Is this the End of Gaming Hardware?

The purpose of Onlive is to eradicate the annual purchase of the latest hardware such as a Playstation or Xbox (the PS3 launched in the UK at a RRP of £425), reducing the cost of games by ‘renting’ games through the service, improving development cost and time for dev companies by only having to develop for one system, use a cloud service to offer ‘save games’, friends list, multiplayer and other social networking goodies.

During the development of OnLive, due out 17th of June 2010 (initially US only), specialists have raised several possible problems to such a system in our current technical environment. I will mention three of the largest problems facing the service and possibly leading to its downfall.

1 Internet speed

Or more accurately, internet latency. Game input data has to now travel from your wireless device (if using the micro consoles Wi-Fi controller), to the console, forwarded through your local network, to the server cloud a number of miles away. The server then runs the game code dependant on your actions, converts the display to a compressed video and sends the signal back to your micro console which then forwards the display to your television.

Bandwidth may now be large enough for HD video to stream down a broadband connection. However, the fear here is that the time between inputting a command to the game and seeing the results on screen, maybe too large for most gamers and hinder the experience. Considering that a lot of current gen games software alone lag at around 50ms, that doesn’t leave much overhead for further delays.

2 Server Horsepower

A single computer required to play today’s ‘hottest games’ would be a large expense for an individual. This new company is looking to purchase a huge array of servers, each machine capable of supporting multiple players simultaneously. Onlive have so far kept very quiet about their pricing structure and cost of installing their cloud. I personally will be very interested to see how low they can get their monthly subscription fee.

3 Image quality / data compression

Everyone today is talking about HD and this is no exception in the gaming market. Onlive, however offers sub-current generation output. Although Onlive does offer HD gaming, the compression needed to get the data through your broadband connection will affect the final output image in terms of quality.

However, with all that said, Onlive have demonstrated their system working at GDC last year within a ‘controlled environment’ using an external server to the building where games were being played. Also I am sure to excite our own Director of Search, Jon Earnshaw, by highlighting that the iPhone was also recently demonstrated playing Crysis via Onlive to a group of Columbia University students by Onlive founder, Steve Perlman. No doubt then that the service will smoothly transfer to the iPad.

Also BT has just purchased a 2.6% stake in the company, promising to host servers which would vastly reduce game latency.

Although with an Xbox 360 now costing just £160 RRP, will a service offering lower quality output, with slower game reaction speed really be able to compete?

Firstly, let me point out that I am not a Lost fan, I am still yet to sit through an entire episode and as a result was left bewildered this morning at the fact my colleague felt compelled to wake up at the crack of dawn on 24th May (on a Monday of all days) to watch the globally aired last ever episode at 5am – Then sit on a Lost Forum for another few hours.

After partaking in some universal questioning of his sanity, one thing has become clearer as the day has progressed…- I appear to be part of a minority on this one. If search traffic and trends are to be believed that is.

“Lost Forum” – high impact on Google search

‘Lost forum’ has risen to be the 35^th most popular search term in Google by lunch time on Monday, a phenomenal achievement and indicative of the vast online community this series has created over its 6 seasons:

Google trends data indicating search traffic during the past 24 hours (Pacific Daylight Time) for “Lost Forum”

This huge surge in online activity surrounding the last Lost episode is evident throughout Google  – when using Google Trends earlier a persistent theme was apparent in the Hot Searches from the USA.

Five of the ten results displayed here are centred around the Lost finale, even considerably eclipsing the news of a celebrity death. (that of Brittany Murphy’s husband)

A similar scenario occurs in Google Insights, this time concerning UK data, with searches for ‘Lost finale’ rising by a huge 200% today.

How has Google Performed for Lost?

So has Google delivered on this mass surge in Lost related searches, even after some slightly iffy search results recently? Let’s take a look at the Google UK (The Web) results using the first keyword term examined here, ‘Lost forum’:

Google searches for Lost

It appears Google has served the grieving Lost fans well with a 10 out of 10 for relevancy here in the Serps, though a slight slip with www.officiallost.com returning a rather unattractive ‘This account has been suspended” page. Bad luck to them for the biggest day in their history, and no page is available.

The forum www.4815162342.com appears to have been overcome by the surge in traffic today and as a result in temporarily unavailable, though many other returned results, such as www.losttalk.net and darkufo.blogspot.com, offer threads addressing theories, explanations and general counselling following the finale of Lost.

Overall a good job from Google here (if not so much the returned sites in some cases), allowing a global nation of Lost fans to mourn as one as yet another long-running series goes to the great box set in the sky.

Lost – Long Term positions in Google

P.s. To see who else has been benefitting from this traffic surge results from January 1^st to the present (24/5/10) are illustrated below for the term ‘Lost’:

Article By Kim Shepherd

However that isn’t the case for the majority of the World’s population. Vast sections of the planet don’t have access to the internet.

But things are changing, and when the large populations of China, India, Russia and Brazil enjoy a higher penetration of internet usage a new world order could be upon us.

Internet Usage hasn’t even touched the surface

• 3/4 of the world population do not have direct access to the internet
• That’s about 5 billion people who don’t have access to the internet around the world
• 1.7 billion people have access to the Internet around the world

The Power of China

• One in five global internet users are Chinese
• More people use the internet in China than the whole population of the United States
• The percentage of the population who have access to the Internet in China is still less than the world average
• 78% of Chinese people don’t have access to the Internet

Highest internet usage by population and percentage

• China has the most internet users in the world with 360 million, followed by The USA (227 million) then Japan (95 million)
• From the top twenty list of users, the highest penetration of percentage of population to internet usage is South Korea with 77.3%, second is The United Kingdom
• Iceland has the highest penetration as a percentage of population of internet usage in the world with 90%
• More people have access to the internet in Iran than in Italy, Spain or Canada
• Poland (52%) has a higher penetration to the internet by percentage of population than Italy (51%)

Internet Usage By Continent

• Asia has the most internet users in the world with 764 million users and 42% of the global population
• However 80% of the Asian population does not have access to the internet
• Europe has 165 million more internet users than North America
• Africa experienced the largest growth in internet usage over the last decade with an increase of 1,800%

The Future is India
It amazes me that India only has a 7% penetration of their near 1 billion population. Yes of course it is a vast country with many rural areas and a population that experiences abject poverty, but it has a huge technology service offering already. To think when penetration of internet users goes above the 50% level, India will be technology leaders surely.

Already Indian names now figure prominently on the league tables of the wealthiest people on the planet. The country boasts 47 billionaires, up from 12 in 2005 and just nine at the turn of the millennium, compared with 10 in France and 35 in Britain. The highest-ranking Indian in the Forbes rankings is Mukesh Ambani, the world’s fourth-richest man with £19bn. If the Internet has an impact on wealth, which it surely does, then India is just getting started.

When India rises to even 20% of internet population penetration no doubt every business in the world and every social media users will have some direct contact with an Indian company or fellow user.

All Data and stats come from
www.internetworldstats.com
http://www.google.com/publicdata

The chart below is the original chart that clearly identifies the surge by a number of authority websites (IMDB), however for a completely irrelevant audience:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with our charts – the image above highlights five URLs for the keyword term Movies from March 16th 2010 to April 19th 2010 in Google UK. As you can clearly see there has been a sharp rise for the Italian, Spanish, French and German URLs in this time period. I even documented on my Twitter account that I’d noticed five IMDB results on page one in Google UK! If we take a look at a more up to date chart, we can see that the URLs have dropped from the top one hundred all together:

It would appear on April 25th something was effectively ‘turned off’ or most probably ‘turned back on’. The main issue appears to be that the Geo filter that Google applies for its country specific search is ‘weakened’ now and again – meaning that websites with authority can rank within Google UK, however the content that some of these websites offer up aren’t relevant to a UK audience. If you don’t believe me or anyone else in the SEO community, why not take a look at the trends over the past six years:

So up to mid 2009, there was a declining trend of seaches using the term ‘UK’ within their search queries, something that you would expect as search engines get better at determining your location. However, since we first reported the major change in Google’s algorithm, which opened up the UK SERPs to non relevant foreign websites the use the keyword ‘UK’ has shot up dramatically. Of course there will be search terms that use the keyword ‘UK’ based upon current events (i.e. ‘UK election’), although I am fairly confident in saying that the rise in ‘UK’ related search terms are due to the irrelevancy of the current crop of results. Matt Cutts stated that ‘you shouldn’t always expect to see only UK results in your queries’ – something I totally agree with but this is a question of relevancy and ‘how useful’ (as Matt has stated) these websites are to a UK audience.

So what are your thoughts on the matter? Are Google actively looking to improve the UK SERPs or is there a hidden agenda behind all of this? You may even believe there is nothing wrong with the UK SERPs, I know our clients do considering all the traffic we help to send their way!

Further reading:
SEO Roundtable – Google UK drops UK country filter?
Matt Cutts – Addresses Google UK SERPs issue
Webmaster World – Discussion on changes in April within Google UK

Political Party Leader searches

Here are the main leaders Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and “The Green Party” in place of leader Caroline Lucas to even things up. I have thrown in Nick Griffin here of the BNP to show the impact his appearance on Question Time had at the end of 2009. Most notably, the BNP leader’s search was greater then than the main party leaders’ has been in the early run up to this election 2010. Just goes to show what a bit of media hype can have on the search results.

Gordon Brown in the lead all year -but for the wrong reasons

Without Nick Griffin on this chart, the Green party had a spike of their own around last Summer, which coincides with the Brighton by-election victory as well as other summer news involving Green issues. Gordon Brown has however generally been ahead all year with plethora of media struggles including the bullying issue etc. But David Cameron and he are now pretty much level pegging in the race to be Internet’s most searched political leader.

Vince Cable and Nick Clegg

Vince Cable wasn’t taken that seriously when he was caretaker leader of the Lib Dems after Menzies Campbell departed. Nick Clegg on the other hand hadn’t fully been accepted by the media and the voters before the campaign started. However in search Vince Cable reflects his resurgence in the media and since his performance on Channel Four news.

Political Party searches on Google

The most important one is which party is getting searched for the most. People will be searching to see particular legislation promises or what policy changes are going to ensue with an election victory. If it was down to PageRank the Tories would win (as Labour has a horrid set of redirects on its homepage at the time of writing). Lib Dems would come a close second. However as if Google Insight search results were a direct reflection of how we are going to vote in a few weeks time, the scores below show pretty much what the polls are showing – that it’s too close to call, and that the Green Party and Lib Dems may surprise us come the 2010 election.

Cheryl Cole thrown in..

To put these searches into perspective, Cheryl Cole has been thrown in. The ex-Mrs Ashley Cole out stripped all the other political leaders in the run up to the 4 week campaign. But how will it progress? Will Wayne Rooney be searched for more than the political leaders? Or will the UK population surprise us all by actually taking an interest in the election?

Who invented the World Wide Web?

• Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, an Englishman, invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

The Internet

• This is not to be confused with the invention of the internet; the internet was invented in 1969 by the US Department of Defence as a means of communication if they were attacked by Russia, and first records of development date back to the 1950s

FlickR

• 3 Million pictures and videos are uploaded on Flickr everyday

Blog Usage

• Every month it an estimated 350 million people browse the world’s 10s of millions of blogs

Registered website growth

• Between 1995- 2000, 20 million .com sites were registered

Early Growth of the Internet

• In 1994 Web usage was growing at 2300% a year

The Very First E-commerce site

• In 1994 Pizza Hut became the first company to venture into e-commerce, with “Pizza Net”; a service that allowed customers in Santa Cruz, California to order pizzas online. This made the front page headlines of a major US Newspaper’s business section

Court order allowing web-commerce

• In 1994 the injunction previously outlawing web commerce was lifted, paving the way for the likes of Amazon, the world’s first major ecommerce site

Amazon Users

• Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and now has 124 million customers

Source = BBC’s very interesting programme on the internet “Virtual Revolution”

Back in May 2009 Bing’s Webmaster Spokesman told us that:

“We are busy adding upgraded and updated technologies to provide better search results. That’s good news for you!”

At the same time Google (when they weren’t messing around with their Geo-location searches) were working on their Google Real Time Search, which incorporates Twitter and blogging results.

It really is no surprise that Google’s share of the market is so much larger that Bing’s – they are simply much better.

Google Real Time Search

This new addition is superb. Plus it seems to help with Google’s more up to date search results. As I show below.

Google’s search is simply better than Bing

Take a look at these two search results for “Cheryl Cole split”. This was a big news item last week and was being searched by 100,000s of people. A week on and people still crave the latest news.

In Google we have the latest news only a few hours old and targeted direct results for the exact topic I am looking for.

When the event took place last week and Cheryl Cole announced her split with Ashley, the SERPs were changing every few seconds. Not only was the Twitter and blog real-time feed going crazy, but the main pages offered in the SERPs were ever changing.

Bing is not as good as Google

Bing on the other hand is completely slow and offering inappropriate content. Here is the search today, 6 days after the event and still there is irrelevant content in the top positions.

In conclusion Bing really isn’t good enough and offers pretty awful results for a lot of searches. There is no real understanding of the searcher and thus no excitement or enthusiasm of the searcher to get more for his search.Bing is painfully slow at updating its results where as Google has entered a new area of speed searches with relevant quick results being offered a minute after they have been posted.

IMDB is one of the most popular film websites on the Internet and provides movie lovers with in depth information and reviews on Movies and TV Shows. I have been really looking forward to season 6 of Lost on Sky1 and was searching for the popular US TV show – when I came across the following:

Lost canonical issue IMDB

Below is the canonical tag that features in the </head> element of the subdomain:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411008/" />

So what gives? Isn’t Google supposed to be returning the canonical page as highlighted correctly by IMDB?

I’m sure you’re all aware of the tag setup, if not you’ll find an example below:

<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example-page.html" />
</head>

This informs the search engine robots of the page that is deemed to be the ‘canonical’ one if there are many available. So for example – say you’re signed up to an affiliate programme where they use a tracking parameter like so:

http://www.example.com/example-page.php?affiliate=blueberry

You don’t want to have both the main page and the ‘blueberry’ page indexed, resulting in a canonicalization issue. Therefore if you place the following canonical tag on both pages, the search engine robots are aware that all the link juice will attributed to the page specified in the href attribute:

<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example-page.php" />
</head>

From tests that have been rolled out to client websites, the tag works a treat for this type of setup. 301 redirects vs. the canonical tag is a separate debate as the canonical tag will never make the 301 redirect process redundant. However, this is for internal pages rather than the new development, which targets external pages. We are still waiting to hear from Bing and Yahoo! on how their platforms will support external version – however it is clear that Bing might not be ready for a few more months yet.

So what benefits can we get from being able to use the canonical tag cross domain. Well for starters, bloggers using Google Blogspot that wish to move to a more ’snazzy’ URL can replicate all of their older posts on their new domain, whilst of course adding the canonical tag with the URL of the post on the new URL. Simple and effective considering there isn’t a way to place server side redirects using this type of platform.

From a downside, there is a of course potential for blackhat SEOs to manipulate the tag. Then we can’t ignore the possibility of cloaking as it is fully possible for a webmaster to make a legitimate informative website that accumulates a vast amount of links and place a canonical tag to either an identical/similar website that is styled differently. However, I do believe that the positives out weigh the negatives here. Blackhat and unethical SEOs will always exist, however as search advances even further, these techniques will become redundant.

I have found a great example of where this tag could be used to compact duplicate content from other webmasters using your content. We all know how great the BBC website is for providing us with upto date relevant content from an authoritative source. As a football fan i’m always keen on finding out the latest news in the Premier League. Looking at the rankings over the past six months for the keyword term ‘Manchester United News’ you will see the inclusion of an identical site to the BBC – http://www.simonbaker.me/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/man_utd/default.stm. Take a look at the identical keyword density values:

Now have a look at the positioning over time of both URLs:

The dates are from 1st June 2009 to the 20th December 2009 in Google UK. You can see the inclusion of www.simonbaker.me throughout the month of November – however if the BBC had of included the following tag (and of course it was supported at the time!), the website would never have ranked for that keyword term:

<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/man_utd/default.stm" />
</head>

This of course can work for webmasters who do not have control over server side redirects, or indeed if there were a situation where by website A was the chosen URL, however website B still needed to be accessible to the public without redirecting to website A. To conclude, the use of the tag for SEOs has many benefits when used correctly. The tag isn’t a replacement for a 301 redirect – however, it can make an SEOs life easier if the technical team are happier to setup this tag rather than a number of redirects.

The aim of the test was to try and find out the following things about PDF documents like:

• Do Microsoft Word® headers (normally used into a professional document) make a difference?
• How much does the Keyword Density in the document impact on its ranking?
• How much do the document properties (Title, Author, Comments and Keywords) influence the indexing?

After just one week, Google started to show some tangible results. The other search engines are still looking around; only Ask returns a couple of results, but nothing worthwhile to report.

The scope of this document is to highlight the fluctuation that the different PDF documents  (13 in total) made day-by-day.

Those are the first – most interesting – results I collected during the past couple of weeks for the main document returned by a SERP generated using the URK “seiunamicone”.

These are accompanied by the hidden results (in a drop down menu):

I’ve been monitoring the SERPs for a while, and apart from the first couple of days where it there were constant fluctuations, the results seem to be stabilized.

Proposing a lot of images it would probably have been muddled, however I can assure you that a lot of changes took place and I presume that even more of these changes will occur over the next couple of days.

Just to give you an example outside the above picture – on 3^rd of November the third result was a document called PDF-test-without-headers-KD43.pdf – my test n. 11. It is quite different to determine why this document was ranking at this specific time, which is the reason for why I included a graph collecting the SERPs detail changes.

This is the full graph:

Whilst this is a graph with the documents that just take part on the SERP during the period in which I monitored it.

Let’s analyze it altogether, but first let me remind you of something about the documents generated. I assumed a KWD of the URK “seiunamicone” split between the page (42%) and the document properties (56%) and fake headers when H1 and H2 have been created using pure emphasis instead of Word styles.

The first PDF to be indexed has been a document called Test 7 (PDF-test-without-header2-KD100.pdf). This document contains an H1 made using Word styles, a fake H2 – just emphasized text – with a KD of 100%. Just after some days, this document has been completely refused by Google SERP. Today is in the index but sit nowhere.

A snugly result for test number 5, 28% KD and one header, whilst no index at all for test 3, 10 or 13 for example.

If we would like to analyze only the first three results (first one and it’s aggregate) plus the first result shown when expanding hidden results we got the following picture.

Positive results has been collected for test number 12, always been present in the SERP and now stable on position 1 from about one week, test number 1.1, with some fluctuation, but now stable on position 2, and finally test 11, that apart some daily disappear has always been on position three.

So what makes the difference for these documents?

I almost sure Google is able to interpret the RTF code contained into PDF document (most probably doing a sort of reverse engineering). This sounds like strong assert (and maybe it is, so please take it just as my personal opinion) but it’s the only explanation I was able to find when I answered to the question “Why these?”

Analyzing the SERPs, I saw that after a KD factor, the headers get their own importance, so, if I should answer about the question

What are the predominant factors that influence a PDF indexing into Google?

According to the test result I collected during the past weeks, today I would probably answer with the following bulleted point:

1. Document properties usage. Adding the keyword(s) into the document properties (Title, Subject e Keywords – Comments are ignored. We can even use the Author field, but looks like to be used for different purposes, isn’t it?)
2. Keyword density. A sufficient number of keyword in strategic part of the document – as per HTML pages – results in a better-optimized document, especially when headers are used. But we remember of another important aspect, such as document length and size that after a certain dimension (100k) results in a non-crawled text.
3. Header usage. Inserting keywords into the header 1 (made with Word styles, not emphasizing the text) boost the document and help it for a better indexing. Eventually use an H2 sounds good, but during the tests I noticed that use both of them don’t get any extra advantage.
4. Keyword proximity. Whenever the headers are not used, keyword proximity plays an important role.