Alex Schultz

Author: Alex Schultz

  • The Economist Likens Google to Napoleon

    Something that has continually surprised me since starting a job is how often companies repeat the mistakes countries and armies of the old world have been making for centuries.

    The economist has an interesting article likening Google to Napoleon at the start of the 19th Century when he was advancing and succeeding on all fronts.

    Google is technologically superior to their competitors, Google has made massive progress in a short blitzkrieg against the old empires of Yahoo and MSN with Search, eBay with Checkout/Base and even smaller companies like YouTube with Video.

    Has Google overlooked and failed to kill off a key competitor and are they reaching into a new market that could become a Russia? Only time will tell but with search, ecommerce and advertising I think google has at least three fronts. You cannot have a war on multiple fronts and win.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Microsoft Windows Live Writer Download

    Great job from microsoft today in providing a simply awesome bit of desktop kit. I love being able to work on the web without going through numerous layers of authentication and the usual vagueries of a browser. With the new windows live writer I can post to this blog from my desktop! Great job microsoft keep on creating good work like this.

    A final point is that the live homepage and widgets are great, the live search is looking actually very competitive in terms of user experience and quality listings. I think Microsoft are seriously starting to get their act together. The next 5 yrs is gonna be fun.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Search APIs offered by the largest engines

    APIs are a topic dear to my heart. Something that I have never understood is why a company would build an API, only allow developers a couple of thousand calls a day and then leave those APIs out there relatively unsupported for a significant amount of time.

    A quick analysis shows all pure natural search APIs are highly restricted. Why is this? As I see it the question is one of upside for the search engine. A non-exhaustive list of negative suggestions include back engineering their algorithm, producing copernicus and dogpile tools which don’t monetize with their adverts and competitors finding ways to compare and improve their rankings.

    The search engines do not support their natural search APIs well at all and since there is significant risk and little opportunity to exposing them I don’t see this changing in the near future. The same cannot be said for their revenue driving tools. Panama by Yahoo is a really significant tool and the adwords API and adsense API are well supported.

    I think it is clear that search engines promote and support the APIs that offer them more revenue.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Search Engine’s opening up free API’s for their results

    Rand Fishkin makes an excellent post on his blog about why search engines should offer APIs for all SEOs to be able to pull search results without scraping. He argues people are doing it anyway and opening complete, accurate APIs could reduce the incidence.

    Certainly exposing this data gives SEOs a head start. It would make it trivial to detect who is the #1 site in a field, ripping apart all the variables in that site and by running a comparison getting significant clues towards improving your rankings.

    From a search engine’s point of view I personally wouldn’t expose search APIs. Unlike eBay the search engines don’t benefit from allowing people to use their search results platform without visiting it.

    I think Rand’s post was really awesome and his blog is fantastic. If you are into SEO you should definitely read it.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • eBay Tag Cloud up and running

    I have been working on a syndicatable eBay tag cloud for quite some time now and finally completed it yesterday. It seems to be working really well. I just wanted to make this post to #1 announce the tag cloud but also #2 give people somewhere to post suggestions for how to improve it so go on… post a comment.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Google Page Rank of 5 with few links

    Something strange is afoot in the world of google page rank. I created the website randomdomainname.co.uk just about a year ago and didn’t link to it from anywhere. I added one link to the page on seomoz.org and subsequent to that another 13 links appeared.

    All things being equal you would expect the site to remain low profile. This however is not the case, Google has upgraded the site to a pagerank of 5!!! I simply cannot believe it and it’s really pleasing.

    More detail to follow early next week on the Yahoo! APIs for del.icio.us and for flickr – both of them are awesome, I have really enjoyed working with them this weekend.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Radisson SAS Hotel Tallinn

    I am lucky in my current role to do a fair deal of travelling going away on work just shy of once a month at the moment. As I type I am on the 22nd floor of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Tallinn looking out over the port with a beautiful sunrise ahead of me.

    This hotel offers free internet, provides a reasonable level of soap and toiletries and also delivers the three things that make my day in any hotel.

    1. Tea, good english tea
    2. An Iron and Ironing board
    3. A power shower that practically acts as a masseuse

    I don’t know how any other business travellers out there feel but give me those 3 things and I will forgive anything else.

    This hotel is also forward thinking and offers free internet, which, in the city that programmes skype, must cut into their international telephone call revenues but at the same time delights me.

    So I can heartily recommend the Radisson SAS hotel in Tallinn for a stay!

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Dynamic categorization using the ebay API

    In my last post I explained that I was investigating the interrelation of keywords (or tags) in eBay titles to see if they could help me to producing some kind of dynamic categorization for the eBay site. I completed my research yesterday and wanted to share it here, the answer definitely seems to be yes and that really excites me.

    The experiment involved me pulling all the titles for the 77750 listings related to the word iPod on eBay.com and saving all those titles into a database. I then split each title into individual words and entered them into a mySQL database then running an SQL query to give me the DISTINCT keywords and the COUNT of how many times they occurred in the titles.

    What I found was absolutely fantastic. The keyword ipod had a 31% probability of association with the word Nano, 28% with case and Apple, 27% with video and so on.

    Dynamic categorization and keyword discovery carefully optimized by millions of sellers over 10s of thousands of items daily with billions of dollars of GMV in any category of item you could want exposed for free! That’s gotta be worth something to someone 🙂

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Thoughts about Tagging

    For those of you who don’t know tagging is a little bit of a phenomenon sweeping the web right now. The idea is that any content can be “tagged” with a series of words which will describe it and then you can reaccess that content through the words.

    To my mind however tagging is a very old thing in terms of the web. Tagging is a way of attaching the most relevant keyword/keywords to a set of content. Effectively anchor text is just a form of “tagging” by webmasters and titles for webpages are just strings of tags the owners have put together.

    Auction sites, classified sites and personal sites effectively receive thousands of tags a day. Self learning category structures could be created really powerfully from this stream of user generated tags. All this data is exposed to any API programmer and someone with the skills and interest could create a product search more powerful than any of the Kelkoo’s etc. out there right now with millions of small businesses and individuals automatically helping them with accuracy without even realizing it.

    I suspect I may post more on this later since I am now planning to give it a go in a small category of listings on eBay.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Temporal Perturbation

    I had a really interesting chat with one of my colleagues last night about keyword detection, keyword relevance algorithms and in general self learning computer systems for the web. These are growing more and more important in the web today.

    The problem that is becoming evident at a low level is described in natural search circles as the rich get richer. Since links exist for ever older links may be less relevantly describing a site’s content than newer links and yet these links are still used heavily in determining keyword relevance for a page in Google.

    In recommends services if I have browsed both good to great and built to last recently amazon will happily recommend the two together. What if a newer book has a stronger affinity with Good to Great and more people start visiting those two books in the same session… due to the massive weight that old affinity already has the more recent change could take months or years to appear.

    A suggestion I have heard is to assign all data sets a relevance score and downweight that relevance logarithmically with time… I love that suggestion. Don’t be surprised if the internet back end needs another tweak within the next 2 yrs as the big sites begin to realize their clever technology isn’t quite as clever as it used to be and is getting a little bit too tied to past results and a little slow to pick up on present trends… interestingly close to a human being as they age really!

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here