The Sandbox

The ironic thing about Google's new enhancements is that it totally loops back to early days.  Once upon a time, webmasters tried to tell search engines what type of content was on their sites using meta-tags.  The spamsters got tricky, adding content to meta-tags that was nowhere on the site, so that people searching for: "Britney Spears Naked" found themselves at a website selling kitchen knives.  They also crammed the meta-tags with repeated keywords.  So the major search engines gave up and stopped looking at meta-tags.  Then other tagging services became popular, such as Technorati.  And smaller engines experimented with having users tag sites for each other's benefit.  Now Google Labs is rolling out their coop feature, allowing sites to be tagged for relevance to particular topics.  No doubt Google has already built in some measures to control spamming, but I know a lot of spamsters are sitting around trying to figure out how to exploit this new feature.

Google Adsense rules much of the known universe.  Almost everything you can do for free, online, is mostly done through some Google product and comes with their Ad-words campaign pasted in it somewhere.  MSN has been trolling along with the only real competition, Overture.  Now, they are bringing their own product to bear, MSN Adcenter.

Supposedly, AdCenter has better targeting tools so you can pitch your product to a well-specified demographic.  Except, MSN only reaches 11% of whatever demographic you want.  Google/Skynet reaches everything.  

In my day job, I work for a company that provides the best web design in Washington DC. Washington DC is kind of a unique place for web design, because there is so much more message selling than commerce involved. Non-profits, trade associations, politicians, and small press groups publish an enormous quantity of stuff to the web every day. It’s enough to bury anyone looking for answers. Once upon a time the problem was how to find information on a topic. Now the central problem is controlling information so that you only get as much as you can handle. But you want the small trickle you get to be the best, most relevant information out there. Thus, search engines. On the other end, I help people trying to get their vision across climb to the front page of the search engine results. Otherwise it’s like shouting from the bottom of a well.