Monday, February 23, 2009

Google blog: The Power of Measurement series

From the Official Google blog:
This is the first post in a series on The Power of Measurement. In this economic climate, these posts are designed to cover ways to make your website as successful as possible. Over the course of the next few weeks, our in-house Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, and others will demystify the world of website analytics and offer tips for getting the most out of your metrics.
Link

Avinash's first post of the series talks about the Bounce Rate feature in Google Analytics. And how to improve it (btw, here's a contrasting view about how a high Bounce Rate might be good as well).

I found Avinash's tutorial detailed without being overwhelming. Helpful screenshots too. Looking forward to reading more.

There are other informative posts from Google's Official Blog, contributed by various Google employees.

Here are some of my personal favourites:

Like this one on the eye-tracking data Google collected.

This post talks about the Google search findings from the 2008 US Presidential campaign. It seems that 12% of inauguration-related queries came from outside the United States.

Did you know that "one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2"? This post shares more.

As a librarian, it helps to stayed updated on Google's search features. Like this enhancement to Google's Image Search by allowing searches to search specifically for clip art and line drawings (in addition to Faces, News content, Photo content).

I found this post REALLY detailed, and insightful of course, about how Google "trains their search language system".

If you ever have to write a paper on how a search engine can help in tackling global pandemics, you might be interested in this post on how Google helps track flu trends.

BTW, forget about leaving a comment in the official Google blog. 'Cos they have turned off that feature (I can understand why though).

1 comment:

  1. A few good points- not sure how a High bounce can really be a good thing. I do use google more carefully by using quotes and search in results.

    A lot of webmaster say look- I am top out of 2 million results for - xyz new abc -term.

    The actual competition for that term in much less as the count is show all the pages that have each of those words.

    The actual real competiton is "xzy new abc" -those pages which have all 3 words in that order -slightly different.....

    scrolling to bottom of a search can help you out by allowing only to "search in the results" is also Good.

    Just my 2 cents....
    Paul
    http://www.DigitalAWOL.com/

    ReplyDelete

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