Out of the Woodwork

I'm a Mac. I'm a PC. And I'm Linux.

There's no denying the brilliance of Apple's "I'm a Mac ... and I'm a PC" commercials. Ted Haeger does a nice job of explaining how they put the Mac in the best possible light by playing off of our existing perceptions, "framing" the conversation in favorable either-or terms, and by just being funny and clever. Whether you like the product or not, you've got to appreciate its marketing.

Ted goes on to look at attempts to redirect the popularity and momentum of the ads, such as with spoofs inserting a Linux character. As he notes, these probably haven't done a very good job of making Linux look its best.

(Though in all fairness, I think the above was clearly intended just to be funny--not as an attempt to mold Linux's public image.)

Ted's clearly an optimist, though, and has set out to create his own spoofs which do make Linux look good. He describes in great detail how he and others at Novell tried to break the "either-or" framing of Apple's original commercials with a spoof casting Linux as a sexy female (though not too sexy--see his blog for the full reasoning).

The results are interesting, as is Ted's description of the thought process behind them. But I walked away thinking about one detail he didn't address. This was the work of Novell? As in the company which is well on its way to destroying any credibility it may have once had with the Linux community?

I could be wrong, but... Don't they have more immediate concerns than trying to sell Linux to the masses?

Tags: advertising apple linux mac marketing novell pc

Posted at 04:42PM Mar 20, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[1]

Does Google Track Search Result Clicks?

A lot of bloggers are talking about Google's patent application for a method of ranking blog Search results. As Bill Slawski and Alex Chitu have noted, these break down into a set of factors which provide positive and negative scoring influences. I won't repeat them all here, but I did find one of the positive factors particularly interesting: the implied popularity of a blog, as determined from click stream analysis in search results.

In other words, if users consistently click on a result from Blog A more often than one from Blog B when both show up in the results for a given search (such as on blogsearch.google.com), it can be seen as an indication that Blog A is more popular and/or of higher quality than Blog B. Pretty obvious stuff. Right?

Sure. And it's also pretty obvious that the same idea can be applied to non-blog resources (such as general web results returned by www.google.com or image results from images.google.com).

The question is... How would Google actually obtain this data?

Normally, the page which presents a hyperlink isn't notified when it's clicked. There are ways around this (such as using special javascript or pointing the hyperlink to an intermediate "redirector" service), but I don't see any evidence in Google's pages that they're employing these mechanisms in their regular search results (though paid ads are a different matter).

So when you click on a Google search result, Google should never know it.

But wait... There is a good chance that they do know it. If you use Google's toolbar and enable the "PageRank Display" feature, they'll know about this click (and all of your others, for that matter). Of if the final destination happens to use certain of Google's server-side services (such as AdSense or Google Analytics), they'll likewise know about it (and all other access to that site).

So does this imperfect but growing view of users' behavior on non-Google sites provide enough data to plug into their search ranking algorithms? Probably. And it's one more example of how a web giant such as Google is gaining a "moat" of data which guards against smaller competitors.

Tags: algorithms google patent ranking search

Posted at 11:41AM Mar 20, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[2]