Google Personalized PPC/CPC Results – Hurts Advertisers
I have been noticing something over the last couple of weeks in regards to rankings of paid search listings in Google and their odd propensity to show up differently in different browsers. Odd you say? Yes I say. Thinking of why this might be, the only logical conclusion I could come up with was cookies. So I decided to test it out. I took a screen shot before I deleted my Google based cookies and then one after. Here are the before and after screen shots. (Obviously this is anecdotal at this point!) Before Cookies Cleared After Cookies Cleared So Google is personalizing Paid Search results, thanks for the heads up Google. Good for advertisers? Not really. By doing this Google eliminates some listings all together, or pushes them to never-never land, thereby...
Profitable Web 2.0? That’s Probably Worth $5.35 Million
It was bound to happen. Many people have pointed out the link between the tech crash and today’s Web 2.0 venture frenzy. It always seemed backwards (traffic -> venture capital -> make money). In the “real world”, businesses are expected to prove their worth before they get venture backing. You know, actually posting profits before getting funded. Well, it has happened. iContact (formerly intelliContact by Broadwick) has managed to do just that. With over 11,000 clients, the company turned itself to Web 2.0 by building RSS / Blogs and Syndication into its already hugely successful Opt-In Email Marketing Platform. Updata Partners recognized that, for once in the history of the world, a young, successful, profitable company was able to seamlessly...
XSS Hole in Reddit Allows Gaping Access: Proof of Concept
Fixed by Reddit. So, a few months back Digg added a new feature that allowed users to invite and add friends more easily. Unfortunately, as I reported then, this hole allowed a site to automatically add friends if the visitor was still logged into Digg. This story did quite well in Reddit, often considered rivals, actually out performing the story on Digg which was, unsurprisingly, quickly buried. Nevertheless, an XSS hole in the handling of non-existing 404 pages has created a gaping hole which can allow a site to perform almost any site function we would want. To be fair to Reddit, I figured the Proof of Concept should mimic the same one as I did for Digg, an auto friend adder. If you are reading this page and are logged into Reddit, assuming the hole has not...
96.6% of Wikipedia Pages Rank in Google’s Top 10
While everyone has noticed Wikipedia dominating Google’s search results, this is a little outrageous. After grabbing 600 random pages from Wikipedia (using their special:random link), I conducted searches in Google for each of the titles of the Wikipedia entries. Out of the 600, 580 were in the top 10. Wikipedia Entry Top 10? Czechoslovakia at the 1960 Summer Olympics yes Jefferson Park yes Unity Day yes St. John Vianney High School (New Jersey) yes Veil of Darkness no Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission no Al-Fakik (crater) yes Group key no Driver Hearing yes Black Lips yes William Shakespear yes Comparative government yes Robert J. White yes Lila Bell Wallace yes William Dodd (Congressional candidate) yes Star (glyph) yes...
Super Smart Experiment – Surviving the Digg Effect
Definitely one of the smarter experiments I have seen these days. This site tries to promote 1 story with 9 different hosting companies loaded up in Iframes. That way, each site gets the exact same amount of traffic from the exact users. Then he just pings them to check which are still up. I absolutely love this kind of attitude of bootstrap experimentation, especially when it is crafted in a way that makes it really accurate. I have seen stories before where they just pound 1 host, but not one where they can really compare multiple hosts at the same time. Kudos! No tags for this...
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