I currently use Google Adsense and was wondering just how many hits a second I would need to be receiving in order to apply for their Premium service
You need to be getting 10 million content views per month. This is not the same as hits because images, spider hits etc don’t count.
Last month I got approximately 1020358 hits which sounds impressive but it isn’t that great because this only got me 102,636 content views on google adsense as per their own stats. So approximately every ten hits I get 1 content view.
Using some advanced mathematics based on our very accurate assumptions 😉 This means I need approximately 100 million hits a month to achieve 10 million content views. This is of course pie in the sky.
This is about 40 hits per second. I doubt very much if my little sever would be able to withstand that kind of usage 😉 I suppose if I was getting that many hits per month then I would be able to afford a whole rack full of equipment.
Google Talk
I received an invite the other day to a Google talk in London. For those that don’t know me I am fascinated by search engines, particularly google since there is more online about how they did their stuff than any of the others. You can imagine my enthusiasm at the prospect of going so I registered my interest and decided to go.
I then discovered that the talk has been organized by Pulse Group. From what I can gather they are the recruitment arm of Google for Ireland (wild guess). This rang recruitment company alarm bells for me, (I wrote an entire site to circumvent the need to go through a recruitment company, I don’t trust them.)
I am making bets online that it is going to be some corporate nonsense recruitment drive with more emphasis on that than on Googles tech.
I was also disappointed by the website.
1. No document type
2. It is mostly flash so a lot of people cannot see it.
3. Most of the menus are tiny and hard to read.
4. I was unable to resize the text.
5. The text is embedded in flash so it cannot be indexed by Google the people they are representing.
6. Some of the menus are mouse dependent (The mouse must hover over them to view the content)
Its another site designed by managers for managers. I suppose they have a different set of requirements than me.
Anyway I didn’t go. I would be interested in hearing from people who did go and what they thought of the talk………….
As a follow up I was correct. A friend of mine went and was quite pissed off because it was a total waste of his time.
Who’s searching on what
I noticed that someone had a look for gimpy on my blog today and I was wondering what terms people are finding my site with so I ran the following over my logs
perl -ne ‘/.*google.*?&q=(.*?)(&|”).*$/; print “$1\n” if $1;’ *.log | uniq
I am sure there is a shorter and better way to do it but this was more than enough to have a quick look.
Marketing a simple website
I have spent a fair bit of time working on another website that had some of the most horrible HTML I have ever seen. I managed to actually upload the site last night and it is now live. I didn’t design the site I just converted it to HTML Transitional that validates from some Dreamweaver mess.
I have already made a few entries about this in my blog so here’s the link.
Aerospace NDT
The people at Aerospace NDT realised they where not getting enough from their website so they contacted me to see if I could do something with it. I had a look at their site and wrote up what I thought of it and gave them some advice as to what I though could be done with it to improve its visibility etc. They seemed to like what I said because I got the job.
I am basically tasked with getting their site up the google ranks which I have already done and quite substantially. I was very lucky and they were unlucky in the fact that the single greatest change required to the site so far has been the removal of the splash screen. They were unlucky in this because their last developer had left them with a site that could not be seen by the search engine because there was not a single link off the splash screen. This also meant that in certain browsers without flash they could not actually see the websites.
I have made some fundamental changes to their site during the conversion from the old one so we should see an overall increase in the google ranks but time will tell. I am keeping a tally for certain search terms to make sure that what we do has a positive affect on the site so watch this space.
Show me NOW
There is an ever increasing amount of information on the internet, this fact appears obvious in the extreme but what might not be so obvious is the ever increasing amount of duplicate information.
Have you ever tried looking for “man find unix” on google, nearly every page displayed has the same information. I know that some pages are slightly different but its becoming increasingly difficult to find what you are actually looking for. This is not an isolated incident, most search engines are suffering.
Google was a fantastic leap in the right direction but has anything changed in the last 2 years that visibly makes a difference to the layman, I haven’t seen it, have you?
Everyone assumes that the more pages a search engine has in its database the better the search engine. As popular as this school of thought is, its wrong! very wrong!! Why?
Up until 2 months ago I used Google exclusively and recommended it to everyone who wanted to find something on the internet. Just recently I have found that Google is not providing me with the goods. I have often caught myself switching to Yahoo in order to find what I am looking for, I have even went as far as Looksmart and got better results.
At first I considered these breaches from the one true search engine as isolated anomalies arising from the eclectic nature of the topics I was researching but empirical evidence suggests otherwise. I am now going to Google and trying a search and then going straight to Yahoo and getting what I am looking for. Am I a heretic to suggest that Google is just not cutting it any more, quite possibly, but I am not the only one.
As much as I love Google, it appears to be slipping compared to other engines. However, I will not give up on it because unlike most search engines I actually trust Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page to act in the best interests of the users. Maybe I am being naive in thinking Google will retain their morals in light of going public but hey, I’m an eternal optimist.
There goes any chance of ever attaining my dream job 😉
Google Page Rank
I have been meaning to throw together some thoughts about Google Page Rank etc for some time and I finally got around to it tonight.
Google Page Rank Explained
More Google Adsense
I have actually managed to make a little bit of money via Google adsense. I am not at liberty to say how much but its nice to actually have made a little to help pay for the costs of hosting my sites. I have decided to put google ads on most of my websites to see if I can increase it enough to pay the hosting outright. Its a long shot but the sites are cheaply hosted so it is possible.