In the past few months’ time I’ve spent more than my usual amount of time watching others surf the web. I am always astonished by how poor people are at knowing where to type searches, or web addresses, or login information. When I ask someone to go to a website, there is genuine confusion about where or how. It’s no surprise to me that a thriving sub-economy exists based on navigational searches - which I define loosely as “typing a web site URL into a search box because you want to visit it.”

Most of the time it’s user issues that causes navigational searches IMO:

• The toolbars have been dragged out of whack.
• I don’t even think about, I just type.
• Ambiguity between “search”, “find”, and “address bar” in browsers such as IE7.
• Alcohol or Drugs, Senility, or perhaps Loud Children.

Some people have real reasons for it. Here are a few:

• I don’t have to worry as much about typos.
• I sometimes want to look at the cache
• I get a quick glance at other sites referring to it (talk about ad-hoc reputation management!)
• I’m a rebel, damnit, and you ain’t gonna change me.

A terrific article on navigational searches prompted me to begin a list of good resources on this matter. I also found this terrific write up by Jeremy Crane over at compete’s blog. It was also eye-opening. (more…)

Looks like Google Transit has rolled out Quebec’s AMT Service

I went to visit Agence métropolitaine de transport using Google’s link http://www.amt.qb.ca, but it had been hijacked! No wait. Google put ‘qb’ instead of ‘qc.’ Need to fix that folks. Should be qc…

Postscript: Google fixed the link.

AMT’s territory spans 63 municipalities and one native reserve, 13 regional county municipalities, and 21 transit authorities. It serves a population of approximately 3.7 million people who make more than 750,000 trips daily.

We are all busy, but most of us love blogs. Finding, filtering, and selecting blogs is something that must be done by hand. because it requires that we personally evaluate an author’s efforts and give them enough time to show their stuff. It’s my blog audition, borne from necessity.

At one point I had 1400 blogs in Google Reader, haphazardly picked. Even with nicely developed folders, filters, and so on, I found myself wasting far too much time. So one day I got fed up. I did the equivalent of “touch bloglist.opml” and started over.

And, what evolved afterward was a very simple and effective method for narrowing down the thousands of blogs without impacting your daily flow.

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Google Transit expands once again as it announced inclusion of European locations from Italy to Switzerland, helping mass transit users efficiently move about! This is the latest in a series of changes recently including addition of Southeastern Virginia, Sacramento, and Vancouver BC.

Firenze (Florence) Italy and Torino (Turin) Italy (Gruppo Torinese Trasporti) - 90 million passengers every year.

Switzerland National (SBB, VBZ) - around 25,000km of mass transit.

Southeast UK including London (Traveline South East) - see this outstanding article about integration of UK’s public transit data into Google.

See also the post about this in Search Engine Land.

What would you pay to be totally unburdened from spam? I mean totally.

$10/day?

$10/week?

$10/month?

Would you be willing to tighten laws on email commerce? Do you think that Trusted Sender programs are going to help?

I wonder if the blur between “hidden” SPAM filters, such as those offered by ISPs causes people to hold off on genuinely good spam filtering (yes, that you buy) because they think they “already have a filter” and are just resigning themselves to cleaning the crap out of their in-box each day?

I honestly don’t get it. This issue is having a huge, direct impact on our economy and yet nobody is taking serious action on it. If it weren’t for spamstopshere, I would be put out of business by SPAM.

Microsoft has put together a set of keywords by Industry.

Currently listed are Retail, Technology, and Financial Services groupings.

For example, you can download pre-fab lists of financial services terms around “Banks, Loans and Refinancing”. Retail can look into Apparel, Toys, Transformers, Video Games, and Mobile Phones.

….Tis the season for advertising online—particularly if you’re in one of our featured holiday consumer industries: Retail, Technology, and Financial Services. It’s time to prime the holiday search advertising campaigns, to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable holiday sales. Below we’ve compiled lists of industry search keywords designed to give you an even better shot at ringing up more holiday sales in these hot industries….

These may be good for the newbies to learn more about what a keyword list looks like. The lists are in a near-ready-to-import Excel spreadsheet set up for Microsoft Adcenter.