One of the minor annoyances with the introduction with Bing is that all the tools currently used has to be updated (assuming of course you care about MSN/Live/Bing for your work). The sad reality of all this is that Google Analytics has yet to update its system to include Bing as a standard search engine–even Omniture has done this!

Maybe it’s Google just thinking “eh, with all the mistakes on it currently, they’ll just rename it again anyway?”

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Want to see effectiveness of “Google Bombs” still on-going on other engines? Take a look at Microsoft’s new Bing and type in some of the usual (now hidden Googlebombs) ones like “French Military Victories” or “Miserable Failure”

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Google officially launched its free music site in China where any Chinese user can download free Chinese music from Chinese artists signed by Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music. This noted as an actual effort considering that Baidu offered free music that for awhile has hurt Google’s search market share:

Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com.

“We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads,” Lee told reporters. “We were missing one piece … we didn’t have music.”

Not surprisingly, this is limited to only China and if you want to get your fair share of music that is being unfairly regionally blocked, then there are only two things hindering you:

1. Learn Chinese
2. Use a proxy that is based in China

If you can do those two things, then enjoy downloading free music.

Now the legal question: If music is available for free in China, then can the music industry here in the United States actually still claim you are costing them money?

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The Internet has been envisioned as many different aspects since the beginning; starting as an information educational network to an almost anything goes libertarian world. As it has become adopted across the world, various governmental organizations have tried, some with success and some without, to dictate domestic rules across the Internet.

Governmental organizations are not alone in this regard as multi-national corporations have been trying to push governmental organizations or the United Nations to impose rules favorable to the respective corporation that goes against the core of what a libertarian-viewed Internet is supposed to be about. Napster’s free music shut-down, Comcast’s P2P filtering, and so forth are examples of these aspects to re-make the Internet into a more structured system that is (in their opinion) more conducive to business.

It is in this same way Google’s concept that brands are an answer to the Internet not being very conducive for business and thus Google’s CEO calling the Internet a cesspool:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Yes, the answer was to allay fears over Google trying to take over the role of publishers and advertisers, but instead Google’s CEO let out an interesting view into what Google wants to change with the Internet beyond what Google has already done with its massive permeance (some say monopoly) in search and other online aspects.

The thing is, many people do not always want to do business online and are often looking for information, games, data, forums, etc. that come from random sites that are not brands. In fact, if the site is successful enough, it could actually become a brand from the very “cesspool” Google’s CEO believes to be a problem.

Of course, we still are assuming what Google’s CEO considers as a “cesspool.” Malware sites? Spam blogs on blogger? Thin affiliate sites? There are many definitions that people consider, and for me one of things that I strongly believe is that brands are not the solution. Sure, they can help, but so can random sites that provide just what people need when browsing the Internet. There is no one solution to any cesspool (whether the Internet is/has one or not) when you have both small sites and brand sites doing many of the same things that people find harmful.

When news outlets hype things up without enough information or when every far away local disaster is “breaking news” that has to scroll across the screen, that is a cesspool of useless information that these brands are doing. Even inside of the SEO world with brand sites such as SEOmoz or WebmasterWorld hyping fears of the tests that Google does to its algorithm on a daily basis (in this case the use of AJAX for Google’s SERPs). These sites can provide useful information at many other points but when there is a hyping fear of things without enough proof as news to me that is a cesspool within the Internet that should not rank or show up.

Large and small sites, or brands and non-brands, these can all create cesspools within the Internet, and one should always be careful on believing there is only one answer to everything. It is that hubris that could lead to unforseen consequences that will not benefit Google in the future.

Update at 4:41PM:

The idea of whether Google should fix some of cesspool it has indirectly spawned from its own services such as Made For AdSense (MFA) sites is an idea put forth by John Andrews, but then the question becomes, where should Google stop fixing the web? Paid links, paid posts, and affiliate ads are livelihoods of many people (whether rightly or wrongly) that can and has brought up and then knocked down their living standards.

Regardless of the view on this matter, whenever one company has something close to total control, these problems manifest into greater issues that all sides begin to fear to some extent, particularly when there are black boxes into what goes on behind various search algorithms or when more trust is given to some sites than to others that can be placed solely on one company, whether fairly or unjustly.

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Google got tricked again today first with Google Suggest, then with Google Trends (more or less inter-related) with the phrase, “I am extremely terrified of Chinese people,” first broken here:

At one point the phrase got up to position 24 with 10% of the searches coming from Providence, Rhode Island (#1 by cities).

These phrases show up in the hot trends when a group uses their network of people to search for the phrase, and if it is interesting enough, more people will type out the phrase themselves, snowballing the effect (aka: going viral).

Oh, and the page that comes up is NSFW, so I would advise not going there.

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Quick note that if you want to learn a quick way to use advanced segments within Google Analytics for eCommerce, I strongly suggest heading over to the Google Analytics Blog.

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Google, knowing that digital TV will become mandatory within the US removing the ability to use all analog TVs without converters, has introduced a digital video recorder that can report for Google TV ads into Google AdWords.

Through a partnership with Dish Networks, the tool monitors time-shifted data from DVRs to give advertisers insight into how and when viewers see ads during the playback of recorded content. About 25% of television households in the U.S. have digital video recorders or DVRs installed, according to the Mountain View, Calif., company.

Google said it processes DVR viewership data from millions of set-top boxes to provide accurate, detailed time-shifted impression counts. There are several ways to view the number of impressions, from same day to seven days. As with all metrics in Google TV Ads reports, time-shifted impressions reflect the viewership of your specific TV commercial, not just general program viewership. The data is available to Google Adwords TV advertisers for free.

This, of course, leads to it being used within Google Analytics to provide additional information on the ads’ ROIs for free as well.

Would this be television’s savior as companies shift budgeting dollars to the Internet that has the ability to track at a deeper level? Maybe, but the problem still occurs that there is no direct correlation to one watching the advertisement and actually seeing the ad beyond the use of vanity URLs that could potentially come through other marketing channels.

That said, computers and TVs are slowly (in a technological advancement aspect) merging into one whole unit that will likely make the DVR specific device obsolete in ten to twenty years once devices such as HP’s Media Center become the norm and TVs becoming just tertiary (not secondary because one has to have two computer monitors) monitors that connect wireless to a household mainframe computer.

Unsure about how that would work? Look at how Youtube is becoming interactive now and the huge jump in tracking that will provide in the future for television (or online video content) with a simple mouse click away.

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As evident by the latest Googlebomb, “cheerful achievement” that went to the White House website, Googlebombs still work. Previously, as Danny Sullivan somewhat inaccurately noted, Google tried to “defuse” Googlebombing through an algorithm. Google did not kill or defuse Googlebombing, but instead minimized the impact over the long-run (one has to really fine-tune what Google says and not over-react to the meaning).

Nonetheless, with sites such as Wikipedia noting that Googlebombing at one point potentially no longer worked, there was a public relations blitz using the public face of Matt Cutts to talk about how Google really detects Googlebombs through its algorithm. Useful information, but more insightful was two points in the official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Hidden gem #1:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.

Sounds like as long as no sites are talking about a new Googlebomb and the referenced phrase, then any Googlebomb that is kept quiet will still rank until it is publically exposed and that is only if a small number of people are pushing the Googlebomb.

Hidden gem #2:

Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Yet, having sitelinks for non-brand keywords either is Google’s opinion about what site should rank high for or not enough people are complaining/publically assuming what site to go to. Would be an interesting question to learn about from Google.

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Custom reports for Google Analytics, though second best in my opinion to the advanced segmentation filters in the latest update, provides some rather helpful and great uses for the rabid Google Analytics user. The Google Analytics blog provides some tips about what to use the custom reports for:

• Combining metrics from multiple reports
• Creating relevant drilldowns
• Simplifying reports to share with colleagues

With any new feature (or really with any features) there are going to be limitations so keep in mind how to combine metrics and dimensions. I have run across some of the limitations below:

• You unfortunately cannot directly create a Landing Pages & Visits custom report–Entrances (which is really the same thing), yes. But otherwise, you either have to drilldown by landing page in the traffic sources section (which, honestly, I have some qualms about) or within the custom report put in the other values you want, create the report, and then do the drilldown.
• Just about anything with AdWords data–sadly, the data within Analytics (when its linked) comes from AdWords and not through Google Analytics so it cannot be modified (that is, the click data) in important ways.
• Ecommerce Conversion Rate–I honestly have no clue why this is not in there when the custom report has average value and per visit value, but there you have it.

Nonetheless, there are a variety of useful custom reports that you can create and to throw in some fun, albeit more for data research, I can create the following:

• Ad Slot Position & Keywords (and vice versa)–I now know where my keywords show up in a far more useful manner to see whether the PPC ads being clicked on are coming from what position and which side of Google’s SERPs (Can I please beg someone at Google Analytics to provide the same information for SEO?). I can then see how the positions conversion rates are doing for each keyword. More for data research as AdWords has some of this information already and that PPC cannot change their bids based on top of the SERPs versus the right hand side.
• Keyword Visits & Bounces–If you ever want to see a depressing custom report, look no further than a custom report that removes all keyword visits that did not result in a bounce (or one that has all bounces).
• Browser & Per Visit Value–Should you really care about Mac Safari users? You may find that although they may account for a small version of your site traffic, the amount of revenue they generate per visit may necessitate you creating a website that works for the top browsers & computers.

If you are new to custom reports, be sure to check out the Google Analytics video below:

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The stronger the rule of law becomes in China, the more cases such as Gooogle’s become the norm. A Chinese company, Beijing Guge Science and Technology Co., sued Google China for using the same Chinese name, Guge (谷歌).

A year ago, the Chinese courts dismissed the case against Google China as Google had registered the name seven days prior to Beijing Guge. More startling was that Google actually responded with a counter-suit and today won 100,000 yuan compensation from the previous lawsuit and ironically forced Beijing Guge to change their own name!

This was a major mistake in their ability to research or a corrupt attempt to forcibly change a foreign company’s name that really came back to bite Beijing Guge. Either way, this is a just another example to show that companies can safely do business in China even when the Chinese government does not like the industry very well.

In any case, would it be too over-the-top to say that Beijing Guge should have used Google for their research on trademark registration dates?

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