News

I was at the G-MauritiusDay2009 conference today and the Googlers talked about a lot of Google technologies to help people build better websites and monetise them. Here is my Twitter transcript:

(about 9 hours ago)
#googlemu Second day of the Google conference in Mauritius! Mary Himinkool, who does New Business Development, talks about Google's vision

(about 9 hours ago in reply to asheshr)
@asheshr How bizarre… They use MacBooks Pro and mentioned Linux one or twice yesterday :-)

(about 9 hours ago)
#googlemu A captivating website is (i) relevant (ii) customisable (iii) respect users (iv) engage users to participate (v) innovative

(about 9 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = Launch early and iterate = open source development model :-)

(about 9 hours ago)
#googlemu Long tail community of users…

(about 9 hours ago)
#googlemu Need to have a look at the nice things on Google Labs http://www.googlelabs.com/

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Google Indic Transliteration in real time http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = Share everything you can = open source development model once more :-)

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = Hire the best (most intelligent — not most vocal :-)

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = Allow people to pursue dreams. 20% of the time, Googlers do whatever they want to spend energy on.. and you get Gmail

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = ideas come from everywhere. Make people meet, talk and communicate. Let them suggest ideas.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Google acquires companies to get people with new ideas.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = don't politic — use data. Only deduce something from hard facts. Get the data! Run pilot experiments!

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Innovation = creativity loves restraints — put clear boundaries

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Focus on Users and usage and money will follow. Don't focus on the money. Start with satisfying user needs.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Don't kill projects — morph them. Simplify. Combine. E.g. Google Talk + Gmail = Gmail chat…

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Talked about Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu THE FUTURE = LIVING IN THE CLOUD. I'm convinced. And I hope you're too!

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Advances: Better search, better visualisation, etc.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache. I'm lucky that I'm being inspired by Mary :-)

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy told us to blog about how awesome the keynote by Mary was. So I feel compelled to say that Mary's keynote was very nice.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu 15 minutes of break before a Google Analytics session. See you later.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy starts on Adsense and Adwords.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu 74,200,000,000 Google searches in June 2008. Bloody hell :-)

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Evolution of search: lycos, askjeeves, yahoo, excite, web crawler. Brings a lot of past memory.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy mentions Mozilla Aurora, 3D search, http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Google Search is successful because of its speed (and also its relevance.)

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy didn't mention it but Google search runs on a cluster of 500,000 Linux computers.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Google continually changes its algo. 10-20% of the web is new each time Google starts using a new algo.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu By the way (and this will appeal to functional programming fans like me), Google uses MapReduce http://bit.ly/2ErR0O

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy explaining the Ad Auction mechanism. See http://bit.ly/VUAVo

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Ad position determined by quality score (click-through-rate, keyword, ad text, landing page quality.) So ad text also has a role!

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Ad position also depends on how much the advertiser wants to pay (CPC). Ad rank = quality score * max CPC.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Payment = Ad rank / competitor quality score + $0.01. Actual CPC <= Max CPC.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Revise your Quality Score and your Max CPC a least once per month

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Account -> Campaign -> Ad group. Chose relevant keywords and ad text.

(about 8 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy mentions the AdWords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu The Keyword Tool is really excellent. I am happy to have been introduced to it!

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy explains exact match, phrase match, broad match, negative match. See http://bit.ly/ecb3S

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy says that people spend less time watching TV, listening radio and reading. Instead they do those things online.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Marketers are moving online as things can be measured. Everything is based on clicks.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Return on investment calculation becomes trivial.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu New platforms: mobile. iPhone users search 50x more than other mobile phone users. Mobile ad market: around $4B estimated.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy mentions the Nokia N900 http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ which is the future of phones ahem computers, maybe.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu The guy next to me is fast asleep. He shouldn't have come…

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy says that the most important parameter in AdWords is the budget per day. Starts at $1 per day which means Rs 1000 per month

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu The destination URL for an advert should be as specific as possible.

(about 7 hours ago in reply to yashvin)
@yashvin I hope that guy didn't come yesterday :-)

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy is a fetishist: he is using the domain lickmyear.org as an example domain :-)

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Adwords finished. All and good. Now let's move to AdSense.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Explains about ad units, etc.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Revenue from AdSense depends of course on the traffic.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy finished doing his presentation on AdWords (great) and AdSense (so so…) Julian will talk of Analytics next.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian starts on Google Analytics. Know your users. Decide from data! That's the new mantra :-)

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Analytics = what's happening | Website Optimizer = change your website

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian Harris explains how analytics is highly customisable: profiles, geofiltering, custom reporting, visitor demographics, API

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Having referrals is a great way to increase traffic. https://www.noulakaz.net/ gets 55% of its traffic from referrals.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian explains the difference between hits and page views. A single page might request hundreds of server hits.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian speaks on Analytics URL builder http://bit.ly/foZtS

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu For those who don't know: Chewy is @LordofGoats and Julian is @julianharris What about the other Googlers?

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Hell! I've mistakenly typed @ instead of # again. I am getting too old for this :-)

(about 7 hours ago in reply to who0)
@who0 De rien :-)

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Think in terms of user goals! Know your users. Why are they coming on my website?

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Potential goals: e-commerce, lead generation, brand and/or product awareness, member acquisition, etc.

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu Google Analytics can track goals (multiple pages e.g. an e-commerce sale process.)

(about 7 hours ago)
#googlemu For lead generation, goal tracking can be used, for example, to check whether a visitor is filling in a form after his visit.

(about 7 hours ago in reply to AdamWoozeer)
@AdamWoozeer True. True.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Analytics allow you to "pinpoint where you lose visitors" and "duplicate successful paths" I really need to have a look at goals

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Up to now, I have used Analytics as a good-looking webalizer. I need to change my stance.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Funnel reporting looks really nice graphically.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Don't don't don't tell me that googlestore is powered by ASP!?!?!?

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Goals and Funnels explained at http://bit.ly/GKWmX I have to spend some time with those for my http://www.knowledge7.com/ website

(about 6 hours ago in reply to misrael)
@misrael You win this time :-) #googlemu

(about 6 hours ago)
@misrael There is something fishy. If you go on the website e.g. http://bit.ly/cmYx5 you'll see that it is using PHP… #googlemu

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu So, on the Analytics webpage, we see .asp pages whereas when we visit the site, we can see .php. Who can explain? Using both?

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian now starts talking of Google Site Optimizer which is what you should do after doing analytics.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Netcraft confirms that googlestore.com works on IIS 6.0 http://bit.ly/rSrRJ Must be a side project, n'est ce pas @misrael? :-)

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Site Optimizer https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/ allow people to improve conversion rate.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Site optimizer allows people to do A/B testing (compare two versions of the same page) and multivariate experiment (compare >2)

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Read http://bit.ly/2VQhFd for more information on Google Site Optimizer

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu What? Test what combination of site content drives most conversions. Why? Help marketers convert visitors into customers.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Visitors take 8 seconds to decide whether they will leave or stay! So cut down on the crap graphics :-)

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian is talking about multivariate analysis. In other words, GSO can compare the conversion rates of, say, 3 versions of a page.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu GWO allows different designs to cohabit. Nothing to do with trying out a design for, say, a week. That's neat.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Maybe Julian is getting into too much depth, isn't he? A lot of people in the audience are somewhat dizzy :-)

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian was a user experience consultant in his pre-Google life. By the way, you should really really read http://bit.ly/VMhYK

(about 6 hours ago in reply to __Sun__)
@__Sun__ Why don't you come? I don't think they'll notice there is an "outsider" :-) #googlemu

(about 6 hours ago)
@misrael timbuktubikes runs on PHP :-) I'm vindicated! #googlemu

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Talking of conversions and conversion rate. See http://bit.ly/W82Hp Basically, has the visitor done THE action you wanted.

(about 6 hours ago in reply to LordofGoats)
@LordofGoats Finding nice sounding domains has really become tough lately because of those people buying domains in bulk. #googlemu

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian has just finished demoing a Website Optimizer experiment. Now he is showing us a case study of Picassa.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian said something very important: "A funnel can be only one page!" That's excellent.

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Hypothesis #1: It is always better to describe user benefits than product features

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Site optimizer showed that the hypothesis was false. I would have never guessed…

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian showing us a "enhanced" design which cut the sales by half. He also said that the homepage is a political battleground :-)

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu Julian is summarising now. He has called Julien Faliu how he optimizes his own website. See http://www.expat-blog.com/

(about 6 hours ago)
#googlemu sed 's/u h/u to show h/g' please

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Expat-Blog has a lot of traffic. More than 290,000 visits per month. Julien must be a rich guy :-)

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Julien is getting more than 6000 new customers per month on Expat-Blog now :-)

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Julien Faliu is saying that Analytics & AdSense are great tools to monetise a website. I guess we're all convinced now :-)

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu 66% of people coming on Expat-Blog register. That's excellent!!!

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Consultants can use Google products for free and bill customers for their service. Phew :-) [As if we didn't know already.]

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Someone asked a good question on the real influence of SEO experts on ranking. They didn't answer. Seems to work though.

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Talking of the potential of using Google Earth for the tourist industry..

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy showing us a layer in Google Earth from fboweb.com where one can see all airplanes flying in the US airspace! That's neat!

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu See http://flightwise.com/ for more info.

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Need to have some *real* food now :-)

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy showing us Google Squared http://www.google.com/squared

(about 5 hours ago)
#googlemu Lunchtime!!!

(about 4 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy explains Google Search (1) crawling (2) page ranking http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html and (3) indexing

(about 4 hours ago in reply to kiagiri)
@kiagiri Should be on http://flightwise.com/ somewhere… Sorry I don't remember the exact name.

(about 4 hours ago)
#googlemu For fun, search for "search engine" on Google and be surprised :-)

(about 4 hours ago)
#googlemu 25% of queries have not been seen in 3 months. 10-25% of the web is new each time Google crawls it.

(about 4 hours ago)
#googlemu Basic guidelines. Make your website (1) discoverable (2) indexable (3) nice content and structure (4) get a lot of incoming links

(about 4 hours ago)
#googlemu About (4), do it correctly: by becoming authoritative in some adequate forums and having, say, your URL in your signature.

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Make your URLs nice and clean. Have a lot of normal internal text links so that the GoogleBot can visit all pages…

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Reduce the number of redirects to a minimum. Think about what users will type as keywords. Use good titles, headings and keywords.

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy mentioned Linux again. And Mary somewhat described the open source development model in the morning. I'm happy :-)

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Check your website using Lynx :-) GoogleBot cannot (yet) understand images…

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Use Flash and Javascript sparingly. Measure everything. Run Analytics. Look at referring sites. etc.

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Flash recommendations: use HTML for navigation, use meta tags, use text tracks, create an HTML version of your site…

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Personally I dream of a world with no flash but a lot of HTML5. See http://www.youtube.com/html5 I tried with Safari and it works

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy is explaining the syntax of robots.txt which a lot of people don't know about. I don't use robots.txt personally.

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Dealing with duplicate content. Read about rel="canonical" at http://bit.ly/I9KXQ

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Google does not like paid links or anything fishy at all!

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Showing us Google Webmasters Central http://www.google.com/webmasters/

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu … which allows people to use the Google Webmaster Tools.

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu "Top search queries" only appear here, in the Google Webmaster Tools. It's worth its weight in gold :-)

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu Exploring GWT. Crawl stats. Pages crawled per day. Time spent downloading a page. PageRank of pages. Page with highest PageRank.

(about 3 hours ago)
#googlemu About SEO: you need to understand what the SEO people are doing. Avoid black hat http://bit.ly/dREBl

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Mary starts presenting some innovative applications using Google technology. First…

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu http://www.meetup.com/ Do something • Learn something Share something • Change something

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup.com

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Showing us http://animoto.com/ Turn your photos & videos into pure amazing videos. Free, fast and shockingly easy :-)

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu You can add music. Either your own or one of the Creative Commons music available there.

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Now she's showing us http://www.zappos.com/map/ which is something girls will love ;-)

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Now we're seeing http://obamavisits-ghana.appspot.com/ which is the Obama visits Ghana website. App Engine, YouTube, Maps, etc.

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu By the way, something nice just happened. Flash crashed within Chrome and everything still works :-) This is great.

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Don't forget about the Google App Gallery http://appgallery.appspot.com/ I really need to get into that.

(about 2 hours ago in reply to LordofGoats)
@LordofGoats HTML5 has the potential to displace Flash from the heart of a lot of *real* web developers :-) #googlemu

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Asvin Balloo has just showed us his own application http://twitree.com/ and it was great :-)

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Now having a look at http://www.kotzot.com/ and it looks like a portal for Mauritians. Dilraj is demoing it ;-)

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu I think it's time now to go home. Seems that there is not much to see.

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu I liked: App Engine, Friend Connect, Mary's keynote, Adwords, Adsense, Analytics and some of the websites shown by Mary.

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu I was somewhat less enthusiastic about: the Google Web Toolkit but, maybe, I didn't manage to understand everything.

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy is showing us Google Audio Indexing http://labs.google.com/gaudi You can search for words in a video!!!

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Mary mentions Google Channels. I need to think about using one for @KnowledgeSeven

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu I need to ask one question about Android…

(about 2 hours ago)
#googlemu Chewy said that Android has just started and everything now will depend on the user community developing applications.

(about 1 hour ago)
#googlemu Finished with a great group photo. Bye bye everyone. It was great being part of this event and twittering for 2 days was cool too