AdMoolah News and Views

AOL recently released a document on the Internet containing query data for about 20 million searches from 658,000 different users.

This has been seen as a huge mistake on AOL part and raises some serious privacy concerns. The AOL user IDs in the data had been replaced by random numbers, but there was still quite a bit of private data in the search queries such as Social Security Numbers and credit card numbers. See Elliot Back’s post about the privacy issues.

The reason this is of interest to publishers is that it is a very extensive source of information about keywords and search behavior. Mining the data can reveal which keyword phrases are popular and what alternate phrases people use when one phrase does not show the desired results. This data is much more detailed than anything obtained from sources such as Wordtracker or Overature keyword listings.

I expect to see people’s analysis of this data popping up soon.

See this Digital Point thread for more discussion.

Update: Here are some websites which you can use to access the data:
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/ – Users can query by user id, keyword, date or clicked website
http://fuaol.com/ – A list of the top 5000 keywords
http://simplifiedsec.com/KeywordDigger.html – Search by keyword

Update 2: http://dontdelete.com/ This looks like a good, quick interface to the data.

Google has been cracking down on websites which use trademarked terms like “Google” or “AdSense” in the domain name. They have been sending letters to publishers indicating that this is a TOS violation and that AdSense can no longer be used on the site.

Eric Giguere and a poster on WebmasterWorld have both reported getting letters.

This is important to keep in mind when choosing domain names. If you plan to run AdSense on a site, don’t use any of Google’s trademarks.

According to a New York Times article (registration required), Google is purchasing a 5% stake in AOL for one billions dollars. Here is my take on how this will affect the AdSense world.

One thing that will change is that Google will put special AOL ads on their web sites.

If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content – like information about Madonna – there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL’s logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.

The one effect I see this having may be a slight decrease in CTR for AdWords advertisers. The regular AdWords ads that are displayed on Google’s searches will have more competition on the screen, so they will be clicked less often. Advertisers may not be too happy about this.

The other slightly disturbing thing was this quote:

Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google’s search results.

If Google engineers, who know the “computer formulas” are giving technical assistance, this means that they will have an unfair advantage over other publishers in getting good results in the SERPs. Other publishers need to guess what SEO techniques work best on websites. If AOL knows what works best they will do better than everyone else.

To me this goes against Google’s philosophy of always providing the most “natural” results as possible in their search results.

More commentary at John Battelle’s Searchblog

Google Analytics seems to be totally overwhelmed still. Yesterday, about 60 hours after I put the tracking code on my site, I was able to get a brief glimpse of what kinds of statistics they gathered. But today, I can no longer see any data. I get the same message saying “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.” If this was a company I had not heard of before, I would have already deleted the tracking code and given up, but since its Google I’ll give them a little bit more time.

One of the things I was disappointed with is that there is no way to track advertising click on a web site with Google Analytics. I’m hoping they will change this soon and integrate AdSense, and other advertiser program clicks into the system. Right now when some one leaves the site I have no way of knowing how they left. It would b nice to know which visitors ended up leaving via advertisers links. This way you can compare the value of say, AdWords generated traffic versus organic search traffic.

Shawn at digitalpoint noticed the same thing and came up with a JavaScript hack to partially fix this. The reason I say “partially” is that it only works for visitors using Internet Explorer. I have included this JavaScript on one of my sites, but I have no idea when I will actually be able to see the results.

Google announced today that it is making their Google Analytics (aka Urchin) service available for free. This will be of interest to web site publishers for two reasons:

1) This will be a great package for doing advanced tracking of visitors. You will be able to track where visitors are coming from and what they do on your web pages. Knowing the behavior of visitors to your site allows your to target and keep surfers happy.

2) Th analytics service is integrated with AdWords. This will increase the number of websites reporting conversion information to Google, which means that their smart pricing algorithms will have more information to work with. Hopefully this will improve the accuracy of smart pricing.

I have signed up for an account and placed the code on one of my sites and will be trying it out. I will report more when I have used it for a while.

Right now, when I try to sign in to my account, I get the following message:

We’re upgrading accounts. Please come back later.

Thanks for stopping by. We are currently migrating existing customers to the newly improved Google Analytics service. This process will be completed later this afternoon. Please come back then to sign up for Google Analytics.