Last week Andy Beal reported on a rumor/story that Google was looking to establish an office in RTP. Andy speculates that Google could be looking to acquire Scot Wingo’s successful ChannelAdvisor. Arrgghh! Maybe I should have taken Scot’s offer to come in for a interview last year. 
The story continued when a local Raleigh blogger reported that Google had a jet parked at RDU for several days last week. Suffering from post Thanksgiving lack of motivation yesterday I called the largest private hangar at RDU, posed as a reporter and asked about the jet. She had no idea what I was talking about. So in continuing with my theme of avoiding the code I needed to be writing I spoke with that local blogger yesterday and he confirmed that the jet was indeed from Google and was parked at Raleigh International but he didn’t know if it was still here. (I seriously considered driving over to find out for myself and to wrap up the day with only 15 minutes of meaningful work).
Maybe Google will attempt to set up shop in Raleigh and keep it a big secret like they have done in Georgia. Or maybe they are just looking for a Raleigh parking lot to setup one of their new mobile data centers. Hey Larry and Sergey, I have a big parking lot here on Six Forks road and I’ll even run you some ethernet down from my office.
While at Pubcon 10 last week I signed up for the free version of Urchin now known as Google Analytics for one of my sites. Of course the service was overrun with new signups since its free (my regards ClickTracks) and the data took FOREVER to aggregate. Well yesterday after anxiously waiting like a kid on Christmas Eve my data finally began to trickle in.
I’ve owned licensing for Urchin log file analyzer on several of my dedicated boxes for years now but never could figure out how to properly configure it. Had I known how beautiful this reporting is I would have taken the time to figure it out. You’ve done a fine job Brett Crosby and crew. But the one thing I was really excited to see was the site overlay feature and for whatever reason it doesn’t exist on my reports. Is this a temporary scale back of features en lieu of the tidal wave of data Google has received? Anyone else experiencing this?
Here is Google Analytic’s screenshot of an overlay (click for full size):
Note the site overlay option under Navigational Analysis
Here is what I see in my report:
When Brett Tabke decided to disallow all search engine bots via robots.txt on Webmasterworld, I was amazed to hear that his reasoning was that rogue bots check the robots.txt and thus by disallowing them they would go away. That hasn’t been my experience on any of my sites. In fact when I write code to scrape the hell out of a site i never include this line:
$handle = fopen(“http://www.somesiteabouttobebangedon.com/robots.txt”, “r”);
I just let loose a slew of asynchronous threads and start chewing.
Good luck to all those poor souls that were using Google for site search on Webmasterworld. Brett claims that there will be a functioning solution in 60 days. However, I hounded him about it over a year ago at Pubcon Las Vegas and he also said it would be ready in 60 days. Again I hounded him about in in the supporters forum and was promised something soon. While I was in Vegas last week for Pubcon November 2005 I also spoke to the programmer hired to take on the task of building a Webmasterworld site search. He said he was planning on a custom flat file approach. Yikes. Reinventing the wheel might take more than 60 days even for Larry Ellison.
On the Other Hand
Perhaps Brett’s real motivation for taking this seemingly ridulous step is to improve the quality of the discussion. The massive flood of newbies to the board has created a level of noise that makes it damn near impossible to have useful conversations like the ones that went on a few years ago. Theres no doubt that the success of NickW’s Threadwatch is due in large part to an exodus of quality posters looking for a quieter place to talk SEO. (Although many factors make TW a great read such as attitude and style of moderation). I started a private, invite only SEO forum a year ago for the same reasons and have found myself visiting WMW very rarely en lieu of Threadwatch and private forums. So maybe banning all bots is Tabke’s last ditch effort to save the original SEO forum from implosion.
There was some rumor flying around this week that Blogger had been successful at deleting all SPLOGS. Worried, I rushed to check my Splogs and found them happily cranking away traffic.
I’ve since confirmed with some spammer friends that they too have not seen any splogs deleted.
After my business bought several Dells in the past few months I decided that I would try and save a few bucks and just do an upgrade on the couple of home machines that were lagging. Bad idea.
What I bought:
• Chaintech motherboard
• AMD Athlon 3200+
• 1GB of DDR 400Mhz
These were purchased in combos with multiple rebates from TigerDirect so the total cost was only $120.
However, I have spent about 12 hours of pure frustration as this setup would only post about 50% of the time. Finally I believe I narrowed down the problem to a simple jumper setting and some BIOS settings that were absolutely unintuitive.
Yes I probably saved $700 per machine but I’m not sure if it was worth it. I wouldn’t recommend Chaintech primarily because their documentation is pretty lousy. Not to mention I don’t have the beautiful Dell 24″ LCD at home. 
The story continued when a local Raleigh blogger reported that Google had a jet parked at RDU for several days last week. Suffering from post Thanksgiving lack of motivation yesterday I called the largest private hangar at RDU, posed as a reporter and asked about the jet. She had no idea what I was talking about. So in continuing with my theme of avoiding the code I needed to be writing I spoke with that local blogger yesterday and he confirmed that the jet was indeed from Google and was parked at Raleigh International but he didn’t know if it was still here. (I seriously considered driving over to find out for myself and to wrap up the day with only 15 minutes of meaningful work).
