We showed you before that Google Datacenters can be quite interesting to look at. Now Google has released another nice inside look into their datacenter policies. This video shows how Google uses sea water to cool their new data center in Finland. Google therefore is NOT using an air-condition system, but only relies on the sea water.
As for the nerds under us: Google used a tiny submarine to go through granite tunnels to make sure the tunnels weren’t blocked.
At SASCON last week we talked about Negative SEO and the tactics that can disrupt competitors, we carried on that discussion on our radioshow Tuesday. Some of them were funny, some were nasty and others seemed harmless. There are cases however that you are not talking about ‘negative SEO’ anymore, but now a case has come to light which touches closer on extortion than on Negative SEO.
Linda Buquet, a blogger about local and Google Places, yesterday found about a hundred results in Google Places with in the title “Awaiting Removal”. At first it seemed as if they were getting penalized by Google, it turned out to be a company trying to fraud unknowing business in Places. (more…)
Google just launched an interesting new tool: Google Correlate. It is currently available in beta in Google Labs. The tool enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. In other words: it does what Google Trends does, but in reverse.
The tool could very well be an interesting tool for SEOs doing keyword research, but is primarily intended for researchers. On their blog Google states that the tool is designed for researchers to see what terms best match the current trends in real life. (more…)
Aren’t they lovely, the new Google Profiles? And you can put so much information in it. Information which everybody can see. And download… We’ve discussed the privacy matters around the profiles before and I will be talking about the presentation I did at SMX about the profiles soon too. But there is a lot more to the Google Profiles. A Dutch researcher was able to download, export and import 35 million Google Profiles, with data.
The researcher Matthijs Koot, working for the University of Amsterdam, is writing a research paper about anonymity and privacy. For that research he decided to look at the Google Profiles. He noted that a lot of the information can be downloaded pretty easy. (more…)
Europe is a weird continent sometimes. Every country has its own rules and regulations, every country has its own culture and every country has its own way of using the web. Socialbakers did a small research into Facebook users and country population data in Europe. They found that almost everyone in Monaco for example has a Facebook account.
The numbers show that %-wise Monaco has the biggest penetration of Facebook users with no less than 95.47% penetration to population. That is a lot! You have to keep in mind though that the exact number of Facebook users in Monaco is not high. The small country has got 29,200 actual users. Compare that to the UK which has 29,789,040 Facebook users and Moncaco looks like peanuts. (more…)
After a week of conferences in the UK with SMX, ISS and SASCON Bas and Roy returned with a live show. They were joined by Rishil Lakhani. They talked about what went on at SASCON, specifically at the ‘Negative SEO’ panel. They talked about the different methods which eventually leaded to the talk about the return to the top of the results of JC Penney.
Other topics discussed were the usage of mobile in search and Rishi gave away some tips on how to get visible to ‘those who matter’.
The shownotes are below.
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Google doesn’t take them seriously, but many in the East of Europe and the countries below Russia certainly do. And for a reason, they are growing rapidly and making new functionalities and taking new steps all the time. Who? Well Yandex off course.
Yandex earlier announced it was going public and today announced the pricing of its initial public offering. 52,174,088 Class A ordinary shares will be available for $25.00 per share. The Class A ordinary shares will begin trading today on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “YNDX”. (more…)
Google is bringing in the celebrities. To get interviewed and to make commercials. We saw Eric Schmidt interviewing Tina Fey and Marissa Mayer giggling with lady Gaga. Now Lady Gaga appears to be a big Google fan, and a Chrome fan. She features in the new Chrome commercial. And it is a nice commercial, it has to be said.
Linkbuilding, it keeps on being one of the major parts of the SEO business. Getting links in is regarded as the best way of doing optimisation according to many. And there are many ways of building these links. I’ve discussed before what linkbuilders should and should not do when addressing bloggers for example.
You can make many rules on how to do linkbuilding. And so has done this blog, which has made the “10 commandments of Linkbuilding“. Now, whether they are correct you might be able to disagree on. But it is a nice attempt to make things visible. (more…)
Last week was a week filled with conferences. After SMX and ISS we went up North in the UK to Manchester and visited SASCON. This conference (Search Analytics Social CONference) had much in it, including some big partying. On our special SASCON page we have collected links to posts about SASCON, the presentations and videos from the event.
But especially for you, here is the closing video of the SASCON conference, a very special rap up, which is a unique way of ending the conference (live-version also on the SASCON page). Plus we have collected all the presentations so far on slideshare and will add any others which will become available.
Now what if you were CEO of a big company and wanted to become “Media Person of the Year”. What would you do? Show up in the press a lot off course. And be controversial. Maybe that is what brought Eric Schmidt to his several epic quotes.
Or it is just a coincidence. What is happening is that Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, has been named Media Person of the Year by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. (more…)
We all know that Google is testing a lot of things all the time. They usually do this by giving a portion of the users a new feature, function or design to look out. Based on the responses (not the tweets, but how people actually click) they figure out what works and what doesn’t.
We always love to look at the new changes Google is testing out. It gives us an insight into where Google is heading. Now most of the things we spot are indeed changes which are actually being made. Many of the tests which are spotted by many make it. But there are also a lot of changes which don’t make it. This weekend I stumbled on a presentation of a Googler which showed some screens of design tests that didn’t make it. What is interesting about looking at tests that didn’t make it? For one thing, it gives us an idea of how Google is thinking. And you still might see some of the test-changes become actual changes in the future, who knows. (more…)
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