Morpheus Media Mlog » google

Future of Medicine: Opened vs. Closed

Marius Draghici — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:56:40 +0000

Personal Health Record (PHR) can be shortly defined as person’s complete medical history. Under the current system the use of PHR proves to be inefficient. Only 20% of the US patient population has digital medical records scattered to more than 200 personal health systems most of them having a closed access. One reason for which this data can’t be in one place is the federal regulation (HIPAA), which governs the privacy of personal information and how it can be shared. As a direct consequence, researchers don’t have access to these records.

Recently, the Internet giants Microsoft and Google entered the eHealth business. Microsoft’s HealthVault was launched in October 2008 (still in beta version) and at this moment the system is available only for US users using a Live ID login. Microsoft has already partnered with a list of companies that make products of offer services compatible with HealthVault. The company plans to make money by selling ads alongside search results promoting medical products and services.

Google Health was unveiled on February 2008. It is still in the development phase with no login page live yet but everything else is functional. Google announced that its future partners (Aetna, Duane Reade, Walgreens) can connect their proprietary closed health records with the user’s account and upload the data. Google does not plan to sell ads at this moment although they don’t exclude the possibility in the future. Instead, it automatically generates links to discussion groups with topics closely related with the user’s medical condition.

Search Within Search

Halie Ritterman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:32:45 +0000

It seems as if Google, the leading search engine has taken another step in providing users with just what they are looking for. Google has just announced SiteSearch, which is a feature that allows users to search within a single site. The Google SiteSearch Box is a search within search feature that enables users to stay on a Google results page, but allows the user to refine their search even further. The Google blog declares that the feature will only occur when there is, “a high probability that the user wants more refined search results within a specific site.” Popular sites like AETN Television Networks, Restoration Hardware, and Wal-Mart are amongst the brands in which SiteSearch has been introduced on. So far the New York Times has been critical of the modification.

The search box appears when a user queries the name of a specific company or web address. A good example may be if someone is searching for, “A&E Television.” The results of the initial search are exactly the same as a standard Google search with the addition of the SiteSearch Box underneath the company’s web page. In order for the SiteSearch Box function to appear the exact term must be the top return for the query. The SiteSearch Box offers users the chance to then further advance their search within the company’s site and will provide even more Google search results from within the company’s site.

The introduction of SiteSearch could cause a problem for sites that sell advertising space because the impressions they are promising may not be generated if fewer people are using the search functions on the site. Also problematic is that sites will lose the ability to capture people in their own site search with features such as; you may also like, or related products or stories that show up when using a site’s internal search function. All in all, for Google, this is great because increasing numbers of ads will be served whereas for the advertisers whose site Google is navigating will be losing ad impressions and in turn dollars.

YouTube’s “InVideo” ads plans to drain marketing budgets

Toby Evers — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:39:13 +0000

Through rigorous testing rolled out last May, it seems that Google has finally settled on it’s much anticipated AdSense for video model. YouTube has settled with what they call “InVideo” ads, which will follow the typical AdWords process of competing in auction. The InVideo ads are paid on a CPM basis, and text overlay ads will be paid on a CPC basis. You can view examples of all of these ad types on Google’s website.

Here’s the catch, publishers who want in on this must serve a minimum of 1 million video streams per month. Other publishers can add AdSense ads to YouTube partners’ video content though. Seems that InVideo Ads are launching with a whopping $15 CPM (which is actually down from the $20 CPM initially launched during testing).

Google has labeled this AdSense solution as combining “engaging and non-intrusive” ad formats. Advertisers, despite this hefty CPM, will be jumping at the chance to utilize this feature, because of YouTube’s larger than life video catalogue, and just for name’s sake. One engaging question will be, how will the consumer that is viewing these movies respond to YouTube “going commercial”? YouTube’s following has long lived on the notion that this is all free, and the typical user has been able to easily navigate around name-brand’s sometimes futile attempt to advertise for free (in a non-transparent manner) by building a YouTube profile. So now I ask, will the average user balk when they see these ads rolling into their day-to-day viewing routine? I strongly feel that it will be a minor disturbance at best to start, and then the average eye will be accustomed to seeing these ads in the lower-thirds. At least they didn’t move to the annoying “mute-your-speakers” pre-roll!

Another thing to note, is that they are releasing this as a “beta” product, but we all know how little that means in Google world since Gmail is still a “beta” product, and half the nation is using that.

SES NYC 2007 – Organic Listings Forum – 4/12/07

Toby Evers — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:57:37 +0000

Tags: organic listings, search, SEO, search engine rank, SERPS, black hat seo, white hat seo

Here’s a breakdown of this session…

Panel

Detlev Johnson – Host

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay inc

Todd Friesen – Rage online media

David Naylor – Black Hat SEO guy, "Viagra" SEO

Jill Whalen – High Rankings

Forum Questions

How do you deal with scrapers beating you with your own material if you are moving off of a blog site host?

Blogger.com platform, hard to move off of, lose rank when you move
Just takes time to build back up.. should start with own server based blog

Can you Differentiate between Multilanguage crawlers?

It’s the algorithm that determines language not the crawlers, they crawl regardless

What about using off the screen div’s and marquee text, or underneath the flash div’s?

Still perfectly ok, as long as it’s content relative to what’s on the site

Social Media sites and spam? (this was my question for the panel)

Seems to be that it might be phased out, due to black hats abusing it
Not going to go away, but will keep changing
Digg users – can be bad, they go in, high traffic, come fast, leave nasty messages and leave. They don’t convert
Now, we can’t ignore it, we must monitor it and watch it. You can certainly drive rankings right now, link building etc…
If you have to play in that space, you have to be careful, it can bring you down with bad ‘press’

How do you get out of cloaking if you are ranking well?

Recreate the site and make the cloaked part visible
Inbound linking is not cloaking and will weigh in your favor
Google webmaster optimizer is like cloaking

Personalized search

This is great for SEO
Changes the way we look at rankings… how do we measure now, they will be different all the time
Good reason to look at traffic numbers instead of rankings
Metrics should focus more on traffic, organic traffic, and ROI

CMS – treating spiders differently than users (time stamp, cookie, etc)

Give the spiders a hard copy
Do not cookie the spiders
Use rewrite module for URL’s (ModRewrite – it’s white hat cloaking)

IP-delivery.com

Gives you all the spider IP information you need

Can you link build too aggressively?

If someone bombs you, not much you can do about it
You can’t really hurt a domain by getting aggressive links, but make sure they are high ranking links

Spider frequency

Hugely dependant on website
Sitemaps, webmaster tools, site builder etc… def. helps
4 – 6 weeks to get a significant portion of site crawled

Google Presently – is google getting into the “powerpoint” game?

Toby Evers — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 20:15:53 +0000

Google Blogoscoped has reported that Google is working on a presentation application to add to their “office-like” online software tools. You would think they were heading in that direction after the launch of both Google Docs (like word) and Google Spreadsheets (like excel). And so the battle wages on, and we’ll see weather the business user prefers to do their daily work online, or directly on their machines.

It definitely seems as though google has a long way to go to compete with office, but with the fast emergence of rich internet applications and combining them with the desktop, demand for online office programs will increase quickly. Also, with most users now having 3 or 4 computers and mobile devices, internet driven applications would provide a “sync all without even syncing” of all of our “office” documents with all of our computers since all would be saved online via server. So now your presentation would be ready for you when you arrive at the company you are pitching to, you just have to access your google account!