“Google partners with [HugeCo] to solve [HugeProblem]”.

The announcements sounded fill-in-the-blank, like MadLibs. So, for April Fool’s, we posted a fake announcement that we’d hacked Google’s internal PR server. We presented a silly app for generating fake Google PR releases. And we “leaked” a random release about Google partnering with GE to solve the energy crisis via open standards.

Here’s our randomly-generated fake announcement: Google, General Electric, US Dept Of Energy Announce Open Platform for Power Generation (4/1/08)

Last week came the real GE/Google announcement: Partnering With GE on clean energy (9/17/08)

Amusing.

In all seriousness, it is excellent that Google is teaming up with GE to develop a smarter power grid. As a nation, we need all the innovative thinking in energy we can get.

Humor to divert from the economic turmoil:

Tomorrow, Sept 19, is Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Online retailers seeking to reach the elusive Pirate demographic can try this free English-to-Pirate translator.

Once your landing pages are shipshape, consider testing AdWords in Pirate.

As Google says, “you only pay when swabbies click on yer ad.”

(AP)

Google officially filed for Chapter 11 protection today marking the end of an era. The once iconic giant is expected to sell off its assets and the still popular google.com domain to rival MSN. While the announcement was not unexpected given the rapid decline in Google’s revenue over the past 4 quarters it still left many industry analysts wondering how it could happen.

“It all started with Quality Score” explains Nicolai Took, former VP of product development for Google. “Originally ads were served based on the advertiser’s keyword and match type and ranked based on bid times the click-through-rates. That was great for us in that we served incredibly targeted ads, and we maximized revenue from those ads that were most responsive to the user’s search.”

“However, we weren’t satisfied with the results, and neither were our users” continued Took, “We noticed that if the ads landed on cheesy AdSense Spam pages, that was a lousy user experience, so we wanted to clean that up. To do that we needed some way to arbitrarily penalize the sponsored listings tied to those pages. The notion was that we’d just punish the ‘bad’ landing pages and that would be it. Later, we realized that if landing pages were really slow loading, that was a bad user experience, too, so we folded that into QS as well.

“All that was good! We were rightly focused on making the ads as useful as possible to our users, thus encouraging them to use the sponsored links. Quality Score was the right idea, but it opened up Pandora’s Box in a very real sense.”

“QS gave us a black box to do essentially whatever we wanted to do in terms of ranking the sponsored links, and we took that freedom and ran with it. Our VP of Accounting, Ewell Cheatham, first came up with the concept of Expanded Broad Match. He said ‘If a company is willing to spend $4 for clicks on keyword “A”, and only $0.25 for clicks on Keyword “B”, why would we ever serve Keyword “B”?’ He said: “As long as the CTR of “A” is more than 1/16th of “B”, we win!’ Some people at the meeting objected that the keywords might not have anything to do with each other, but Cheatham persuaded the group that the market would sort things out. If it worked, we’d make more money, and if not we’d simply dial back up the relevance and go our merry way.”

“The problem was, it worked great!” said Took with a grimace.

“It turned out that people didn’t read the ad copy very carefully, so the fact that we were serving the ‘wrong’ ad didn’t depress the CTR that much. The more emphasis we placed on the bid and the less we placed on the relevance the more money we made.”

“Some of the savvy PPC agencies caught onto this quickly and started being very careful with match types and developed clever ways to get around this process, but most didn’t. And as our addiction to pleasing Wall Street grew we also realized in late 2008 that Quality Score gave us the ability to penalize the folks who didn’t play the game we wanted to play…”

“That’s when our lead council, Agnes Fairchild, resigned. She saw the FTC, FCC and SEC troubles brewing and wanted no part of it.”

Asked whether the government regulatory actions played a major role in Google’s eventual collapse, Took responded “Yes and no. It certainly didn’t help, but the real problem came from ignoring our users.”

“We thought the fact that CTR didn’t drop much initially meant no harm was done. We figured as long as revenue grew we must be heading in the right direction, but we lost sight of two important trends: First, we didn’t realize that much of the revenue growth in 2007 through 2009 was really the last phases of rapid growth in the channel. When more and more people were poring into search and using our engine it hid a lot of tactical mistakes. Second, we thought that CTR was the best measure of satisfaction with results, but it turned out to be a trailing indicator, by the time CTR tanked we were already sunk.”

“The real measure of success of course was whether people found what they were looking for after clicking on a link. Because we chose high bid ads rather than the ads that exactly matched the users search the landing pages were wrong, either too deep or too shallow, and users left the retailer’s sites frustrated.”

“We hated the long tail. If anyone in the office mentioned the long tail he or she had to put a buck in a penalty jar. Huge keyword lists were great for retailers, but they ate our bandwidth and depressed our revenue, or so we thought. As we saw it, they just allowed thorough agencies to get better conversion rates at lower CPCs, and we didn’t see how that benefited us.”

“For a while, everything was great. People didn’t land on the right page, but they would come back to the original SRP and click on another link hoping to find what they wanted — we made even more money getting multiple clicks from the same users. We were really the only game in town at this point, but that’s when MSN came out of nowhere.”

“We had always planned that the sponsored links would be for retailers and the organic links for information. By penalizing retailers in organic rankings in favor of “information sites” we would encourage folks to use the ads when they were looking to buy something and the organic links for information. Unfortunately somebody didn’t get the message. As our sponsored links became less and less relevant people started doing their shopping on MSN’s platform.”

“Advertisers jumped on it and revenues flowed to MSN. By the time we realized what was happening the word on the street was out: use MSN for shopping, use Google for information. It was too late for us to reverse the trend…”

Asked for final reflections, Nicolai Took responded with a forced smile: “Remember when ‘Google’ was a verb?”

On a related theme, I’ve been toying with the idea of developing a new email client aimed at enhancing corporate productivity.

The entry level “bronze” level of my software would be your basic MS Outlook clone.

Corporations seeking increased productivity could step up to the “steel” level software , which would remove “BCC” functionality, mass distribution lists, and email themes.

For a slightly higher price, the “silver” version would in addition lose the ability to send HTML, to include attachments over 1Mb, and to “CC” anyone in the org chart higher than the recipient or yourself.

The “gold” level software would drop CC entirely, restrict the “To” field to at most three recipients, and automatically delete inbound or outbound email matching rumors on snopes.com.

The top-tier “platinum” version of the software would impose a quota on the maximum number of emails each user could send each week, would automatically delay angry outbound emails by 24 hours, and (here’s the killer feature) would allow users to check email at most thrice daily.

Verily, such software could cause corporate productivity to soar.

Apologies for sinking so low as to quote Fake Jerry on the Google/Yahoo deal, but damn Dan Lyons is funny!

But one thing that struck me is that I just found out today that the way AdSense works is we don’t actually know how much of a cut we’re getting. We just take their ads and run them on our site and they send us a check at the end of the month, and we trust them to give us a fair amount of whatever they were paid, though there’s no actual way to determine what a fair amount might be. I asked Eric Schmidt about it and he was like, Well, it’s kind of complicated and there are all sorts of variables in the algorithm that determine what a particular ad might be worth at any particular instant in time and it can depend on the search itself and then other variables like the context of the ad and the region where the ad was shown and how far along we are in that fiscal quarter and how close we are to making our numbers.

I was like, That can’t really be the way you do it. You mean you just pay whatever you want to pay, and we’re supposed to just accept that? Eric says, Hey, that’s how it works with everyone else. I started to ask a few more questions about how the algorithm works but Sergey jumped up and said look, it’s just really complicated and even if we explain it to you it’s going to take half a day and there’s no point anyway because the algorithm is constantly being tuned and adjusted so whatever we show you will be totally obsolete by the time we finish explaining it to you. Oh, and besides that, you’re the one who called up and begged us to save you.

Fake Jerry, 17 June 2008, Funny thing about our deal with Google

Hah!

Old SEL post: Google At $950 Per Share: Extreme Transparency

source: google internal PR server http://tinyurl.com/2nh9yb

For Immediate Release 4.01.2008

Industry Leaders Announce Open Platform for Power Generation Devices

Group Pledges to Unleash Innovation for Power Generation Worldwide

Schmidt: “No Immediate Plans” For Rumored “Google Hydrogen Cell”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California. (Tuesday, April 1, 2008) — A broad alliance of leading technology and power generation companies today joined forces to announce the development of “Zappy”, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for power generation devices.

Google, General Electric, the United States Department of Energy and others are collaborating on the development of “Zappy” through the Open Power Generation Alliance, a multinational alliance of technology and Power Generation industry leaders. The group’s website is at www.OpenPowerGenerationAlliance.com.

With thousands of power plants world wide, this year has seen increasing focus on open source power generation. However, the lack of a collaborative effort has made it a challenge to respond as quickly as possible to the ever-changing needs of savvy power producers and consumers. Through “Zappy”, power utilities will be better positioned to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. The end result will be an unprecedented global power generation platform that will enable producers to provide their customers better, more personal and more flexible power generation experiences.

source: google internal PR server http://tinyurl.com/2nh9yb

“Be unique in your merchandising and value proposition,” we say, “not on where (for example) you put your site search box and your add-to-cart button. Testing and usability labs show that conversion suffers when users can’t find site elements where they expect them to be.”

We’ve written before how folks don’t see things outside their zone of expectations, and here’s another fun video on the same theme.

Watch carefully. How many passes does the team in white make?

Interested in making your website more effective? Give us a call.

OpenSocial does the same for social networks.

Sitemaps does the same for web page listings.

See a pattern?

As engineers, we were intrigued. We attempted to crack the security on Google’s press release server. We succeeded. This link /cgi/private/crack.rb shows press releases coming out of 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway for the next few weeks. If there are multiple in queue, you can page them using the red “Next Press Release” button.

Bottom line: the future is about establishing standards.

These upcoming announcements show Google gets it.

Please keep this quiet so Google doesn’t patch the security hole.

Link:/cgi/private/crack.rb

(post 4/1/08)

Don’t do this.

The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks
has some “funny” images documenting quotation mark “abuse.”

Hat tip: Andy Sernovitz at DamnIWish