Rex Hammock compares Google's Froogle product search engine (just beta'd in time for Xmas) to Yahoo's and others.

Me, I didn't even know Froogle existed until Rex pointed to it.

It's clearly not ready for prime time, which assures some odd results (like, say, this one)

To give Froogle a good test, I searched for the Sony DCR-PC120BT, which is the successor to my old camcorder (DCR-PC110), which was swiped at a party last weekend. Then I compared the results with several more mature retail search services:

• Froogle
• Yahoo
• mySimon
• Bizrate
• Epinons

Plainly, Bizrate kicks ass.

Here's the Kartoo search for the same product. Here's the one for this blog. And here's the blog I've hardly seen before that's central to the results. It's a LiveJournal blog. There are about a zillion of these blogs in the world, in an orbit that doesn't seem to intersect as much as you might expect with our own local ecosystem. Unless, of course, I'm missing something, which happens approximately all the time.

Anyway, the story I'm hearing is that the vast majority of LiveJournal's blogs are by teenage girls, especially those given to gothic self-expression. Since LiveJournal's code is free and GPL'd, it has spawned the very entertaining DeadJournal, which was reportedly hacked into existence by even more gothic teenage boys.

Now all of this (other than the fact that Live/DeadJournal exist) is hearsay. The information comes from a passenger in the car I was driving up to The City the other day. So if ya'll have any interesting facts we might string together and make a story, send 'em along.

ClickZ: Effective Skimming and Scanning

A visitor arrives and her eyes immediately begin scoping out the situation to determine if she's in the right place. First, she'll scan the visible screen for prominent elements, determining if they mesh with her mental image of her mission. As she scans, in addition to collecting top-level clues such as headlines, she'll evaluate larger-scale issues, such as legibility, arrangement, and accessibility. This is where more prominent features, including type size, page layout, and color use come into play. You want to help her to minimize the time she spends finding, sorting, and selecting information and to engage her in the conversion process. [...]

Skimming is the second, but equally important, activity. It's reading based, a refinement of the information-gathering process. When a visitor has a fairly good idea of the lay of the land, she's going to start engaging with the copy.

One thing good web designers prominently provide value for, is in the proper organization of white space, to help structure the visual flow and engage people in actually reading the copy as fast as possible.

Wired: Google vs. Evil

This is an interesting interview piece with Sergey Brin discussing Google's struggle to remain true to its core beliefs.

Google has succeeded by adhering to one, pure principle: Do good by users. Now, for the first time in its history, Google is facing rifts between what's good for users and what's good for Google. And Sergey Brin is finding that purity just doesn't scale.

searchengineblog: Interview with Kenneth Norton of Inktomi

Following on the debate last week here as to whether Google's Froogle is heading in the right direction, this interview with Ken Norton of Inktomi sheds some light on the whole issue of paid placement versus paid inclusion.

In order for marketers to tap into the remaining 70 percent of Internet searches for more specific items, such as particular book titles or product models, it is more efficient and cost-effective to turn to paid inclusion. With paid inclusion, subscribers do not bid on keywords for preferential placement within a results set, but instead feed their most current, deep Web site content directly to the search engine for consideration in a search. Since paid inclusion ranking is driven by relevance, the marketer's pages returned to users truly meet their needs and translate into higher conversion rates than paid placement. Not surprisingly, someone searching for a very specific product is more likely to complete a transaction than someone searching for a general phrase.

iMedia Connection: iMedia Summit Coverage, Continued

A roundup of the latest from the iMedia Summit. Particularly interesting were Doug Weaver president of the Upstream Group comments on making ideas the driver.

Online advertising can maintain an advertiser’s presence between campaigns: When major TV campaigns go dark, the advertiser can use online to hold the gains made.

Online advertising can pre-sensitize an audience: An Internet campaign can set the table for the traditional advertising campaign that comes after.

The point of no return: We can identify the diminishing points for other media and shift to online at those points.

The Internet as Integrator: The Internet is the intellectual and promotional base for all integrated marketing in the future.

The Holy Grail is a Myth: There will be no silver bullet solution or technology that makes it all happen. Wait no longer. EXECUTE.

ClickZ: AOL 8.0: All Database Rules Have Changed

Until now, email database creation was solely about obtaining permission: opt-out versus opt-in versus double opt-in. All that's about to change. With new Web clients such as AOL 8.0 already available and others quickly following, the conversation suddenly and dramatically shifts from whether you have permission to email someone to how to get email delivered. [...] Without immediate, dramatic changes, delivering a newsletter, company announcement, news alert, or other message to AOL 8.0 users now, and other ISP subscribers in the near future, requires getting recipients to give that message "trusted priority" status in their email client.

How to make sure your legitimate e-mails reach their opt-in recipients is one of the biggest concerns for online marketers to have risen this year. This article suggests a workaround based on user-generated subscription e-mails.

But Now I Will Rant: The Dumb Spammer

Being in the anti-spam business myself, I'm always amazed at the rabid stupidity of spammers.  No I'm not referring to the ones who send you a message for "Breast Augmentation Drugs" --- when your first name is "Billy Bob" or the others who send you messages for "All Natural Viagra" -- when your name is "Janet Marie".  Or the ones who try and sell you other inappropriate things.  No I'm referring to the ones who just don't seem to have even the foggiest blue clue at all.  The ones who demonstrate just utter stupidity.  The worst of these are the ones who don't even bother to try and sell me anything at all.  Here's a spam that just came in:

<HTML> <HEAD> </HEAD> <BODY>
<iframe src=cid:BJn7K650 height=0 width=0>
</iframe>
<FONT> </FONT> </BODY> </HTML>

That's it!  Oh one more thing -- the subject had "Have a funny Christmas".  So what exactly is going on here?  Did they forget to attach the "Buy this book of [ETHIC_NAME_HERE] christmas jokes" offer?  Did they forget to lecture me about the need for christmas humor?  

And then there is the blinding stupidity as exemplified by the people who send me messages in non-english languages.  Now while I may be polylingual in the world of "ASCII character sets as interpreted by some type of Yacc / Lex based parser", I am so verbally monolingual it isn't even funny.  I remember from high school spanish that "donde" means "where" and "hablas ingles" means "do you speak english" but that's about it.  So why, oh why, do I receive spam in:

• Italian
• German
• Insert Asian Language here -- I have no idea which one(s)

And then, for the frustrated english teacher in me, there is the ever special mis-spelled or grammatically incorrect subject line.  Here are just a few of the many, many I've seen:

• Because home is where the hart is [Spelling - 3, "heart"]
• The Incredible Illuminating Pen Lights as it Writes! [Grammer - 5, "that lights"]
• Enhance your Preesure [Spelling -3, "pleasure", Absolute stupidity? - 15]
• (I could go on but I won't)

This just amazes me.  As much as I hate to get Spam of any type, I think I hate the stupid spammers even more.

Side Note: The nice thing about a spam product like Inbox Buddy that automatically routes all spam into a folder is it makes it trivially easy to write a blistering anti-spam rant like this -- just open your Spam folder and vent bile into the ether.