Every wonder what’s on the internet mind? Me neither. But we can find out by using a cool new start-up we app called What Does the Internet Think. Basically, by entering in any random terms from Barak Obama to Water to Peanut Butter (like I have), you can be returned results referring to what the internet thinks on the particular subject.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the results are given in the form of a bar chart with positive,negative and ‘don’t care’ categories. According to their calculations, the internet likes peanut butter very much.
Your also given a random tweet by someone who mentions the subject.
This app is powered by the big three search engines; Google, Yahoo and Bing. And then Twitter lobbed onto the side for the ‘real time’ feel. Over all, this is a fun little app which may actually have a useful side if you want to see how search engines regard a particular subject. Check it out here.
It has been reported this morning that Farecast has been acquired by Microsoft for $115 million. Farecast is a travel prediction engine which attempts to help you find the most ideal time to purchase tickets.
This is a good return for investors into Farecast, because they received approx 5 times their investment.
Microsoft has already openly stated that they will integrate the Farecast technology into MSN Travel. Farecast had a very good technology and im sure there must have been more companies interested in Farecast, because I cant see that Microsoft would pay $115 million just to put the technology into their travel section. Must have been a strategic move to keep the technology out of reach of their competitors.
It is huge news today around the blogosphere that Google PageRanks of large sites have been hurt. DailyBlogTips had some of the first info on the topic and most of the key information was from Andy Beard. Sites penalised are as follows:
Here is a list that I gathered with big blogs that supposedly lost PR on this issue:
Update: It looks like mainstream websites that were selling links were also penalized:
Andy Beard thought the drop was because of text selling which was reported about a week or so ago. This turns out not to be the case.
Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch has reported that Google didnt drop the page ranks because of the selling of text links, but because of link farms. Links farms are where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links.
This all comes a week after the linking characteristics of Techcrunch was analysed. Where it was reported that 1/3 of all Techcrunch outgoing links where to related Techcrunch sites. Hence, link farms do explain why the Techcrunch page rank hasnt changed, but the Crunchbase ranking is now at 0.
These changes will affect a lot of blog networks that survive on text link ads and related sales that depend on strong Google page ranks. A drop from a PR7 to PR4 should really affect traffic too heavily but it will make the tough job of selling ads much tougher. In the coming months and years I think we will see a lot of small blog networks starting to struggle and trying to find another way to survive.
About 4 months ago now I saw a decrease from a PR4 to a PR1 and I found it difficult to work out why, and about a month ago when Google announced that selling text link ads would bring in a punishment, I finally found out why.
Every wonder what’s on the internet mind? Me neither. But we can find out by using a cool new start-up we app called What Does the Internet Think. Basically, by entering in any random terms from Barak Obama to Water to Peanut Butter (like I have), you can be returned results referring to what the internet thinks on the particular subject.
