Many thanks to Dirk Paessler for sending this my way:

“Google has perhaps more than any other company become “The Internet Company.” It’s grown hand in hand with the internet and its entire business model has from the start been totally focused on the internet as a delivery platform.

And let’s face it, Google is a pretty interesting company. In fact, we think it’s so interesting that we put together this infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google. We’ve been digging through Google’s SEC filings, news articles and the trusty old Wikipedia to get plenty of interesting data to include. We hope you like it!”

Google facts and figures (massive infographic)

We recently made the switch from ClickTracks to Urchin, mainly because Lyris have bafflingly chosen to leave ClickTracks to gather dust and slowly decay.

As our company has been using ClickTracks since 2003, making the move from the familiar to the unknown has been understandably painful but necessary.

However in our initial tests, we were surprised to see Urchin significantly over-reporting the figures in their reports.

After some digging, we found the reason why. By default, Urchin reports visitors and bots together.

In other words if the home page of your website was visited by 1000 human visitors and 500 different bots on a given day, Urchin would report this as 1,500 hits to the page.

Bear in mind that some bots might hit pages on your website regularly throughout the day. We’ve seen data sets where there are more bot hits than visitors.

As a user of Urchin, why on earth would you want to merge these two data groups together?

I can see this being useful when considering server load, but for regular reporting, I can’t see any valid reason for this.

Excluding the bots is fairly straightforward, but if you’re using the default settings, you should make sure you’re sitting down when you first view your ‘real’ data.

You’re going to discover that you’re not getting anywhere near as many visitors as you thought.

The question is why would Urchin choose to set this up by default? Why distort the data?

A new AdWords phishing attempt seem to be making the rounds:

The link points to adwords.google-ge.com/accounts/signin.html

Don’t fall for it.

If you get any such email, go directly to your browser and login as you normally would. Don’t click the links.

Let’s be careful out there.

From the joint-horse’s mouth:

“Microsoft and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union. This milestone is an exciting step in our effort to give your business a time-saving and cost-efficient way to connect with a larger combined audience of potential customers.”

Let’s face it, Google could use a little competition.

Our blog post New AdWords Ads Increasingly Getting Stuck in the ‘Under Review’ Black Hole now has 50 comments – the majority of which express extreme frustration. Many AdWords account holders are eager for alternatives.

This could be the start of something interesting.

I guarantee that your Google AdWords account is wasting money.

I guarantee that tomorrow’s webinar will help you recover some of that money.

And I guarantee that you have never come across some of the ideas before.

100% original.

45 minutes.

15 ways to cut your AdWords costs.

And no, that isn’t a typo.

Register for the free webinar and find out why!

Remember Pirate Bay?

Peter Sunde was one of the ‘innovators’ behind Pirate Bay – a venture that resulted in his one year prison sentence and a fine of over three million US dollars.

Mr. Sunde and his other pirate friends are requesting a retrial, and it appears that his sentence may be affecting his outlook of the world.

Flattr is Sunde’s latest venture:

“We aim to revolutionize how people pay and get paid for content on the internet. Come, join and show the world that good content is worth some coins out of your pocket.”

To go from assisting theft to assisting revenue is an interesting U-turn, to put it mildly.

But will it work? The system will involve users setting up an account, entering credit card details and deciding an amount to be paid each month. When they don’t have to.

At risk of sounding cynical, it doesn’t have a hope of success.

I’m all for helping content providers make money, but I don’t think this will be the answer. And coming from an individual charged with assisting copyright infringement, the irony is bewildering.

What’s next – identity thieves pushing online security? Mercenaries for peace?

Google have announced the launch of Google Buzz: “a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting.”

I know what you’re thinking. Google Wave?

No. “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.”

And Google Talk, in case you’re wondering, is a tool to “Chat with friends and family on the internet“.

So Buzz is about conversations. Wave is about real-time communication. Talk is about chatting.

Got it?

Next stop: Google Hype. “A newer, even-more real-time tool to convey thoughts“.

The pictures say it all. Note that today’s Google logo is commemorating Norman Rockwell’s birthday.

And I don’t know whether to be amused or scared by this one:

Hype is a powerful thing, but behind all great marketing has to be (at the very least) a good product. Otherwise it’s little more than noise.

Google Wave set out to be a solution to a problem that most people don’t have.

Which is why, according to Business Insider, web visits to Google Wave have dropped sharply.

Having used it myself, I can understand why. It’s confusing, buggy, and as good as pointless.

Next stop: the iPad.