it would need to be. But 10 of them. What would your ten be? And to avoid just pausing at that question, and then continuing to read what I’ve typed, think of the first three, and jot them down. Anywhere.

1 blog post a day. 1 mile a day. 1 extra glass of water.

When I thought of writing this, I thought it would be easy to come up with ten ones, but look at my shabby list I just typed, “1 extra glass of water?!” What’s wrong with me? Besides training for a marathon (still 4 months away) it’s much easier to think of 10 things than to even write down 3. Perhaps its the process of commitment we associate with writing, but I felt as if, in a week if I haven’t blogged each day I’m gonna have an angry comment about what a flaming liar I am. Perhaps fear and guilt are good motivators, but only superfically, and only temporarily. However, personally, the process of commitment can turn into a pattern that then turns into a practice and if I’m ever lucky enough, a theory or theorem (I’m not sure which).

So, what are your 10? At least post one, come on, I won’t hold you to it, but I might comment back on your blog.

Yesterday I was recalling an article I read about some guy’s rant on up time. It was mocking those sites that claim 99.9% up time. Which made me think, how much downtime is that, really?

So, the basic calculation:

60 seconds X 60 minutes X 24 hours x 365 days

.1% downtime would equal 31536 seconds, or 8.76 hours.
Thats just a third of a day. That may not sound like much, or it may, depending your experience, your IT admin, your servers, but 8 hours in a power failure could mean big money losses for even a small company.

Ryan spoke of a report where they listed the downtime for the top 20 sites on the web.

Yahoo - zero downtown. None. Google, 7 minutes. I wonder what that cost them?

Up time is basically irrelevant. It’s cost per hour or minute in downtime that matters. How much would it cost you to be down, for say a week should be the major factor in the amount of money you put into solving the uptown equation.

This question has resurfaced in the SEO-world, and in my world recently, and so I’d like to weigh-in. Here’s the latest situation presented to me:

My friend sent an email to 100,000 subscribers, of which 1,000 of them were GMail addresses, advertising “college widgets”. The link back to his site contained the anchor text “college widgets”. He went from ranking #10 in a Google search for [college widgets] to #1 in just a few days, then later he dropped back down to #4. I looked at my GMail account and the email page has a PageRank of the 7!

The first thing to understand is that the way the PageRank in your toolbar works, is that when it doesn’t find any data for your current page, it extrapolates an approximate value from the previous page you visited as well as the domain. Because the Google domain is a PR10, your toolbar extrapolates a PR7 for your mailbox.

So where did the resultant change in rankings come from?

Well, the page in question has a title tag whose first two words are “College Widgets”. The page also has 59,000 links pointing at it (according to Yahoo!) most of which are from the same domain, with the anchor text “college widgets”.

In a sample of 100,000 emails, I have to think that at least 1-3% would have the Google Toolbar installed. Add in the GMail subscriber base, and Google has 3-4 thousand pieces of user data to use about the page in question. I would estimate that amount of user data spread over just a couple days would be more than enough for Google to trigger a deeper crawl of the page, and potentially index or count more of the backlinks.

As RC mentioned, you can’t triangulate with only 2 points. Google uses user-data, it’s time to face facts and build your websites for users too.

As a designer, I loved the invention of Flash some many internet moons ago. Motion, bad site intros, and tweening gave way to easing, elasticity, gravity, internet games, full flash sites and flexible ads. Now, with actionscript, you can build a slick slider menu to complete apps. Flash video reinvented itself and made it the industry standard for sites like YouTube. For designers, information architects, and those in interactive media, Flash is your Desktop Zeus.

But for the search bots, Flash just looks like one large grey box. Like an image. Like nothing extraordinary. Just something taking up space in the code and more space on the page. It offers little in the way of information on it’s value. The H1 tag says, “Hey, I’m more important that my little brother H2, or the paragraph kids.” Flash says practically nothing. “I’m this wide and this tall and thanks for passing in those variables and please run me at the highest quality. Thanks.”

So Search with Design could really be called GoogleandFlash.com

It could really be about how the human eye and the robot see.
About which perception holds the most value.
Now, and in the future.

To be good at any job, you need to like doing it. Not just the ivory-tower, CEO-stuff. But the boots-on, factory floor part, too.

An SEO should always be conscious of search. Trying to find a new restaurant, looking for a specific book, or in the case of my next example: looking through an online help guide.

I was busy converting some old Overture campaigns to the new Panama system recently. I was using their online help system to find out what [match type] meant (in the relative terminology of the system). I found the information I was looking for in the 3rd result, titled: “Importing Campaigns”, which contained a concise definition for every field name used in the importing process.

Every time I needed to refer to that information, I searched for [match type]. But eventually, I realized how stupid it was to keep using that term, despite the fact that I knew the title of the article I wanted was “Importing Campaigns”.

So, the next time I needed that information I used the search term [importing campaigns]. It took me about 3 times as long to find the information I needed because my first expectation was that the page I was looking for would be SERP #1. Nope.

Well, it couldn’t be any lower than #3. Nope.

Result #6 was the page I was used to seeing. So I went back to using [match type] to find the information I needed on importing.

What’s the takeaway? Well, if someone at Yahoo! was watching the logfiles, they’d probably see me importing campaigns, and searching over and over for [match type]. They’d think to themselves: “Wow, this guy is sure having trouble understanding match types. But he’s must be having a pretty easy time with importing, because he only searched for it once.” They might then conclude that I am new-ish to the SEM world, and that I don’t undertsand match types.

The course of action then is to improve the information on match types, and neglect the information on importing campaigns. When all I really needed was for someone to rearrange the SERPs for the latter.

It’s subtle, but it’s something to think about.

Okay, it’s just about time to kick this blog off.

SearchwithDesign is the companion blog to our business, 97percent.com. Here we have an opportunity to riff on the main theme of our work without having to be in a client-provider situation. So first things first, a round of introductions…

I’m the first half of SearchwithDesign. I started out making websites for real estate investors and real estate agents back in my hometown of Tucson. I got really interested in the promotion side of things while working on a particularly large website. Trying to compete for major search terms is part art form, part voodoo, part networking, and part math. It’s the perfect fit for me. While working for a small online software company, I ran into Luke, who is the design half of search with design.

Hopefully Luke can fill in some of his own bio here, but for now I’ll say that he’s got a great eye for design, and I’ve never heard him say that something is impossible. If you set him on a task, you can bet that he will have something to show for it within an hour.

So the two of us will be posting here on topics we find interesting but not necessarily within the confines of our specialties, and probably not even within the topic of search and web design.

Okay, now that the introduction is over, we can get on with the posts.