Category Archives: google

error, google, google maps, lchs, stupidity

Don’t Believe Everything …

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Don’t believe everything you see on Google. I tell people that all the time. Now I have a perfect example of why you shouldn’t believe Google.

This weekend and today, my front door was besieged by people knocking and asking if this was indeed the humane society. (OK, 5 or so people which counts a siege out here. {*grin*}) I’d tell them no and then give them the right number to call. But I also was very curious as to why people suddenly thought my house was the humane society. All of them said that this was the address the internet told them. I put 2 and 2 together and figured it was something odd on Google.

Sure enough, if you search for Logan County Humane Society, right there in the first page of results sits this little gem:

Note that it does indeed have one of the LCHS (Logan County Humane Society) numbers listed, but every other detail is wrong. Who knew Google could be so completely off the wall?

Unable to leave it at that, I clicked through – lo and behold the idiocy continues:

There are so many wrongs here it is painful. The picture in the lower right is indeed 510 Glenora via the Google cam car and is indeed my house. But Google has it labeled internally as 514. The map is correct. But ….

The Logan County Humane Society is not a county agency, it is a 501(c)3 corporation with no association to the county. 510 Glenora is my house, nothing to do with the humane society. The nearby places in Yuma, CO – are close to 60 miles down the road, etc.

I filed the forms to get this removed and corrected, but Google is noted for being slow to fix egregious errors like this. So keep your eye out to see how long it takes them to fix it. Click here to see the Google maps page in real time.

In the mean time I sent the county commissioners an email chiding them for their aggressive take over of private property for new secret offices. Wonder if they’ll catch the humor?

Time to go answer the door again. Only another 20,000 door knocks to go and I will have explained that this is not the humane society no matter what Google says to everyone in the county.

(Given the severe thunderstorm warning and thunder booming happening at the moment, Molly is busy laying on my feet and begging for reassurance, not answering the door. Probably a good thing. A dog answering the door might encourage people to believe this really is the humane society.)

google, Molly, weather

Unsettled Tuesday

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Today was full of ifs, buts, and maybes. And it must not have just been here that it was that way. How do I know?

First off, all morning and most of the afternoon, my iGoogle home page looked like it had been redesigned by a crazed color blind Tibetan monk. No info, no listing of my RSS feeds (all those lovely blog posts – ignored), no news, no anything like normal. Only a lonely search box begging forlornly for me to type at it. Worst of all, the problem seemed to be mainly affecting Firefox. Opera looked almost normal. Of course my internal ordering of browsers runs Firefox, Opera, and finally if life is nearing an end, Internet Explorer. So I was just one step away from the universe as I know and love it coming to an end.

I might have figured it was just me and my machines, but then on the Google developer forums there were confirmatory messages mentioning the same problems. So it must have been either Mozilla or Google having a bad day. Now this evening, all is back to normal and I am so happy to return to the news of Balloon Boy and all the coulda-shoulda-wanna-be sports stories written by the mid-week wound licking losers. (Anyone else notice how the Google news feeds seem to have a real emphasis on the negative slanted stories? Why is that? Have they joined the Fox News Network and I just didn’t notice?)

Then to add insult to injury, it was overcast and dark here all day. The sun seemed to run off and hide, afraid that the brown and gold and orange colors of fall just weren’t enough. It looked like a snow storm was eminent all day long. By late afternoon is was misting – you know, the billions of wanna-be snow flakes unable to make it in the real world and falling to the earth like a living fog bank. So it was damp and cool and breezy and dark all day. Weather ultimately conductive to lifting the spirit and making one happy to be alive – *not*. It was bad enough that by noon the normally chipper Molly had retreated to her bed and wasn’t going to pull her nose out from under her paws for anything short of Armageddon.

It seems that the gloom of the day must have infected others. Every call I got today had a note of gloom and doom and rant and rave in it. I can’t wait for the weather to turn sunny again.

Oh well, I have beans soaking to make soup tomorrow and Molly has decided she should come to life. So I leave you with Molly and the chew toy of death. Let the battle begin!

google, weather, youtube

Bicentennial Post Tuesday

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This is the 200th post here at The Art of Panic. Who would have believed one could write that much drivel in a half year? I certainly wouldn’t have.

The weather here is overcast and in the mid 70s today. What a change from the blizzards of the last couple of weeks. Maybe the snow and blow season is finally coming to a belated end. I can but hope! Since the weather is boring, I will take this opportunity write instead about something that has caught my fancy from the news – Google and its ownership of YouTube.

How many of you have followed all the bruhaha about the amount of money Google is losing running YouTube? If you want to see a really depressing view, read this. The basic factoids are that Google will make about $240 million in ad revenue on YouTube, but it will cost them about $711 million to operate the site. Some simple math then leads to the $470 million dollar loss for the year. No company can long afford to lose a half billion dollars on a single property and enjoy it. Heck, most of us couldn’t afford it even if we moved the decimal point 6 places over.

The most interesting thing to look at is what the effective CPM (Cost Per Thousand) would have to be for YouTube to break even. The estimates I have seen posit about 75 billion video streams being fed this year by YouTube. Even if we are optimistic and believe that Google can find an ad for every video (hard given the idiocy of some of the content) and assume that Google actually gets to keep the revenue on the popular copyrighted works, we come up with something on the order of $10 CPM on average. That is almost impossible to achieve. Add to the dilemma that current estimates claim that only 3% of the available ad slots are sold and you see a real problem.

To quote the Silicon Valley Insider’s analysis:

The economics are hard to overcome. Assuming YouTube delivers the 75 billion streams that Credit Suisse projects for 2009, and assuming YouTube manages to slot an ad for every stream (which is practically speaking, impossible, given the nature of much of their content), YouTube would have to achieve a $9.48 CPM for every video impression shown. Presumably, the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable. Hulu claims to be charging a $30 CPM, of which roughly 70% goes to the copyright holder. Averages for other proprietary content hover around the $10 CPM mark. CPMs for user-generated content, assuming you can attract the advertisers, tend to be measured in fractions of a dollar.

So the real question for Google is how to find a new way to monetize the ever growing traffic on YouTube. This seems to be one of the better known counter examples to the old adage that “traffic is everything on the internet.” The adage only works when the traffic doesn’t lose too much per visitor. It will be interesting to see what the year will bring for Google and YouTube. Even Eric Schmidt (Google chief) is sounding cautionary about YouTube as a potential loss leader for the foreseeable future. (Listen to Eric here.)

So what do you think? Is there a way for Google to stop the bleeding without killing the site? Do you view things on YouTube? Do you ever click on he ads on YouTube? Do you think Google should do the obvious and kill the amateur video and go to only commercial content ala Hulu? Inquiring minds want to know. (Besides, I’m just plain nosey!)

analytics, google, sex, weather

Tuesday Attacks

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(With apologies to Mars Attacks.for the title.)

Tuesdays seem to attract insane weather forecasts this time of year on the plains. Last week we had the spring blizzard, followed by warm weather so all the snow was gone in a day or two. Today it was cool all day and there was a nippy north wind making it feel even colder. I couldn’t resist checking the weather forecast and it has snow tonight clearing to cold on Wednesday followed by a major wind and snow storm for the weekend. It must be close to April on the plains!

A while back I promised to revisit the lack of sexual searches landing people on this site. As I expected, writing about it caused a skew of the droppees toward the sex queries. I have been tempted to do a post featuring variants of “that certain part of the male anatomy” and its female counterpart just to see how it would drive traffic. Back a few years ago when I followed such things in detail, searches for things sex related were more than a third of all searches and appreciably more during certain hours of the day. I suspect it says more about the human condition than about the level of purience of the users of search. After all, there is a reason that the primal drives are usually listed as food, shelter, and sex. (And usually not necessarily in that order.) For those who are curious, the original post is here.

With out further ado, I give you the revised top ten query list  that drives traffic from Google to this site:

  • googlesex – What can I say? People that omit punctuation can end up in very unsatisfying places when they search. Google kindly deposited them here and here most often. Note that Google took the places where I had the phases like “Google, Sex” and “Google sex” and made them a hit for googlesex. For a good time, click here to see who owns the domain name googlesex.com. Nothing like being one of the 36,079 domains owned by Google. {*grin*} 
  • googlesex vedio – Not only do they omit the spaces, they can’t spell video either. But they were all dumped here by Google. Note the overlap with the phrase in the number one position?
  • “comfort memories” – An old standby that moved up the ranks from last tme. 
  • “in retrospect, I wouldn’t say” – A new riser on the list, related to this post.
  • “the course of high school” – Yet another riser from this post.
  • robert reed – One mention of him being a veteran author led to the legions of his fans finding my words. At least I assume it was due to this post.
  • art innocence death – What a strange juxtaposition! And how it got people to this post is a complete mystery to me.
  • art two bicycles love – Another puzzler. Google dumped the readers here, but why I don’t know.
  • best sexi cartoon art – This seems to have come via the bogerella pointer back to this site from long ago. I think when they moved to their new how, the blasted all the past posts out in readers and that evidentally temporarily raise the rating of this site. That’s the best guess I can come up with.

So how is your site being read from the search engines? What do your analytics tell you? Inquiring minds want to know.

Jenners has suggested via email that a post on how search engines work would be of interest. Is anyone else interested?

Off to bed to since I have to head for the radio show in the early in the morning.

google, oddity, sarcasm sex-linked question

Google, Sex, and Me

7 Comments

Now that I have your attention, …

One of the things I find interesting is that the searches bringing people to this blog seem to be tad different than the ones reported by bloggers of the female persuasion. Blogger after female blogger reports that their blog is being found by numerous sex related searches. That certainly isn’t happening here and I feel really left out and undesirable. This blog is like the shy girl with a crush at the middle school dance as far as Google goes. All that desperate desire for attention, but Google only has eyes for others.

For your amusement, here are the top 10 search terms that have caused Google to deposit people here:

  1. grammar rap
  2. “russian woman” “she bit”
  3. 1936a811f775436384fe7b5e0582814f38e…
  4. blood test mpg
  5. broke my brother out of hospital
  6. dentist allergic to color
  7. dentists for dental avoiders
  8. don’t panic eau de toilette men
  9. favorite winter memories
  10. finger turns black and blue from finger prick

Grammar rap is an obvious fit for my post extolling the joys of sistersalad and their wonderful “Yo Comments Are Whack!” video. Blood test mpg is clearly a hit for my diabetes post. I can even see some relevance in several other of the terms. But where does the string of hexadecimal digits came from and why am I a match? I figure it must be a search from a double-byte language set, maybe Chinese? Whatever it is, it seems to be popular. Maybe that is where all my sex queries went. (That’s it, I have a horde of hot blooded Chinese women performing secret sex acts via my blog. I’m down with that!)

And how about “don’t panic eau de toilette men”? I can see how it might drop some poor schmuck or schmuckette into my Five Things I Know But My Dog Doesn’t Know I Know post, but I suspect that Google left its followers deeply unsatisfied and in need of the extra kick of eau de toilette when it happened. And I have to ask, why would one panic about men and eau de toilette? Do all men really smell that bad? Have we all joined Molly in drinking at the porcelain goddess’ fount? Inquiring minds want to know.

So I continue on, deeply disappointed that the lowlifes of the world aren’t looking for and finding my blog via Google. I want the unfettered joy of being able to write humorous posts on the spur of the moment about the odd contortions necessary to achieve a chosen search term. Besides, I can use all the readers I can get! {*grin*}