Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

This weekend on Necker Island Google founder Larry Page married Lucy Southworth. Valleywag has an entire special feature on the new couple–they gloat at revealing private, intimate details about a man who created a tool (Google) that has ruined so many people’s privacy. But all I have is a cute photo of the couple:

Congratulations Larry!! With Google’s influence, this event almost has the same effect as watching the Queen’s marriage.

According to a GigaOm article Google Trends Predicts Hillary as Dem Nominee, “current Google trend lines show Clinton beating Obama and Edwards.” Unfortunately they neglect to compare any possible Republican nominees, or any other candidates for nomination, such as our infamous Ron Paul, who easily pwns Hillary’s search volume by orders of magnitude:

Can Ron Paul steal the Republican nomination? According to his Google trends graph, he can! Maybe democracy is coming…

Valleywag is saying that Mahalo needs another $20M, even though it already received that sum just 6 months ago. Give me $3,000,000 a month and I’ll be able to come out with a site that barely gets more interest than my own. They have a nice design and front page, but there’s no way they can displace Google with human-edited search results.

It’s cute that you can add MahaloToDo to your post (please write an article about Asps), but not particularly useful. It’s also cute that one of their subject-matter teams is playing video games.

Ah, so that’s where the money really went. That and looking for ” Vanessa Hudgens Nude Photos,” their most popular search term. That and that their content is basically just a hand-built keyword aggregator that you could automate and build out with a cheap cluster of servers and simple algorithms.

Given that I’ve reported two Google finance bugs (overflowing numbers, color updating), I’m more than happy to report the third. See, this time, there is a stock that really went up asymptotically today:

I know the product is not yet out of beta, but still that is no excuse for displaying “inf.” Google’s market data seems awfully out of sync sometimes…

The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:

An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.

Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:

• Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
• Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
• Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites

Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:

The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?

Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”