The google.com homepage received on average 38 million unique hits per day over a 7 day period according to this compete story about the G1 release. This started me thinking, how much bandwidth does serving up Google’s homepage use in a year? Well some rudimentary maths left me with the following:

Homepage size = 15k (code + 8.5k logo image)

15k x 38 million page views x 365 days = 209,020,900,000k

209,020,900,000k = 24.3 terabytes of bandwidth

This is just to display the homepage of google.com and does not include the 165 local domains or the 400 million or so searches Google receives every day.

Of course, the bandwidth figure above assumes (and they are big assumptions!) that there is no browser or ISP caching and that the number of visits remains constant. However, it does highlight how for Google displaying even a low sized webpage requires a huge amount of bandwidth. It’s no surprise then that The Google’s biggest expense comes from running and maintaining their servers and why they are looking at new technologies to reduce costs such as creating their own renewable energy (wind, solar & geothermal), super efficient server farms and even server farms based at sea. 

And if displaying Google homepage takes up so much bandwidth it’s not surprising that running YouTube has been estimated to cost nearly 1 million dollars a day and that the site uses as much bandwidth now as the whole internet did in 2000!

This week saw our team participate in the Travel Industry Five-a-Sides up at Wembley Goals Soccer Centre.

Two qualifying groups were drawn and we were in the group with Virgin Hols, Low Cost Beds, Trip Advisor and teletext.

First up were Low cost beds where our team lost 2-1 but a screamer of a goal from Neil Cains. Next were Teletext where a tight game ensued but we lost again 0-1. We knew we were in trouble as the the strongest team in the tourno were up next - virgin Hols had already scored 13 goals on their way to the quarters; and we weren’t wrong - they scored another 4 past us without reply.

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Anyone logged into a Google account should now be able to see the new functionality that Google’s SearchWiki adds to the search results. Certainly the SearchWiki has generated a great deal of controversy in the SEO and web community at large.

We’ve been monitoring it since the beginning of November when we noticed Google bucket testing it, but it’s only been since last week, when it was officially launched, that it’s really been making waves. Anyone who doesn’t know what it is can read Dan’s explanation of Google’s SearchWiki here.

Google have stated that personal result manipulation won’t be used to determine the results for others - at least not in the short term - so the standard SEO rules will still apply for a while. What’s really causing problems is the amount of comment abuse that’s appearing - either in the form of spam, utterly inane conversations (a la Youtube), or blatently obscene and unmoderated abuse.

All comments left on the SearchWiki can be publicly viewed, which has implications for brands’ reputations. For a great example of negative commentary in action, read this post on ReadWriteWeb. The guy spamming the McDonalds comments also appears within the SearchWiki comments of several other world-leading brands. A further review of the McDonalds comments today would suggest that someone might have been trying to clean up the negative commentary, which apparently is possible by voting down negative comments.

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Image Credit: Flickr user seyDoggy

I have little doubt that, had Facebook’s recent offer for Twitter been in cash and at a price around the £250-300m mark, they would have taken it. As most of us probably know, that’s because, as great as the service is, there is no obvious solution for how it should be monetised.

There might be an argument to say that’s because it’s not that necessary. After all, just like office chat, Twittering goes straight out the window the minute things get busy. There’s no time to follow what people are doing and even less to update your own status. But, despite that, it is absolutely a useful thing to have in your life. When it comes to staying in touch with what people are saying and doing, it’s perfect. It also serves as a grand broadcast tool for your own news and views.

But, there are many useful things in the digi-verse – most fail to prosper and very few justify price-tags like £250-300m. At Circus Street, where I used to work, there was a brilliant view that can help to spot which is which. It says that what defines a digital service with real revenue potential is one that is able to value an interaction (whether a view, a click, or anything else), either for itself or for its advertisers. Google is the best monetised digital business on the planet for many reasons, but most chiefly because its advertisers value the interaction it delivers.

This then is where Twitter needs to focus its efforts. And, if the online journey is – as iCrossing believes – about conversation or navigation, then Twitter faces two approaches: to seek to attach a value to its audience’s conversations (e.g. become a paid-for research tool) or to the way in which Twitter users help in navigation by directing their followers to useful products and services (e.g. develop a paid-link model).

Both approaches have issues. As a research source, Twitter faces competition from the wealth of free tools now available to track conversations taking place on the service. Meanwhile, valuing the links that Twitter users share would involve a degree of tracking many might find discomforting.

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I spent a couple of very interesting days at the World Travel Market recently- the annual industry convention in London.

I spent one day at the Eye For Travel Seminar - Online Content and Conversion Strategies. One of the most interesting speakers was Severine Philardeau. She’s Senior Manager of Brand Distribution at TripAdvisor. She quoted some stats about the value of User Generated Content (UGC) from an eConsultancy survey. From a sample of 360 website owners across all sectors (not just travel)

• 56% say it lifts conversion levels
• 77% say it increases traffic
• 42% say it increases the average spend on site

Often UGC is what tips the balance and makes someone move from engaged looker to full-on booker - according to Severine.

I think she’s right. Increasingly the most important next step for Travel websites is adding real customer reviews. Some are embracing it already, but many have yet to take the plunge. There’s nothing more powerful than an unbiased endorsement of your product from another satisfied customer. (And a few less complimentary ones shows you’re serious about letting customers give their opinions and by extension care about them and their opinions.)

But all too often you see ‘Add your comments’ boxes at the bottom of trip or product descriptions and nothing there. Announcing to the world that no one could be bothered to review your holiday is a prettty awful admission.

I mentioned UGC in my previous post about the future of Travel Content. Trip Advisor’s lead as stand alone provider of UGC for travel is pretty unassailable (20 million reviews, more being added at a rate of 4 per minute). So adding a feed from Trip Advisor to your site with reviews for the hotels and tours you offer would seem an easy way to add this kind of content quickly and build critical (pun intended) mass.

But this got me thinking…

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We’ve recently started work on a blog to support Toyota’s launch of its iQ city car in the UK.

The official Toyota iQ blog; This is iQ aims to gather up the most interesting content and commentary about the car and the activities surrounding its launch.

It’s a great project to be involved in. The tiny iQ recently scooped a design award, and romped home with Car of the Year Japan - receiving twice as many votes as its nearest rival. There’s a fair bit of speculation about it reaching the US under Toyota’s Scion marque, or even appearing as a convertible in time for 2009’s Tokyo Motor Show.

iQ went on sale in Japan yesterday. In the run up to its launch we’ve seen it driven up buildings, and even cropping up in the Japanese online world meet-me.
We’re hoping for similar antics to write about in the run up to iQ’s UK launch on 6 January 2009.

In our previous posts we looked at the average Click Through Rate (CTR) by search engine for Paid Search and average Cost Per Click (CPC).  This time we’ll look at how you can use that information to work out how much it would cost you to capture a certain percentage of the paid search market.

As a company you may have ambitions to take 5% of paid search within your category and want to know how much that would cost.  Alternatively you may have a certain budget and want to know how much of the market you could get with that money.  Using the CTR and CPC information from the previous posts you can estimate these figures and use this to help inform your paid search campaign.

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iCrossing staff played friday afternoon host to Creative Director Jim McNiven from local viral specialists Kerb last Friday (check out their hugely popular viral games chart here).

Kerb and iCrossing UK have had a similar past, both originating in bedrooms in flats in Brighton! Jim and UK CEO Arjo Ghosh have rubbed shoulders at various Brighton events over the year. Both companies work with some great clients - Kerb’s list including E4 and Playstation (an upcoming pitch for this project is planned to be hosted inside the gameworld of a Playstation game).

Although Kerb are reknown for the Flash based games Jim describes what they do as ‘digital engagement’. Throughout Jim’s enormously entertaining presentation he was equally insightful - he stated enormous figures for engagement, and also conversion figures that DM would be proud of!

Jim demonstrated several Flash based creatives and talked about viral as an outcome rather than a concept. He also drew analogies between a traditional media buy for display creative and hosting for Flash-based client-commissioned games, both of which have brand as well as direct data capture input.

Check out there viral games chart here, and their latest launch - Locoroco 2 - here. Jim tells me this morning that since it’s launch on Friday Locoroco 2 has already had 200 unique users on this one site.

Getting a straight answer from Google on specific natural search optimisation practices has always been difficult. Matt Cutts has from time to time hinted at what should and shouldn’t be used in your on-site optimisation but apart from that they’ve been pretty quiet on any specifics up until now.

The release of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) marks the first time that Google have given such detailed and specific recommendations on all the major on-page and site accessibility topics. As it says this is just a starter guide, and doesn’t really contain anything that an experienced SEO wouldn’t already been putting into practice, however it’s always nice to see Google back up your on-site methodology with examples.

URL Structure

The guide discusses URL structures including the use of keywords within URLs to improve both click through from a Google results pages and also to help users remember URLs should they wish to visit directly from memory. Keyword stuffing URLs is added as something to avoid, as are session IDs and deep nesting of subdirectories. There’s no direct mention of whether any weighting is given to keywords within URLs, however there is talk of users linking using the URL as anchor text and this being a beneficial part of including keywords within URLs, they state that it

could inform a user or search engine what the target page is about

This is basically saying that you can increase keyword rich anchor text to your site through including keywords within the URL, something that most optimisation strategies will already include

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