I suffer from a Google addiction. I know it is unnecessary. I know I don’t need it. In fact, I want to STOP using Google, but I can’t seem to. Even updating my Firefox so that now it contains  Yahoo Search box in the tool bar, doesn’t make me stop using Google.Even though I prefer Bing with their cheery home page and clean results, I can’t stop typing www.goo

I know I am not the only one. There is a Google addiction sweeping the world. According to some ‘research’ by Smarthouse (an Australian digital media publication), Bing is going ‘bung’ (nice alliteration there).

For those not up on this strange lingo, this means that Bing is crap, it isn’t doing what it purported to do (gain market share off Google) and people don’t want to use it.

What the ‘research’ didn’t clearly identify however, was WHY people prefer Google. People said they thought that Bing provided cleaner results. They also said they preferred the simplistic design.  But then they nearly all finished off by saying they were unlikely to change their Google habit.

It is quite worrying that we aren’t very open to alternative search engines. I mean, I know I personally don’t want to use Yahoo (except I really do think that Yahoo Mail trumps gmail), but Bing!? Bing is so good. I love it. So why don’t I use Bing instead of Google?

This addiction is not good for the world of technology. Firstly, this Google addiction means that new entrants into the market will be discouraged, limiting competition and, maybe eventually, development. Yes, Google does put a lot of $$’s into R&D, but lately that seems to be in a lot of avenues that aren’t search.

Which brings me to the second reason why this addiction is so damaging: Google is investing a lot into new products. Google Voice.  You Tube. Improving their advertising network. Google Maps.  Google is expanding across the internet, (and in some cases offline into radio, tv and phones), so that we could easily use 10 Google based products online every day. Couple this with our obvious Google addiction, and you have a situation whereby they futher and further entrench themselves into our everyday online lives, and we let them. In fact, we refuse to NOT let them.

In research done in the US by CS Monitor , one of the reasons users cited for their loyalty to Google search (despite preferring some aspects of Bing, or even saying Google and Bing were equally as good) was because they were already using lots of other Google apps, like Google docs and Gmail.

Come on Bing. Help us overcome our Google addiction. Help break up the monopoly. I am sure the newspaper conglomerates would love to help you…

A story ran in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning talking about how a guy used the "Find my Iphone"  from Apple to track down his iPhone after it was stolen.

I am not sure of the authenticity of this story, but I love that this could be possible, and also hope that it serves as some disincentive to this kind of theft in the future.

Apparently, the fellow had lost his iPhone at a Lego convention (no judgement here), and then logged onto Apple’s me.com, and tracked it down to a nearby neighbourhood. As he kept refreshing, so the story goes,  he could see the iphone target moving up the street and around the corner, and so him and his three mates chased it down.

Apparently the thief very nicely gave it back – obviously not some tough drug dealer being cornered by three geeks.

I doubt Apple would be encouraging anyone to use this technology for Vigilante reasons, (not every thief would be so friendly or apologetic I am sure) but it certainly makes for a fun story and great PR for them (as if they need anymore).

Matt Cutts, the Google employee who regularly speaks on SEO and the Google algorithm, has released yet another Youtube video answering questions from the public.

The question was basically – can you over-optimise a website? The example the questioner gave was excessive use of No-follow tags.

I thought the question of over-optimising was a great one, and was excited to hear Matt’s response. But like many of his video’s before, the answers were vague, not giving away corporate secrets, which is of course understandable, but didn’t satisfy my curiosity.

His one concrete statement was that you can put as many no-follow tags on your own site as you want – this will incur no penalty.

As for other SEO practices, he only seemed to discuss a couple.

The first was keyword stuffing – which is certainly an SEO strategy, but not a highly regarded one. Keywords are almost a necessity on a page, if you want it to rank highly. Some people take this to the extreme, and ’stuff’ their keywords on there. Which means, that they put excessive amounts in – more than necessary for a human reader. As Matt said in his video, this can render a page spammy, make it unreadable or unpleasant to read, and does not make for a good user experience. He did not say though, that Google will penalise a site with keyword stuffing.

The other strategy, which is related to keyword stuffing, is to cloak keywords, or make them the same colour as the background. This means that human readers can’t see the keywords (and therefore their user experience isn’t affected by them), but the Google robot can. Surprisingly, Matt didn’t dwell on this for more than a second and didn’t say that it was a bad thing to do. Which is so wierd, because it is widely considered a black hat technique.

There was zero discussion of offsite SEO or structural SEO in his answer. Offsite SEO in particular is a huge one, and there are so many pitfalls, and ways in which you CAN over-optimise, that I actually thought this would be an obvious part of the answer.

Matt’s discussion seemed concerned solely with the user experience, insinuating that we webmasters could do whatever we liked to the site as long as the user wouldn’t be adversely affected. SEO practitioners would know that this hasn’t seemed to be true in the past, with black hat SEO techniques occassionaly being punished.

I still love Bing. Even though it is very different to the promo’s. I really didn’t like the ‘online-shopping’ appearance of the Bing Promo’s but the Beta Bing has turned out to be not much like what that portrayed, and I love it.

Why?

I love the cheery background pics which change everyday. They got me on Day 1 with Santorini – the most beautiful island on earth. I felt national pride when they had an Echidna on the weekend. Yesterday I think it was Huang Shan in China, and when I landed there I just felt a familiarity, I have been there! And finally, today, it is a pic of two super-cute otters. For a travel-lover like me, who also has an appreciation for all things nature, the new background pics are a simple but intriguing addition. A lot more interesting than the boring white background of Google.

But lets get off the aesthetics – what about the search results? I love them too. They don’t seem to be as spammed as Google, (and I am not just saying this because my clients are totally smashing it on Bing). The top 10 seem to me to be invariably relevant, and high quality sites.

In Google lately, there seem to be more than 10 entries, sometimes up to 12, because of blog, news and video entries. I don’t like them being all mixed up in the top 10. If I wanted those, then I would do a Youtube, blog or news search. Bing seems to keep it to a simple top 10.

Yes the layout is similar to Google, but it is prettier, simpler and less spammy. Taking all the best features of Google, and improving on it.

But I have been so institutionalised by Google, I feel that if I Bing something, I might miss out on something in Google. I need to break this dependence.

The other day, I finally (and accidentally) discovered how Twitter can be useful for me personally. It all started on a cold, blustery Tuesday….

I was anxious, because my new addiction, Master Chef, was clashing timetable-wise with my pre-paid tickets to the Lily Allen concert in Sydney. I wanted to get to Lily Allen fairly early, because with no assigned seats, I needed to ensure I could sit down and wouldn’t have to stand with the teeny boppers.
Problem was, it was celebrity chef night on Master Chef – I didn’t want to miss it! Would Lucas get through?
Sitting in my seats at the Hordern pavillion at 7:30 I was glad I got there early to bags seats with the other ‘adults’, but I was also dying to know who won Masterchef. A quick look on my friends iPhone solved all my worries, as people were tweeting just seconds after Lucas’s victory.
Admittedly I could have waited till it got onto the MasterChef website, which would not have taken much longer, but such is the ‘youth’ of today. We want it all, we want it now, and in two seconds it will be old news. In such an environment, ‘real-time’ search engines like Twitter might just have a place. Since I am the most impatient of all, I have found a happy use for Twitter.

Sure you can’t see the most up to date news unless you know what to search for, but you can see what the zeitgeist is, by looking at the twitter trends. Right now for example, 2 of the 3 most popular twitter threads include Iran (democracy debate), which is heartening, and shows that maybe Twitterers aren’t as shallow as the non-converts might think. This pride diminishes, when you see that the second most popular thread, and the eighth as well, are on ‘John and Kate’. If you aren’t familiar (and I only am because I just stayed with my friend in the US) this is a couple from the US show John and Kate Plus Eight, and they are apparently splitting up. The fact that this gets two spots in the top 10 might insinuate a very large proportion of US users.

Another positive thing about Twitter? I only just noticed the new ability to erase Tweets you have written…great addition for those impetuous people out there (like me…).