The article below has some interesting stats on Google’s share of the Search world. Here’s the latest on how the Search market is divided from SearchEngineWatch.

The much-anticipated Google IPO stock auction was filed for yesterday. Media Post has an interesting article on the things to learn, from their now public information about their finances and revenues. Almost a billion dollars last year. And here’s CNET’s take.

Here’s an excellent tool for comparing results on different search engines. You can type in a search, and it shows, for example, all the sites in the Top 100 on one search engine and where they rank on another.

Perhaps to the chagrin of the holier-than-thou SEO crowd, Garrett French’s column today confronts the notion that there are “black hats” and “white hats” when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. In other words, there are things you can do that cause higher rankings (good SEO) and there are things you can do that can cause lower rankings, perhaps even getting a site “banned” by Google (bad SEO). But those things are better discussed in terms of risk, not morality.

To the uninitiated, there are certain “black hat” techniques as they are called that clearly violate, e.g., Google’s, Terms of Sevice (TOS). Examples include cloaking to hide dynamically-generated keyword-stuffed pages, dynamically generating non-”valuable” content-rich directory pages, most doorway redirects, invisible text, etc.

“White hat” SEO’s often refer to these techniques as “unethical.” Perhaps some language other than English has more forms of the word unethical to provide a more specific meaning. Unfortunately, English doesn’t differentiate between, for example, dynamically generating content-rich pages and embezzling from an employer. Both are “unethical” according to the rehetoric of the white hatters.

It’s interesting that SEO professionals with a certain mindset tend to characterize the work of others (competitors in most cases) as “unethical.” The problems with this characterization are several. First, these words are potentially libelous. If a competitor is damaged, for example in losing a big client because a competitor wrote an email or posted in a forum or blog that a certain company or SEO professional was “unethical,” it could very likely be actionable. If it was communicated orally, as in a client meeting, it could be slander.

Second, these “white hats” are defining ethics according to Google’s Terms of Service. We all know that Google is a big, powerful company (whose potential for privacy havoc is only beginning to be understood). But since when did one company’s rules for how it chooses to display third-party information on its web site become the standard bearer for morality? The answer is, it didn’t.

Garrett’s column addresses the fundamental point when he quotes Ammon Johns: “[T]o my philosophy, the SEO who refuses to properly inform their clients of all available techniques and the costs risks and benefits is not ethical.”

You see, ethics are a purely human issue. If an SEO takes money from a client and does things that cause the client’s site to get banned without warning of the risks, then the client has been harmed in the same way that Michael Milliken sold junk bonds. “Give me your money and I’ll get you good results,” he says, without warning of risks that, had the clients known about, they might have chosen not to participate.

But the issue is what is promised and what is delivered — between humans. As Leslie Rohde pointed out to me today, Google is a machine. And ethics are between humans, not machines.

In the end, thinking of it this way is more helpful to the discussion. What is the effect on humans? If a human hurts a human — as when one humans spams the email inboxes of 4 million other humans, wasting their time and money, that’s unethical. Though it’s also called “spam,” it’s an entirely different thing when a human creates extra pages on a web site so that it comes up higher in the rankings — for an otherwise relevant search — when another human is searching for just that thing. In that case, the other human is not hurt, and she may in fact be helped. Indeed, even white hatters often point out that there can be “good” uses for cloaking or directing Google one way and humans another — as when you use some of the the same techniques help the Googlebot keep from getting trapped in endless loops within certain confusing web sites.

But helping or not helping Google is not a matter of ethics. Google is a machine; you can’t hurt it. As Leslie says, “If the target page provides value to the human, it is ethical, no matter what you did to the machines along the way. Their injury is not our concern.”

It’s the effect on humans that matters. So when pornsters dynamically create pages wholly unrelated to their content to make their listings pop-up when someone searches for something rated G, that is unethical. It wastes the time of the human searcher in the same way that spam clogs their inbox.

Likewise, if an SEO charges a client to “optimize” their site, telling them they will get higher rankings for competitive words, but does nothing to help them get quality incoming links or tell them they should, knowing full well the client is unlikely to rank well, that’s “unethical.” Unless the SEO didn’t know; then it’s incompetence. Or what about the SEO who charges for time spent optimizing alt tags or Meta keyword tags. That doesn’t violate Google’s TOS, but it doesn’t help get higher Google rankings either. So is charging for valueless work unethical? It depends on whether the first human thinks it’s valuable to the second human.

Of course, the bottom line is that given the fact that Google doesn’t reveal what’s actually factored into their algorithm or how it’s weighted, reasonable people can argue whether such billable hours are valuable. But in the current environment one thing’s certain. Many of these so-called “black hat spam” techniques work like a champ.

So it is certainly frustrating to see a competitor’s web site beating yours in the rankings when they are employing these “bad” techniques. Even if you report them to Google or Yahoo, often nothing happens.

In the end, the answer is for the search engines to continue to get smarter, as they have. And SEO’s will continue to try to figure out what matters in the alogorithms and conquer the rankings. So the arms race continues . . . and as they say, “All’s fair in love and war.”

So who are all these people who have had gmail accounts for two weeks now? I logged into Blogger today and, lo and behold, there’s a big offer to sign up for gmail. And a notice that the link only works once, so don’t tell your friends.

There are plenty of screen shots elsewhere, but here’s another:

To see a more detailed review and vertitable gmail users guide written by someone with more time on their hands, click here.

As to the idea of gmail itself, comments so far (after everyone figured out that the April Fool’s Day announcement was not a joke) have mostly centered around the alleged privacy implications of giving one company all your emails and letting them dig through them, albeit with computers, to figure out what ads to deliver. I say alleged privacy implications for several reasons:

1. People already store all their email on other companies’ servers, e.g., Hotmail and Yahoo mail.

2. We all know the NSA’s computers are already scanning every email we send looking for bomb threats. Right?

3. Yahoo and Hotmail already deliver large, annoying ads to all their users right in the middle of the application. Why would anyone want to fault Google for trying to deliver more relevant ads (that you might actually be interested in) based on the content of the emails you’re getting and sending. Believe me, no one at Google has time to read your email. Everyone’s too busy planning an IPO and shopping for yachts.

4. Anyone who uses the Googe toolbar, which many of us feel naked without, have no right to complain. Every web page they ever visit is tracked, and the cookie is stored on your computer with an expiration date of…never. [Hey, I used the word naked (twice now). When I receive this posting as an email in gmail, I wonder if Google will deliver porn ads. Actually, I'm pretty sure they don't. Guess we'll find out....naked girls naked cute girls naked hot girls.]

And don’t let anyone tell you keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore.

Search Engine Radio launched today. It’s the first Internet talk radio show (or any talk radio show, I’m sure) 100% dedicated to Search. If you missed the first one, don’t worry, the shows are archived at the host wsradio.com. wsRadio.com is the largest Internet talk radio station, producing shows by eBay and Entrepreneur Magazine, among others.

I’m hosting the show on Tuesday’s at 12:00 p.m. Eastern, 9:00 a.m. Pacific on www.wsradio.com.

Today, my guest was Barbara “WebMama” Coll, founder of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization). As always, WebMama makes for lively conversation. (I knew this from the panel we spoke on at the Kelsey Group’s local search conference last month in Santa Clara.)

Producer Lee Mirabal, who was a syndicated host on NBC, said the first one was an A+. Thanks, Barb! For topic ideas for SEORadio.com, or guest suggestions, email show@seoradio.com.

Next week’s guest is Leslie Rohde, owner of Windrose Software and creator of OptiLink, an indispensable link analysis tool for SEO professionals. Check our OptiLink here.

In a sudden reversal of fairly long-standing policy, and after litigation with American Blind and Wallpaper Factory, Google has finally said, “it’s not our problem.” — at least in the U.S. In the past, Google has disallowed AdWords advertisers from bidding on competitors trade names, such as Playboy. And Google is currently in litigation with American Blind about whether other competitors can bid on the keyword “american blind” and other words that are included in or trademarked themselves.

Google’s policy in their FAQ states, “As a provider of space for advertisements, we cannot arbitrate trademark disputes between advertisers and trademark owners. As stated in our Terms and Conditions, advertisers are responsible for the keywords and ad text that they choose to use. We encourage trademark owners to resolve their disputes directly with our advertisers, particularly because the advertisers may have similar advertisements on other sites.”

On the other hand, their updated policy says, “As a courtesy, we are willing to perform a limited investigation of reasonable complaints. When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, our review is limited to ensuring that the advertisements at issue are not using the trademarked term as a keyword trigger.”

But their actual complaint policy states, “When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we will only investigate whether the advertisements at issue are using the trademarked term in ad text.” (emphasis in original)

So you can still use another company’s trademark in the ad itself — until the actual trademark owner complains about each particular ad by each inidividuual advertiser. And it appears that you can now, within the rules, bid on any trademarked keyword that want (at least in the U.S. and Canada).

Ouside the U.S., it appears Google still blocks all trademarked words in both keyword lists and the ads themselves.

C-net has an article today on the story ofthe “original spammer” — a lawyer in Arizona. Laurence Canter wrote a Perl script to post his ad to hundreds of news groups, unleashing a firestorm (that’s why they call them “flames”) of complaints that resulted in $100-200,000 in new uiness by his account. Canter would later be disbarred in Tennessessee, in large part for his email spamming.

Remember the shakeup after the Florida update? Two main theories circulated to explain the bizarre results. And Leslie Rohde thought it had to be a bug. Although we all had very little data and were mostly just guessing, that didn’t stop the SEO pundits from putting out one explanation after another. I thought Dan Thies was correct, that Google was implenting Topical PageRank into their ranking alogorithm. Other people argued that there was a new “over optimization penalty.”

The OOP theory was that Google was penalizing sites that were “overly optimized.” Now, I think I have proof. www.myweddingfavors.com was coming up on the first page of Google for the last couple months for the competitive search phrase “wedding favors.” When I changed my title tag to just “wedding favors” (and that was the only change), the next day the home page had completely disappeared from the Google rankings. Not lowered — crushed. (Not in the top 1000.)

Doh! Google can drive you nuts. The next day, I changed the title back to a longer title with other words besides just the optimized search term, and bam, it was back on page one the next day. I think I must be on the edge of some filter. Every other day now, I’m tweaking the title tag and I’m either on the very first page or completely out of the top 1000. One of the interior pages stays on page 3 for the same search term, but the main page is bouncing completly in and out of the rankings. It’s either very high — or totally gone. Argh. The good news is that Jennifer is getting too many orders anyway so when we’re off Google she doesn’t complain anymore.

Her: “Where’s my site, Mr. Google Crusher? Huh?”

Him: “Hey, you get what you pay for.”

Much to my surprise, my blog just reached profitability. Since my costs are nil (other than my time, which like most bloggers apparently isn’t worth much — most of them seem to have way too much time on their hands, don’t they?) Anyway, I put that “Donation” button down the left hand column a few months ago, and lo and behold, I checked my email this morning and some (very cool) person from Connecticut named Mark sent me fifty bucks by PayPal. WooHoo!

Now that’s interesting. Jennifer couldn’t believe it. (Of course she’s the one who thinks updating my blog is a complete waste of time when I should be helping her keep up with the wedding favor site (which is now starting to rank for bridal shower favors. Vindication!)

Donation supported web sites are an interesting phenomenon. I guess that’s how Matt Drudge started. Some people think that “micropayments”are the holy grail of web content. As opposed to selling ads, users can pay, say, one penny per quality page downloaded. The cost would be insignificant and the benefit to the web site owner would add up, allowing him or her to create higher quality content without annoying ads. Here’s an interesting article on the subject. And here’s an article against the idea.

You be the judge. At any rate, fifty bucks isn’t a micropayment. Thanks for the macropayment, Mark!