inter:digital strategies

I can’t help it; I’m still calling Google Webmaster Central "Google Sitemaps". What can I say? It’s more defining of the function to me. Webmaster Central theoretically encompasses a broader set of functions than just the Sitemaps - however, most of the issues I ever address have more to do the Sitemap functionality.

However, that’s off the topic for this post. What I actually intend to write about it Google’s recent changes to the preferred domain feature in Sitemaps. Previously, they automatically added the "non-preferred" domain to your listing of sites owned when you set a preference. They will no longer be doing this, do to complaints of confusion from users.

I don’t know how widespread these complaints were, but it certainly came up in a Cre8asiteForums thread in August, where Vanessa Fox actually responded to a member’s complaints about the preferred domain system.

It’s nice seeing Google explicitly responding to problems - and in a reasonably efficient manner, as well. The complaints were initially posted on August 20th at Cre8asite, and the changes were announced today - September 12th. Three weeks isn’t a bad turnaround.

That said, it’s important to keep in mind that your www and non-www versions of a domain are, technically speaking, different web addresses. Like any subdomain, the "www" domain represents a subset of what can be present on your domain name. Although having this automatically added is confusing, given that many people don’t differentiate between the two addresses, maintaining the ability to register separate Sitemaps will still be possible.

So, Google has taken one more step towards providing a full-service online application service. Now making Google Apps for your domain available, which includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator you’re looking at a branded site service enabling inter-office and extra-office communications, group calendaring, and web publishing within your organization - all very handy tools which are not frequently available at this kind of cost level.

Of course, their information pages do say that there is no premium edition:

Is there a premium version of this service?

Not at this time. However, if your organization has advanced needs not met by this free service, let us know and we’ll get in touch when a premium service is available for your organization.

But I think we can all pretty easily see the possibilities available with the expansion of Google Spreadsheets and Writely - or future related products. As has been observed by several people around the blogosphere, this project seems to be targeting the enterprise desktop market using a service business model.

It’s also very easy to see the appeal of a service model of office software. This could certainly relieve some of the burden on IT departments to maintain licenses, install and reinstall software, and maintain support for diverse products. Of course, many IT departments have gotten to the level where this kind of maintenance is highly routinized - nevertheless, the appeal can’t be ignored.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of takeup the service has - will this be primarily appealing to mid-sized businesses with undersized IT departments, large corporations, small business owners? Will the targeted education market like the idea? Who knows…in many cases, the lack of control of their own hardware and data centers may sway IT directors away from the product.

I can’t even guess, really…

Yesterday, Tim Converse wrote a very interesting article discussing the “>challenges of discerning the difference between quality aggregation of content and spam. This task can be a major challenge for search engines - what baseline decides the difference between a resource like Google News and your average feed scraper?

Google news provides excellent, high-quality results and has stringent requirements for news providers. Average feed scrapers scrape, well, whatever they can find. But can an algorithm tell the difference?

Tim notes, in particular, the interesting recursive nature of searching aggregators. Since many aggregators are scraping results from other search engines, it’s not impossible to have some very complex results.

As an in-between case ask yourself this: if you’re doing a websearch (on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, …) do you want any of the results to be … search-result pages themselves (from Google, Yahoo!, MSN)? That is, if you search for “snorklewacker” on MSN web search, and you click on result #4, do you want to find yourself looking at a websearch results page for “snorklewacker” on Yahoo! Search, which in turn has (as result #3) the Google search results page for “snorklewacker”?

Altogether, an interesting question - no really conclusive answers, however.