First, the anatomy of Google search result:

On top there’s the clickable site link in blue whch lists the title of the page being hyperlinked to. Beneath the link is the “snippet” of text in black which is one or more excerpts from the content of the linked page ,with words from the user’s search query highlighted in bold. Below the snippet is the URL in green which indicates the source of this content, followed by a pair of light blue links with some advanced features.

As a rule, web content owners love the blue site link and the green site URL, but have mixed feelings about the black snippet. This is because the former elements are useful to bring search users directly to the content (where revenue-producing ads may be shown), whereas the snippet runs the risk of providing the answer to the search user’s presumed question without leaving Google at all.

The article I read this morning describes tests by Google on the effects of lengthening this snippet. This change would benefit end users by potentially answering their question in as few clicks as possible. It would also benefit Google because each user’s eyeballs will remain planted on Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages), and thus their ads, for a little bit longer. The only potential losers here would be the content owners who spent money and time to create this content.

This all culminates into the basic principles of the WWW, with potentially serious ramifications. For instance, the web is a series of open standards like HTML which provide the full source of every published page to every visitor. This means this material can be cut, pasted, copied, republished, and printed with or without the permission of the content author. This permission is implicit with the act of publishing content to the web – If you put your content on a web page you are effectively letting go of it.

I can’t duplicate these long snippet tests so I’ll be a good web neighbour by directing my readers to the screenshot on the source article. Compare it versus my screenshot above, showing the traditional 155 character snippet.

A quick interjection – Google doesn’t keep this motive secret by any means. According to Google’s corporate page:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Snippets aren’t the only means at Google’s disposal to fulfill this mission statement. They’ve recently added functionality allowing users to ask questions with common factual answers, and the answer is displayed in line with the organic SERPs (meaning the results linking to pages with the queried keywords – natural search behaviour). Even though it takes time and effort to compose web pages with these facts, it’s debatable whether Google publishing common knowledge could be considered stealing revenue from websites with the same data.

Personally, I’m ambivilent on the topic. I tend to gravitate toward whatever solution will most benefit the end-users, plus I expect a longer snippet might further entice those users to visit the source material. I do empathize with web content publishers, though, since they must opt out of Google (perhaps at their peril, traffic-wise) to suppress this “scraping” of their content.

In Google’s favour, they are quite generous in their own conformity with open standards. They permit the parsing and republishing of their search results (which can potentially strip out their valuable ads), and freely allow hooks into their other services (like Gmail) which allows you to enjoy their content without relying on their chosen form of delivery.

For content owners feeling at odds with the prospect of extended snippets, Google provides its usual choices: take it or leave it. Webmasters may opt out of Google search listings at any time; most do not.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Google’s parrot Polly wants a bigger cracker

That’s right. 1UP has gone down the tubes. The top story on 1UP.com tells of its recent buyout by self-proclaimed “gamer lifestyle portal” UGO.

1UP has been in a desperate state for a little while now, mostly following parent company Ziff Davis filing for bankruptcy last year. It’s obvious that UGO picked up this hot property due to its street cred alone, oblivious to the fact that it’s 1UP’s reputable and highly intelligent staff that earned it this credibility. It’s obvious because UGO laid off 40 promenant staff, including some veteran editors whom I respected very much. A peek at UGO’s senior staff doesn’t instill much faith that they even know what “gamer lifestyle” is.

A full list of 1UP’s canned staff can be found in this Joystiq report.

I doubt these layoffs came as a surprise to any 1UP staff, though the immediacy probably blindsided most. It wasn’t long ago that Ziff Davis shut down Games for Windows Magazine (nee Computer Gaming World) with Editor In Chief Jeff Green jumping ship shortly thereafter, followed a week later by the intellectual and crass Shawn Elliottt, both of whom now work as game designers at major development houses. These two talented fellows are luckier than the others because they are now comfortably employed.

I’m pretty furious at UGO, whoever they are. They’ve spelled the end of my favourite TV show, the 1UP Show, and some of my favourite podcasts, not to mention the editorial articles that were heads and shoulders above pretty much every other gaming site. What made 1UP unique was the fact that they were journalists in the true sense of the word. Its editors were insightful and articulate and found a way to portray a fun editorial voice without dumbing down the verbiage or impact of the content. I don’t know where to get this experience now, but considering the numerous mentions of inane “Top” and “Best” lists on its front page I can guess it won’t be UGO.

As former senior editor Ryan Scott would say, “Damn.”

P.s., anyone know where I can get the full archives of the 1UP Show? I can only get the last 20 or so from Miro, but there’s been about 150 episodes. I contacted several people at 1UP over the years, begging them to let me pay for this free content so that I could own it on a disc, but no one ever replied.

P.p.s., here’s Jeff Green’s expanded reaction from his blog. This man worked for Computer Gaming World magazine for 17 years so I appreciate his omniscient more than any other on this matter. The other editors called him “Dad”.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

1UP, 40 down

Here’s his article on Google Hot or Not.

It totally reminded me of one of jPod’s Kam Fong‘s many underworld operations.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Gaming the tubes

I began as a lurker in early 2006, sopping up the then tech-only news stories whenever Slashdot, my home page of many years, hadn’t saturated my sponge. I loved Digg’s concept of democratizing news, empowering its readership to grant its yea or nay for each story and each user comment, imposing the law of the jungle to separate the cheetahs from the zebu.

My impressions at that time were largely favourable but not wholly impressed. My own attempts to submit stories I found interesting all fell flat with fewer than 5 Diggs, and the sophistication of conversation fell far below that of Slashdot which uses a similar peer comment ranking system. Digg’s biggest asset was the sheer volume of stories, titilating me technologically at all times between less-frequent but generally harder-hitting Slashdot stories.

About a year later Digg’s eyes widened like saucers at the prospect of broadening its audience, so they opened the system up to the most mundane of news – non-tech news. At this point the floodgates opened and the masses flocked to Digg like Fox News to conjecture. With this influx of traffic came increasingly pervasive ads, many of which were animated and covered the primary content, uninvited, until being manually dismissed.

I enjoyed, but mostly endured the new news topics, largely because I had to. I had a user account which enabled me to toggle categories on Digg’s front page, but I chiefly navigated Digg through an RSS feed which was the same for everybody, including all topics. This subjected me to endless celebrity gossip, brainless top-10 lists, and worst of all, American politics. Specifically, Ron Paul and his overly aggressive supporters provided the last straw.

By this time the persona of Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, appeared to have changed as well. I knew him first as a mousy troublemaker as “The Dark Tipper” on TechTV’s The Screen Savers show, offering black hat networking tricks and shadowey . He’s since seemingly evolved into a juvenile frat boy, hosting a variety of podcasts and web TV shows, openly drinking malt liquor and guffawing over the day’s sensationalist stories about sports bloopers and Hooters restaurant embarassments. Even his attempts to return to his more credible roots, by means of technology web shows, fell flat as he’d introduce fascinating topics involving meticulous handiwork, only to “start wipe” past the squeamish details in a fell swoop of brainless TV magic. I felt like the world had successfully swallowed Kevin Rose.

I’ve not returned to Digg since April, and have experimented instead with hosting my own RSS aggregator servers and similar solutions. I feel that in this day and age the ideal solution is for MY news to come to ME, not for me to seek out other people’s news as I did on Digg. Perhaps others agree with me.

A speculative story on the Search & Social blog prompted me to check out Digg’s Alexa traffic ratings myself. I was pretty astounded at the sharp dropoff of viewers around June of this year:

The increase in traffic from August 2007 through June 2008 is almost linear, with a sudden dramatic dropoff immediatley after. I wonder what could be the cause of this? Rumours of a Digg buyout have circulated for years, yet never seemed to find a suitable beau. If my web service showed such a linear increase in traffic I’d be reluctant to pin a price on it as well. Could it be that Digg has missed the gravy boat?

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Digg your own hole

You know what would clarify 6 million words? About 100 more words!

I’ve had some pretty amazing viewership numbers (nearly 68,000 as of this writing) on my very simple YouTube screencast of my old song, Technophrenia, being played in ModPlug Tracker. I enabled email notifications for the comments and have been doing my best to reply to people’s questions about how I wrote the song. Unfortunately, YouTube’s comment system is atrocious and randomly discards my replies even after it assures me they’ve been successfully submitted.

I noticed some videos featuring very annoying “annotations” superimposed over videos and assumed it was some kind of new ad system, but after delving into the interface I realized I had the opportunity to annoy my viewers as well! I enthusiastically created a little realtime walkthrough of the mechanics of writing a song in MOD (or similar) format. It was an uphill battle, though, since the annotation interface is extremely buggy and glitchy. Luckily it seemed to auto-save about every minute so although I had to refresh the page after making pretty much every little adjustment, and even though the entire YouTube website became unresponsive for a while (did I DOS them with my refreshes?), I never lost any progress.

Here’s my annotated video. If you have exceptional patience maybe you can do something similar for your own videos. (I tried to embed the video but annotations only show when you view it on YouTube’s site).

Hypnotic Melody – Technophrenia (annotated)

Incidentally, can anyone out there recommend a good self-hosted Flash video player app that I can embed on my blog? I’d rather host the videos myself to ensure reliablility.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

When six million words ain’t enough

One feature I like is the ability to export results to PDF. The reports it generates are very attractive and well laid-out. I’d like to share one of these reports.

Fear not, there is absolutely no identifying data about any one user, anonymous or otherwise, in this report. I’m not terribly interested in the comings and goings of individual users anyway so I don’t care to track them. For the most part Google Analytics focuses on broad trends more than sessions.

Download my Analytics report here

P.s., if you see my Snap Preview plugin you’ll probably be as impressed as I am that hovering over a link to a PDF actually shows a preview! Man that’s cool!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Analyse this

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Speak softly and carry a fat pipe