Scoreboard Media Group, Internet Audience Development

I’m a huge Formula One guy and a big fan of most motorsports that don’t involve rednecks, a stadium, and turning left for four hours at a time.  I was half asleep last night by the end of the F1 Bahrain race and wanted to remind myself of the results again when I was more coherent this moring.  So I Googled [formula 1] to go to all the usual F1 news sites. 

But I also got this at the top of the SERP:

Must be nice for Formula1.com to have the top 3 first page results. Also very cool that there is a reminder with the time for the next race.

As much as we all bang on Google as search practitioners or adversaries in information retrieval, as a consumer, we should give them a little credit when they do build things that make our lives easier or better.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me Tweet about this a little while ago, many (if not most) of you will be able to get 1st page SERP real estate for your name by completing a Google Profile.  It was basically a real time result for me to get this:

This should immediately be inserted into your processes for those of you managing Reputation Management clients.  Especially if they have popular names (eg, “John Smith”).  Or, apparently, if your name is Todd Malicoat!…

Now, as cool as that is, the more interesting opportunity for the savvier spammers among us is the last line of that Profiles insertion.  Wanna guess how much traffic and user registrations that drives to Myspace, Facebook, Classmates, and LinkedIn?

Yesterday, Google launched their Starter Guide for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Today, SEO’s rejoiced.  All this guide really does is A) reinforce to entities on the web that they need SEO and b) empower them with a slingshot while everyone making money around them is launching tactical nukes.  SEO Consultants should be handing this Guide out on every street corner to nurture business.

If you haven’t downloaded the Google SEO Starter Guide yet, let me save you some time:

1.  Apply Google SEO Starter Guide’s best practices
2.  ???
3.  Profit!

Tinfoil hatters, you might want to skip that hourly trip to Drudgereport.  The current Drudge flash:

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GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials “track sickness”.

“Flu Trends” uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: “GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week.”

Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.

Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: “One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used… as early warning signal for flu activity.”

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE’s chief executive vows: “From a technological perspective, it is the beginning.”

Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

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On one hand, this is very, very cool and super-useful in solving a problem in a very innovative way.  Googlers are probably better with data than anyone.

On the other hand, this is some Big Brother shit.  We know they like to forecast with their data and we know they’ll rollover to .gov’s, so that leaves us with a pretty scare privacy rights bomb just waiting to go off.  What are they going to forecast next?  How deep will it intrude into my life? 

Actually, I really don’t care about that.  At least not for now.  The weirdos can worry about black helicopters.  Right now, my single biggest emotion is jealousy.  Do you realize what kind of financial positions you could take with this kind of geo-specific forecasting?  I bet there were lots and lots of foreclosure searches or “WTF is an ARM reset?” searches in Vegas, SoCal, and Florida way before the markets had priced in that volatility.  I bet you, that right now Google has a better idea than anyone what the top selling items being sold during the Holiday shopping season are.  What if I told you that right now Google knows where the sluttiest chicks are?  Is THAT something you’d be interested in?

Screw Adwords/Adsense.  Google should open up a trading division if they want to grow revenue.

Quick question of the day for everyone out there:

How long do you think it would take for Google to perform a query if they considered all the variables that the 7,500,000 SEO Blogs have claimed Google to evaluate?

I’m setting the over/under at about 13 minutes per query…