Any regular reader to this site can infer that I don’t like Google for a number of reasons, the most important being their privacy practices.  Every search query, and what you click on is stored by Google.  Wouldn’t this information be a goldmine for modern paranoid intelligence agencies?  It is.  I would love to dedicate an entire article about the specific instances of government agencies viewing certain “profiling” articles I have written.  When someone uses Google, and clicks on your site in the results, your site can see the query used to find yourself.  This is just the tip of the iceberg compared with what Google has.

So, Scroogle and sites like it have value. Don’t blame Google for your problems keeping your site operational.  Be real computer scientists and write some new scraping code for crying out loud!  Get someone else to do it for you otherwise.  Why not get some real street credibility and write your own search engine?  Seriously, there are undergraduate programs all over the country that do this as a project in semester-length courses.

The Scroogle scraped results are not available.  I’ll bet there are at least 100 computer scientists out there reading this article that could solve this problem over the weekend.  In the meantime, throw together some results from other search engines.  Scrahoo!  Scring!

I want to go on the record and say that ELWsoftware.com will solve this Scroogle problem for the low low price of $10k.  I know it can be done for less money, but I don’t hear anyone else offering.

The truth, if you want to hear it, is that ads don’t make very much money for small web sites.  Relatively speaking ads won’t make you much money on big websites either.  Everyone likes the Madmen show and how it portrays a golden age where advertising actually worked well.  Where are we now?  Google makes a huge amount of money on advertising, but that only shows that advertisers are paying.  This doesn’t mean that you, as an intelligent human being, are watching.  In my opinion, Google sells higher positions in search results, not ads.  The fact that they put the results off to the side doesn’t fool too many.  By the way, does anyone wonder why so many major companies pay for Google advertising for their own name?  Why would Godaddy buy the keyword godaddy?  This doesn’t make any sense to me.  Of course they make money on it, but it seems more like they are paying for some kind of mob protection scheme.

What can be done about this over-advertising problem?  People trying to make money will always be willing to beg for attention through whatever means necessary.  Sooner or later they will discover how little they money is buying.  What if there was a new search engine that heavily weighted results that have very little advertising?  That could work.  Until then, I suggest replacing the ads on small websites with this simple promotional message:

This is where the advertising would have been if we wanted to annoy you.  You’re welcome.

First, let me say that this is only speculative.  Anyone who has read my other articles can figure out what my basic view on Google are.  I suspect that what Google does is much less sophisticated than any theoretical optimization problem would allow.  Good optimization techniques are slow, and don’t scale well to anything near the size of Google.  It sure is lucky for the world of computer scientists that simple and fast ideas work so well.  Sometimes “dumb” solutions actually work better!

Forget everything you think goes into a search engine’s ranking algorithm for a minute.  How would you compare the quality of two different algorithms?  You need to actually put them into practice and look at the click-through data!  Which ranking components lead to the most clicks on the first few results?  Which bad ranking components lead people to enter a different query, or look at search results on the second and third pages before they find what they want?

I have done quite a bit of experimenting on this, and have developed a combined algorithm for improving search engine ranking algorithm quality by optimizing for positive click feedback.  Contact ELW if you have a few million dollars and want to give Google a serious run for their money!

I can only speak for ELW, but I hope that the world sees this for what it is.  Google only wants you to use their services when they control the medium.  This makes some sense if they were losing money from scrapers, but we know that isn’t true.  This truly is an act of aggression against professional SEO firms everywhere.  Don’t get me wrong, ELW has not been inconvenienced at all because our research doesn’t rely on the same back doors as Scroogle and rank checker.  Maybe this is a good thing, and no complaints are necessary?

There is much more to this outage than meets the eye.  I’ll save the real conspiracy theories for our paying customers!  More to come.

If any of you out there actually trust Google or any of the other search engines with your privacy, maybe you should reconsider your beliefs.  You may think that preserving their reputation (Don’t be evil) is enough to motivate them to keep your searches private.  You were wrong!  When you search for something using Google, then visit the results, the sites you visit know what search queries you used to find them! I can hope that intelligent police officers and other law enforcement show some discretion with their searches.  The trouble is that I already know that they don’t!  The tracking software we developed at ELW tells us what you were searching for when you found us.  It tells us what you looked at.  It also tells us your IP address, and ISP which gives us a very good idea of who you are.  Sometimes it tells us exactly who you are if you are silly enough to use a government computer!  Have I said enough to give you the picture?  The information you are so desperate to obtain from search engines, with or without a warrant, is usually right there in plain sight on some other web site.

If you are involved in law enforcement, you need to understand what is going on.  Cops who search for criminals using search engines may actually find them!  The problem is that the criminals can see cops coming too, and they don’t need a warrant.  This website doesn’t need a warrant to see who visits us.  Google doesn’t need a warrant to see what people search for.  Yahoo doesn’t need one either.  This begs the question:  Can law enforcement set up a fake web site to obtain this information too?  I’ll bet many of them actually have.  In fact, I’ll bet the present infiltration of the internet would boggle your mind.

If you are involved with law enforcement and need some help in this arena, I strongly suggest you seek the advice of a professional.  It isn’t helping your reputation to be searching the internet like amateur private investigators.  ELW is willing to help set up websites, give training, and develop strategies for obtaining information through the internet.

I’m still researching, but I hear that the scheme is actually based on a true story!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of web site to help find opportunities like this?  Sure there are many web sites out there with coupon codes for all sorts of things, but this could be about more than saving money.  This site could use the latest in artificial intelligence to detect coupon and discount opportunities that actually make money.

In the movie, the character ends up with thousands of dollars worth of pudding.  If the opportunity for profit was not so spectacular, this might end up being a problem.  What if the profit margin was only a few cents per item you purchased?  You might end up with a warehouse full of stuff you don’t want before you make any money!  So, if you incorporate some sort of process to get rid of the goods, this might vastly increase the number of money making opportunities.  Every time I see some interview with a super-shopping housewife, they talk about how with coupons and rebates, something in their cart ends up being free.  So, why do they only buy 1 or two of them?  If there exists a way to get something for free, you should be cleaning out every store you can find!

If you are interested in making this web site idea into a real working moneymaker, contact ELW and we will help you get it started.

Maybe the guy should call up Microsoft and tell them that searching for some obscure keyword doesn’t bring up the most authoritative result.  I’m joking of course to make a point.  Should the search algorithms for Bing be changed because some moron’s site doesn’t show up where he thinks it should?  By his own admission the keyword is obscure, so what would be the point?  I don’t know!  I witness the same thing with Google and Yahoo as well.

Is it at all surprising that SEO has a bad reputation?

I don’t think it is a mystery at all.  SEO has a bad reputation because the public has little or no understanding of how search engines work.  Is there fraud being committed by less-than-honest SEO companies?  Of course!  I don’t necessarily think this is the problem.  The vast majority of customers we get at ELW have problems with their websites that are so easy to fix that people don’t think we deserve our pay.  The bigger problem with SEO reputation is that people think there is magic involved when there really isn’t.  Should the SEO community start bullshitting our customers more?  Content, metacontent, and links.  Everything else is blackhat.

There really isn’t any value left in being an expert in search engines.  Having a graduate degree in computer science isn’t very useful if all your customers have the same problems:  No titles, text, or links.  There really isn’t much that can be said about the situation.  The reason Amazon.com shows up #1 in a search for “online bookstore” isn’t because they know some secret about SEO that you don’t.  I don’t know what else to say.

So, what can we do to give SEO a better reputation?  Who says we even want SEO to have a good reputation?  Maybe the opposite is true!  SEO should embrace the reputation it has, because we all know some of it is a load of crap.  Be honest, how many of you have optimized sites for keywords that you know nobody will ever type into a search engine?  How many of you have sat back and done nothing, while your client watched in amazement as their site’s ranking improved for no reason?  These examples are true stories I have heard from clients!

The SEO bubble will disappear long before the reputation is repaired.  Search engines are at most a few years away from completely negating all reasonable attempts to influence rankings.  I think they are already there, but many SEOs benefit from the illusion that it is still 1999 technology at work.

I say we try to keep the bad reputation, even if it isn’t deserved.  There are still plenty of sites out there with no text that will keep paying the bills.

If you have read this far, and are human, you probably realize that ELW posted this article as a honeypot to test our spam detection software.  If you really are interested in leaving a comment about SEO, please do.  I don’t expect you will see any spam get through here.

SEO firms usually to to promote the myth that search engine algorithms are a big secret.  This serves to make them look like really smart people who know all the secrets about getting your web page to rank higher.  Is it true that search engine ranking algorithms are a secret?  Yes and no!  The actual complete piece of software that decides the final rankings is a secret, but nobody should even care about this!  Does knowing the exact weight that Google gives pagerank really help you as an SEO?  No.  The really important search engine ranking factors are not secret at all.

Do you realize how many patents there are dealing with search engines?

There are at least hundreds of patents specifically related to search engine ranking algorithms.  Reading search engine patents could be what sets you apart from all of the phony SEO firms out there.  That would take a lot of work right?  Who wants to read all of that junk?  Don’t worry, ELW is going to summarize important search engine patents, and how they relate to SEO.  Now you won’t need a degree in computer science to be a professional SEO!  If you are interested in link-building and keyword density, you have come to the wrong place.

Google has a link command, but experience suggests that it doesn’t work very well at all!  Think about that for a while, since it doesn’t make much sense.  Why wouldn’t Google want you to know what sites link to yours?  I don’t have an answer.  You should be asking Google.

You can still find out pretty easily who is linking to your site with Google.  You might just have to get a few bogus results included.  Do an exact search for your domain name like: “elwsoftware.com” and see what comes up.  Hopefully your site will be the top result, or you will need to do some more SEO work.  Among the list of search results should also be all the sites on the web that have your domain name somewhere in their text.  This might not include all the sites that link to yours, since who knows what people use for anchor text.

If you want to remove your site from the search results above, you can use Google’s site command like this:

“elwsoftware.com” -site:elwsoftware.com

Now you have a list of every site Google has found that includes your domain name.  It isn’t quite as good as knowing who links to you, but it is close.  If your page titles all have your domain name included (look at the top of your browser when you visit your site) the search results could include many links to you from scraper sites.  These sites scan the web for information, then they post it on their sites.  Usually it is just a summary of your article, and a link to the original.  It is often done to make it look like a site has more content than it really does.  It can also be a good way to get some good links to your site if you approach it carefully, but that is a subject for another article.