Google Labs

Today I had the amazing opportunity to tour of the GooglePlex with Matt Cutts & Adam Lasnik. It was a Very small group of webmasters and online advertising professionals. I can’t give any details about what was discussed because I signed a NDA. Even if I didn’t sign it, I wouldn’t have anything scandalous to report anyway. Still… Even though I didn’t get all of my questions answered, it was very cool to be able to check it out, look under the hood, and see how the people work.

I’ve been at this stuff for a very long time and I’ve always wanted to experience something like this. All I can say is that Google takes quality seriously and is working very hard to provide webmasters and online advertisers the tools they need.

Matt Cuts showing us one of the many scooters the Googlers have to zip around the campus on.

Still to go…
Party with the folks at ASK tonight.
Google Dance Tomorrow!

Aloha,
Dave.

In a few hours I’ll be in San Jose to attend the Search Engine Strategies Conference . Last year was great but this year is sure to be even bigger and better. Even my friends in the print and video industry are asking more and more questions about online advertising. I would highly recommend attending this event for any Hawaii advertising professional.

I’ll try my best to post on the events as I have time.

Aloha,
Dave.

I’ve been playing with it all day. It’s great. I seriously believe this type of application and technology will help create an environment where a $100.00 laptop might be possible.

I won’t be switching from Excel anytime soon but there are about 3 Billion people in the developing world that could use a cheap computer with free power tools like this.

I found this strange AdWords result this morning on my wife’s computer from a query she made. I made her stop working and took over her computer. I did a similar query for a different state and got the same result. (Same ad, same company but different state.) As you can see, the top ad has twice as many lines of text as normally allowed.

I emailed a screen capture to the folks at Search Engine Roundtable to see what they thought about it. It was then picked up by Danny Sullivan at the Search Engine Watch Blog, and a few days later by ClickZ News. No one on the mainland was able to reproduce the result so I’m sure there was a bit of skepticism. (I couldn’t believe my eyes either.) It was later confirmed by a Google spokesman that they are conducting a “limited test” with larger ad formats.

Ironically… Yahoo! Just shortened their ads from 190 to 70 characters to making them more like Google just the other day on January 18^th. The reaction was, this is not a good idea. It’s way too big. If both ads had four lines of text it would push the natural results almost off the page and it’s ugly. The only benefit this ad format could have (IMO) is possibly for the AdSence advertisers. It’s a nice block of copy that might work well inserted into an editorial article. One of the new features of AdSence is you can select the relevant copy on your page that you would like to trigger an AdSence unit. (Thanks to JenSence.com, You can download a tutorial here) This might allow the advertiser to create a more compelling ad that allows for better qualification of the click and the publisher to present the most relevant ad to the audience. Another interesting fact is that I can only reproduce the result on my wife’s computer. I have a personalized Google home page etc on my computer and at work. This leads me to believe that Google has some extra AdWords targeting options they don’t make publicly available.

Aloha,
Dave.