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October 16, 2005

25 Words... Give or Take 1 Giant Toolbar Ad

The esteemed Battelle has a screenshot of a giant, graphical ad for the Google Toolbar right under the "I'm feeling lucky" button on the Google homepage.

I haven't been able to duplicate it myself, even in browers which don't have the toolbar installed, but if he's right, it's big news for a couple of reasons:

First is the toolbar's role in the whole Google as massive data mining company meme, which may be the key to Google's continued revenue growth should AdWords start going the way of the banner ad.

Second is the concept of SEO through Site Vistor Actions. When you look at the history of SEO, you start with keyword density (easy to manipulate), move on to PageRank (harder, but still doable), then on to Topic Sensitive PageRank (pretty damn hard, and arguably where we're at now). It's certainly likely that Site Visitor Actions are the next step, or at least will play a significant role. And that might be enough to (in the words of Aaron Wall):

make search spamming so complex or expensive that most people would just rather put in the effort to create something of high quality.

Sure, things like tagging through Google Search History are part of it, but the key to truly collecting useful searcher data lies in the toolbar, and it's ability to track things like booksmarks, time spent on a site, etc...

The Search talks about how Larry and Sergey are known for counting every word on the Google homepage, so a decision to put up that ad could't have been taken lightly.

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