I was playing with a backlinks checker earlier and stumbled upon some interesting Yahoo and Google link love facts…

Yahoo doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against their rival Google (quickly becoming everyone’s rival). Yahoo lists plenty of backlinks in its search results for google.com. Google isn’t currently returning the favor for yahoo.com. In fact Yahoo shows more backlinks for Google than Google does for itself. Surely Google caps its results.

Try directly at Google with a search like this:
For Yahoo at Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:yahoo.com
0 Pages

For Google itself
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:google.com
1,600,000 Pages.

Or even going to Google’s advanced search page and using their Links search,

Links – Find pages that link to the page

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Try both yahoo.com and google.com there.

Google’s backlinks are known to be only a small percentage of what are actually crawled, but 10% of ZERO is still ZERO. Given the round number 1,600,000, I’d say the results are capped.

Over at Yahoo, the results are quite different.

For Google at Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com
Currently 17,475,629 pages.

For Yahoo at Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fyahoo.com
Currently 1,675,687,898 pages. That’s 1.6 billion.

I have always defaulted to Google’s search. Originally because that was all they did. With the Yahoo Directory and all of Yahoo’s other offerings, I assumed years ago that since Google concentrated on search, their tool would be better. Now I’m wondering what I may be missing.

It is every business’ prerogative to do what works best for them. Internet search is becoming a utility though. Millions of people depend on their daily bread for traffic from these utilities. Is there anyone monitoring them?

The “killingest” assumptions businesses make revolve around how their customers buy. Suppose you and 99 other people go into an electronics store and purchase the exact same item. That’s 100 sales. But you can probably guess those 100 sales didn’t unfold in the exact same way. No properly-trained sales person would ever use the exact same language or structure the sale the exact same way for every single customer. And yet, ecommerce sites routinely assume one product page is going to meet the needs of all customers interested in that product. Talk about your huge assumptions!

Source: GrokDotCom

How flexible are your sales processes?

It is well talked about that our attention spans are shrinking all the time. I have noticed it in myself more and more of late. I bought a Tivo in late 2000 and have been watching recorded TV almost exclusively since then (I was already videotaping my few shows at the time).

PVR’s and time shift technology are some of the most underrated uses of technology in everyday life. No longer chained to a network’s programming schedule, I can watch the shows I want, when I want and without commercials. I can pause to get up for a minute. But more importantly, I can rewind to watch a scene again. Didn’t hear what the actors said? Didn’t quite understand what was going on? Quick rewind and watch the scene again. Now we don’t even have to pay attention during our recreational activities! We can work and recreate at the same time (and pay little attention to both).

I reached for the remote to rewind a section of a movie last week. I wasn’t at home. I was in a movie theater. It was Mission Impossible: III.

Sitting in the theater I started thinking about how many times recently I have done that; listening to the radio, watching TV, a play or at a movie.

And when the thought had ended, my mind was pulled back to the movie screen by an explosion. Not knowing what had preceeded, I reached for the remote to rewind.

Jeff Han of NYU is working on a computer interface similar to the one Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report (or Ben Affleck in Paycheck). In Minority Report, there are several scenes where he is interacting with the precrime computer with his hands in 3D space. Usually computers usage in movies is pretty cheesy to a techie, but the similarity of Jeff’s work to Minority Report and Paycheck is pretty cool.

Jeff details his research in the paper Multi-Touch Interaction Research. Take a look at the demo movie where Jeff and friends showcase the user interface system.

First there was the punch card, then the command line and now the windowed desktop. What will the next computer user interface be like?

I recently received a call from a new aquaintance; friend of a friend. In the small talk following the introduction he asked what I did and I tried to explain in non-techie terms.

From our conversation, my new friend gleaned that I did websites. [I may have done one generic, static website in my career, but that's easier than getting technical.] The phone call was to tell me that his barber may need a website. Now while I appreciated the thought, the idea of building a website for a barber shop caught me off guard. A salon or day spa? Yes. But an old men’s barber shop?

That got me thinking… who really does and doesn’t need a website?

A business website can be used for different things.

• Selling directly online (ie. an ecommerce website)
• Online business card
• Informationtional site
• Marketing

Selling directly online – Most ecommerce websites fit into this category.

An online business card – A small site containing information about a business or person and contact info.

Informational site – A site containing information about a person, place, event or product with contact information for further details.

Marketing – A marketing tie in site. Coca-Cola, Budweiser, etc.

Most restaurants in cities would benefit a residual effect of some online presence. For a downscale restaurant a map listing with contact information on a Citysearch type site. For a more upscale establishment, an advanced site with menus, pictures of food and commentary. When you are looking for something to eat these types of sites make it easy to find a restaurant close by, find the days and hours, delivery options and phone number. Except in rare cases, these are not destination sites.

Any type of professional; doctor, dentist, lawyer, accountant could see results from a business card site with additional information about specialties and links to outside information on specific issues of their profession. I don’t think every doctor should outline the intricacies of their specialties, but links to medical journals and other known resources would be helpful.

An upscale spa or salon could support a more broad website in many cases. Besides the general information, more specific details about treatments and special events would be useful. A reservation form could be utilized. The income potential per website vistor would be higher here compared to most restaurants.

I can’t see how a barber shop would benefit proportionately to the cash outlay required to setup and maintain a site. I wouldn’t think traditional barber shop clientele would go to the web to find a barber in their area.

It boils down to the income potential of a website whether it is beneficial or not. If you are in a high income potential arena, it only takes a few positive hits a month to take income from a website. With a more modest income potential arena, it can take a lot of hits to make a website break even, so if you can generate the traffic, it may not be worth investing thousands in.

I am embarrassed I hadn’t thought of this sooner. Maybe I can blame it on coming from the Windows world where this type of thing would never work consistently enough to remember.

I open BBedit’s font pallete from time to time to increase the font size of a source file. [Going from 15" PowerBook screen to 23" Cinema Display makes a difference to my old eyes.] The font pallete is accessed via the Text menu item which ends up in the top left of the display. For some reason lately the pallete is popping up in the bottom right of the display. It’s a pain¹ to mouse up left hit the ‘Show Fonts’ menu item then mouse down bottom right to adjust the font.

It just dawned on my to move the fonts pallete up to the screen top left, nearer the Text menu item. Of course on closing and re-invoking the font pallete, it pops back up right where I had left it, saving my mouse from having to navigate the full screen real estate again.

1. Yes, I am aware of the irony of speaking of the ‘hardship’ of moving a mouse mere inches. [back]

I found this today on Blog Maverick while searching for something else and thought it was worth a mention.

The Path of Least Resistance

It was Aaron Spelling I believe who said that “TV is the path of least resistance from complete boredom”. Which is another way of saying that its easier to watch TV, than to sit there and do nothing.

Which describes exactly how people make most of their choices in life. They take the easy way. They take the path of least resistance.

There are certain things in life we all have to do. There are certain things in life we choose to do. Then there is everything else. The things we do to kill time.

In every case, all things being equal, we choose the path of least resistance.

Except for the truly lucky (ie. Mark, Bill and others), we all must spend about one quarter of our time working. Some of us work 10 or 12 hour days a the time. My question is what for? Self employed? Building a business to get ahead one day? Or working to keep the boss happy and just pay the bills.

Fill another one quarter of our time sleeping and half of the time we have is gone. What am I doing with that half today?

Is more of our time spent on things we actually want to do or merely filled with time wasting tasks?

I have two clients who have recently noticed their sales contact queues were increasingly filling up with questions and information requests concerning information readily available via their websites.

Why?

It’s so much easier to pop off a quick email than actually read. If you don’t read, how do you know what you are buying? Forget the small print… many people don’t seem to be reading the normal-sized (and even bold) print.

Good customer service dictates trying to answer all questions promptly, but that only feeds this behavior.

What to do?

My first instinct was to optimize pages and design to make sure that the data is easily available. We found a few small tweaks to make some of the information more easily found, but the two sites were already very well laid out.

Discussions with colleagues led to some other interesting options:

Prepare a form response stating the information is available on the site. Some provided a place for support personnel to provide a link and others left the requester to let their fingers do the clicking.

Sit on the request for a day, allowing them time to find their own answer (and perhaps feel stupid). This may seem like a good idea, but you still end up spending the same amount of support time fielding the request (eventually), and your customer receives a subpar customer service experience. I might suggest holding on to any dumb requests until the end of the day and sending them all out at once with a form response as above. This won’t interrupt meaningful support functions and the customer shouldn’t perceive a bad experience. Specific support procedures is a whole other post though.

File 13 the requests. Trashing the requests may seem harsh, but if your business requires after sale support (such as a web application) these kind of clients are expensive to support. Are the worth it?

If you site hasn’t been optimized by a professional (and best a fresh set of eyes) don’t even think about these ideas. The problem could be your fault.

A system admin’s life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards!
-Michael O’Brien

The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was horrible. It was actually caused by a worthy adversary… a real storm. I have seen some of real devastation of Hurricane Rita, and I am in no way belittling the real, physical losses sustained in East Texas and Western Lousianna. BUT, a large percentage of the monetary loss and loss of life is a direct result of the unnecessary evacuations.

The ‘mandatory’ evacuations of cities and counties in all up and down the Texas Gulf Coast four days before landfall or even a halfway accurate projected landfall location has caused millions of dollars in lost business revenues, wages, wasted fuel costs and state and local infrastructure expenditures. The unwarranted mass evactuations from as far away as Corpus Christi, wasted hotel rooms that should have been available those that really might have been affected. For the sick and elderly who succumbed after fifteen hours of being stuck in a school bus with no a/c in the midday Texas heat, there is no excuse. What is that saying “Primum non nocere”, “First, do no harm”?

Too many people feel that we cried wolf on this one. If the next one happens anywhere near recent memory, NOBODY is listening.

***Note to Houston mayor
Before you decide to mandatorily evacuate two million people that aren’t in a flood plain, give the people that actually are in the storm surge warning more than an hour to get out of your way.