Amr Awadallah Blog

In a previous blog entry I commented about how my blog was coming up as the first result when you search for “Google Hatred” on google.com.

Well, I was now knocked out of the first position (I am second now), and to my surprise the 1st position now goes to Google Finance, makes you wonder whether google is boosting the relevance for their own content.

Here is a screenshot:

Another interesting query from my http referrer logs is “Google 2006 Q1 earnings“, I show up as 3rd and 4th results for that query (SearchEngineWatch beats me for top two spots, though I claim my entry is more relevant 😉 ).

— amr

After the miss from last quarter, all the analysts cut their sequential revenue growth estimates from the 25 to 30% range for 2005-Q4, to just 9 to 15% range for 2006-Q1. I think Google will come in within that range, however, I predict that the stock will still drop as this is what folks expected, and I do not see them beating it by much (GOOG is at $409.66 as of today’s close). Furthermore, I have a gut feeling that Google will surprise us with some large increase in costs, specially for sales and marketing.

Next week should be super fun with both Yahoo (4/18) and Google (4/20) releasing earnings.

Cheers,

— amr

As you know, Google last year introduced a feature that dynamically sets the required Minimum Bid for a given keyword (before that they had a flat $0.05 minimum bid for all keywords). I commented on this change as being smart but evil at the same time, since it lets Google price its keyword inventory to perfection and capture every penny possible, thus leaving a small margin for you, the bidder.

This allowed Google to drop the default minimum bid from $0.05 to $0.01, which allows them to capture more listings from keywords that were not ROI positive at 5 cents and above. However, at the same time it protects the high value keywords since Google can over-ride the minimum keyword bids for those terms individually.

So for fun, I went to Google today and checked what is the minimum required bid for some people names, here are the results:

Its really hard to figure out the logic behind their algorithm, if any, so for example, consider these facts based on the numbers above:

• George Bush is valued at twice Osama Bin Laden
• Arnold Schwarzenegger is valued three times Tom Cruise
• Steve Jobs is worth twice as much as Bill Gates
• Isaac Newton is worth twice as much as Albert Einstein
• Alicia Witt is the most valued among this list, she is worth five times Britney Spears
• Terry Semel, Larry Page, Mark Cuban and Bill Gates all have the same value
• Among the bloggers I checked, Ken Norton topped the list at $0.30
• I, Caterina, Chad, and JenSense were tied as the cheapest bloggers, at $0.05 each
• Poor Udi Manber is valued at $0.03, hopefully his recent move to Google will help improve that 😉

— amr