Google

CMS Wire's Barb Mosher reported about a forum posting by a Google Employee explaining why PageRank has been dropped from the Google Webmaster Tools. Barb writes:

Do you constantly watch the Google toolbar in your browser to see if your Google PageRank has changed? Do you worry constantly about why your rank is less than that of a competitor? Well, there may not be any reason to worry any longer.

Google has dropped PageRank data from Webmaster Tools.

Google has for some time discussed that PageRank is a very small factor among many factors that they look at for placing a particular indexed page on a search results page. Dropping PageRank from the Webmaster Tools appears to be just one more step in moving PageRank away from everyone's attention.

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

I have observed that indeed PageRank doesn't matter for placement on Google's search pages. I've seen CMSReport.com's front page ranked from as low as "3" to as high as "7" over the years. Although the page rank has varied over time, the placement of my web pages on the search pages have stayed about the same. Relevancy of the page to the search terms being used seems to have a much greater impact on how well your site ranks with the search engine. Additional details on why Google doesn't see PageRank as a good measurement for a site can be found on one of their Webmaster FAQ.

Barb Mosher has written a great summary at CMS Wire on Google's new Sites API which allows content owners to move content in and out Google Sites. As Mosher points out, this new API and some additional tools will allow content owners to "pull stuff out of SharePoint and place it into Google Sites" which is sure to bring "real heat between Redmond and Mountain View" in their quest for customers.

Until now, content and data inside Google Sites stayed inside Google Sites. And there was no easy way to migrate additional content and data into it. With the introduction of the Google Sites Data API, that has changed.

The API support almost all of the functionality currently available within Google Sites including:

• Retrieve, create, modify, and delete pages and content.
• Upload/download attachments.
• Review the revision history across a site.
• Display recent user activity.

Which brings us to the point. With these new capabilities, you can now not only move data out of Google Sites, but you can move data into Google Sites and possibly out of other similar applications, like SharePoint.

Whether Google Sites and the new API will be a threat to Microsoft and SharePoint is questionable. But, once again I think these type of events emphasize that those content management systems that get the most attention from us these days are those applications that open up and work with other third party applications.

There is a reason why such topics as CMIS, open source, and API are in the spotlight with folks interested in content management. No one really wants to be stuck with a vendor that doesn't play well with others. It just strategically isn't a good idea to have your content controlled by a single vendor, so why do it? I suppose I'm rhetorically asking that question to both customers and vendors. 

Yesterday afternoon Google announced at their Webmaster Central Blog that Google is changing the architecture of its search engine. These changes are expected to improve the speed, accuracy, and completeness of the Google search engine. Better yet, the prototype for the enhanced search engine is available for public testing.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at [link broken] and try searches there.

When first using Microsoft's new Bing search engine one of the surprises for me was the speed in which the results were delivered. I suspect that it's probably no coincidence that as competition heats up Google now sees a need to improve the infrastructure for delivering search results to its users. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to see that changes are coming.

I also have to admit that I get a secret pleasure in knowing that changes with Google's search engine will put those search engine optimization (SEO) folks on even shakier ground. These are the folks that claim for a price they can put your website pages on top of Google's index pages. As you can tell from my tone, I'm not a big believer in SEO. I'm a big believer that writing good content on your site is the only search engine optimization you ever really need. Hopefully Google's new search engine will continue to prove my point.

I'm doing a little morning reading at some of my favorite Internet spots.  A couple of this morning's IT related posts that caught my attention:

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

By now you've heard of Google's new Chrome browser which is currently in beta.  But did you ask yourself, why would Google want to enter the Internet browser market?  There are a number of reasons to why Google may have developed this browser, but I believe the explanation given by an article posted at CNET's Webware is the most likely reason.

On the Web, a site that responds a few milliseconds faster can make a big difference in people's engagement. It's for this reason that Google believes its new Web browser, Chrome, is a project worth investing in rather than a footnote in the history of the Internet.

Chrome, Google said during its Tuesday launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Google's hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today's Web-based applications...

...Why speed means money
Google benefits materially from fast performance. First, when it comes to search, Google discovered when its search page loads fractionally faster, users search more often, which of course leads to more opportunities for Google to place its highly lucrative text ads. Second, a faster Web application foundation means that Google's online applications for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and calendars can become faster and fuller-featured.

I'm not a huge fan of creating sites with Adobe's Flash.  I personally find Flash sites difficult to navigate, bookmark, and retrieve worthwhile information.  However, I can understand why the more artistic Web designers and site owners out there prefer to use Flash when building a website.  But in my mind, one of the biggest drawbacks with Flash is that Google and other search engines have a difficult time reading and indexing Flash sites.  Let's face it, if Google can't search your site then it is highly unlikely your customers will find your site in the first few pages displayed by Google no matter which keywords are being used.

This is why I'm very cautious in using any type of search engine toolbar (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Google is working to fix a bug in the Google Toolbar that could allow criminals to steal data or install malicious software on a system, a security researcher warned Tuesday.

The flaw lies in the mechanism Google Toolbar uses to add new buttons on the browser. Because the toolbar does not perform adequate checks when new buttons are being installed, a hacker could make his button appear as though it was being downloaded from a legitimate site when in fact it came from somewhere else.

I have not had time to talk about Google's Highly Open Participation Contest. Luckily, Amy Stephen posted a good article about the contest at Open Source Community which I encourage you to read. In the article, she talks about the positives of this program for both the high school age coders as well as the open source communities involved.

As Amy mentions in her article, Google invited ten Open Source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe to participate. In Google's own words this is what they have to say about their program:

I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code.  But just like the invitation from Drupal, WordPress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.