Sponsored terrorism links by Times of India

One of the common monetization strategies used by content providers on internet is what is knows as "contextual advertising". The phrase is self-explanatory enough, it refers to a technology where ads are served based on the context of the page (Google's "Adsense for content" is the most popular product to use this technology). It works best when the content of the page is somewhat suggestive of the commercial intent of the user; for example someone reading a review of digital cameras is most likely interested in buying one. But it blows on your face when this contextual ads start appearing against sensitive topics; such as accidents, wars or terrorism.

Now here is a good example of when not to use contextual advertising. Today, I was reading an article about Pune blast in Times of India's website. Just when I was about to leave the page, my eyes went to the ads on the right hand side of the page - First there were ads on Jobs in Pune, Houses in Pune, Brides/ Grooms in Pune. Ok, so now that there is a terrorist attack in Pune, it suddenly becomes very lucrative to buy properties there? And wait, does that make you want to marry a Pune boy/ girl even more?

Now this was not the worse part. As I scrolled down the page, I came across a section called "Sponsored Links" (another term for ads). The sponsored links were - Terrorism, Terrorism and Islam, Counter Terrorism BS, Counterterrorism, FT Hood Terrorism.

Wait, it doesn't end here. If you follow any of the links, you'll see ads on life insurance, "is Jesus really God" (don't ask) and even an ad on how to plan your second wedding if you are divorced or widowed.

Thanks for being so sensitive TOI. This is exactly what we expect from our leading national newspaper. Here are the screen-shots:

TechCrunch is losing it

Don’t get me wrong. I love TechCrunch. It’s a great place to get your daily dose of tech updates. But when it comes to reading an “expert” opinion on a topic; Techcrunch, more often than not, falls way short of my expectations..

For example, see this posting about the change in Yahoo search marketing (YSM) reserve price. The conclusion drawn by the writer was so ridiculous that it prompted me to come out of my hibernation and challenge his views.

Just to give you some background – when advertisers bid for keywords in YSM, they have to specify a bid amount higher than the reserve price (or minimum bid) mentioned by Yahoo. Until last week, this minimum bid was a fixed amount of 10 cents for all keywords. But as per the recent update made by Yahoo, this minimum amount will be more dynamic and would depend on two things – a) advertiser’s ad quality and b) the keyword’s worth determined by Yahoo.

That sounds like a nice initiative, doesn’t it? Apparently TechCrunch’s expert bloggers have a problem with it. Here is what they infer from this move – “What is curious about this move is that it suggests that many keywords on Yahoo get bought at the minimum price, without any real competitive bidding going on. After all, if at least two advertisers are bidding for a keyword that means the minimum bid is no longer an issue. So it makes you wonder how effective Yahoo ad auction system is as a market. For a market to exist, there needs to be at least two bidders……..

Conversely, the advertisers with the highest click through rates will now be in a position to buy up keywords below the point where lesser advertisers even hit their minimum bid. And that is not really a market either.”

Wow! Someone who has even spent 5 mins in search advertising can point out several flaws in these few lines. Let’s see how many you can get before reading further.

To start with, “minimum bid” is a very well known concept in Google adwords, which is the number one search marketing marketplace. And even Google calculates it dynamically for each keyword and advertiser. So as per TechCrunch, Google’s keywords must be getting bought at the minimum bid and there is no market for Google keywords?

(I'm not suggesting that everything Google does is right. Wanted to point out the flaw in "there is no market" argument)

Forget Google or Yahoo, very rarely would you get a chance to participate in an auction that doesn’t specify a minimum bid. Be it bidding for those stupid items on your Kingfisher flight, or buying items in eBay or even bidding for cricketers in IPL. So are all these markets non-existent?

Another point to note is both Google and Yahoo for a long time have been taking into account advertiser’s “quality score” in the ranking; which means an advertiser with high quality score can bid low and still get a top rank. The recent change by Yahoo is in the same spirit and it gives advertisers with high quality score more flexibility on their minimum bid. So the point about good advertisers beating the lesser ones is nothing new. Google has been doing it for a long time. Yahoo implemented it during panama launch. Other search marketing networks have implemented it long time back as well. But as per TechCrunch “this is not a market either”.

Now, let’s get into a slightly more subtle point in this search marketing bidding models (you would expect any professional blogger in this domain to know this though). As an advertiser you don’t pay your actual bid value per click; the amount you pay is different from the bid amount and depends on what the next guy is bidding and your relative quality score. See this Google help page for more details. So if one guy is bidding really low (presumably the guy with high quality score), this would affect the price paid by all other advertisers for the same keyword (because the 2nd guy would bid low knowing that he wont get the top rank anyway, which would mean the 1st guy have to pay low .. you get the drift). Having a minimum bid prevents this cycle from getting worse.

Finally, some advice to TechCrunch - do bit more research on the topics you are writing about (unless, of course, you just copy paste the news from the official blogs; which in any case is exactly what you do most of the time). For this topic I’ll suggest read a bit more on auction theory, reserve price, check out how Google’s adwords, the more popular and dominant bidding model, works. Stop criticizing Yahoo! Just for the heck of it, being number 2 in a lucrative industry like search marketing is not bad at all.

Carbon footprint of a banner ad? What the heck?

If somebody walks up to you in this holiday season and asks this question “How would you calculate the carbon footprint of a banner ad”; you should immediately check what he has been drinking. And if you are one of those adventurous types, order one of that for yourself. Because it has to be some really strong stuff that makes ones mind wander in such directions.

But this is precisely what Don Carli of Sustainable Advertising Partnership is trying to figure out. Carbon footprint, as most of you would be aware, is a measure of the impact of human activities on the environment. Don’s organization is trying to bring the advertisers and the supply chain (for all kinds of media, such as print, online, TV) together to come up with best practices for advertising; best practices that would address the challenges of sustainability and make the ads more “green”, so to speak.

Don has been involved in such initiatives for over four years now (at least, that’s what his LinkedIn profile tells me) and since it’s highly unlikely that he has been constantly inebriated all these years, you have to take his question a bit more seriously. Personally, I don’t think it’s important. If I’ve to make a list of all the stuff for which we need to reduce the carbon footprint, “banner ads” perhaps won’t figure among the first hundred billion entries in the list. But Don apparently belongs to the group of folks who believe in the age old saying that ‘every bit saved makes it a bit more’ (or words to that effect). So let’s give this question a shot.

To calculate the carbon footprint of a banner ad, we have to measure the energy consumed at each stage of the supply chain for creating, storing and serving the ad. So what exactly is the “supply chain” for serving the banner ads? Lets see who are the players involved:
1. The Advertiser
2. The creative agency (these folks design and develop the “creatives” or display ads)
3. The Ad agency (they work as the intermediary between the advertisers and publishers/ ad network)
4. The Ad network (someone like Yahoo or Double Click, who has got a pool of publishers)
5. The Publisher
6. The Content delivery network (someone like Akamai, who stores these creative closer to the end users location)
7. The ISP (and the entire internet infrastructure that brings the data to you)
8. The end user

Wow! It’s kind of mind boggling to think of all the systems that are used to serve the ad. For example, take the case of only one of the players in the supply chain, the ad network. It should have systems that help advertisers manage campaigns, book ads, view reports. Additionally, it should have systems to forecast traffic, run pricing models, log events and software to rotate banner ads, if required. All these applications, would most probably, be running on their separate servers (sometimes multiple servers for one application). So how exactly we track the energy consumed by one ad through all these systems.

But hang on a minute. We can make our task much simpler. The end objective is to see if we can reduce the carbon footprint of the banner ad by some optimization in the creative i.e. either by reducing the size of the ad or by optimizing the way it’s served. So we should only consider the systems that are affected by the type or size of the ad. For example, the pricing server would be unaffected by the size of the ad and so would a lot of other systems in the entire supply chain.

Most of the systems in the supply chain would only have a reference to the creative. The actual creative is perhaps used by only a handful of systems. So let’s see in what all systems the creative actually “consumes energy”
1. Systems used by creative agency to create the ads
2. Datacenters by content delivery network that stores the ads
3. Network bandwidth for serving the ads
4. Processing power consumed on users machine when the ad is displayed.

So if we know the average carbon footprint per processing power of the machine, we can allocate some of that to the banner ad depending on how much processing power it takes or how much bandwidth it consumes. In other words

Carbon footprint of banner ad = (Carbon footprint of the server or pc) * (processing power or bandwidth consumed by the banner ad)/ (processing power of the server or pc).

Calculate this for all the systems mentioned above and feel free to use the expression 'Voila' once you get there.

And here comes a disclaimer. Those who have read about cost accounting methods would quickly point out that the “allocation” method described above is perhaps not the optimal way to measure something. But looking at the abstract nature of the problem, this is the best I could think of.

Bubble 2.0?

It is now for quite some time that a few industry experts are predicting another dot com bubble. So it was very interesting to come across this optimistic piece “What Bubble?” by Harry Gold.

Harry looks at the positive growth trend of internet ad revenue and concludes that there is actually no bubble. To quote Harry, “Wow! If that doesn't say it all and validate the hot air we've been blowing all year, I don't know what does….Just look at this growth trend:.”

It’s refreshing to see such a positive outlook, but why I’m still a bit skeptical about his conclusion. Let’s reproduce the image from his article:




-- Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau, 2007 –

Harry seems to have got it right, isn’t it? There is indeed a very significant positive growth trend for past few quarters. But before we start jumping in joy, let’s take a quick look at the Ad revenue growth trend in 2000. Do you remember when exactly the first dot-com bubble burst? It was March 13, 2000 i.e. 1st quarter of 2000. What was the Ad revenue trend before that? Well, again a very significant upward trend. Although, it’s difficult to get the numbers from the graph, the slope looks much steeper in 1999 than it is now. In fact the Ad revenue spends didn’t go down till 3rd quarter of 2000. So the downward trend in the ad spent is actually an aftermath of the bubble not the cause. Harry seems to have got the causality reversed in his equation. Perhaps he would have written a similar article in 2000 saying “What Bubble?”.

Another source for Harry’s positive outlook is an eMarketer report predicting the Ad revenue for future. We, of course, need to take such predictions with a pinch of salt. One of the methods commonly used in such predictions is the use of historical data, and as I’ve mentioned above it’s difficult to predict some drastic event just by looking at the history. One wonders why these folks were not able to predict the first bubble burst.

So what is my view on this? I feel the industry is again heading towards a major shake up. The major players like Google, Yahoo would definitely make it through; but some of the new players might find it difficult to survive. The warning signs are no where more evident than the social networking space. MySpace was valued $15bn in 2006. Facebook is similarly valued at $15bn by Microsoft recently (Yeah, I know the common argument that it was not a valuation, but strategic investment. Although I’m not sure what kind of strategy it was to flush money down the drain). Again we are going back to the days where firms are valued just by page views or user base. On last count there were around 137 million social networking sites (give or take a few); all of them relying on “network externality” effect to win the space. One wonders how many of them are going to make it through.

And by the way when we are on this subject, look at Harry’s article again to see the optimistic predictions by the eMarketer about this space. “Social-networking advertising numbers, currently being revised by eMarketer, are expected to increase from $900 million in 2007 to $2.5 billion in 2011.”. So $2.5bn annual revenue to be shared between all these players; some of them are valued at $15bn.. hmmn.. interesting.

Having said all that, I hope Harry is right and I’m wrong. I was not part of the industry when the first bubble burst (If memory serves one right, I was learning to write “hello world” programs in Java). But this time I earn my bread and butter here. So nobody will be happier if Harry’s optimistic views turn out to be right.

The curious case of Infusion Pumps & Human Resource Jobs

For some reason, Google is extremely keen on selling me pumps; and not just any ordinary pump, they want me to buy syringe pumps, infusion pumps, grinder pumps and dosing pumps. Honestly, I’ve very little idea about what to do with those.

I’m of course talking about the Ads Google shows me; not in the search result page, but in Gmail. Google uses its Adsense product’s “analytical ability” to serve “contextual ads” in Gmail pages. Note the use of quotes in my previous sentence; because after observing these ads for a few days I’m seriously beginning to doubt Google’s ability to analyze the context of the page.

To be fair to Google, it’s extremely difficult to separate noise from the actual content in an email message. In fact this is one of the three main reasons why most of the other email service providers have decided not to show contextual ads along with email messages (the other two being the misplaced privacy concerns and the lack of commercial intent of users while reading an email). My initial thought was that Google was showing me some random ads (“run-of-network” ads, as they are affectionately called) in messages for which it can’t extract the context.

Unfortunately, a few hours of careful observation revealed that this is not the case. Google shows me these ads for pumps whenever I open a particular mail. It’s a forward from one of my friends, with the subject “When your colleague is on leave”. It has an attachment showing images of the pranks you can play on your colleagues. The mail is not a great one for people who hate practical jokes, but it has its positive sides; viz. it doesn’t have any reference to pumps. But Google apparently thinks that the best way to spend your time, when your colleague is on leave, is to go on a shopping frenzy and buy as many pumps as you can. Similarly, whenever I open a mail that has pictures of my nephew, Google quickly interprets that I’m a suitable candidate for “Human Resource Jobs”. I’m clearly missing the link here, but definitely these are not random ads. These ads are tied to the email message by some weird logic that Adsense uses.

As a matter of fact, even in the cases where the context of the mail is pretty obvious, Google does an extremely poor job of showing relevant Ads. Just because a friend is asking me the contact number of someone in Andhra Bank, doesn’t imply that I’m interested in ICICI Bank Jobs or, say, the weather forecast in Hyderabad. Not sure what kind of CTR Google gets for these Ads, but my guess is it would be very negligible.

So what should Google do to monetize Gmail? They, of course, insist on projecting a user friendly image (they should do something about the loading time of Gmail though), which means the usual banners ads are ruled out. This is where you wonder, when Google is actually going to aggregate all the data it has been collecting about the users across various applications. I had an Orkut account (note the past tense). So they know where I live, which should tell them that I would be more interested in Bangalore weather. They have all my search trends, my web history; they know what kind of blogs I’ve subscribed to in my Google reader. So why insist on showing contextual ads in Gmail that doesn’t make any sense.

When exactly are they going to use all this information to deliver highly targeted ads to me? If they want to start serving such ads, Gmail (or Orkut) should be an ideal place to start. That’s because a user considers his Inbox or his profile page as his own little private space and most probably wouldn’t mind seeing individually targeted ads there. At least these ads would be more relevant to me than the ones about pumps.

One more Bridge to burn… err.. cross.

Last week I got an email invitation to join a professional network site called www.6bridges.com (they have also booked, very thoughtfully, the domain www.sixbridges.com, apparently for people who are less numerically inclined).

But the problem was this: the invitation was not from a friend (as is the norm), but directly from the site. I guess it was sent to the alumni id of my B-school. It kind of pisses me off when people think they can spam the alumni group email id. I thought I would take a look and see what this site is all about. (I could have simply deleted that mail; but that wouldn’t have made a very interesting read on the blog, would it? I mean “I got a spam mail and deleted it” hardly makes the blog readers to sit up and take notice.)

Now, why the name “6 bridges”? The invitation mail mentioned this

The name ‘6bridges' is derived from the fascinating concept of six degrees of separation between people, which the site aims to bridge.

Fair enough. Then I took a look at the site logo, which mentions this

6bridges.com . Building bridges to your future

Now I’m a bit confused. So is it the bridge between people or bridge between one individual and his future? I decided to check out the “About us” page (this is always the first thing I do while reviewing any site). The page mentions the idea of “6 bridges” in following different lines

If the theory about 6 degrees separating people is an interesting one, just what would you call the reality that brings 6 professionals together, whose interests and callings are more degrees apart than 6 !

We decided to call it 6bridges. Bridges that connected the 6 degrees of separation between people, their ideas, interests, paths and helped them to their desired destination.

6 degrees gave us 6 bridges, which in turn gave us these 6 topics.

After reading these lines, I just had 6 words for the founders, viz. “What a truck load of crap”. I wonder if they know what the concept of 6 degrees of separation is all about or just tried to use the number “6” and the word “bridge” in as many different ways as possible.

Interestingly, this site is only limited for alumni of certain pre-determined “elite” colleges (I’ll come back to this point later). My point is, after bragging about bridging the 6 degrees of separation, they have limited their user base to people who are perhaps separated, at the maximum, by two degrees. Anyway, enough bashing for the name, lets move on.

Next page that I checked, since I already knew about their spamming tendency, is the “privacy policy” page. For some reason they have decided to club it together with “terms and conditions” page. Compare this page with that of other professional networking sites; such as Linkedin or even the Indian players like Brijj or Techtribe; and you’ll understand how important “privacy” for 6bridges is.

Now coming back to the idea of limiting the site to only the “elite” colleges. Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my linkedin contact list and selected the top 30 most valuable contacts. Out of those 30, only 7 were from these elite colleges, i.e. more than 75% of my valuable contacts never went to these colleges. 6bridges is clearly designed for the headhunters, not for users like me whose idea of networking is to connect with valuable professionals.

I decided to register with them (with no intention whatsoever of using it in future) and got the confirmation mail after around 14 hours. I guess it’s the time they take to verify whether you actually belong to one of those colleges; a feature which I’m sure would please the headhunters.

When I logged in, I was completely lost. The page was completely cluttered and confusing, just like the home page. Also it seems the site was never tested for firefox users. Some of the dropdown menus, images and page layouts are messed up (I think the page layout problem is there for IE as well). There was no instruction for the new users about how they should start networking with others.

The invitation mail that I received had links to bunch of career related articles, which kind of looked tempting. But once I had registered and viewed those articles, I realized how useless the content was (I should have expected this). The content was mostly copied from several online sources (they were honest enough to provide the link to the original source) and was not organized properly. Some of the articles; such as “Salary Negotiation – Tips and Strategies”, make you wonder who the target audiences are; since any “professional” would find this information useless.

6bridges looks more like a job site, rather than a networking site. But I think they are missing the point. The idea of combining professional networking with head hunting is to identify the passive job seekers and to help get candidates through referrals. I’m not sure how a site designed with keeping only the headhunters in mind and ignoring the networking aspect is ever going to achieve that. As far as I’m concerned, this is one bridge I’m unlikely to cross.

Yet another controversy for Orkut.

Yesterday our news channels somehow managed to squeeze a bit of time out from more pressing matters; such as the visit of Samlan Khan’s family to the jail on Rakhi or the public display of affection by the constabulary towards Sanjay Dutt, to show us the recent controversy about Orkut. Apparently, someone in Orkut has created a community called “I hate Mayawati” and the UP chief Minister has taken umbrage (if that’s what people take when they are offended) to some of the postings. Our overenthusiastic and extremely responsible media even flashed the name and hometown of the person who has created the community. One of the senior government official commented that “the matter has been forwarded to the cyber crime department”. Surely our governments have got there priorities right. This is exactly what the cyber crime department should have been doing all along. Now all they need to do is to call the army to hunt down that poor soul who took the “freedom of speech” phrase a bit too seriously.

However, I’m glad with the reaction of Google. They have not removed the community yet. They should treat this just like any other abuse report. It took us a lot of effort to remove the “I hate India” community from Orkut. It’ll be interesting to see if Google changes its review procedure to soothe the government officials.

This brings me to a more generic question, i.e. should Google (or any other website) be responsible for the user generated content. If the answer is “yes”, then is removing the content after someone has reported for abuse good enough? Would you trust the sites to act immediately, if it’s clear that they stand to gain by not removing the content?

Brijjes and Tribes

In the past, I’ve written about how it’s difficult for the new players in the social networking market place to “steal” users from the incumbents. So out of curiosity I decided to check out how the one month old Brijj is doing in the market.

In the absence of any other reliable source, I turned, a bit reluctantly, to Alexa. Some of us, who have been keeping track of Alexa rankings for different sites, usually view these stats with the same degree of skepticism typically reserved for things like Saurabh Ganguly’s call for a quick single or Munaf Patel’s declaration that he is completely match fit; i.e. things that have let you down in the past.

The Alexa traffic graphs for Brijj showed that there was an initial peak and after that it followed a downward slope (This is obviously along the expected lines). But, of course these graphs in isolation didn’t make any sense. I thought it would be more interesting to compare the graphs of Brijj with those of the other players in the market.

A direct competitor for Brijj is techtribe; both are professional network sites targeted specifically to the Indian audience. Techtribe is in market for over a year now; so I expected it to have a greater reach and higher page views than Brijj. But I was in for a surprise. The Alexa graphs showed that Brijj has almost 4-6 times more reach and 3-8 times more page views. Techtribe is ranked 2045 in India; as opposed to Brijj which has a very impressive rank of 371.


Now, I’m not in a position to do a feature by feature comparison of the two sites. I’ve never used techtribe and the time I’ve spent in Brijj would make a typical Sehwag innings look longer. But on the face of it, techtribe looks more content reach (and understandably so). Techtribe has communities, knowledge sections, job postings and so on, which are as of now not present in Brijj. So the question obviously is how Brijj managed to generate so many page views. Is it due to the marketing efforts put in by Infoedge? Is it due to the naukri brand name? Is it due to the fact that Infoedge had a much larger employee base to start the word-of-mouth campaign (seems like a trivial point, but some of my “sources” have told me that Orkut was launched that way)?

I think it’s just a matter of when and not if Brijj would introduce features like job referrals, communities, answers etc. It would be interesting then to see if Brijj can challenge the bigger players like linkedin.

[For some reason the Alexa webservices are not returning any result. I thought of using their widgets to put the graphs directly in the blog, but in stead of the graph I only got a blank space. If you know what's the issue, please let me know]

Cross the Brijj only when you come to it

[This post is partly a review of the new professional networking site Brijj; and partly (or rather, I should say, mostly) a response to another review “A brijj too far” by Shyam.

I must clarify upfront that my views may not be considered completely unbiased. I’ve worked at Infoedge in the past, so might have developed a soft corner for the team. I’ll try to keep these personal biases out of the post]

Let’s start with Shyam’s review “A brijj too far”. Once we have ignored the first three paragraphs, which tell you how Indian firms are only good at copying stuff from the west and how only the developers’ lovers use their product, we reach the point where the author starts the review of Brijj. The most admirable part of the review is the discovery of the redundant Meta tags and the invisible div tag. Hats off to Shyam for discovering these things, which have supposedly escaped the notice of the QA team. But my question is how do these things affect the user? May be I’m an exception, but when I’m surfing the net I hardly ever go through the source code of each page to check the meta tags. So what Shyam is trying to tell us is that the code is not polished. Big Deal! Isn’t that what you would expect from a beta version? When the time to market is so important I would much rather have my technical team and QA team focus on product features than spending their time in refining the code.

Next, Shyam complains about the absence of privacy settings for the users. Interestingly, even LinkedIn doesn’t have such a setting (some of the granular settings were added much later; for features such as your public profile or Q&A section; features which are so far not present in Brijj). So the only “privacy” setting that is present in linkedin and missing in Brijj is whether you allow others to see your contact list or not. I’m sure the team must be having this on their priority list. But as far as privacy is concerned I think Brijj does a much better job than the personal networking sites like orkut, myspace etc. Just like LinkedIn, it tries to handle most of the privacy and spam issues by itself rather than asking users to specify these settings.

Then Shyam talks about Infoedge’s “critical mistakes like not having a common registration database among its properties”. Mind you this line comes from a guy who was just complaining about privacy. The point Shyam is missing is having a common user database is actually more beneficial to the company than the users. Most of the times it’s the user who doesn’t want to have his data aggregated. In any case, I don’t think it makes sense for the products Infoedge has; 99acres hardly requires a registration, most of the users would use jeevan saathi for a very short time (at least I hope they would), and in naukri although there is a repeat usage, the frequency won’t be very high.

My favorite line in the entire post is: “I am assuming that at some point Info Edge will roll into Brijj, the muscle of Naukri’s database, but they have again erred gravely by not having it on from day one”. Networking is a social activity and job searching is mostly a private activity (by this I mean most of us don’t want to broadcast the fact that we are looking for a job switch, we might contact some selected people for this). And what naukri database is Shyam talking about? If he is referring to database of resumes and candidates; I’m not sure how that can be merged with Brijj. Invite all the naukri candidates to Brijj? They might as well send a mail to my HR manager and my boss saying that I’m looking for a job change. And if Shyam is talking about the database of job postings, that I’m sure would come much later in Brijj, but in a different form. Brijj would help companies identify candidates mostly through referrals (that’s the benefit of networking, isn’t it?).

So what’s my verdict on Brijj. I think it’s way too early to write a review for the product. The true value of a networking site can only be gauged when it has gained a substantial user base (“positive network externality” guys, remember I talked about this here?).

Brijj definitely has some cool features to start with. The UI looks pretty decent (I generally don’t care much for UIs, but it matters to most). They provide a type-ahead functionality for company names and educational institute names. The importance of this type-ahead functionality would be clear when you look at the “People you may know” section in home page. Allow me to explain. Even linkedin has a “people you may know” section, which tries to match the company name/ institute name to find your ex-colleagues and alumni. But linkedin misses a lot of potential contacts because the company name is entered in a free text field. If user A enters his company as “Infoedge” and user B enters it as “Infoedge India Pvt. Ltd”; chances are linkedin won’t recognize them as colleagues. This problem would be addressed in Brijj to a great extent, since most users would select the name from the type-ahead list.

I’m sure what we are seeing is a skeleton version of what’s planned for the site. Not because the team accidentally missed implementing those features; but because most of these features only make sense when you have build a large enough user base. So let’s give Brijj sometime before we give our verdict.

How good is Google Analytics?

“In God we trust, everyone else must bring data.”
I read this interesting quote some time back and have tried to follow that in my professional life i.e. make decisions based on hard data. But the question I’m going to explore in this post (and the next one) is can we trust the data that Google Analytics shows us.

Before you turn back thinking that this is just one more of those Google bashing blogs, I must quickly point out that most of the issues discussed here are applicable to any analytics tool that uses similar technology. And yeah, there will be a point when I turn my attention to a possible “Google is evil” theory; but I’ll give you some advanced warning before we reach that point.

It has been a while that I’m noticing a lot of discrepancies between the GA’s data and the internal tracking data (server logs) that we maintain for our site. I turned to my linkedin network to understand if anyone else has noticed such issues and got a few responses that confirmed the problem with GA.

Google Analytics gives us the following important (albeit inaccurate) pieces of information
• Site Usage (number of hits, page views, bounce rate etc)
• Visitor overview (new vs. returning, visitor location etc)
• Traffic sources (search engines, referring sites)
• Content Performance (top content, top landing/exit pages)
• Adwords integration

Let’s look at these points one by one.

Site Usage: It has been observed by many people that GA under reports the traffic of your site; although it’s not clear to what extent, but I’ve read about cases where GA reports only 40% of the actual traffic.

One of the responses I got in linkedin was from David Kutcher, President of Confluent Forms, who very nicely explained the issue with using JavaScript (as GA does)

“Google Analytics is good, but it will never replace server log analytics, for the main reason that it relies on Javascript (the Urchin code).
Javascript's main drawbacks for this are:
1. it can be cached by a proxy server
2. it can be disabled on the client
These two points alone can wildly skew your results….”

Combine David’s explanation with the fact that our server logs typically over-report the traffic because most of the times they fail to ignore the spiders or bots (which GA very appropriately excludes from its report), and you can understand why the huge discrepancies are there.

Perhaps we could have lived with this serious issue if we knew (approximately) that GA under-reports the traffic by a certain percentage; but as Michael Martinez points out in this article (again thanks to David for the link) he has noticed GA diverging from the server data “in a consistently downward spiral” over few months. So what that means is GA is not only inaccurate in its traffic reports it’s, to make matters worse, inconsistent.

We’ll look at the other GA reports in next posting.

To CTC or not to CTC ....... and Google security issues

Apparently, Google has decided to discontinue the Click-to-call (CTC) feature from their Google Maps site. I wonder why they did that, as it seemed like a very useful feature to have. Looking at the response of users to this news in Google groups, it seems most of them share my disappointment and surprise.

On a different note, many iGoogle and Google reader users have reported that they are able to login to other accounts or notice the accounts switch automatically mid-way through the session. You can read the reports here, here and here. Well, maybe now that Lord Voldemort is back in power, we might expect such eerie events occurring.

Updated:
Since I didn't have a clue regarding why Google discontinued the click-to-call feature, I designed a very well thought out systematic step-by-step procedure to find out the cause. I opened the browser, typed in google.com in the address box, and used the Google search engine to look for the cause.

The plan failed. There is not much information available about Google's thought process (and it may take a little while before bloggers with more expertise than me on this subject try to enlighten us with their views).

But the search revealed something very interesting. I stumbled upon this one year old article , which is by the way a post on Google's official blog, where Google explains that someone hacked into their blog and posted a "fake" article saying Google has decided to remove click-to-call. The Google official added "As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we're pleased with the results thus far".

Well, it seems the hacker had more insight about this feature than the Google officials. And strangely that one year old article combines the two issues I've mentioned above (click-to-call and Google security issues). I wonder whether the hacker is related to Professor Trelawney.

Party Crahsers

Google tried to crash Ebay's user conference by throwing a party on the same day and openly inviting all those who were supposed to attend the conference...

Ebay retaliated by pulling out of Google's advertising network..

You can read the news here

This, mind you, came days after Google's antitrust complaints against Microsoft.

Who said the technology industry is boring ?

Google and Privacy...

Is Google and Privacy beginning to sound like "Microsoft Works" i.e. an oxymoron :-)

Search engine expert Danny Sullivan doesn't think so..In his article, he criticizes the Privacy International's rankings and concludes that it's unfair to rank Google at the bottom...

Well, the argument will definitely continue for a while. But, what can't be denied is that Google is treading a very thin line when it comes to privacy. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of Google Street View.. For example, if you are staring at a girl on the street (who doesn't), would you like those pictures to be visible on Google Map's street view? Does it seem far fetched ? .. Well check this out then..

News.com ran a story of a guy who almost got fired because of this Google Map feature..


One lazy afternoon, Maer Israel and a colleague ducked out of work to have a double espresso at a nearby cafe in San Francisco.

Several weeks later, the information technology manager at the French American International School was alerted that a picture of him sitting at the cafe could be found on Google's online map as part of the search giant's new street-level photo view.

"The HR manager ran into me in the hallway and she pulled me aside and...said, 'Do you know that there are cameras everywhere?'" Israel recounted. "Of course, I was a little freaked out because it's the HR person telling me that we got busted having a coffee next door...My mother is surprised I haven't been fired."


I would let the readers draw their own conclusion....

Not a great week for Google

First there were the Shiv-Sainiks... forcing the cyber-cafe owners to block orkut.. Well, perhaps we can dismiss this as a cheap political stunt, which in all likelihood would last only for a few more days...

But then came the big blow on 9th June... An organization called Privacy International released the "Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies".. Google was ranked at the bottom ... below Microsoft, eBay, Amazon and many others.. Here is the link to the rankings..The organization has also gone into great detail to explain why they put Google at the bottom. To quote them..

In summary, Google's specific privacy failures include, but are by no means limited to:

* Google account holders that regularly use even a few of Google's services must accept that the company retains a large quantity of information about that user, often for an unstated or indefinite length of time, without clear limitation on subsequent use or disclosure, and without an opportunity to delete or withdraw personal data even if the user wishes to terminate the service.
* Google maintains records of all search strings and the associated IP-addresses and time stamps for at least 18 to 24 months and does not provide users with an expungement option. While it is true that many US based companies have not yet established a time frame for retention, there is a prevailing view amongst privacy experts that 18 to 24 months is unacceptable, and possibly unlawful in many parts of the world.
* Google has access to additional personal information, including hobbies, employment, address, and phone number, contained within user profiles in Orkut. Google often maintains these records even after a user has deleted his profile or removed information from Orkut.
* Google collects all search results entered through Google Toolbar and identifies all Google Toolbar users with a unique cookie that allows Google to track the user's web movement.17 Google does not indicate how long the information collected through Google Toolbar is retained, nor does it offer users a data expungement option in connection with the service.
* Google fails to follow generally accepted privacy practices such as the OECD Privacy Guidelines and elements of EU data protection law. As detailed in the EPIC complaint, Google also fails to adopted additional privacy provisions with respect to specific Google services.
* Google logs search queries in a manner that makes them personally identifiable but fails to provide users with the ability to edit or otherwise expunge records of their previous searches.
* Google fails to give users access to log information generated through their interaction with Google Maps, Google Video, Google Talk, Google Reader, Blogger and other services.

.. and we all believed in Google's "Don't be Evil" philosophy..huh..

Jokes apart, I'm not entirely convinced that Google deserves to be at the bottom. I've to find out more about this paper to draw any conclusions. Till then if you want to read more about this organization and this study, then .. well just Google it..