Google Knowledge Graph and Search Rankings

A number one search engine ranking is worth about twice the traffic of a number two search engine ranking and the traffic diminishes quickly from there. This is perhaps a sad commentary on how people use search engines, but be that as it may, it is true.

Anytime there is a Google change or modification, webmasters become concerned that their traffic will drop along with their income or popularity. Often, these concerns are valid. Sometimes, these concerns are selfish and have nothing to do with concern for actual readers.

Consider a low-quality, garbage, ad filled, website. If a Google update figures out how to drop this site out of the rankings, the owner of that site will be negatively impacted. The users doing searches, however, will not. In this case, you can be sure that most people won’t care if the owner complains.

In other scenarios, a Google change actually boosts such content ahead of good content. This is bad for everyone concerned. The owner gets less traffic, users find less helpful information, and Google’s reputation takes a hit.

The latest hubbub is about something called the Google Knowledge Graph. I’ll call it GKG from here on, but I don’t know if that will stick.

Essentially, the GKG actually answers certain kinds of queries rather than pointing you at a website that might do the same. For example, if you search on Albert Einstein, a new area to the left of the traditional search results appears. This is the GKG that everyone is talking about.

As you can see, the information there is rudimentary, but potentially very helpful for certain kinds of searchers. For example, if you are searching to find Mr. Einstein’s birthday, it is right there for you to see. This kind of GKG is potentially most detrimental to encyclopedia types of websites such as Wikipedia. It may also hurt websites like Huffington Post that routinely crank out any page, any time, that might pull in a few page views.

One common example is people searching for something like SuperBowl start time. In the past, the Huffington Post would publish and article with a dozen questions listed at the top in order to garner as many search matches as possible and then use its high-traffic website as all the link juice needed to push its page near the top of the search results. Assuming GKG answers these questions right on the search page, the some of those type of sites might lose traffic.

Fortunately, for many website owners and writers making money online with websites, this addition won’t have much impact on their traffic. These search results only show up for very specific queries, those where specific factual information is at hand from any number of sources. Incidentally, these types of searchers are generally looking to buy anything, so these are low click through advertising opportunities anyway. (They are valuable to big websites that generate a lot of cost per view types of revenue.)

Anyone writing useful detailed information probably will continue to draw just as much traffic since GKG only supplies basic details even on someone as famous as Albert Einstein. You can bet that not much will show up to siphon away traffic on your Colorado Dads website, for example.

For users making basic informational searches GKG will be a welcome addition. For everyone else, except the big web traffic slurpers, there won’t be much impact.

Google Knowledge Graph Big Deal or Not? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

via hubllama.hubpages.com

Credit Karma vs Quizzle is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I wanted to update, to write something clever, something intricate, something meaningful.

But…

I am so very, very tired.

Frankly I’m stalling so that I don’t go to bed so early that I can’t actually fall asleep.

Today, we link for no reason to this article about discount premium bonds and then we away for slumber.

So Tired is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Here comes tax day. Taxes are not due today, taxes are due on April 17th this year.

How fast can investing make you rich?

There are many things standing in the way of a successful investment strategy. One of the most common is an unrealistic expecatation of how long it should take for investing to make you wealthy.

Tax Day Cometh? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Where Does Copyright Math Come From?

Piracy is a real problem, and it does hurt the creative industries. However, the so-called losses are greatly exaggerated.

The problem with the loss numbers that Hollywood and the music industry cite is that they assume that nearly everyone who downloads a pirated copy of something, like a movie or CD, would have bought the item otherwise, at full retail price. That’s right, the same people who illegally download free content, would, of course, simply pony up the full retail price for every DVD they download for free off the internet.

Does this make even the littlest bit of sense?

Of course not.

It is ludicrous to think that someone who might be willing to watch Cowboys vs Aliens for free, would shell out $19.99 for it otherwise. They would never rent it for $1.20 at Redbox. They wouldn’t dream of getting it from Netflix. And, they most certainly would not try and find a discounted or used copy online. They would buy it, except, you know, for piracy.

Pirates who download lots of movies often have hundreds, if not thousands, of movies saved on their disk that they will never watch.

After all, a bittorrent user can easily download 100 movies per month, but it takes a dedicated movie buff to watch that many. And, who in the world would even think about buying that many?

Check out my Quizzle Scam article.

The truth is that most pirated movies result, at best, in a lost rental. The vast majority of them represent a lost discount rental like the ones from Netflix or Redbox. In other words, even if piracy were stomped out tomorrow, DVD sales would not increase.

Indeed, in France, where tough “three-strikes” piracy laws led to radical declines in the amount of piracy did not increase sale of movies or music by a single penny. In fact, sales continued to fall.

Why Don’t People Buy DVDs Anymore?

Wonder why people really don’t buy DVDs anymore?

Because Hollywood got so blinded by pirates that it forgot about its customers. Those of us who do buy a DVD find that we have to sit through several unskippable screens of piracy warnings in both English and French. Then, we have unskippable menu animations and unskipple warnings that the commentary is not the official view of the studio and so on. In other words, it’s a pain to even play a DVD, and that’s after you find it.

I haven’t bought a DVD in years. I have over 100 sitting in boxes that never get played. My favorite movies of all-time come out maybe once per year. The reason is that I have to really want to watch it to dig the disc out, put it in, wait through all of that startup nonsense and then finally  get to see my movie.

What I do instead is watch Zombieland from my DVR. I recorded it off of USA. It’s edited for TV and I have to fast-forward through commercials, but at least if I have 30 minutes to watch some Zombieland, I don’t waste 15 of them setting it up. In fact, I might start buying movies again if I could put them on some sort of digital device like my iPod, but those that exist aren’t any simpler.

Why?

Because, once again, Hollywood cares more about pirates than it does about paying customers.

I might buy an iFilm box and connect it to my TV, load all my movies, and then play Zombieland whenever I want, but by the time I get around all of the DRM and restrictions and storage blocks and inability to backup or play on more than one TV, it isn’t worth it again, and I’m not buying movies.

And, neither is anyone else.

Check out my Credit Check Total review...

Enjoy your continuing losses Hollywood. You’re bringing it on yourself.

How Much Does Hollywood Really Lose to Piracy? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I had completely forgotten about my Posterous accounts until the company announced it had been acquired by Twitter.

Now, I like Twitter as much as the next tech-savvy guy, but it’s never been as useful for me as it has been for others. I wonder if the integration between Twitter and Posterous will change that?

In the meantime, check out some of the writings from ArcticLlama at FinanceGourmet and elsewhere around the web.

• Credit Check Total Review
• Credit Karma Monitoring Review
• Using My Blog Guest
• Is Traditional Television Dying

See you soon. I miss my Posterous, now that I remember it is here

Posterous Bought By Twitter is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

In the traditional television model, a producer puts together a television show and sells it to a TV network. Occasionally, the process works the other way around, but for the most part, someone pitches a TV show and then a network either picks up the show and gives it a spot in the lineup, or the show dies.

Television Follows Music Industry to Doom

Recently, however, that model has come under attack. It is still early, but television as it exists today is finished. It will take several years to play out completely, but the television stations and cable systems who once held control (and made all the money) are finished, they just don’t realize it.

Hulu recently created and began distributing its own television show called Battleground. Netflix, likewise, has created a program called Lilyhammer. And, word around Silicon Valley is that both Google and Amazon are close behind.

The reason all of these technology companies are getting into the original programming realm is because the cable systems and television companies have forced them to. It simply is more cost effective to make your own television programs. The high (and rising) prices charged by media companies for rights to stream their programs are only part of the cost. Once the rights have been acquired, there are all manner of restrictions upon how, where and when those programs can be shown.

For example, movie companies force their films off of Netflix when they are being shown during the month on a cable TV channel that bought different rights. Your average Netflix subscriber isn’t an expert on program licensing. To them, it seems that Netflix is an unreliable source of movies. All of this occurs AFTER the studios force Neflix to wait and increasingly long period of time before they are even able to show their films.

Check out good personal finance advice on the FinanceGourmet blog.

Television networks aren’t much better. CBS famously forbids its programs to be shown on Hulu at all, causing users to think of the service as only a partial option. Even shows that are allowed on Hulu come with restrictions ranging from delays in when they can be aired online, to how long they can remain online.

The rise of devices like iPads, Kindle Fire and even Barnes and Noble Nook, show that consumers aren’t interested in only sitting in front of their living room television to watch their entertainment. Yet, traditional television producers give them nothing but the run around in order to watch their shows.

Add all of it up, and getting traditional programming from the networks costs too much. The only solution is to create your own programming that you can show immediately, with no restrictions, reliably and for as long as people want to see it. If any one of these companies tastes even moderate success with their own programming, you can be sure that the growth of these shows will proliferate quickly. The death blow will come when Google, who has been stymied by traditional television (and Hulu, but at the orders of their TV masters) gets into the content game, buying up television shows and documentaries that can be shown without restriction on a Google TV. That may comes sooner rather than later with the technology giant looking for a way to gain a foothold before Apple TV launches and entrenches as the multimedia distribution leader like it is for music.

This stop, delay, complain business strategy worked out terribly for the music industry. One can only wonder why both the film industry and the television and cable industry insist on running the same losing playbook. One chapter will be significantly different. The television industry won’t be able to complain that piracy is causing all of their problems when the programs that are destroying them are actually original works produced by other, savvier, corporations.

Soon, it may be the traditional media outlets paying the online content providers to ensure that their shows get equal billing and availability, and the likes of CBS will be complaining that Hulu promotes its own shows over those from other networks.

And, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

Related articles

• Hulu and Netflix Begin Forays into Original Programming – TIME (techland.time.com)
• How Hulu plans to measure success of ‘Battleground’ without TV ratings (venturebeat.com)

Did Traditional Television Commit Suicide? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

For some reason, the auto-update feature of many software programs fails from time to time. On my computer, the number one culprit is the Thunderbird email client. I don’t think it properly tries to get admin permissions when it should and therefore the update doesn’t work. I think this is particularly true if Firefox (another Mozilla product) is already running. Whatever the recovery mechanism does, doesn’t work any better.

It gets so boggled that when I try and manually install it, from inside the program via the Help menu, or by downloading and re-running the installed from Mozilla, it STILL doesn’t work.

Ninite Review – Online Software Install Service

Enter Ninite. I can go to www.ninite.com and click Thunderbird (and a bunch of other software, if I want) and get an installer. When I run the installer, it checks to see if I already have the software, and if so, it updates the installation. Whatever process Ninite uses, it doesn’t get hung up in the same way as the official Mozilla installer, most likely because it does not bother with whatever version check or recovery file the original erred installation generated. It just goes in and updates all the files, without any checking or asking.

Which, brings me to the other amazing thing about Ninite. The installers are all fully automated. There is no user interaction required. The defaults are all used for a new install, or the update leaves all of your previous settings intact. Obviously, if you want to do some customizing, this isn’t the route for you, but in 90 percent of the cases when I install software, I just click Next, Next, Next, Finish, anyway.

There is one exception. When I install software with toolbars, or that wants to make Bing my default search engine, or whatever, I click NO. Sometimes, developers get tricky and that isn’t enough. Foxit Reader, a PDF reader, pulled a stunt like that a while back where you had to make some very unintuitive clicks to avoid getting some junkware toolbar with your installation. Fortunately, Ninite is run by good guys, for good guys. All toolbars and other extra software, no matter how “valuable” are automatically declined with a Ninite installation.

Ninite Tips and Tricks

At this point, Ninite is already a golden member of the Go-To online service club, but wait– there’s more

Ninite does more than just install one software program. Using the super simple check box interface, you can select one, two or even dozens of software packages to install. The file Ninite delivers will install all of the selected software with a single execution and not a single second of user intervention. This comes in very handy to install lots of software on a new computer or to re-install a ton of programs on a restored machine.

It gets even better. Remember how I said that if you already have the software installed then Ninite will just update it for you? Well that works for multiple software installations as well. So if Thunderbird is updating, but Spotify is new, Ninite knows enough to update Thunderbird and do a new installation of Spotify, again with no user interaction.

Now, here is the best software upgrade method you will ever use. Create a Ninite installer of all your usual software programs. Save that file to your desktop, or other handy spot on your computer. Now, just run that installer every so often to keep ALL of your software up to date, with no hassle and no junk toolbars other other garbage. Any software already running the current version is just skipped. You don’t have to create a new Ninite installer file. The installer automatically connects, downloads and installs the most recent version of software available.

For example, if you update Java via the package from Oracle, you’ll get a vampire process installed on your computer that runs at startup and keeps running 24 hours per day, seven days per week. It’s sole function is to occasionally check for Java updates. Turning it off takes a lot more than you might think thanks to a bug that prevents you from turning off the Java updater unless you manually launch it with admin privileges. The problem is, once you kill it, it will come back with EVERY SINGLE UPDATE. But, if you update via Ninite, they’ll keep that little junkware app from re-installing on your computer.

Obviously, Ninite only works with free or open-source software, but that covers a lot of ground on my machine, ranging from web browsers to email clients, to image viewers to developer tools. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Windows Live suite isn’t available which means you’ll have to watch out for seaport.exe getting installed and then kill Seaport on your own.

Give Ninite a try, you won’t be sorry.

Easy Software Installation Online is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Black Friday Tricks

The oldest Black Friday scam in the book is the super-limited inventory scam. This is the same scam that car dealers use in their advertisements. Sure, you can get a 2012 Ford F-150 for no money down and just $99 per month, the thing is, there is only one make and model and options package that gets you that price and there aren’t any of them left. How would you like a new truck for $2,500 down and $299 a month instead?

It is illegal to advertise items that the retailer does not carry or never has in stock. These laws are the result of the old, now illegal, bait and switch scam where retailers would advertise an item that they did not ever have any intention of selling in order to get suckers customers into the store. Then, the shoppers would be offered a different, more profitable item in its place.

However, those laws are easily circumvented by having a very limited inventory of sale items. Some stores go so far — out of legal obligation or otherwise — to mention just how few of an item they have in stock. Many ads will say something like “Minimum of 4 per store,” or something like that. In other words, unless you camp out, get in the front of the line, go straight to the items without getting waylaid, and grab them right away, you cannot get that price. Some retailers only have ONE of those items in stock.

Here comes tax season. Check here for the 2011 standard deduction and other tax information.

When a store knows there will be demand for HUNDREDS of the item at that price, the only reason to have so few in stock is to ensure that only a handful of customers get the items. The next week, after the sale ends, there will be dozens in every store, or easy availability for ordering online. This turns the sale into a lottery where only the lucky few can “win” the sale price.

Crappy Black Friday Sales

Retailers know that customers want to nab great deals on Black Friday. Some shoppers are naïve enough to think that every Black Friday sale is a great Black Friday sale. Retailers prey on these unsavvy shoppers by advertising items at the normal sale prices, that is the sale price that was available last month, and will probably be available again within a few weeks.

Be sure to at least check the price of the item at a competing store or online at a major retailer like Amazon.com before leaping to buy that “cheap” television set on the front page of that electronics store ad. Chances are good that the price isn’t that great after all.

Black Friday Item Replacement Tricks

A favorite in the electronics and computer industry, with this scam retailers sell and item that is similar but very different from the item you think you are getting. Computers with less memory, or RAM, than would typically come inside of that level of computer are one good example of this scam.

Another favorite are television sets that have similar make and model numbers but that are just different enough to be cheaper thanks to inferior or missing components. Something like a 65″ Sony LCD TV  that has the previous model’s insides but the current model’s case and remote would be one example.

Some retailers and manufacturers go so far as to make different model numbers for each retailer in order to be as devious as possible. Instead of the highly rated and well reviewed MSC99381D model, store will offer a lower quality, cheaper MSC99381O model on Black Friday where unsuspecting customers will purchase and assume that they got the same item for a great price.

Avoid Black Friday Sales Scams

The best way to avoid Black Friday sales scams is to research before heading out to go shopping. Many retailers have released their ads online this year to avoid having them leaked by internet deal websites. Google your holiday items and be very careful to not the exact model numbers to avoid any surprises. Also, check the pricing on Amazon to be sure you aren’t getting a phony sale price. Finally, check out deal websites like slickdeals.net or gottadeal.com to find out what deals are really hot and which deals are no.

Black Friday Sales Scams is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

While Google’s hands may (or may not) be pretty clean in these respects, the company continues to press ahead with initiatives that may be more likely to generate the kind of legitimate, hard evidence, formal complaints that regulators will use to exert control over Google’s stranglehold on the internet search process.

Google Linking Product Usage

One of the things the legal system hates to see is when giant companies use their power to force services or products upon other companies or consumers. This not only limits innovation, it costs other potentially powerful businesses in ways that neither politicians nor judges approve of. Intel, for example, was forced to refine the way it sells computer chips after forcing manufacturers to accept terms that made it impossible to use AMD chips, even if they were better for a specific usage.

Google has made a subtle change to the way they handle results from their dominate search platform. Although the company claims it is making the changes for privacy reasons, there is an exception big enough to drive a truck through that points directly to the beginnings of tying less dominant products to the company’s monopoly product in order to stifle competition.

Users logged into Google will have their searches encrypted by default. On the surface, this sounds perfectly reasonable. However, what this means is that the owners of websites visited by users from searches will not longer be able to see what the exact keywords were that led to the visitor finding the website.

For example, these days, if someone searches for freelance writer and they end up on my freelance writing website at ArcticLlama.com, I get a report that says the user came to my website from Google and that the search that led him to my website was freelance writer. This is useful information for me, because it shows why and how people end up at my website. It can also offer a reason for unexpected things that happen.

My freelance writing business is named ArcticLlama, so when I found a funny joke in the form a Llama Font, I wrote a little post about it and put it up on my website. A month or two later my site got a lot of extra traffic. Since I hadn’t done anything, that I was aware of, out of the ordinary, I wondered why there were more traffic to my website. Had a popular website linked to me? Was there an article I wrote that went viral? Was there a serial killer our there with the same name? Had Brian Nelson just won a million dollars and people were desperately trying to find me?

As it turns out, it had nothing to do with me after all. Upon looking at my traffic logs and Google Analytics, I was able to see that one of the top keywords for users coming from search engines was "llama font". The joke font had gotten popular and people were finding my article about it on Google. It was good information to know so that I didn’t make wrong assumptions.

As a website owner I have no inalienable right to a person’s search keywords per se, and therefore, Google’s decision to encrypt outgoing traffic in such a way that I will no longer see why keywords bring visitors to my website isn’t something that I have any standing to complain about, except Google isn’t doing it properly.

Instead, Google has a very big exception to the rule. If you are a paying advertiser on Google and someone comes to your website from a Google search, then the company gladly hands over the keywords that brought that user to your website.

In other words, If you buy something from Google, then Google will give you something free that no one else can give you and that no one else gets unless they buy from Google AdWords.

Note to Senate committee: If you don’t want to look like you are just chasing after the biggest kid on the block for no reason, start paying attention to these kinds of things. Keywords are valuable SEARCH information and Google just locked them down so that only the people who buy from Google’s ADVERTISING group are allowed to see them. Vertical integration by monopolies is a no no.

Google Abusing Monopoly Power? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC