The two main forms of navigation online are direct, and link. The latter will remain unchanged, while direct navigation will be opened up to infinite possiblities, and hence infinite confusion.

Picture the scenario: I drive past Barry’s Motors one Saturday morning, and spot a car I really like. Later that week, I remember my drive-by, open my laptop, and start to try and guess their website address (as lots of people do). After much distress, I finally end up going to Google and finding the new web address is barrys.motors. How would I have ever managed to type that in to the address bar? I didn’t even know .motors existed.

So the first point is - Google will benefit from the large dose of confusion that ICANN will inject into direct navigation through increased query frequency.

Part of this confusion will stem from del.icio.us-style use of extensions in branding. User’s can’t just add .com or .co.uk to a brand name. That would be too simple. This will bring about another change though, this time in search from Google’s perspective. Extensions will now truly have to be treated as keywords. They are part of the brand. If I decide to register http://luke.eales, then both the keyword AND extension combine to make up the full keyword. More weighting must be given to this in the future in light of ICANN’s changes.

PS. Very good news for growth of the internet in countries using foreign alphabets.

I’ll leave you with a picture of one of the Fijian islands we visited - this was taken at 5.45 pm. Now do you understand?

Problems with Google Blog Search

So what are the problems that are keeping Google Blog Search from being as polished a product as it should be?

• Non-blog inclusions - Google seems to have a strange definition of a blog. Apparently, forum posts and Digg submissions both fall into the category. Such pages may be useful for those looking for content on the social web, but strictly speaking they shouldn’t be returned when under the umbrella of Blog Search.
  • Example - Searching for my football club 4 hours after their latest game ended, the first result is this. Why is this being served up in a blog search?
• Spam - For whatever reason, it appears that Blog Search is without the same level of spam filtering as Google’s general search. As you venture beyond the first page for most queries, the quality of results falls away. This could be worked around if it wasn’t for the fact that more relevant results are dotted around amongst the spam on later pages. With Google Blog Search, you never really know when you’ve reached the end of the relevant results. This makes for lots of trawling to find all coverage of a story.
  • Example - Searching ‘baby names‘ when researching for one of my sites, the 14th result is titled ‘Sexy teen girl booty dancing (ass shaking apple bottom)‘

I personally feel I can’t rely on either Technorati or Google Blog Search. Combined use of the two should see you through until Google starts reconsidering the way they serve blog search.

However for many, things don’t go quite as planned, and a link lure turns out to be a fantastic flop. There are many causes of such failure, and I’ve skimmed over two of the main ones below.

(more…)