The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

How Big Is a Pig, Er, an Index?

"How big is a pig?" asks a well-known children's story book that ultimately answers the question "...this pig is my mom and she's the biggest of us all!"

In a similar spirit, according to a recent account in the New York Times business section, Google has decided to end a tit-for-tat dispute with Yahoo about which company has indexed more pages. Instead, Google will ask users to guess the size of the Google index. (Google also claims to have an index three times the size of its nearest competitor.)

Obviously, the sheer size of an index is not the only thing that matters in web searching, and maybe not even the most important thing. The relevance and freshness of search results tend to matter much more.

For the record, I've tried Google and Yahoo fairly frequently on the same searches. I slightly prefer Google. It can be said of both search engines that they are amazingly good - except when they are absolutely awful. (The web itself is full of black holes, for example, anything from more than a few years ago.)

The New York Times article notes that Yahoo and Google have been conducting an "arms war" regarding the size of their indexes, and quotes Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch who states that there is no objective third-party way to count the size of an index.

This may not be entirely true. Winter Corp., a consulting outfit that specializes in databases, publishes an annual list of the largest databases. Among them: the largest non-commercial database at 222.8 terabytes belongs to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the largest commercial database is Yahoo's at 100 terabytes, and the hardest-working database belongs to UPS and processes more than 1 billion SQL statements an hour.

Book Review: Winning Results with Google AdWords

New on my bookshelf is search engine marketing guru Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords from McGraw-Hill Osborne.

Several years in the writing, publication of this book has been considerably delayed. (Of course, as I know only too well, writing about any Google program is trying to hit a quickly moving target!)

Author Goodman runs Page Zero Media, a Toronto outfit that specializes in AdWords and pay-per-click (PPC) consulting engagements. True to the "write about what you know" adage, this book focuses pretty narrowly on search advertising with Google AdWords.

The viewpoint is that of a professional advertising campaign manager who urges clients (and readers) that "you must advertise consistently and confidently."

The book explains the size of the paid search market, the mechanics of working with AdWords, keyword selection strategies, and conversion tracking. There is good material on writing winning ads, increasing conversion rates, and the future of online targeting.

There are costs and benefits to this book's relatively narrow focus, but I found it a compelling read. If you are managing, planning, or thinking about an AdWords campaign it should be in your library.

No Child Left Behind As a Military Recruitment Tool

Did you know that a little know provision (Section 9528) of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ("NCLB") entitles military recruiters to receive information about students in junior and senior high schools?

These provisions apply to public and private schools both, although private schools may not comply if it is objectionable to their religious principles.

A side note here: One of the school principals we talked to in the spring when we were looking for a new school for Julian insisted on referring to the No Child Left Behind Act as "No child left untested!"

Leaving aside the hypocrisy of NCLB, which is really intended by the conservatives to help gut the public education system by saddling it down with useless testing obligations, everyone who cares about privacy in the age of Google should be worried about the Pentagon's use of this data about kids.

The exact data that is released to the military depends on the school district. In addition to name and address, it probably includes a photograph, date and place of birth, major field of study, participation in sports, height and weight for members of athletic teams, awards, degrees, and so on.

In theory, parents can opt their kids out of this information gathering effort by the Pentagon (see Leave My Child Alone and a position paper from the National PTA organization for more information).

In practice, depending upon the school district, opting out is sometimes discouraged by using the opt-out request to deny information to colleges as well as the military.

The "Pentagon" is nomenclature for the Department of Defense, which uses the provision of the NCLB I've cited along with Section 544 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2002 as the justification for compiling an immense database on more than 25 million American children. This JAMRS database includes the information I've already mentioned as well as things like GPA and college intentions ("if documented").

The administration of JAMRS has been outsourced to a private contractor, BeNow, Inc. Here's the official description of what BeNow does with JAMRS:

BeNOW is a Mullen subcontractor that provides database marketing services. Specific to JAMRS/Mullen, BeNOW manages, from a technical standpoint, its direct marketing relational database. This JAMRS Consolidated Database is arguably the largest repository of 16-25 year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records. It also serves as the primary platform for processing JAMRS' core DM deliverables. BeNOW helps to produce the High School Masterfile (HSMF), Selective Service System (SSS), Joint Leads Fulfillment (JLF), and College and Permanent Suppression releases for the Services to use in their respective marketing/recruiting efforts.

Let's make the corporate interests here even more confusing. Mullen is an advertising agency, and a prime Pentagon contractor. Mullen subcontracted with BeNow to handle database management and mining. BeNow, based in Wakefield, MA, is now part of Equifax, a leading credit information outfit publicly traded on the NYSE.

Here's Equifax's boilerplate description of itself:

Equifax Inc. is a global leader in turning information into intelligence. For businesses, Equifax provides faster and easier ways to find, approve and market to the appropriate customers. For consumers, Equifax offers easier, instantaneous ways to buy products or services and better insight into and management of their personal credit. Equifax. Information that Empowers.

If that description doesn't tell you much, it probably wasn't meant to. But if you've ever had to finance a car or house, you probably know what Equifax does. Certainly, if you've been the victim of identify theft, you'll understand that the security of consumer credit databases leaves something to be desired.

What on earth would move us as a country to hand significant information about our children over on a platter to an abhorrent combination of the Pentagon and a private credit reporting agency? Even apart from concerns about how the information might be used - or abused - can you really feel that this arrangement secures the privacy of the kids involved?

IT Incompetence at FEMA

The form used on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to apply for aid won't work without Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. (See http://www.fema.gov/register.shtm.)

If FEMA were an online merchant of, say, underwear, this wouldn't matter much. If this hypothetical merchant chose only to do business with customers running Windows, poor business choice - but not a big deal.

In the case of FEMA aid for those affected by Katrina it is more of an issue because telephone access to FEMA is problematic (if phones are available at all to those in need, the FEMA lines have been described as "quite congested").

There's no good reason that I know of to deny relief to people who might have access to a Mac or a Linux terminal (or, for whatever reason, are not running IE6).

This IT blunder is certainly not the biggest mistake that FEMA has made recently. But, as Jim Rapoza points out in a recent opinion piece in eWeek, there's no excuse for it either. As Repoza puts it, incompetence and laziness in this case "are causing those in great need to potentially go without aid."

To put this blunder in context, it would take me at most a few hours to write the FEMA form in a standards-compliant way so that it could be opened in any web browser.

It's also symptomatic of the culture of incompetent greedy cronyism foisted by the Bush administration on our country.

Spider-Friendly Tables

Are you using tables to design your web pages? (These days, many webmasters prefer to use absolute positioning with CSS.)

If you are still using tables, here's an article with a good tip about how to design your tables so that search engine spiders "see" your content (and important keywords) before they see your navigation bar.

Google Bombs at War

If you don't know the term, here's a definition of google bomb:

Google bomb: to hyperlink a term to a website in order to raise the linked site's ranking in a search return result set on Google.

I've intentionally written an opaque (but accurate) definition of Google bombing. It's easy to understand Google bombing in practice.

The most notorious current example of Google bombing - in fact, of Google bombs at war - relates to a search for the term failure. President George W. Bush's official White House biography comes up first, although film maker Michael Moore's official site is a close second. These sites have been Google bombed and connected to the word failure in web pages.

The Google PageRank algorithm encourages this kind of "voting" by webmasters - both a strength and weakness of the methodology. (Click here for more of my take on the PageRank algorithm.)

I've already voted twice in this piece for George W. Bush as the failure of the two, and now let me stack the votes some more: failure, failure, failure!

Updates: DV Press, world's longest domain name, and a raccoon

DV Press
In DV Press: A Publisher that Cheats and Response from Eric Rockenbach I detailed the story of my tribulations with Eric, mostly using his own emails. The update is that Eric followed through on his threat to stop payment on my royalty check as retribution for my story.

I don't suppose I can expect anymore of the pittance of money that this deadbeat publisher owes me, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that anyone who googles DV Press will find my story - and understand that they are at risk if they do business with Eric and DV Press.

World's longest domain name
In the Googleplex Blog and on O'Reilly I wrote about the world's longest domain name. Here's a correction and comment from a reader:

Hi

Your website is wrong !

The longest valid domain name in the world is :

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.com/

and not

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com/ as stated !

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch-uchaf is a real place - I used to live near there.

Keith
(Thanks, Keith!)

Raccoon
Check out the raccoon caught in the act of browsing our trash can!

Black Bush Humor

Q: What is President George W. Bush's position on Roe versus Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

Department of Homeland Security Funds Cyber-Pork

According to a recent article in eWeek, the Department of Homeland Security has spent $1.7 Billion on what amounts to cyber-pork.

eWeek reporters Caron Carlson and Paul F. Roberts note that the $1.7 Billion has bought the following since 2003:

- Daily briefings about cyber-related activities called US-CERT
- The launch of a public-private group to coordinate government and private responses to an IT emergency as part of President Bush's "national strategy to secure cyberspace."
- Sponsorship of the Blue Cascades II and Purple Crescent II regional tabletop cyber-exercises (role-playing crisis management games). (Ironically, Purple Crescent II did model a hurricane in Lousiana, for all the good the exercise did!)
- A "cyber guidance" bulletin to help government agencies address infrastructure protection plans
- The creation of a government forum to address incident responses to IT security issues
- The launch of MSISAC - Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center - to promote cyber-secuirty awareness using conference calls and webcasts

Now, it seems to me that I could have done all this stuff for a couple of thousand dollars, not the billions that the Department of Homeland Security is spreading around as cyber-pork. But the real questions are:

- Who is all this money for nothing going to? (and whose cronies are they?)
- What could this money have bought if spent on our kids' educations?
- What business has the Department of Homeland Security with this nonsense when it can't deal with a disaster like Katrina?

A further observation: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its governing directorate (as it calls itself) manages to be both sinister (invading many aspects of our lives) and almost comically inept and wasteful. As concerned citizens, it is up to us to keep an eye on what this gang of "more-equal pigs" is up to (with a nod of my cap to George Orwell's Animal Farm).

Anywhere Computing with Laptops

I'm very pleased to note that after a bit of delay Anywhere Computing with Laptops: Making Mobile Easier has been published by Que.

My collaborators Phyllis Davis and Chris Hopper deserve much of the credit for its virtues.

To some degree, seeing this book with real pleasure - and forgetting the work that went into it - is the inspiration for my entry The Emotional Cycle of Writing a Book.

I think Anywhere Computing will be genuinely useful to anyone who is getting started with a wireless laptop, wants to improve their wireless security, or needs to configure or administer a SOHO Wi-Fi network. Check it out on Amazon!

The Emotional Cycle of Writing a Book

I've written many books, and these days seem to average three or four a year. For me, there's an emotional cycle in my relationship to my books not unlike what one might feel with an inamorata.

My model here is the terminal illness cycle that Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross formulated. This roller coaster has become a cliche, but it contains elements of truth. The Kübler-Ross stages of grief are: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance.

The Harold Davis stages of writing a book are hubris, fear, negotiation, infatuation, irritation, nepenthe, and surprise.

Hubris - No problem, piece of cake, here's a proposal and outline. (Swaggering and preening and knowing the material superficially.)

Fear - I've signed a contract, now I have to actually learn about the subject and write the thing. Am I good enough? (Will she like me, too?)

Negotiation - Let's talk about this relationship. Can I work on other projects? Can I cut material that was in the outline? Can I bring on other authors? (Monogamy is tough.)

Infatuation - The book is going well, the subject matter is really interesting. (Yes she is wonderful. I think I might be in love after all.)

Irritation - The process of editorial review can be tedious, and book production takes too long. (She uses my toothbrush and doesn't cleanup much. Is she really that attractive?)

Nepenthe - Forgetfulness. My part in the book is done. I forget all about it and move on to other projects. (Let's date other people!)

Surprise - When the book actually appears in print, as in "I wrote that?!?" (Good grief she's beautiful, and for a while she was mine!)

Response from Eric Rockenbach

I previously posted about DV Press, a publisher who has been slow to pay me royalties (and personally insulting, as well). Here's the back story.

And here's Eric's response to my post (the asterisks are mine, the original contained the expletive):

"I have not cheated you out of anything and YES your f**king check was sent. If you ever want to receive your royalties and if you don’t want me to stop payment on the check that was sent remove your post immediately."

Note: As of today's mail I have not received this check, and I am not holding my breath. If it does show up, I will add the fact to this entry - and also whether it clears.

Update (September 9): To my surprise, a check and statement were in today's mail. I'm depositing the check, and will see whether payment was stopped and it clears.

DV Press: A Publisher That Cheats

Over the years I've had many sub-optimal interactions with publishers having to do with editorial direction and the strength of marketing plans. But none of this has stooped to the level of DV Press, a small producer of instructional DVDs whose business model appears at least partially to be based on cheating its authors. (I am not supplying a link because the DV Press site is currently not responding.)

I'm spurred to go public with this because I recently received a mass email from Eric Rockenbach, who owns DV Press, calling for new authors to produce material relating to the 2005 release of Visual Studio. If you are considering working with this company, you should definitely regard my story as cautionary.

In part, the email states:

"DV Press is signing author trainers for their VS.NET 2005 titles. DV Press has 16 available titles on Amazon, most of which hold extremely high customer ratings. ... DV Press is quickly growing into the number one leader in video related courseware...DV Press DOES NOT pay advancements [sic]. We have found that in the past authors who require advancements do not put the required effort towards the title and give no support in marketing and self promotion. These titles typically perform the worst. We guarantee that if you are confident about your abilities both on camera and your immediate marketing abilities your title will do extremely well."

Almost two years ago I authored two DVDs for Eric (one about C# programming, the other about Javascript programming). I've never claimed to be a telegenic personality, and these DVDs are certainly the victim of poor direction and production values, but you can (if you want) judge this for yourself. In fairness, it is also true that my discs have not sold particularly well.

Since authoring the discs, my relationship with Eric has been one of dealing with his bounced checks and prodding him for my past-due payments. He's generally had some "dog ate my homework" excuse, although up until recently he has also eventually paid.

I think the most recent dialog speaks for itself:

Harold: "I am really upset to get this email in light of the lack of statements, royalties, and responsiveness from you. As I've said before, I am really disappointed personally. I do think it is in your best interests to keep your commitments to me if you plan to continue publishing in this area."

Eric: "We have moved into a new space and things are starting to settle. This is a business and of course it will honor the royalties. Right now we are 30 days late on your royalties payment… last quarter for instance Baker Taylor was over 120 days late on their Pos. This is the nature of the business from what I have learned Harold. Your titles aren’t exactly hot sellers either ranking at the bottom of our list, yet I seem to get the most amount of negative energy from you.

I would like to try to keep this as professional as possible, neither of us had an ideal experience with the other party but we still must continue doing business with each other."

Harold: "Your assertion that being late with royalties is comparable to payment terms on a merchant account is, of course, false. Every major publisher I have worked with have been prompt with their royalty payments. If you want to keep our relationship professional, then it is incumbent upon you to honor the terms of your contract.

BTW - obviously I am disappointed in the sales of my DVDs (although the Amazon comments haven't been bad). However, the sales rankings on Amazon of my two titles are 16, 837 and 20, 260 (as of today), not very significantly less than the Neal Ford Java title you tout as one of your good performers at 11, 532.

Eric, with a bounced check from you, a check for taxi fare that the cab driver wouldn't honor, and consistently late statements (that only show up after prodding), I don't see how you can blame me for being somewhat negative. As far as I know, I've lived up to all my commitments to you, including promoting your titles (for example, see my web sites).

So get off it, and honor your contract. In my opinion, until you can do this basic thing (and, yes, you always do have a good excuse) you have a heck of a nerve soliciting new authors."

Eric: "I guess we threw professional out the window with this last message. I will be more then happy to show you Neal’s rankings. Amazon numbers flucate daily and for a long stretch Neal’s titles were in the 700-900 rank below the 1000 mark. I would really enjoy a more professional tone with you. This is one of six businesses I own and for me to spend this wasted time bickering with you is pointless. I have honored the contract to date and I will continue to do so.

I never wanted to indicate this in previous emails, but you have driven me to it. Your tongue is hanging out of your mouth for the majority of the video giving a “fruity” appearance to most viewers. Everyone who has actually ranked your DVDs besides you, your wife and myself have given them 1 star. I know you are a very talented author and I’m not denying this fact, but some things don’t translate well into video.

Your royalties will be paid within thirty days after the quarter has ended. I will stop responding to your emails if you continue in this tone."

Eric (in a separate email): "Your royalty check for $172.80 has just been sent out. This includes 43 sales of the JavaScript title and 53 copies of the C#.NET title."

In light of my past experience with Eric, I'm not surprised that this check has not, in fact, shown up. I have no idea what his six businesses might be (or why someone who claims to have so many business interests can't honor his commitments). I do not believe his assertion about all the positive Amazon reviews for my DV Press titles, but find it interesting that he admits to having written false reviews.

Unfortunately, the economics of the matter ($800 per year of dwindling royalties) do not permit me to sue him in Texas. However, I am posting this so that other potential authors who research Eric and his outfit will be warned.

Google Then and Now

Today marks the seventh anniversary of Google, which was officially founded on September 7, 1998.

Cruising the Wayback machine for Google is instructive. The first search page in the archives for the company is from December 2, 1998. The graphics are a little cruder, but the basic pattern and interface is in place.

On the earliest Google company info page in the Wayback machine (from 1999), you'll find these tidbits:

"Google Inc. is not at present a publicly traded company, and we are currently unable to speculate on whether or when our privately-held status might change." [Comment: ...but I bet they already had a plan...]

"10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling "Google" better. We picked the name "Google" because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone." [Comment: ...but not, apparently, all information, such as that about Google execs...Click here for a googol FAQ]

It's fun to see how far Google has come in such a short time, and fun to speculate about how far Google may go in the next seven years!

Katrina Relief Auction on Flickr

Those of us living with our families in the Bay area realize that the disaster could have been ours. It's important to help the victims of Katrina not only out of common humanity but also because there but for the grace...go we!

The Katrina Relief Group on Flickr is having some success raising money for the victims by auctioning prints by Flickr photographers. Funds raised will benefit the American Red Cross emergency fund set up for hurricane Katrina victims.

Here's the link to my specific auction on Flickr (you can bid on a print of any of my photos that I've posted on Flickr or that have appeared in my Photoblog).

You can read about the auction in the official Flickr blog, and also donate directly via the American Red Cross.