some highlights:

stumble upon

Formula:

(Initial stumbler audience / # domain) + ((% stumbler audience / # domain) + organic bonus – nonfriend) – (% stumbler audience + organic bonus) + N

Description:

The initial stumbler “power” (Audience of the initial stumbler divided by the amount of times that stumbler has stumbled the given domain) is added to the sum of all the subsequent stumbler’s powers.

Subsequent stumbler power is ((Percentage of audience stumbler makes up divided by the number of times given stumbler has stumbled domain) + a predetermined power boost for using the toolbar – a predetermined power drain if stumblers are connected)  + (% of the stumbler audience + a predetermined boost for using the toolbar)

N is a “safety variable” so that the assumed algorithm is flexible. It represents a random number.

Del.icio.us

Formula:

Points = (Amount of times story has been bookmarked in the last 3600 seconds)

Description:

Rank on Del.icio.us Popular is determined by comparing points. Points represent the amount of times a story has been bookmarked in the last hour. The higher the rate, the higher the points. Every bookmark counts as one point.
3600 is the seconds in one hour.

good investigating post i am not sure these are the only parameters nor what these sites use against “popularity fraud” but still interesting reading.

1. you will get screwed

2. even if the traffic provider has nice ad real estate it doesn’t mean he wont screw you

Today I got 10 emails from marchex.com telling me i have a low ad budget. marchex.com? who the hell are marchex.com and when did i use their service? after some googleing i found out that industrybrains changes their name to marchex. I guess a lot of people think industrybrains suck so they had to change their name to the parent company that bought them in 2005. It looks like they think so as well since nowhere in the email did they mention their old brand.

MSN search team are Idiots and Clueless.

some highlights:

if ads appear above the organic search results and are exceptionally relevant they can get a 10% to 30% clickthrough rate. Ads that appear on the side of the search results are typically much more likely to be clicked on ~ 1% of the time.

the relative click volume of lower ranked results relative to the top ranked site.

Overall Percent of Clicks	Relative Click Volume
42.13%, 2,075,765 clicks 11.90%, 586,100 clicks 8.50%, 418,643 clicks 6.06%, 298,532 clicks 4.92%, 242,169 clicks 4.05%, 199,541 clicks 3.41%, 168,080 clicks 3.01%, 148,489 clicks 2.85%, 140,356 clicks 2.99%, 147,551 clicks	3.5x less 4.9x less 6.9x less 8.5x less 10.4x less 12.3x less 14.0x less 14.8x less 14.1x less
1st page totals: 89.82%, 4,425,226 clicks 2nd page totals: 10.18%, 501,397 clicks

User Intent

Most people who search are looking to research information rather than buying an item, and yet most pay per click ads aim to sell items.

Tip: If a person searches for a research oriented keyword and your listing uses words like compare and reviews in it then the searcher will find your listing more relevant to their needs and be more likely to click on your listing.

Paid Search Ads

If paid search ads appear above the organic search results they drive down the organic search results and take away many of the potential clicks. Google is aggressively focused on keeping attention focused on the upper left corner of the search results, and will only display ads on top of the search results if they have high perceived relevancy driven by a high CTR.

Tip: We typically scan search results in groups of 3 or 4. If 3 paid search ads appear above the search results for a keyword you really need to be in the top 3 organic search results to get much traffic.

I am confirming that Network Solutions steals domain ideas when people check domain availability on the Network Solutions website. They seem to have started the practice of stealing domain ideas on December 16th 2007 according to our Domain History database but I was just made aware of this practice today. I am appalled at the concept of taking people’s domain ideas and registering it before the consumer has the ability to manually register the domain.

It is a deplorable action that Network Solution would announce potential domain names to the entire world. If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period. After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else. However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them. By registering the domain Network Solutions is exposing the domain in the DNS and every computer in the world now knows about the domain. These domains are now easy fodder for scammers and it is mind blowing that Network Solutions would expose their customers queries to the world in this manner.

AMAZING

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
• Chairs, desks: men’s names
• Materials, curtains: women’s names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
• Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling
• Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

from wikipedia

This is an old story, but it has a new twist to it which I have noticed only recently. When I was visiting my favorite torrent site I noticed that they are using Google Analytics as their site analysis service. I found it very strange. Not only does google track my online habits on their search engine, they can now track me on none google sites as well. It all started 2 years ago when google opened up Google Analytics, till then a paid service, for free use by the public. Till then it cost about $5k a year for websites to have similar web analytics and this was a real treat to a lot of websites. Slowly, one after the other, more and more websites started using google analytics, which is a hosted software on Google’s servers, as their web analytics software. In essence, Google got a full knowledge of where we go, what we do there, where we go from there, what we search for and what we do after we find it – no matter where we are on the web.

I knew a lot of sites use google analytics, after all it’s a great service, but I didn’t expect a torrent site to run it due to its “controversial” content. I wondered how many big sites run analytics or are tracked by google. So I ran a little test on the most popular sites according to alexa:

41 of the 100 most popular sites are tracked by Google, and anything you say, post, read or do there is recorded by Google. If you remove google search sites you learn that 14 out of 74 top websites use Google Analytics. These do not include sites that use adwords or google search in their websites which also adds information to google’s tracking and profiling. That is a lot. You would expect site owners to hide their site stats from google. I was especially surprised by friendster, adult friend finder and Fotolog usage of Google Analytics… you would expect them to guard their stats data and host some other web analytics application. People who like to visit mininova or Youporn probably get an un easy feeling as well. As you can see Google knows a lot about your online habits. You can argue that they don’t use the data or that not much can be done with all this data but without a doubt Google holds too much information on all of us. Especially as a corporate that does not like to disclose what they do with all that tracked data.

For the more privacy cautious between us the solution for preventing any site’s Google Analytics to record any information on us is quite simple. Just add to your hosts file the following lines:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 *.google-analytics.com

Google Analytics javascript won’t be downloaded to your computer nor will it be able to send data home.

You better
Watch out
you better not cry,
you better not pout I’m tellin’ you why,
Google is coming to town,
they are making a list checking it twice,
gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,
Google is coming to town.

I don’t know why but the original song has a less scary feel to it.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large. Focusing campaigns to optimize on clicks means skewing campaigns to optimize on middle-aged women from the Midwest. If these folks are not your target, then you should be ignoring the click-rate and looking deeper, to what audience your impressions are being delivered, and what audiences are converting (there is a large body of evidence that shows that click-rates and conversion rates rarely correlate with each other).

Highlights:

Label position—Placing a label above an input field works better in most cases, because users aren’t forced to look separately at the label and the input field. Be careful to visually separate the label for the next input field from the previous input field.

Alignment of labels—In most cases, when placing labels to the left of input fields, using left-aligned labels imposes a heavy cognitive workload on users. Placing labels above input fields is preferable, but if you choose to place them to the left of input fields, at least make them right aligned.

nice.