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Okay, here is the latest list of what google thinks about This Damn Blog:

• robert randolph
• evertek
• top 10 rock songs
• top ten rock songs
• hot girl wallpaper
• firefoxs
• jonas brothers
• huff po
• gran bel fisher lyrics
• liza menelli (WTF?)
• tribal wallpaper
• women and songs
• notre damn football
• cathrine harris
• “robert randolph”
• pixel girl wallpaper
• liv ulman
• power line “blog com”
• tdbs
• rasing arizona

Turns out that The Ninja is part of a “community effort” effort over at Zend - that’s been cranking out some code for the Zend Google Data Client Library:

The Google Data APIs provide a simple standard protocol and writing data on the web. For example, Google Base, Calendar, Blogger, and CodeSearch each have a data API following the Google Data protocol.

Zend Google Data Client Library provides a PHP 5 component to execute queries and commands against Google Data APIs from your PHP applications.

Congrats - You’ve come a long way since the SpotEdit

So now you can claim sites at Google, sorta similarly to the way you can at Technorati - this is what Google thinks of This Damn Blog:

Top search queries
1. badgirlshotel
2. badgirlshotel
3. ursla andress
4. “onward christian soldier” mp3
5. the damn “blog com”

Top search query clicks
1. the damn “blog com”
2. badgirlshotel

I imagine that those “onward christian soldier” folks might not have found what they were looking for.

I am sure you have heard by now about Google’s Video Search, but it is much more then just a video search. Here is what Google says:

Our mission is to organize the world’s information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.

To this end Google has created a in-browser video playback proggy Windows Only ) based on VLC. I’ve used for a number of years when it was my only option, here’s hoping that with Google’s backing in can turn into a world class media player.

One of the most interesting features is that video producers can charge for their videos. As of now they are only making available the free videos. One caveat - even the free video may not be free for end users if “you upload a high definition file that’s 500 MB and it becomes extremely popular” then Google plans to charge end users and keep the fees to cover expenses.

As I have pontificated previously, I think that the interweb has the potential to transform TV, movies, etc. For just one example ( and as an example of why P2P is not the devil ) see Global Frequency.

I’ve uploaded my first video and it has been accepted. Details to follow.

Back in the day, all of the search engines ( Altavista, Infoseek, etc. ) wanted to become portals and become sticky. So they poured millions into free e-mail, shopping apps, horoscopes, stock quotes, you name it - and they lost their users to an upstart that focused on search.

Fast forward to the present - I was reading this ZDNet analysis about Yahoo! and Google and it, and the second hand insider info that I have been getting about Yahoo! lately got me thinking about the original portal ( Yahoo! ) and the search engine that kicked the portals collective asses that is slowly but surely morphing into a portal.

Google is obviously the media darling at this point - and it has a larger market cap - but imho Yahoo! is catching up in search and Google looks like it is starting to move away from its single minded focus on search. search.Yahoo!.com is really pretty good, in fact in some of my admittedly non-scientific tests it performed even better than Google.

Beyond search, both companies are buying up smaller companies - some obvious ( blogger, flickr, overture, etc. ) others make you wonder ( blo.gs, Picasa, etc. ) but more interesting to me is the homegrown apps of both companies. Yahoo! 360° is not a serious blogging tool as of yet, but the combination of blog and social network is indeed a good idea. Google’s desktop search, Web Accelerator, and even Froogle are interesting if not ground breaking.

Google’s Acquisitions and beta services have a number of folks theorizing about the Google Browser and even the Google OS. It does seem to me that Google is planning some sort of platform.

Yahoo!’s new CEO seems to want to make Yahoo! the web’s media destination, and that is not a bad idea, but it is yet to be seen how this will jive with being a web portal. Often overlooked is the depth of Yahoo!’s services, for instance just the number of users playing games at Yahoo! at any one time is impressive - not to mention Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Stores, etc.

There is no way that I can positively know this - but my feeling is that the culture and atmosphere at Google is more conducive to innovation. Google’s policy of giving its engineers 20% of their time to work on a pet project combined with some recent second hand info that I got about the inner working at Yahoo! confirm this in my mind.

All of this ignores Microsoft’s online offerings. While MS is at best the number three destination site on the web, it has the money to continue to get it wrong and continue to try again. The new homegrown MS search is not as good as Google or Yahoo!’s search, and it’s news service is not very good at all - but you gotta figure that they are not going to throw in the towel and let Google and or Yahoo! be the standard bearer.

With all of the services, acquisitions, and new technologies, the bottom line for me is search. Sure, I like Gmail, and blogger is a good service ( except, why can’t you give your poor bloggers an rss feed standard? ) and I’ve played fantasy football at Yahoo! - but what I really want is quality search results.

And I have news for both of these companies - neither of your search technologies is good enough. Search is still in its infancy, make it better - index everything and return the best of exactly what I am looking for - quickly. Don’t get so enamored with the hollywoodization of the web or creating a web platform to compete with Windows that you forget the lessons of Infoseek.

JD has created a cool little app called GCensus based on the U.S. Census data and Google Maps:

The map tool that is located on the home page of this site is a combination of technologies. The map and all of the images belong to Google and come from maps.google.com. The data is extracted from the 2000 United States Census and can be downloaded from www.census.gov.

JD recently completed his Masters program at The University of Mississippi where one of the projects was processing large quantities of data and Google had just released its map technology. The two were a perfect match and GCensus is the result.

As it turns out technology companies are a lot like media superstars, or maybe it is just a truism that nothing can sustain popularity at the highest level, or maybe it is as simple as power corrupts. I don’t know, but I do know that what Google is going through right now is very similar to the once beloved media darling that the public has turned on.

And the tide is turning against Google on a number of fronts.

First there was the whole Autolink controversy, I still say it is a bad move for the precedent it sets as well as the ill will that it is creating. And the collective good will of Netizens is really the only thing that keeps Google afloat, I mean if a search engine searches the web and nobody uses it is it really a search engine?

Add to that ill will a growing numbers of webmaster that have had bad experiences with Google’s Ad Sense program. A number of the webmaster that have received “the notice” swear that they did nothing against the TOS but were banned anyway. I have no idea if that is true or not - but again, ill will. And then there is the coming competition to Ad Sense. Possibly the biggest problem with adsense is that it just doesn’t work for a number of webmasters. Competition is good so maybe Yahoo’s entry ( and maybe even M$’s ) in the field will help.

And now there is a huge stink about Google News. It looks like they have removed the Nazi “news source” but the critics are now demanding more transparency ( not one of Google’s long suits ) and want to know what sites Google uses for sources.

Growing pains.

And one of the most alarming trends is the shirking percentage of users that use Google for their search results - its down to like 35% with Yahoo closing at 32%.

And that’s a shame because at it’s core Google is a great search engine. Really the best available solution we have today for finding semi-relevant web pages on the interweb.

I admit that when I first heard of Google’s Autolink dealio the first thing that crossed my mind was the evil Microsoft Smart Tags Fiasco - and in the context of Google’s Do No Evil moto it seemed contradictory to say the least.

Upod further review it’s not quite as evil. Unlike smart tags it has to be initiated by the user which to me is the biggest difference.

That is not to say that I don’t think that it is somewhat evil, especially for a company with the offical policy of Do No Evil and further more sets a very bad precident.

Hell, even Microsoft gave you a way to add tags to your page to disable the smart tags, Google hasn’t even provided that - fortunately third party developers have developed tools for web publishers that do not want Google re-writing their pages. Additionally unlike smart tags auto links look exactly like the other links on the page, visually nothing is different between Google’s inserted links and the original page authors links.

Personally it’s the slippery slope that I find the most troubling. If Google is willing to re-write web page content with this feature does it mean that they are willing to do similar things with other features? How about some sort of combination of the cached versions of their search results and ad words? I would hope not, but this Auto Link feature make me wonder anyway.

I have been a huge Google fan since jump, but this unilateral, dubious move is at least making me re-examine how I look at Google.