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.

{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.

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. :)

Disclaimer: Google Apps is frackin' amazing--drop everything and give Google your $50 a year.
------------

Can someone from Google explain to me why GMail and a Blackberry suck so much when you put them together!?!?!

It seems like pulling GMAIL via POP setting from GMAIL/Google Apps (which I just paid for) results in inconsistency, lost mail, and delays. Forwarding from GMAIL seems slightly better, but still slow and painful.

Blackberry users represent the top 2% of all email users (I made the % up)... if you can't make Blackberry and GMAIL work together you got a huge problem.

If you can't get Google Apps GMAIL for $50 a year to work well with Blackberry you've got A HUGE SHOW-STOPPING problem. At this point if I can't get my GMAIL in Google Apps to work with my Blackberry I'm gonna have to cancel my account. I can't live without instant email.

Will someone from the GMAIL team please respond to this?

Other folks with the same problem including CK, my wife, and this dude. I hear "GMAIL and Blackberry suck together..." all the time when I'm out.

PS - Google Calendar HAS TO have native, wireless sync with my BlackBerry... please Google... simple features for business users. You've got like 18,984 PhDs at the Googleplex... I just need like three of them to fix these problems! Seriously, you need to setup a BLACKBERRY ambassador at Google.... it's that important. :-)

Ego Search CC: Bret Taylor; Derek Parham, Lead Software Engineer, Google Apps; Keith Coleman, Gmail Product Manager; Sergy; Larry; Marissa.

10 Gig.... oh yes!

Google is getting super aggressive--some people say heavy handed--with their launch of Google Checkout. Not only did they give people free money for signing up, not only did they place an advertisement for Checkout on their homepage (something they said they would never do), now they are rewarding merchants who use Google Checkout with an extra line in their Google Adsense adverisements.

Google Adsense + Checkout = Game over for PayPal.

Check out the text in yellow highlighting (I ADDED THE YELLOW) for Google Adsense advertisers who accept Google Checkout.

This is a HUGE incentive for merchants to signup with Google Checkout--look how much more their ads look. They get that quick checkout icon and an extra line of text.

Go Google Go!

I love the new aggressive Google. I hope they launch free/flatrate auction next. IT IS SO ON RIGHT NOW!!!

It was really aggressive for Google to give away $10 with their new PayPal killer "Google Checkout" a couple of weeks ago.

It was even more aggressive for them to promo Checkout on the Google homepage.

It looks like PayPal is responding by giving away $15.

If this was 1999 and these weren't two highly profitable companies I would be thinking "bubble," but it's obvious this is just a dog fight for customers.

I love GMAIL, but I want two features:

1. Please let me pay you $100 a year for 10 gig.
2. Please let me sort my email by file size.
3. Remove attachments but keep the email feature (good one Ew!)

thank you.

You asked for interviews... you get interviews.

CalacanisCast is up... episode three

if you want to subscribe go into iTunes and hit "Advanced -- Subscribe to Podcast" add this feed:

http://podcast.calacanis.com/rss.xml



Question 1: Show Name
What do you guys think of Brian's suggestion for the name of the show?


Update1: Audio Comments
Thanks for the 10+ audio comments people sent in... I have them ready for CalacanisCast Beta 4.


Update2: Show Notes
I don't want to do show notes... in fact, I'm banning anyone else from doing show notes. You either listen to the show or you don't. You want to know what's on the show you listen, not scan the notes. Either you commit to the show just as I'm committing to do the show or you don't. Please stop asking for show notes--it's not gonna happen.

Update3: Jersey Todd
I love this guys Jersey Todd song that Adam Curry plays... I can't stop singing it. I wish someone would do a promo like this with Brian's new show name that he mentions in this weeks show. It's such an amazing name for the show i can't believe I didn't think of it. I can just hear it in a dozen different contexts, and I can't wait to see the reaction to Brian's show name--people are gonna freak out.

Question2: Marantz Compact Flash Recorder
We recorder the show on one of these.... should I get one? Crazy expensive at like $500+ right? Maybe there is a $200 version of this (if not someone get on it!)

One of my readers made a Greasemonkey script that adds Google Adsense to the Wikipedia (with the ad revenue going to Wikipedia of course). So, users can OPT-IN to see ads and donate to Wikipedia with their attention (to the ads).

However, based on the comments from the post I wrote, it now seems Wikipedia is blocking Google's ability to target the ads.

Why does Wikipedia have to stop users from opting in to this?

We know for sure that Jimbo is not anti-advertising.... so it can't be that. :-)

Jimbo: Why is the script being crippled?

Great story in the NYT about Google's legal battles. You gotta respect the fact that Google is going for it when it comes to defending itself in the legal space. As we've seen, success in our industry is largely based on who is able to be balance innovation against antiquated law that never envisioned a networked world. Go to far one direction you're Napster, say a little the other way and you're YouTube.

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?