Just got this interesting email. Can some SEO experts tell me what to think about this email in my comments?

Curious about the part of email where it says "Click here to see the notice posted on Google.com." If you click on that link it just takes you to a google search but there is no notice posted on Google.com. In fact, I've never seen a notice on google about a sites trust. Is this some sort of trick?

best j

SEO Service <admin@seoserviceinc.com> to jason@ date Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 1:19 PM subject Google ranking consultation

1:19 PM (18 minutes ago)

Reply

"avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links"

A link pointing to www.jewelrypayless.com was found at the following location on your site:

http://mahalo.com/Earrings

The site www.jewelrypayless.com is considered a "bad neighborhood" due to copyright infringement and spamming. It is now being penalized by Google according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Click here to see the notice posted on Google.com.

You know you're on to something really big when the SEO's polluting the web make you public enemy #1... IN A T-SHIRT!!!

Note: I'll be wearing this to my next fireside chat with Danny Sullivan for sure!

{saving time by hartichocked via CC }

I get these great emails and IMs from Web 2.0 folks all the time. As I've said before some services are designed for the top .001% of the market and some are designed for the "the market." That's one of the things I learned a lot about while at Graduate school (also known as my 12 months @ AOL LLC). There is a very large market out there for internet services and that market is filled with folks who want simple, easy to use services that they trust.

Mahalo was designed for those folks. If you love submitted stories to digg, load TechMeme 12x day, and have over ten Facebook applications installed you're probably not the target market for these simple services--and that's totally cool! Some folks are cutting edge, few folks are bleeding edge, and most folks are just getting on with their life.

Anyway, here's today's IM that made me really smile:

• Hey, thought you might like a quick perspective I heard yesterday. Talking to a local friend of mine (40-50) who takes a lot of holidays and was complaining about how hard it is to find good travel on Google (hotels, destinations etc SEOd to death).
  
  I showed him Mahalo and he was blown away... he was wondering if he could pay money for it or something. He was amazed something so useful was free to use. He was really happy to save, literally, hours of painful Google research for his next few trips.
  
  so you know you're doing something right when the typical 'man on the street' is excited for Mahalo and adds it to his bookmarks.
  

Couple of important points in this anecdote:

1. Human's curating search can save other humans a LOT of time.
2. Certain verticals benefit more from human curation: travel, products, news, and health come to mind.
3. When people love a service they bookmark it. That's the Holy Grail of product design, getting someone to bookmark your service.
4. People do pay for the service Mahalo provides for free currently: they pay for it with THEIR time. They pay for by asking their loved ones or employees to do research. We save folks a LOT of time and money, and if you create a service that does that you're going to have an impact.

Anyway, I love these stories... so, if you want to conduct a little experiment forget about the hype around human search, SEO, and my public persona--that's all meaningless. Sit one of your friends or family members down and show them one of our search results next to Google, Yahoo, or Ask and watch the magic happen.

If I had not have done tons of market research in this fashion (including with out in-house testing lab) I would not have even started Mahalo (let alone raised capital to go after this market). At this point in my career I put my faith not in what A-List bloggers and pundits think, I put my faith in my I see in user labs. Pundits don't know jack about the market, the MARKET knows about the market (and you can include me in that pundit list... if you consider me a pundit).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend... I'm suffering with a throbbing jaw and mouth sores. Pass the vicodin.



{ vicodin by prodigal via CC }

The great thing about mixing it up with the SEO crowd is that they prove your point over and over and over again... first they tried to kidnap my search result on Google, now they are buying adwords to attack Mahalo (do a search for Mahalo.com on Google and you'll see ads like the one below).

The more SEOs fight you the more you know you're doing the right thing for the average web user. SEO is going to be looked at as a footnote in the history of the internet and search--a time we'll want to forget.

For more childish SEO behavoir check here.

We have an interesting discussion starting over at Facebook:

What would you do next if you were CEO of Mahalo?

Feel free to post here, but would rather see the debate over there.

I think this is the first video interview I've done for Mahalo.com.... comments over at Loic's blog.

I'm getting obsessed with optimization of Mahalo. We have a bunch of servers, squid, memecache, image servers, and a great team lead by Mark Jeffrey (who i've known for 10+ years).

Right now we are trying to get our very beautiful pages--designed by Jon Hicks, the greatest web designer on the planet for my money--to load in under one second.

If you know about optimization please give us some feedback and thoughts here in the comments. I have a great firefox plugin called FireBug that lets you see load times. Seems like I get 1.5 seconds for our serps, then .7 to 1.2 for second loads of serps (when stuff is semicached).

what load times are people seeing out there?

should we strip the pages down and make them less purdy and more fasty!??!

please let me know!

here is a firebug image showing 1.22 seconds. feedback (click on image look at bottom right)?

Kevin Rose dugg us!! http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Mahalo_We_re_here_to_help
Today my team launched our latest project Mahalo.com. It's a human-powered search engine. We've already completed the top 4,000 search terms on the Internet and we hope to do 10,000 by the end of the year.

Our Mission: To help people.... a lot.

Please take a look at our results and compare the ones we have side by side with machine powered search by folks like Google, Ask, Yahoo, Technorati, AOL, and MSN. I think you'll find that humans can really help make search results better.

Feedback is not only welcome, I'm begging you for it! That's the whole point of our ALPAH: Tell us how to make search suck less! We're listening and we want to help... in fact, our tag line is "We're here to help!" The comments below are open so have at it, or post your thought to your own blog and I'll link to your comments (keep them constructive of course).

Here's the press release for today's launch, which took place at the Wall Street Journal's D Conference (thank Kara and Walt for including me in such an amazing event!). It also has details of our funding including our lead investors Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, and Newscorp.

You'll probably be able to find some more feedback on the Mahalo project at these links over the next two days:

Google Blog Search
Technorati Blog Search
TechMeme
Google News
and at http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo_press_coverage

If you're with the media, a blogger, or podcaster and would like to schedule an interview please feel free to email media at mahalo dot com.

A friend of mine sent me to a cool meta-search engine which looked just like the ones I'd seen back in the late 90s and I thought to myself "these are illegal right?"

Anyway, I looked up Google Terms of Service and it seems very clear:
http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

• No Automated Querying
  You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things:
  * using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries;
  * "meta-searching" Google; and
  * performing "offline" searches on Google.
  Please do not write to Google to request permission to "meta-search" Google for a research project, as such requests will not be granted.

I pinged my pal Danny Sullivan and he pointed me to the EBAY vs. Bidders Edge case and the fact that metasearch has rarely gone to court.

Of course, it feels really unfair to use three people's resource to make your own--at least without their permission.

More:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-519959.html
http://legal.web.aol.com/decisions/dldecen/ebay.html
http://pub.bna.com/lw/21200.htm
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/4_302591

I love how the same ideas come around in different forms every four years as something new in our industry. :)

Looks like Neil is doing an OK job so far of increasing the search traffic to Calacanis.com over the past two weeks. He's only been able to push about 10% of the changes he wants to do to the Blogsmith software (the amazing software my blog runs off of--and that we sold to AOL) and my blog, but the results are solid so far: a 21% increase according to Niel.

Now, we don't know that this result is:

a) sustainable
b) because of the changes he made

I could be going up because Google likes my site more because so many folks have been linking to me in the past month. The Fatblogging.com (TM) movement and the payperpost wackos have both sent me hundreds of links during the same time period. Thoughts on this Neil?

That being said, I think Neil will be able to increase my traffic when he does all of his changes, and my position has always been that ALTHOUGH SEO can work in the short term it is NOT a good long-term strategy. The best long term strategy is to just make great content in my mind--BUT I COULD BE WRONG.

All of these changes Neil makes would have cost me $10-20,000 in consulting fees with an SEO firm from what I understand (correct me here if I am wrong), and these kind of changes do NOTHING for the reputation of you site. They get you a quick, free hit of traffic.

If you're a site owner I still maintain you're better off putting that $10-20k into hiring a great writer to do original research, video, audio, photos, services, etc. to help people.

All that being said.... I must admit that the SEO crack hit feels good. I can't wait to smoke the rest of Neil's SEO crack and watch my stats go through the roof for things like HIIT training and HDMI cables--of course, it makes me feel very, very dirty.

Neil: You said you would explain the changes... would you do a followup post about the two or three changes you made and why they worked? Also, I'd love to hear Google, Ask, Yahoo and Microsoft search folks comment on what we're doing.

This is an important discussion for our industry and I thank Neil for taking the time to explain his changes and educate me. Also, thanks for the Blogsmith team--Gavin, Alex, and Brian--for helping out. Side note/Plug: Alex and Gavin has an amazing side project called Emurse.com that I'm hoping they ask me to join the board of if they ever blow it out.

So, I'm kicking butt on the stairmaster and in the middle of the Daily Search Cast Danny Sullivan starts talking about our new social+machine search hybrid!

For those of you keeping track the last time anyone mentioned Netscape search Marc had hair and I was 30 pounds lighter. w00t!

Note: Daily Search cast is in my top ten podcasts right now. I listen to it every day... amazing information--for free.

We've built a new search engine over at Netscape based on social news results and Google's index. It's worth checking out: http://www.netscape.com/search/

The results page is very cool with stories voted up by users at the top, followed by Google results. The right hand column has a tag cloud and the most voted up stories on the web. Also, the search results are very high up the page (as everyone knows I have an issue with search results being pushed all the way down the page :-). There is a lot more to come, but I thought I would put this out there early for feedback.

Check out a search for something like ipod: http://www.netscape.com/search/?show=&s=ipod

What do you guys think?

Thanks to one of my readers for pointing our Microsoft's Live search beats every search engine out there in terms of the placement of the first organic result: 192 pixels from the top! That's about 20% better than Google for the iPod search.

Wow.... nice job Microsoft!

Check it out here: http://www.live.com/#q=ipod

Update: Jim talks about my approach to solving problems and I respond.
------------------------------------------------------

As everyone knows I like to point out all the good things we're doing at AOL on my blog as often as I can. Most folks complain that I only point out the good stuff. So, in order to be credible I guess I have to be honest about the things we are doing bad.

A couple of weeks back I called out AIM Triton for being a memory hog, and I'm happy to report that there are some beta version of AIM floating around that are much, much lighter.

Not sure if we will be lighter than Yahoo IM, but we should be much closer. Also, I'm not sure if the AIM people are going to take my advice and create an AIMLight and bundle that with AIM Triton, but I'm gonna keep fighting for that (at least until I'm CEO and I can just mandate it :-). I mean, why should we lose the top 10% of our users to Trillian and other light clients??! What's the logic in that?

Today I have to call out our search. I've got friends in the search group, and I know they're working on the issues--but our search is bad. Very, very bad.

Now, it's not the results that are bad (how could it be... we use Google results which are the best in the business!). The problem is screen real estate.

When I ask folks inside our company what search engine they use they say "Google." I ask them why, the most common response is "because it's cleaner." Sometime folks says it's faster, but I don't think that's the case or the reason. We basically all know that our search is filled with too many ads and too much collateral, yet we haven't done anything about it for months.

This is a mission critical thing in my mind. We have to clean up our act and start loving our users more than Google.

If I was running Search I would make it my mission to be *better* than Google in terms of screen real estate. Of course, when you're at a big company like ours you have numbers to hit and sometimes what's in the best long-term interest of users is not in synch with the short-term goals of shareholder. Regardless, I take a long-term view to our business and the long term view says we are going to get a reputation for being abusive if we don't clean up our act.

Let's take a look at a search for iPod on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOLSearch.com.

Google Search: As you can see a Google search for iPod start with two small ads (in light blue) and quickly goes to the iPod page on Apple. I've highlighted the first organic search box in yellow and noted the number of pixels from the top (238). Google is very generous with screen real estate and is the #1 search engine in the world.



Yahoo Search: Yahoo's iPod search has three sponsored links, is 40 pixels from the left, and the first organic result--the one people really want--is 300 pixels down the page. Yahoo is not as generous as Google and they are in second place when it comes to search share.



MSN Search: 285 pixels down, 0 pixels to the right--almost the exact same as Yahoo. MSN is in third place when it comes to search share.




AOLSearch: Ouch! First, we are pushing the search results over 198 pixels to the right so we can have a navigation box that no one really uses. Then we have our "Snapshot" module which features links to iTunes, Apple, a canned news search, and a link to our shopping section--not much value there. Next up is Sponsored Links, and we're running three to Google's two. After all that--538 pixels down the page--you get the first organic result. At 538 pixels, our first search result is below the fold on most monitors. This is totally insane considering that AOL users typically have smaller monitors. Bottom line: AOL is much less generous than Google, Yahoo, or MSN. We're in fourth place in terms of search share (hhmmmmmm....).





Here is a look at the four results side-by-side (click for large version): that tells the story right there. Now, just because search share and screen real estate seems to match up perfectly doesn't mean it is so. Clearly MSN has a lot of search because of their browser share for example, but how you present the results is *one* of the driving forces in our space.





If I was running a search engine in second, third, or forth place I would put *one* advertisement at the top and give the users (and the advertiser) the best experience out there. That's how you win in our business: by loving the users more than your competitors do. That's our big challenge: we (AOLers--the ones who work for the little Yellow Man) need to love our users more.

Anyone have any search data or reports on search they can forward me? (email jason at calacanis dot com).

Trying to get a handle on things like search marketshare, top searches, # of searches per session, etc.