Go Sportn

Real time search: what it means to small businesses

For years the big gripe against search engines was how far BEHIND they always were. The most recent content in search results was often weeks or months old. In recent years Google has tightened up the time lag, and now I often see posts from blogs and news sites that are sometimes just hours old.

But suddenly Google is getting even more ambitious. The buzz is all about "real-time" search results -- content that turns up in Google almost as soon as it gets published to the Web.  Google's founders have said that they are pushing hard in this area, and it shows in Google's results of late. Posts from this humble blog, for example, turn up very quickly.

The reason for the push is Twitter, which has become a sort of grassroots source for vast amounts of real time information on both the trivial -- what's on tomorrow's school exam -- and the crucial -- news tidbits from eyewitnesses to the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the Iranian demonstrations. Twitter offers a search engine that taps into Twitter "tweets" pretty much up the second, and Google, in a sense, has a bit of Twitter envy. Why? The blog TechCrunch has a thoughtful post on the subject with a heavy-duty quote from one of the pioneers in this area: "Real time taps into consciousness, search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.”

That's a highfalutin way of saying that it would be great if search could reveal what's on people's minds a heartbeat ago -- as opposed to a few days ago.

News organizations will rejoice because they've always wanted Google to capture their news stories in real time, instead of days after the fact. Or will they? If Google captures a New York Times story as soon as its published, it will also capture tons of related content from posts and possibly Twitter tweets as well. Google's search pages are going to get a whole lot more crowded, and staying on top may get even harder, even for a big, important newspaper.

So what does this mean for fishing guides, charter operators and outfitters? Look at it this way: if you have a website that doesn't change much, then your site's visibility will start to sink beneath the ever advancing tide of blog posts, fishing reports, and, eventually, tweets that flood your corner of the market. Go to Twitter.com and type in "bass" or "trout." There are posts from a few seconds ago. Maybe you'll buy search to try to keep your business above water, but that gets expensive.

The best answer, and the most cost effective, is to generate your own Google-friendly hubbub by posting regular fresh material, such as fishing reports, photo galleries and so on, and plugging that into Twitter and Facebook (time to sign up if you haven't).

If that sounds daunting, then don't worry: GoFishn.com will make it easy. And it's coming soon.

By the way, you can follow me in Twitter @neddesmond and Ned.Desmond on Facebook.

Google Question #3: How do I make my PageRank grow?

I'm not kidding when I tell you billions have been spent trying to make those PageRank numbers grow for the sites of companies big and small. There are hundreds of specialty firms and consultants all over who will take your money to show you how. Funny thing is it's not really that hard, at least no harder than tying a blood knot in dim light. And you can accomplish a lot without paying an expert.

So how do I get my Google PageRank to increase? There are a number of ingredients but the protein on the plate is the number of inbound links (also called "backlinks") to your site from other sites. But before you ask your brother-in-law's auto-shop to link to you, note that those inbound links, to be helpful, need the following qualities:

• relevance: the page and site linking to you should have the basic subject matter -- fishing -- as your own site.
• authority: Or call it PageRank -- a link from a site that Google thinks is a winner is a good thing.
• authenticity (as in you did not pay for them)-- Google will penalize sites that pay for links or deal with you "link farms" to gin up your results. Yes, there's a big business out there making money off of tricking Google, and Google spends a lot of time and money trying to crush it. Don't mess with link farms or other under-handed strategies. The wrath of Google can be rough, and hard to repair.

There are a number of way to strategize how to get links. They basically fall into one of two broad categories:

• do something on your site -- like post a picture or a story -- that people will link to because it is important or amazing. They call this "link bait" or  "link magnets."
• think through what non-competitive or friendly sites might/should link to you

The first is an argument a site that you can update easily and frequently. (Of course GoFishn.com will offer that, and much more besides.)  When you catch the Big One you want to tell the world immediately and have the local network news affiliate on the way to your dock. Absent something spectacular, just publishing regular fishing reports is good too, especially when other sites link to them.

But there's nothing like a good story, as captain Joe Fitzback discovered when he published a great story about an encounter with a great white shark and enjoyed the usual summer hysteria in the media attached to shark adventures. Publishing that story on his site has helped him obtain and maintain pretty good ranking for years, though now it seems to be declining as the story ages and the site gets a little dated.

In the Google era of the Internet, every site is on a sort of treadmill. There always has to be something new if the site is going to improve, let alone maintain, its rank.

The second approach is to get links from sites that arguably should link to you -- for example directories of fishing sites, your state fish and game agency, the local chamber of commerce, your local tourism bureau, your equipment sponsors, if you have any -- you get the idea. And you can also consider paying for links on sites where you might get some advertising exposure for your own site.

One way to get ideas is to see who is linking to your competitor's sites, which is easy to do with a link analysis tool, like the one available for free at SEO Tool Set. Drop in the url for the site you're interested in and aftera few minutes you geta  read-out of what sites link to that url. Here's a link to the results for Joe Fitzback's site.

TIP: If you're lucky, the person handling your website should be able to help you figure out a strategy. if they're no help, start figuring out on your own who to go to for linkbacks. And if you have a site that allows for regular publishing, get on it. If not, hold on for GoFishn.com. We'll be along soon.

A good Google read from The Times in the UK

I would not ordinarily point my readers to a British newspaper to learn more about online marketing, but just today a friend sent a really fine piece by James Harkin about Google-- how it got so powerful, why it works so well, where it comes up short and where (if anywhere) its challengers may come from.

Harkin tells the story, which I've also told, of PageRank, the key invention that has made Google such a dominant force. But he also points out that Google results can be way off base, and often are, especially when searching for people. In a quick test, Harkin types in the names of three modestly well known Brits and gets back, well, not what he was looking for:

Had I been “feeling lucky”, in Google’s whacky terminology, and plumped for the first hits that came my way on each, I would have come away with information about an Italian porn star, an US football player and a Liberal Democrat MP.

Now Google has us trained to look past the fact that it can't read our minds, and most everyone knows that it's best to add a little bit of extra info to the search, like name + place or name + company and so on, to find who you're looking for.

But it's that limitation that makes a tool like Google so maddeningly inadequate when you're looking for something that's at once broad and precise, like the best way to fish Lake Okeechobee when I head south for the ICAST show next month. Any tips?

That's why we're building this GoFishn.com platform. For the first time we hope that anglers will be able to get a detailed birdseye view of all the professionals in any given area and lots more relevant information to go DIY or sign up a local expert.  More good information will mean more fishing, at least I know it does for me.

Henry Cowen on Cape Cod stripers stacked like "cordwood"

The new July/August issue of American Angler  has a great piece by Henry Cowen about striper fishing in my native stomping grounds, Cape Cod. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I've rarely fished for stripers from shore on the Cape, but I know there are great spots all around. I once had a great day fishing the cut at Barnstable harbor on the north side. We cast into the deep channel from hip-deep water on bright yellow sandback that could have been in the Caribbean. Gorgeous day and caught loads of fish. In his story, Henry takes a trip to the very tip of the Cape, Provincetown, where he provides a helpfully detailed take on how to fish the area DIY. My favorite line in the whole piece is when Henry describes the big breakwater at the end of Provincetown, where, when the tide is right,  "The stripers will stack up like cordwood, waiting to see what is coming through the breakwater passage." Sign me up. I'm head to the Cape in a couple of weeks and that spot just got on the list.

Google Question #2 What's my Google PageRank?

In Question #1 I explained why Google dominated search online and we walked through PageRank, the patented technology at the heart of Google's effectiveness as a search engine.

PageRank gives each Web page in Google's index a score of 1 to 10, and the higher to score the more likely that page is to rise high in search results. PageRank does not tell you all your need to know about search ranking, but it's a good guide.

So how do you figure out the PageRank for your site? Google makes the PageRank information public, and you can download a small program that provides the PageRank score for whatever page you have in your browser. Google builds this feature  into its Google Toolbar, which works on most browsers; SearchStatus is another good choice, if you use a Firefox browser. In both cases the PageRank indicator appears in the frame of your browser and it looks something like this:

The longer the green bar the higher the PageRank; if you place your cursor on the bar a little pop-up will tell you the exact number, as in PageRank: 4/10. Ten is best possible score.

I have a friend who is mystified by the presence of a competitor, Maverick Charters Ltd., near the top of many search results for fishing charters in the Cape Cod area. My friend's site is better organized and more contemporary, which he thought would help it do better in Google. That's a common misconception. The cold fact is that Maverick's PageRank is a 4 and my friend's is a 2. And those numbers tell most of the story.

Which leads to the next question: How can I improve my PageRank?

TIP: Download one of the PageRank tools and see how the main pages on your site perform, and check out your competitors'. You'll probably see a pattern emerge. Over time, you can also check to see if your PageRank is improving or not.

See you at iCast, July 15-17, Orlando

Just registered for the iCAST show in Orlando, Florida. I will be meeting with various folks in the industry to brief them on the GoSportn project. If you'd like to meet, please let me know.

Google Question #1 Why does Google rule search?

Even technophobe business owners know that when it comes to the Web, it's all about Google. That's where customers come from. No guide, charter operator or outfitter I know misses that point.

Consumer research shows that the vast majority of folks online get around by using search engines, and Google has at least 60% of the total market share for search. In other words, solve for Google and you have it made.

How did Google get so powerful? I get that question all the time. And the answer at its heart is pretty simple: Google came up with a better way to search.

Back in the mid 1990s there were lots of search engines -- Infoseek (where I worked), Excite, AltaVista, Lycos and others. For the most part they worked the same way. They matched the words in a consumer's search query -- let's say "chicken recipes" -- to the words in documents on the web. The top of the search results page basically went to the web page with the most mentions of "chicken" and "recipes" and "chicken recipes."

The problem was that the consumer didn't ask for the Web page with the most instances of those words. What consumers really expected, whether they asked for it or not, was the "best" chicken recipe or the "right" chicken recipe -- whatever that was.

Enter two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had a better idea: maybe the "best" result is the one that has word matches PLUS the most inbound links from other respected pages. In other words the "chicken recipe" page that had gotten the most attention on the web, with "attention" meaning other pages were linked to it.

They called this idea PageRank, and it's at the heart of how Google ranks pages. Google rates every page it finds with a PageRank from 1 to 10. If your site is in Google, then it has a PageRank. Here's how Google describes the concept:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

In 1998 Page and Brin formed Google, and we all noticed right away that Google results were in fact better. Sometimes they almost seemed to read your mind. The Google revolution was under way.

Today Google's search technology takes many looks at many factors, many of them company secrets, to rank results, but there's wide agreement among search experts that PageRank is still at the core.

Curious to know your site's PageRank? You should be, and I'll address how to find it in Google Question #2. 

Tip: If the company that handles your web site isn't able to talk knowledgeably about your site's PageRank and how to improve it, find another company. Or wait for GoFishn.com. It's coming.

Hurtin' fish, PETA, and a sea kitten named "Blair"

    Proof certain that academia must be running out of interesting subjects to explore, Joseph Garner, an assistant professor at Purdue, has released preliminary results of a study that suggests gold fish feel pain. Oh-oh. In a very amusing and smart piece, Frying Nemo, avid angler and Slate editor Michael Agger wonders if Garner's work will kick off another effort by PETA to villify anglers for causing fish "pain."  You probably recall the last one, which involved a lot of advertising on Google and suggesting that a hooked fish must be in agony. PETA's punchline: "If you wouldn't do this to a dog, why do it to a fish?" I'm not going to lose sleep over that one.
     Anyway, Agger points out that PETA has a slightly less in-your-face campaign underway that's aimed at kids and called "Save the Sea Kittens." You can create and dress up your own animated sea kitten (Agger called his "Blair," pictured at left), which is all very cute but probably won't succeed in getting the generation of kids to think of fish the way they do dogs. Fish don't wag their tails.
    Agger rolls out the scientific case against the idea that fish experience "pain" in any meaningful way, principally a 2002 paper by Dr. James Rose, a professor of zoology and physiology at the University of Wyoming, and he also draws on the late author David Foster Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster,  about the annual Maine Lobster Festival and the question that kids always ask when you drop a wriggling lobster into a pot of boiling water: Does that hurt? Wrote Wallace:

Suffice to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut.

Agger says he's not going to stress about the next trout he reels in. I'm certainly not either. And if other folks want to imagine the pain of the fish, well, they can hang with the sea kittens. Fine by me. As my Uncle Red would have said, "Suit yourself."