Google Now Filling in Forms and Crawling Those Pages

From the Google Webmasters Central Blog, Google states that they are doing limited testing on high quality sites of automatically filling in forms to discover new pages. Sounds like they use onpage content to establish terms to enter into the form and they are avoiding any personal information related forms of those which require a login.

Obama vs. Clinton, Stats

The Compete analysts just did a post for their blog covering the primaries and overall attention, Obama and Clinton. Most of the data we see is a fairly narrow view, ie specific poll data, web traffic stats, etc.

It seems clear that in the relatively new field of using web data to gage candidate interest there is a serious gap in the quality of the data and actual interest. Best example for this season was the Ron Paul campaign. Time and again his web traffic numbers were stronger and faster moving than any other Republican candidate and just as strong as the democratic candidates. Apparently, the best explanation I heard in the end was that Paul's support base was simply more skewed to be proactive on the internet.


This Compete article takes a more holistic view, showing a number of metrics, not just web metrics, side by side.

Informational, Navigational, or Transactional?

A recent study by Penn State on the types of queries of search engine users has identified that 80% of all queries are Informational, with the remaining 20% being evenly split 10% and 10% between Navigational and Transactional. Penn State Web Search Study Press Release.

Google Introduces Previous Query

In what is likely to be one of the biggest changes to Organic Search in a while, Google will be adding a user's previous query data to shape the results of organic results. In other words, if you search for 'SEO' then search for 'Blog', your second search will be tailored more to SEO related blogs. Google has been employing this for Adwords so I guess it was just a matter of time. The real implication and where it will theoretically improve the quality of results for searches is in single word queries. So, in reality, optimization for multiple keywords is the direction of things to come.

This is not based on personalized search, but on cookies, so its not like users can really opt out of it. SearchEngineLand broke the story and covers it well.

Trademark SEO

I got a kick out of this one and you have to hand it to the guy, trying to trademark SEO. Apparently he has gotten quite far in the process, though you cant imagine what he would do with it. SEOMoz covers the Search Engine Optimization trademark drama.

Who Says Google Won't Control The Internet?

Google just launched Google App Engine, a developer tool to create your own web apps and they will host them for you.

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of
storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We
expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million
pageviews per month

Global Internet Ad Spend

Attended a conference yesterday in which one of the sessions a presenter mentioned that the total online ad spend per year is about $500 billion. I just ran across this piece from CNN Money which discusses a recent JPMorgan study (could not find a copy of it) called the 2008 Global Internet Snapshot. The CNN piece mostly addresses the mobile phone market, but there was this:

He highlights a stat showing that the global population of people
connected to the Internet - now 1.3 billion - has had a compound annual
growth rate of 20.3% for the past eight years. Meanwhile, Internet ad
spending of $40 billion remains only 6.6% of the global total of $605
billion and is growing at an annual rate of 33%.