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Well I was checking the SERPs to see what all the current fuss was about regarding Google datacenters at the moment (is it an algorithm tweak or just a shuffle?), when I came across something amusing.

Check the current SERP for “SEO Training”, paying careful attention to the #3 result. Yep, you can now undertake SEO Training of the Smelly Kind. From the site:

“In the Precertification Academy, DEP and PSATS provide Sewage Enforcement Officer (SEO) candidates with the basic knowledge needed to work for a local agency and prepare them for the duties and responsibilities of an SEO. We are committed to providing quality training to assist SEOs with making decisions that ultimately protect the Commonwealth’s public health and environment.”

It all sounds pretty similar to the responsibilities of most SEOs, although protecting public health and the environment is going beyond the call of duty. Perhaps we now have a more appropriate anagram for SEO: the Sewage Enforcement Officer!

Gave me a chuckle anyway.

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Popularity: 33%

SiteProNews have now published my 2 part article based on the Webstock 2008 presentation by Google’s Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning.

Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

In his presentation, Craig, who is New Zealand born and bred, explained how Google uses science to develop more precise search techniques. I found his talk absolutely riveting and typed frantically during the whole thing in my hurry to blog it.

Here are a couple of classic excerpts:

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for “definition of…”, or “what is a….” etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Craig says that once a week, a person at each data center has a list of all the failed hard disks and walks around the datacenter with a pile of hard drives, replacing them one at a time. Velcro is Google’s secret weapon! All Google’s hard disks are velcroed in. This allows super quick service and replacement time. So curiously, there is no downside to hardware failures at Google, because they are expected and managed via scale.

Fascinating stuff!

Popularity: 28%

Just heard the news that Google is testing out a new feature in the search results pages. It’s a search box within the search results, directly below the site snippet. It allows searchers to search the entire site where the snippet has come from. Kind of like site search, but off-site. This only works for a few authority sites at the moment, including Amazon, NASA, Wikipedia and the New York Times, but apparently it will be rolled out on a larger scale shortly.

You can read more about it on the Google Blog.

Popularity: 27%

You all know by now that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s 45 billion dollar offer to acquire them and form a super search company (which I nicknamed Microhoo). The price was unanimously rejected by Yahoo’s Board of Directors and described as “substantially undervaluing the Yahoo brand”.

But what I found the most interesting development in the whole chain of events that unfolded last month was Google’s reaction. Check out their public statement on the potential acquisition. Not only does it use a scathing language against Microsoft, but it’s issued by a single person instead of the company as a whole: David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer. Here’s an extract:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?

I may be completely off base here, but this suggests a couple of things to me:

1) Senior staff at Google weren’t comfortable enough with the content of the statement to release it as a standard-issue corporate press release.

2) Some staff at Google clearly have an axe to grind with Microsoft.

3) A potential Microsoft-Yahoo deal scares Google. A lot.

4) Google may approach (or may have already approached) Yahoo with a similar acquisition offer.

Maybe the threat of a Microsoft buyout of Yahoo will force Google’s hand. I am betting we’ll see some big moves from the big G this year.

Popularity: 44%

I’m signed up to receive Google Alerts whenever a new web page gets indexed by Google that contains a reference to Search Engine College.

It’s a great service and I often find spam blogs and sites that have scraped entire pages from our site so I can report them quite easily. But today I came across quite an amusing blog post that has obviously been translated into English by either very poor quality translation software (maybe Babel Fish?) or by someone whose grasp of English is pretty rudimentary.

Check out the highlights:

For those people who are not that computing machine literate person and are not up on the up-to-the-minute computing machine jargon, where are they going to travel to acquire their necessary cognition about SEO? One illustration is through Search Engine College. Their chief end is to offer easy, merriment and low-cost courses of study in not only hunt engine optimisation but in other hunt engine selling topics as well.

Does this mean we have to replace SEO (search engine optimization) with HEO (hunt engine optimization)? *chuckle*

Popularity: 27%