John Battelle's Searchblog

Google Keyword Tool (external): what do you think of it?

The Miro logo was taken down ... Seems the "current owners" of Miro's works feel their copyright was infringed, and that G should at least have asked them first. On the one hand, it seems somewhat silly, as whether G used parts of Miro works or not, it serves to promote his work, period ... on the other hand, this may be seen as another case of G doing whatever the hell it wants, and asking permission? Google doesn't need to do this, as they've always got the best intentions at heart, and you can trust them ...

The "Google Cars" was interesting when I tried it, but while looking for a used car ... well, I already *know* that the location is nearby, so showing the lat/lon in those SERPs isn't that useful for me. What *would* be useful, though, would be an indication of what that car's mileage is. I'd like to see a drop-down to sort results by that. Perhaps I'm more pragmatic than most.

Finally, the flash ads ... I just don't get what's unusual about this. Is it ads for G promoting G within an AdSense box? Now *that* would be something. But flash ads about G in and of themselves ... I've been seeing those on Slashdot for years now.

I test drove the Google Page Creator yesterday for a short while. While I applaud Google, as a hardcore Googlephile, I still must say I'm sadly underwhelmed.

The web page templates are not very attractive. I have trouble getting to the Edit HTML tool. I cannot at this point generate a fair usability review, but I quickly ran into some real frustrations.

Is this a Web Page version of Google's Blogger/Blogspot?

As a beta, it is not pretending to be ready for full rollout to the general public, so I will try to more fully explore it later.

Thanks for the link to it, John. What do you think of it?

;^)