Google News, Inside.

Google Trends and Offends with ASCII Art of 9/11

Jonathan Dingman — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:21:52 +0000

Another bug with a Google product. This time, it’s with Google Trends. As Barry reported at SEL, there was some ASCII art of 9/11 in the latest trends.

This specific trend seems to be originating from Sacromento, CA. Each area can have its own trend because the way Google Trends actually works is it pulls data from Google Analytics, Google Search, and many other search related products.

In the past, Google has had similar problems with automated products like this. As we’ve seen before, Google had its very own porn edition a little over two years ago.

Matt Cutts has already come out and talked about porn filtering, but this is something different that may not be on Google’s algorithm-radar quite yet.

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Google Trends and Offends with ASCII Art of 9/11

Google Gets Ready for Macworld

Jonathan Dingman — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:33:31 +0000

What can you expect from the Google booth at Macworld? Plenty of Mac Googlers, demo stations, and plenty of engineers.

If you want to talk to the people who actually created the software you’re using or have questions about, Macworld is the place you need to be.

Google always goes all out for a booth, so expect the “fully monty” form Google, so it will be hard to miss them.

So if you’re already going to Macworld, definitely stop by — they always have awesome free stuff, like schwag and stuff. While Google is not handing out Google beanbag chairs, they usually hand out free stuff like shirts. If you catch Google at an SES show, you can even pick-up AdWords vouchers, valued up to $50 each.

I hope the show goes really well and wish Google the best for it.

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Google Gets Ready for Macworld

Which was the Better Buy? YouTube or Flickr

Jonathan Dingman — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:30:44 +0000

The year 2005 marks one of the largest turning points in the tech industry. Yahoo! makes a bold move to acquire a fairly popular photo sharing website called Flickr in March 2005 [press].

The year 2006 marks one of the highlight moments for the Yahoo! competitor, Google. YouTube is acquired on October 9th, 2006 [press].
(...)
Read the rest of Which was the Better Buy? YouTube or Flickr (931 words)

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Post tags: Yahoo!, YouTube

Ironic, Lively is Dead.

Jonathan Dingman — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:59:47 +0000

I find it ironic that a project named Lively is, well, dead.

Google announced that they are shutting down the beta project called Lively.

Here’s a short excerpt from the post about why it’s being shut down.

That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

In non-Google terms, this can be translated to: “We don’t see a realistic way to make money from this, so we’re shutting it down.” In reality, that’s what it turns out to be. Google will not resources on a project that will not generate venue.

Look at every other Google product/service and you will see that they are making money some how — or gathering data which proves to be valuable. Gmail: ads; Search: ads; Analytics: data mining; Maps: listing placement; FeedBurner: data mining; Trends: data mining; Reader: data mining/ads; Knol: content/data mining/ads; Docs: data mining; and the list goes on to where they are making money somewhere — whether you want to believe so or not.

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Blogged on Google News by Jonathan Dingman © Fireside Media

Ironic, Lively is Dead.

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Post tags: Google Advertising, Google Analytics, Google FeedBurner, Google Gmail, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Maps, Google Reader, Google Trends

Tracking Flash with Google Analytics

Jonathan Dingman — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:14:35 +0000

Google announced the partnership with Adobe to start indexing flash sites better. Google is piggybacking on that partnership to also now offer better analytics for flash sites.

For those all-flash sites that used to be a nightmare to analyze, aside from unique visitors, now you can see where people are going around your flash site. This is especially great news for companies like 2Advanced, one of the premiere flash design firms in the world [in my opinion.]

Here’s a quick spin around the block about how the new tracking system will work within Google Analytics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Great! Now that you’ve settled in a bit with flash tracking, here is a quick breakdown of the initially supported platforms:

Flash visual component
Flash AS3 library
Flex MXML component
Flex AS3 library

All Flex you say? You bet. Flex is the next generation of where flash is going.

Flash is becoming more and more searchable and measurable everyday — which is definitely a good thing. It really means that older legacy sites will be added to the index and searchable [which is a good thing for everyone.]

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Tags: flash+analytics, flash+tracking, google, google+analytics

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Tracking Flash with Google Analytics

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Post tags: Adobe, Flash, Google Analytics

Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation

Jonathan Dingman — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:50:18 +0000

Google Analytics has some new features that you will think are worth taking a look at. Advanced segmentation comparison.

Three simple words, but when combined together and applied to Google Analytics, they mean something very powerful.

In short, you will now be able to [easily] compare key segments of data side by side to create custom reports that are critical to your business operations/traffic analysis. Whether it’s comparing paid traffic vs. organic traffic side by side along side of real values.

Here is a great example that is described in the article.

Here’s another simple, specific segment example. Call it “Engaged Visits” and segment as follows:

* users who stayed on the site for longer than 30 seconds
AND
* had more than 2 pageviews

Then you could even take that segment and compare it to values such as how many people left on X page or how many people actually finished the sale process. Or maybe it’s to see if people are subscribing to your newsletter, whatever your end result is, Google Analytics is now better equipped to analyze it and provide you the details you need to make executive decisions.

The article published on the Google Analytics blog is quite in-depth and I think it’s definitely worth reading over.

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Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation

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Post tags: Google Analytics

Duplicate Content Horror

Jonathan Dingman — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:08:04 +0000

After recently running into a problem that I could not copy and paste or duplicate goals from one profile to another profile in Google Analytics, I decided to start the search.

After using the specific keywords needed for my query, I quickly realized that Google was serving a ton of duplicate content, back to back.

Looking at the screen shot below, you can clearly see that Google is serving up the same content, simply on separate google.* domains.

The problem I’m seeing is that there are over 100,000 results and after looking through more of the results, there are a number of results which are better suited to be displayed above the duplicate content results that Google is returning right now.

Does the “duplicate content” filter not apply to the google.* domain?

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Tags: duplicate+content, google, google+search

Blogged on Google News by Jonathan Dingman © Fireside Media

Duplicate Content Horror

Google Analytics Ramps up for SES San Jose

Jonathan Dingman — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:53:48 +0000

The Google Analytics team is just as excited for SES San Jose as we are here at Ginside.com!

And boy do we love it. The Search Engine Strategies conference is right up our alley. Google will be there in force, sponsoring the show, with a giant booth for AdWords and Google Analytics. Googlers will be headlining or participating in numerous sessions, and we’re all looking forward to meeting interested users and hearing what you think about our products. ~~Google Analytics has been given a 20% discount code: 2OG00 (two-oh-gee-zero-zero). Feel free to use it when you register here.~~

But don’t use the Google promo code, go ahead and use the special Ginside.com promo code! 20SPKER

If you still have not registered for the event, you should. And you ought to use the discount promo code above to save 20% on the conference pass.

SES San Jose is going to be an amazing conference. It’s a particular highlight of the year for me, so I’m hoping to see you there.

In case you hadn’t seen on this site already, I will be speaking at the conference.

Come on out and have a party! The sessions are going to be great, but the parties will be even greater! Especially the annual Google Dance!

I’m hoping to grab a t-shirt from Jeff Gillis at the Analytics booth before they run out. Be sure to grab yours too! (only after me though!)

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Google Analytics Ramps up for SES San Jose

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Post tags: Google AdWords, Google Analytics, SES

Google Analytics Now with Auto-Login

Jonathan Dingman — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:24:29 +0000

Google Analytics has for a long time required a re-login even if you were already logged into your Google Account using cookies. But recently, Google Analytics has changed the re-login to a single “Access Analytics” button. But, it’s still not a truly automatic login which it uses for other platforms such as AdWords.

It will be great when Google can get its act together and make sure that Google Analytics automatically logs you into your account.

Google has a few products that has this issue, so I’m still eager for Google to clean up the auth systems to accommodating for this.

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Tags: google+analytics, google+account

Google Analytics Now with Auto-Login

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Post tags: Google Accounts, Google Analytics

Google Analytics with its own Favicon

Jonathan Dingman — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:23:35 +0000

Every Google property has the little “g” logo as its favicon.ico, except Google Analytics.

Seems a bit odd that Google Analytics is the only web property that has a different favicon.

Props to DreamTimes on Twitter for this one

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Google Analytics with its own Favicon

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Post tags: Google Analytics