Wow! I’ts been some time since I checked this g-metrics report on podcasting. The bottom line? On 14-Oct-2004, Google returned less than 50.000 results for “podcasting”, on 27-Dec-2005 (a bit more than a year later) 2,210,000!!!
Regular visitors of this blog know that I am the developer of g-metrics.com. It is an interesting idea: a script makes use of Google WEB APIs to keep track of the number of results Google returns for a query. The results are stored in a database and are available to visitors. For example, look how “podcasting” turned hot again after Apple’s announcement a couple of days ago that iTunes support podcasting. Registered users can add their queries to the system.
The thing is, I have no time to support and make g-metrics.com what it should have been. I have a long list of future enhancements, like the use of tags to organize a user’s “watchlist” or the “monthly report by email” that will send a report on how each user’s queries changed during the last 1month/3months/6months/1year period (this last one has been ready for a couple of months but I did not have the time for proper testing). I also intended to develop more advanced tools to allow data mining since this is quite an interesting data set, or maybe sell the full data aquired during the 1 year+ of operation to anyone interested in such things for a fee.
BUT, I have no time to do all this. So I consider the option of selling the whole site, together with data (of course I will let registered users know, in case the want to delete their account).
How do you sell a site like this? Do you think ebay is the right place? Is there a better way?
It’s nice to see one’s little project getting attention and publicity! I just finished reading Google Hacks, and g-metrics.com, my pet project is Hack #3!
Interesting reading even for someone like me, who thought that knew a lot about Google, Gmail and AdSense… Recommended!
Podcasting is growing and it’s hot! I knew this but here is some more evidence:
There has been a lot of talking about whether rel=”nofollow” is good or bad, useful or usless (check
Bitflux Blog :: Why nofollow is useless )
However I think that nofollow is quite useful for a different reason than preventing spam: preventing search engine results shown on “third party” websites mislead the search engines themselves.
Here is what I mean: Take for example g-metrics.com. Most of the pages of this site display results (actually the top-10 results) returned by google for specific queries. To do this, g-metrics.com makes use of Google Web APIs. So when google indexes one of these pages, it would increase the pagerank (or whatever ranking system a search engine is using) of a URL just because it had high enough pagerank to show up in the top 10 results…
However, using rel=”nofollow” can prevent this. (I have started using nofollow in g-metrics as soon as I read about it).
Similar cases could become a big problem for search engines, as similar APIs become more popular (Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Amazon/Alexa, etc…) The way I see it, similar services may oblige or encourage developers to use nofollow when presenting “their” results.
I never had to search for something longer than 10 words, but I guess that such upgrades are always welcome.. So, this is it, you can now google using up to 32 words per query.
From now on, g-metrics.com will be using rel=”nofollow” in the links returned by Google (Top 10 shown at the bottom of each report). The reason is avoiding cyclic reference to the results that Google returns anyway…
As some of you may know, I have set up a site, g-metrics.com that keeps track of the googlecount of various queries (users can add their own). This way you can see how many results google would return for a cetrain keyword for example, and how this number changes from day to day.
The other day I was wondering arround g-metrics when I noticed something very weird. The graphs returned for “on-line” * betting and “sony ericsson” are identical!
For me this is very strange since the two queries re not related. Well obviously they are in some way. Any ideas?
spreadfirefox.com mentions g-metrics in their article Climbing in the charts! Hooray! 
BTW, I have to say that spreadfirefox.com is probably one of the the best on-line campaigns I’ve seen -a great product helps too..