I’m managing a website for a customer and they want to have the AdSense program running on their site. Piece of cake I thought… First off I created a new AdSense account for the domain with my customers contact information and linked it to my own Google Account. I used my own Google Account because I didn’t wanted to bother my customer with the technical setup e-mails I expected to arrive. So my thought was to transfer the AdSense account to him at a later stage. BIG MISTAKE! That’s not possible.

But since I hadn’t activated the AdSense account yet – only created it, I thought I could just start over and create a new AdSense account for the same domain and link it directly to my customers Google Account. This was not possible. My customer got an e-mail saying the supplied information was identical with information on a previously created AdSense account linked to the Google Account [xxxxx]@gmail.com. It’s interesting to notice that “[xxxxx]” in this cause was not my own Google Account e-mail address, but actually belonged to a colleague of mine!

Why did Google write that e-mail address to my customer? My colleague had not previously created an AdSense account in my customers name. My colleague does not even have AdSense activated on his Google Account. I on the other hand have both. How did Google come up with his e-mail address instead of mine?

Closing an AdSense account

Anyway. I thought it would be best to close my newly created AdSense account and begin the whole process again. Now how do you close an AdSense account? Officially Google will tell you that if you’d like to remove products from your account, you just have to follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Google Account.
2. Visit the My Account page.
3. Click the Edit link located next to ‘My products.’
4. Select the product you’d like to remove from your account.

The truth is that I’m using 15+ Google products and not one can be removed this way. The only option I have after clicking the Edit link is to close my entire Google Account all together!

Reading the help page again I find that the small print say:

Currently, it’s not possible to remove all products listed on the My Account page. If you’d like to remove a product from your account that isn’t on the My Account page, please visit the Google Help page, where you can find extensive product-specific information.

Ahh… So I just need to find some AdSense specific information about how to close my AdSense account? The hunt continues…

After a lot of searching I find this form: Closing my Google AdSense account. I submit the form, wait and later receive a nice e-mail telling me that they are unable to cancel my account because I currently have “payment holds”. I must admit that I’m not entirely sure what that is, but since I haven’t ever used or earned any money with this account, I didn’t think “payment holds” should be an issue. They tell me, that if I want to give up my rights to get my money (what money?), I must fill out another form almost identical to the one I filled out before. The new form have the same name but the URL is slightly different: It ends with “cancellation” instead of “request_cancellation” and have this extra check box:

Why didn’t they just show be this form to beging with?

Well, after filling out the form I got this e-mail:

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to write to us. As per your request, we have
permanently closed your account.

Finally!

Trying once again

After finally having closed my originally created AdSense account, I tried to start over and once again apply for a new one – this time also making sure to choose my customers Google Account as the one the AdSense account should be tied to.

But now I was told that my customer already had an AdSense account and I therefore couldn’t open a new one. What!? After looking at the e-mail Google had previously send my customer (the one weirdly specifying my colleagues e-mail address), I found that the AdSense account creation process actually had been put on hold and that the only option to get it started again was to delete my own (or my colleagues?) Google Account. There was no apparent way to let Google know that I just canceled the AdSense account “manually”.

Stuck

Now what? I can’t create a new AdSense account unless I close my own or my colleagues Google account – and I don’t want that! I’ve tried to reply to the e-mail my customer got from Google, asking them to continue the process – but so far no response. And why do they think that my colleague have created an AdSense account using my customers credentials?

Dear Google, please help me!

P.S. Sorry that the first post I write here in a looong time is a rant. But at least I’m getting started ;)

Google Webmaster Tool is a great tool for webmasters who want to see and manage how Google crawls their site(s). If you have a Google ID you can add all the sites that you control to a dashboard. From here you can see intimate details for each site. After adding justaddwater.dk I found that Google was encountering some HTTP errors when crawling our site. This of cause is very important since other users unfortunately also encounter these errors.

When diving into the errors I can see that some links to our site point at stuff that is not there. I unfortunately cant see where these links come from. They could be external or internal I guess, but I have to manually look at my site to see. Adding a “source” for the link would be very easy for Google and be a great benefit to the webmaster.

Besides web crawling problems, the tool also gives loads of other interesting information. I suggest you take a look your self, but to just summarize I quote Google:

Statistics

Top search queries
See which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked.

Crawl stats
See your distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site.

Subscriber stats
If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.

What Googlebot sees
See details about how the Googlebot sees your site.

Index stats
Learn how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site.

Links

Pages with external links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.

Sitelinks
See which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results.

Pages with internal links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.

Sitemaps
Add and manage your sitemaps (including code sitemaps).

Tools

Analyze robots.txt
See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.

Enable enhanced image search
Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.

Manage site verification
See all verified owners of this site, and optionally reverify them.

Set crawl rate
See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.

Set preferred domain
Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.

Remove URLs
Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal.

Technorati Tags: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Central, sitemap, sitemaps, tool, review, search engines, http errors, accessibility

I of cause immediately tried to see the state of “usability”:

There is really not much help on how to read and understand the user interface so I don’t know what they mean by “Languages”, but what struck me was of cause that when I queried for “usability” my own language, Danish came out on top:

Technorati Tags: Google Trends, denmark, danish, languages, usability

From BentUser – Windows XP and Vista Side-by-Side (via MadMan’s LinksMatic: Windows XP vs Vista):

The start menu has evolved in Vista. At any time one can type search words, resulting in Search-As-You-Type functionality. This search leverages the broader search functions built into Vista. It functions in a very similar fashion to the MSN Desktop Search deskbar – but is integrated directly into the Start Menu. It is actually quite useful, and newly created documents appear to get indexed almost immediately. For example, after copying some Word documents into the Documents folder, they were available for search immediately. Since the start menu can be activated with the start button, one can actually perform a search and select a search result, all without touching the mouse or opening any new windows. Quite slick. Pressing enter opens a full search results window.

From the conclusion:

Search is a big addition, and its nearly inescapable omnipresence throughout Vista point toward Microsoft’s emphasis. The fact that all of these search boxes can also search the Internet with MSN Search also paints a fairly dangerous-looking picture for Google.

My comment: It doesn’t matter if you call it Find-as-you-type or live search or autocomplete. Live search is getting big and perhaps ready for broader mainstream acceptance.

Previously, Live search has been implemented in multiple desktop and web applications.

• The browser address bar autocompletes as you type based on the web adresses you previously typed.
• Windows XP file manager autocompletes when you open a new file from an application.
• Microsoft Outlook autocompletes contact names as you type.
• Google’s web based GMail also autocompletes contact names (and is much better than Outlook in guessing correctly). Link to GMail demo with autocomplete.
• Google Suggest is a find-as-you-type version of Google web search.

In all of these examples, You’re actually searching without pressing a search button. Here are screenshots of GMail and Google Suggest:

Recently I’ve seen more Live search solutions showing up. There’s a blog plugin that does it. There’s even a component library (perhaps more than one). Amazon’s diamond search does it. I’m confident that this will show up more and more.

When is Live search ready for mainstream

As we see more and more Live search being implemented in real-world web applications, it’s obvious that users will get used to searching without pressing a search button.

When users start suggesting live search, and wondering “why don’t they use find-as-you-type”, then it’s ready for mainstream. How we get there? I guess somebody has to implement to start the trend. Google is well on the way already.

Technorati Tags: windows xp, windows vista, comparison, user experience, usability, live search, find-as-you-type, google suggest, gmail, amazon

Technorati then uses these tags to index your post in different categories on technorati.com. If you for example want to see all current stories that uses the tag “usability” you visit the URL http://technorati.com/tags/usability – But if you are an experienced blogger you already know all this.

Tip 1: Technorati automatically combines multi-word tags

If you write a story about Technorati Tags (like this one) you have a choice between using several tags:

• technorati
• technorati tags
• technoratitags
• tags

You could of cause use all of them, but besides the hassle of always having to think of all the combinations a user might use, I don’t think this is a very “nice” solution – you could call it a mild version of tag spamming.

Instead you can just use one tag: “technorati tags“. Technorati will then automatically use any combination of these words – except directly changing the order of the words of cause. So using just that tag will make your post appear on the following URLs:

• http://technorati.com/tags/technorati
• http://technorati.com/tags/technorati+tags
• http://technorati.com/tags/technoratitags
• http://technorati.com/tags/tags

Tip 2: Technorati is not case sensitive

Technorati is not case sensitive, so the tag “Technorati Tags” and “technorati tags” will result in the same indexing.

Tip 3: Technorati automatically uses the blog categories

All of the popular blogging tools use categories to group their posts. Technorati will in most cases detect what tool you are using and also include the categories as tags.

So if you post a story using the Technorati Tags “A” and “B” and post it in a category called “C”, the story will appear in all of these:

• http://technorati.com/tags/A
• http://technorati.com/tags/B
• http://technorati.com/tags/C

But I would of cause argue that it is more reader friendly if you print all the Technorati Tags you want your post to appear under. This way your readers can click on the tags to see other blogs blogging about these topics.

To demonstrate this in action, I’ve on purpose left out a Technorati Tag in this post: “Search Engines”. Instead I posted this story in a category by the same name. So you should therefore be able to see it here as well: http://technorati.com/tags/Search+Engines.

Technorati Tags: technorati tags, blog, blogging

Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom
but sharing data is the first step toward community

This is why we decided to use this blog to share data with you. Recently we’ve posted about our November and December 2005 visitor statistics.

Origin of quote

A google search shows approx. 3.000 occurrences of this quote. Mandriva Linux use the quote on their page. Also some Powerpoint documents show up saying it originates from an IBM – On Demand Business Prodigy Advertisement. But before that, somebody must have said it, right?

Technorati Tags: video, ibm, linux, wisdom, community, quote

It is a very interesting read and gives a good picture of how one of the biggest in SEO does his deed. I also can recommend the guide to but it’s a bit longer – but very informative.

From the Newsweek article:

Earlier this year Google engineer Matt Cutts started a blog directed at the SEO community, dispensing tips on how to make sites more visible to the automated software “spiders” that catalog the Web.

So if you are interested in SEO you should definitely check out the blog – and Matt Cutts have of cause also mentioned the Newsweek article here (as has many other blogs)

If you think SEO is just a matter of doing good and valid HTML and CSS (you know: no tables, use DIV’s etc.) and maybe making sure that you are linked to from the right websites then you are a bit off. To stay on top of things Fishkin, for example

[...]studies each Google patent application and search-algorithm upgrade. “If you don’t understand how search engines work, you can’t do a great job of optimizing a Web site,” he says.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Google, SEOmoz, Newsweek, Rand Fishkin, Matt Cutts

If you browse a website chances are that it has its own build-in search engine where you can search its content. But chances also are that you never get any good results when using them. How come? What can be done to improve them?

When referring to a study about site navigation and whether or not users found what they where looking for Jared Spool writes:

Using an on-site search engine actually reduced the chances of success, and the difference was significant. Overall, users found the correct answer in 42% of the tests. When they used an on-site search engine (we did not study Internet search engines), their success rate was only 30%. In tasks where they used only links, however, users succeeded 53% of the time.

Ranking

The main difference between an on-site search engine and search engines for the web is the way they rank the results. Google is very silent about their own ranking algorithm (PageRank) – but it’s no secret that the corner stone of the web (hyperlinks) is quite a big factor in the equation. Google themselves explain it this way:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

If you could just do the same with links between the pages locally on your website, you would be on your way. But the reason this works for Google is because the web is so enormous. This is the same reason why a survey covering 10.000+ people gives a clearer and better image of the reality than one that only covers 10. Of course you could just make your own indexing bot whose sole purpose was to traverse the net and log all links pointing to your website. But why waste time, bandwidth and money on this when you can just ask Google?

Asking Google

Google have what they call Google Web API. This is a semi-free Web Service (a thousand free queries allowed per day) you can use in your on-site search engine to tap into Google’s huge databases and use it to search your own site. You can easily limit the Google search to only cover a specific domain by using the “site:” operator. In this example I’m searching the domain justaddwater.dk for the word “Google”.

When doing a search through the API, you can either use the retuned results as they are and just display them (properly formatted of cause). Or you can use the ranking and apply this to your own algorithm.

Of course to be able to use Google like this, all the corners of your site must be reachable to Google’s indexing bot. So you can’t ask Google to find stuff on your intranet or even a password protected forum on your public website – In that case you have to host the indexing and searching technology in-house. If you are a Google fan this is possible to do with their enterprise solutions (we at Capgemini Denmark are currently implementing this solution on www.dk.capgemini.com – so hopefully we can review this later when we have gathered some experience).

Asking MSN Search and Yahoo!

After Microsoft have woken from their great slumber and entered the search engine market they as well have developed a Web Service you can use to access and query MSN Search. I haven’t tested it yet, but you can find more information about it on MSDN.

MSN Search has learned from Google and has also implemented search operators which are an important factor if you want to use it for searching your own site. Even the format is the same – so the “site:” operator can easily be used.

I haven’t been able to find out if Yahoo! supports search operators (it doesn’t seem like it!), but they do have an impressive collection of Web Services. Of interest here is of course their Search Web Service.

What to do?

The message is clear enough. If your search engine is not working, don’t let your users use it. In that case it can do more damage than good. If you want to have an on-site search engine please implement it properly. This means:

1. Rank the results with the most important once at the top of the page.
2. Make all your content searchable. Many on-site search engines does not search for example a product catalog because this in many situations is implemented via 3rd party software.
3. Show matching text snippets with highlighted keywords. If the user can’t see the relevance of the results he or she can’t judge how well a given one matches the query. So do like all the major search engines and show two or three lines of text where the keywords match.
4. Remember the title-tag. Make sure each page on your website has a proper title! This is the headline that will show up in search results and the first thing the users sees in a result set – very important!
5. Group the results by category. This is hard (if not impossible) to do by the big internet-wide search engies since they don’t have control over the content. But surveys show that this actually works very well on site specific search engines. One of these is detailed in this PDF by Microsoft Research: Optimizing Search by Showing Results In Context.

Of other important points could be the use of proper meta keywords and maybe also a meta description. But Google does not use any of these when indexing or ranking results though. David Callan from akamarketing.com explains:

I imagine many of you know this already but Google does not use meta tags such as the keywords meta tag or the description meta tag. This is because the text within these tags can’t be seen by visitors to a website. Therefore Google feels these tags will be abused by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words in them in order to get more visitors.

In a controlled environment like a single website you could of cause argue that the level of self discipline is so good that this is not an issue – so maybe you should also consider this?

Final words…

This post does not at all do the subject justice. It even leaves some unanswered questions. This is both because one post is simply too small to cover this subject in depth and also because I want to hear your opinions. So feel free to comment. But just remember this: When developing a new website, you should never let your users depend on a search engine. This is just a sign of bad usability. Make sure that your users easily can find what they are looking for via the normal navigation. If they have to use your search engine it just means that your navigation is flawed.

Technorati tags: search engine usability jared spool search ranking google google api msn search yahoo search