Search engines

• The Wall Street Journal runs a tremendous interview of Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country For Old Men and The Road, featuring gems like…

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

• “Someone once told me that there is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don’t lie to Google. Period. We type in what we’re thinking — good, bad, and ugly. There’s probably no piece of information that would better show what’s on someone’s mind than their stream of searches.” Context: here and here.
• Who says a grocery store has to stock Pepsi? Every grocery store stocks Pepsi. If anybody really needs Pepsi, they can get it at a gas station. But if they want hard-to-find and high-quality, they go see this guy:

There’s something to be said for offering customers something they can’t get anywhere else…

but sometimes that means not offering them what they can get everywhere else.

Ommmmmm.

It would appear that way, but that article was written a few days before this one, so maybe they just heard their brother-in-law talking about meta tags?

Unlike WMDs, of course.

Last week, Fox News claimed SEO means “working full-time to create thousands of other Web sites that link to the spam site.” Not only does this have nothing to do with SEO, it would actually be a totally worthless strategy.

According to Wikipedia, SEO is an Arabic
word meaning “He who can move Egypt”

Since Google and Bing rank pages that have been around for a while and earned reputable links, each of these “thousands of” sites would have no link power to pass on to the “spam site.” Sure, some disreputable types try crap like this, and a few might even make money in the short run, but engines are more likely to ban a site with thousands of spammy links than to rank it highly.

As SearchEngineLand pointed out here, Fox News practices SEO on their sites. On the offending page in question, as a matter of fact. Meta description, sitemaps, and a robots.txt file to boot. Textbook SEO.

And SEOBook notes this “spamlaws.com” site that Fox News is so worked up about is serving “scammy reverse billing fraud fakevertising ads” that can also be found at… (you have three guesses, and the first two don’t count): FoxNews.com! Ta da!

Finally, here’s an interview with the head of Fox’s sixteen-person SEO team.

But whatever. Big media doesn’t understand the internet. That’s hardly news.

A: No.

We hope this info helps you plan your next car-buying trip. We also hope you’ll keep us in mind for when you need website design and development!

Supply and demand: the lower the demand, the lower the price.

So when is the demand for cars the lowest?

According to Google Trends, people search car-related keyterms most in the summer and least in the winter, with a small spike right before Christmas.

In case you’ve never used Google Trends: it lets you look at search frequency over time for terms of your choosing. Let’s try the most obvious ones. Car and cars are huge terms, so we get pretty clear data:

The second tier shows more volatility since these terms aren’t quite as popular, but the trend is still apparent.

This last batch is all over the place, but still fits the trend. Somebody went crazy looking to buy car late last year, though!

We were planning on buying a used car by September of this year (which seemed to be the time when most of these lined up, more or less), but after seeing this we might wait until late October. What do you think?

What are some other creative ways to use search engines to your advantage?