Wikiscanner

For the Wikiscanner Report, I took a closer look at the Google page, which resulted in some very interesting findings.

 

What are they changing?  As I scanned edit by edit, the changes ranged from spelling mistakes & grammatical changes to vandalism. There were financial edits that were made to better represent the company, and date edits such as replacing “recently” with the actual date “June, 21, 2005,” for more accuracy. There was a debate between labeling Google as Google, Inc or Google, LTD…which is currently Google, Inc. Obviously the most interesting edits were those of vandalism that I came across and could actually see highlighted. Here are some listed below, but there were many more I discovered and some were very inappropriate.
1. As of march 2006, google has announced that it will be officially taking over the world. Additionally, Google has also recently formed a partnership with [[Sun Microsystems]] to help share
2. Poop
3. U Suck
4. COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW ………………………………………………                                   5. Google is a big Scammer in U.S. It’s ADWORD and ADSENSE programs require the participant to pay US$50 for exmaination fee and run the ADWORD with US1000 per month expenditure in order to qualify for passing the scam examination and get the phony professional certifcate.”’
6. The Google Corporation is a large evil Company bent on takimg over the world

Why are the editing? What does this mean?   Overall I think the edits were making the Google page more accurate, providing real facts in numbers, dates, and information, for example there was a line that compared Google Maps to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and this was edited to say that Google Earth should actually be the comparison to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, not Maps. There were a ton of links added in as edits also, for example there was a link added for Google Watch. As I mentioned above, there was a ton of vandalism, which I guess is expected for a company with so many competitors and users. International edits saying that uk.ask.com was better than Google. Oh, and there was a discussion over the correct wording for the phrase “Don”t Be Evil!”

How often?   These changes were made every other minute, day, week…there was a total of close to 3000 edits on the wikiscanner, but all of the edits in the wikiscanner were mainly from 2005 and 2006, why is that? Why did it not have the most recent edits shown? I then went to the Google page in wikipedia and looked at the history, which showed recent edits, and there was an additional 500+. Is there a benchmark for how many edits is considered normal for an article in wikipedia?

Who is editing?  I found that there was a range of edits from individuals obviously trying to vandalize the Google article to university IP addresses, to communication company IP address, such as Comcast, Road Runner, Verizon…etc. There were also a lot of international IP addresses from Hong Kong, China, and the UK. And then I am sure a majority of edits were from within Google as well.

Are the abiding by the rules?  There are definitely contributors editing and breaking some of the articles policies, such as:

• Be polite
• Assume good faith
• No personal attacks
• Neutral point of view

The Vandalism alone breaks all of these rules and there was a ton of vandalism!

Google Ad Words

As an advertiser who uses Google Ad Wordsto push traffic to our website and track it, I wanted to comment on what Google has done for businesses trying to decide where to spend their $$$.  Google has found a way to provide tracking information that allows an advertiser to see the actual return on the investment.  Each month I can look at the Ad Group for example “Caruso Brand” and see the number of clicks that it received, the average click per cost amount, which is 0.17 and the total cost for that time period, and its average position -which is 4.1 -this would show up on the first page of the search.  This paid search opportunity has allowed us to reposition ourselves with in the search and be more in the fore-front when people are searching for Caruso, and even more so when they are searching for general terms such as New Homes.  Battelle says “This is the magic of intent-based marketing, it shifts the marketing dollars from the unknown to the knowable.”  Its changing the real-estate industry…its more competitive, if you don’t have the information available on the web that the customer wants, and within 3 clicks…you have lost them.  Studies have shown that 85% of the people have already been on-line to check out your site and product before they ever come into a sales center.  So the easier a customer can find us within the search the better!

 In 2005 Battelle mentioned that the average cost per click amount was 0.50 in 2005, our average CPC today is 0.91. 

Here is another statement of Battelle’s I found interesting -if the WHAT of the search “lies in the beauty and the potential of the search: driven by the unimaginable complexity inherent in human language -nearly infinite combinations of dialects, words, and numbers,” is it imaginable to think that Goggle could provide a “perfect search?”  Trying to provide perfection in any manner is a hard expectation to live up to!  Is this goal good or bad?