Saturday, July 26, 2008

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

1,000,000,000,000

Posted: 25 Jul 2008 02:36 PM CDT

I just had to publish a post that I could title “1,000,000,000,000″ (1 trillion) and Google gives me the perfect opportunity with news that its spiders have discovered that many web pages.

The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Google stopped displaying the size of its search index at around the 30 billion mark–which prevented a “mine is bigger than yours” tussle with Yahoo. While 1 trillion is an impressive number, keep in mind that this is not actually the size of Google’s current index.

We don’t index every one of those trillion pages — many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn’t very useful to searchers.

Still, 1 trillion is a big number. Need a comparison? 1 trillion is the current price for a barrel of oil!!!! :-P

For the Future of Search, Microsoft Takes a 10-Year Backward Step

Posted: 25 Jul 2008 02:18 PM CDT

What’s wrong with this statement, made by the Microsoft team building BrowseRank–it’s answer to Google’s PageRank?

“The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance”

“More visits?” - sure, spammers will have no idea how to inflate that metric. ;-)

“Longer time periods?” - couldn’t that also mean that your web site usability and navigation just sucks?

This has been tried before, but does anyone see Direct Hit topping the search market share charts?

Come on Microsoft, is this the best you can do?

Pilgrim’s Update: Learn online reputation management skills directly from Andy Beal. Attend the Online Reputation Management Workshop and save $400 when you register today!