Google Techs, Webmasters Mingle

Steve Nixon writes "Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night, but the real action was unfolding inside a sterile conference room at Google's headquarters. That's where the cunning internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google's search engine results for a competitive edge were trying to make the most of a rare opportunity to match wits face-to-face with the company's top engineers."

Comments

Clusty

[superpulpsicle]

That's why I like www.clusty.com. Everyone is concerned about elevating their website so that they are the first page/topranking of Google's results. For example the word "RAM", is memory, animal and technically sex related.

Clusty would have split into 3 separate cluster trees. In google it would just be out of balance.

Re:Clusty

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is doing an inconsistent job lately of associating trademarks with their owner companies. I was looking into espresso machines a few days ago, and noticed that when I looked up "La Pavoni" on Google, the actual company website at lapavoni.com was nowhere to be found among the usual flood of reseller spam.

It looks like the recent GoogleDance has corrected this particular problem, though, since it's now the first non-sponsored link. But I've seen the same problem before when trying to use Google to find a company's website, rather than those of twenty million identical-looking resellers.

Re:It's the yahoo tech news feed

[JPriest]

They also have an RSS feed and for Klipfolio users, the Klip is here. You can click setup in the Klip to get just yahoo tech news. Not a bad site.

Re:Evil?

[SuperBanana]

If Google's livelihood is contingent on destroying these people, I hope they put something in the fruit punch...

More like they're trying to convert people to buy adspace, I suspect.

Funny how they'll throw these people a kegger, but they won't answer emails from "small" webmasters like me. We've been using Google search for a couple of years, and we have almost a decade and a half worth of email archives. We're the oldest internet resource for owners of a certain brand of cars, and we are widely considered one of the best resources.

That said- when I contacted Google's CR people asking why, for over a year, nothing new had been indexed on our site- Google's answer was a form letter "if you don't like how we index your site, that's just too bad". They didn't even bother to read my email all the way through- I specifically said I DIDN'T care about ranking, I DIDN'T care about complete indexing. I DIDN'T care about regular re-indexing. I just wanted to know why NOTHING new had been indexed in quite some time- almost 2 years.

They're about one install of htdig away from a big "fuck you" in the form of a complete block via robots.txt, a redirect on any hit with a google referral, etc. We've been around longer than they have, and we'll probably outlast them as well. I've long since stopped recommending Google to people. Now I point them to, among other things, Teoma.