How Not To Blog ?

While we await blogger-turned-beggar Kottke to psyche everyone out and announce his advertisers, we must first congratulate him on being #4 Yahoo result for "begging blog". (When he's sleeping his ranking falls to #6.)

As Jason "Sally Struthers" Kottke mentions in the note section of the PayPal form:

In considering an amount, try $30 on for size. It's $2.50/mo. over a year and it'll qualify you for one of the nifty gifts being given away. For you, $2.50 is a coffee in the morning, a magazine at the newsstand, or a beer at the pub but in the aggregate, it will help me immensely. But any amount -- from $5 to several hundred million dollars -- is welcome and appreciated.

So, anyone searching for a begging blog will surely find him.

I'm surprised my dirty mouth hasn't inadvertantly made HNTB the #1 result for "asshole blog".

Come to think of it.. Google needs to go back to its "beta" days. It needs to figure out how to be smart again.

blog comment spam
they can't seem to figure this one out. Duh! Ignore the 'name' part of the comment. A billion-dollar company shouldn't suffer the same problem as a Daypop or a Feedster.

autolink
...still not communicating to the webmaster community, and the internet community as a whole. As I mentioned before, signs of Google's self-destruction. Why would you simply not care to uphold and maintain the integrity of your near-perfect reputation? That is googolistically illogical.

irrelevant results
somewhat excusable, considering the hard work is a machine's job. but how about a Craigslist-type "relevant?" feature on the results page (a tiny button would work) that lets the community filter out spam or simply irrelevant results?

the 3 month wait
new websites generally have to wait 3 months to be shown in Google's search results. They've gotten a bit better at this, but there's still a long way to go. This site is already visited by over 100 people per day and isn't even 3 weeks old yet. By the time it shows up on Google I may have retired already. There are lots of other websites worth visiting that you won't know about until a few months from now. Yahoo is a new site's friend. Being #1 and #2 for a mis-spelled search term isn't bad, indeed.

fear of clutter
because Google wants to stick to its clutter-free look, you actually have to dig for many of the services that Google offers. Not only is there this but there's also this. Not to mention Zeitgeist They forget that most users aren't geeks and haven't memorized all of its useful functions. Mom doesn't know about any of it. Neither does little Johnny, for that matter.

the competition
kicking ass. Yahoo will prevail, simply because of its more human element. (The element that makes everything more useful.) To me, Google is just a faceless machine with no personality. Google is just inspiration. Nobody uses the Betamax anymore.

Hundreds of PhDs at Google. I guess 95% just sit around all day picking their noses and jacking each-other off.

Google needs more than just Adwords as a cash cow. Yahoo has figured this out, fortunately. The market may not be so forgiving of Google if its Adwords revenues take a dive when its first-it-is-laughed-at replacement comes along. I'm sure most advertisers won't like its new format. I know I won't.

Send Google back to its own labs for a re-work. Let me know when it's ready.

I'm still waiting for someone to create a web search based on the Google API that displays results on one line only with the keyword(s) in bold. Not everyone wants to see the URL or the page file size, or even its keyword-in-context text. I fear that Google's results are becoming more and more useless due to the efforts of certain search engine optimization parties that don't mind being irrelevant (or just Google's algorithm being off. Maybe this is why some ads on Google have keywords that consistently get a +25% click-through rate - the ads are oftentimes more relevant).

Instead of scrolling further and further down a bulky search result list for many keywords that the SEO guys target, just show me more of what I want to see. I played video games when I was a kid, so my eyes are pretty quick. The 1-line trick would be useful.

This should be part of Google's user preferences, but it ain't.

Really, they need to liven up their core product and give users more options to display and sort what it does best before their search box becomes irrelevant.

This site uses the Amazon API to display books, music, and DVD titles from Amazon in a novel way. At the end of the search the images form out your search term.

Too bad it's not really useful.

I think a display more like a grid of bookcovers (more like a physical bookstore) with the ability to organize them in multiple ways would be useful. Each book's background would have a color that co-ordinates with how popular, how well-reviewed, or how much on sale each book is. In a store with over 1 million books, it would be nice to see a whole lot more on one page. And don't be too shy to add your Amazon affiliate ID to each link.. we know you need money, too.