Jason Unger

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In Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox this week, he proposes an interesting next step for Microsoft, now that their bid for Yahoo! is over (emphasis is mine).

Now that Steve Ballmer has earned his bonus for the year by walking from overpaying for Yahoo, he needs to do something else with his $50B. One idea I would like him to try is to refund some of the outrageous sums harvested by search engines.

a) Give back to the websites that create the content that search engines currently scrape for free: pay sites for only being indexed in one search engine and refuse the other engines. In particular, allow access to deep link archives of value-added content for users entering from your search engine. Value proportion to users: When you search on engine X, you find stuff that's otherwise not available.

So Microsoft, Google or Yahoo should pay me to list my information? Interesting idea, but it's way too late for that.

In a "normal" capitalistic agreement, Nielsen is right — they should be paying me. I put out my information, they use it in their product, and they make money off of selling ads near my listing.

But, given where we are in our expectations with the Internet, this will never happen. Users expect to find the best information when they do an online search — not a company-filtered answer to their query.

What good is a resource if it has no good resources? Obviously, it's no good at all.

This is a similar argument for net neutrality. If your access provider can greatly affect where you get your information, your viewpoint is going to be skewed.

I highly doubt Nielsen's suggestion will happen, and if it does, the types of sites entering into an agreement will be low-profile. Would CNN really NOT want to be indexed by Google News? Would Engadget ONLY want to be indexed by AOL (which owns it)? It would be pretty stupid.

Would you accept money from a search engine for an exclusive listing?

I officially own the entire first page of Google results for jason unger.

While not every link goes to my Web site, each result is about me: my site, my LinkedIn profile, my Facebook profile, my Geek of the Week bio, etc.

Besides being pretty cool, what does that mean?

Considering that eye-tracking studies have found that Web searchers rarely (if ever) move on to the second page of results, I am essentially the only Jason Unger most Web surfers will ever find.

That's a huge brand builder. Since I make my living working online, anyone interested in finding out more about me won't get confused with any other Jason Ungers out there.

I was just talking with Dave Weinberg and Noah Wolfe this weekend about Googling yourself (also known as egosurfing) and how well you rank in the results. Until today, the only other Jason Unger on the first page was the lobbyist/lawyer who worked for GWB during Bush v. Gore.

Apparently, Google's kicked him off of the first page of results. (Don't be surprised if he shows up again; who knows how that Google juice works.)

How do you rank in Google? Take a look and let me know in the comments.

PS - It is totally cool to Google yourself. It's not egotistical or self-centered or anything like that. It's actually pretty important to know, since anyone who wants to find out information about you is doing it.

Why doesn't Google allow you to create an "unread" label for easy access in Gmail?

It's one of those "hidden labels" that Google uses, but doesn't allow you to actually access without typing into the search bar.

There are workarounds, but they're not ideal.

I use Gmail for everything. It's my personal email. It's my business email. It's my work email. I probably have 5 or 6 Gmail accounts.

So it actually IS a big deal that I have to type in "label:unread" into my search bar every time I need to find the emails I haven't read yet.

I understand that Google would rather have you archive your read emails and only keep unread emails in your inbox, but that's not how I manage my mail.

I read the stuff that is important, then leave the less important stuff unread to do later (I rarely check my starred items, so that doesn't help).

Come on, Google, let me create that unread shortcut. It would make life a lot easier for me.

Toshiba Officially Drops HD DVD, to End Shipments in March

Old media news publishers are trying to lock their information away from search engines and, in the process, shooting themselves in the foot.

Long story short, a bunch of newspaper and magazine types want to have more control over how search engines index their content. Basically, they want Google to stop promoting and linking to their content.

Why wouldn't the AP want Google News to display their headlines and summaries with a link to the article?

It's free traffic! These news sites are getting users pointed to them that they may have never seen before.

What are they expecting when they post a news story: that no one will see it? That only people who go to their homepage will be able to click to it?

These people are just like the kids who post pictures of themselves on MySpace and facebook and think that no one will see them.

Wake up: when you put something on the Internet, you can't stop people from seeing it and using it.

Why would you even want to stop people from seeing your content? Unless you're targeting a specific, qualified audience (which the AP isn't), there's no reason to block your content from the masses.

Tom Curley, the AP's chief executive, said the news cooperative spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually covering the world, and that its employees risk often their lives doing so. Technologies such as ACAP, he said, are important to protect AP's original news reports from sites that distribute them without permission.

If you don't want your content freely available, then don't make it freely available. Create a TimesSelect to limit distribution (and then watch your numbers soar when you get rid of it).

Maybe these old media folks are upset because their content can't compete. Have you tried writing better Web headlines?

(As always, Techdirt breaks it down into nice, simple terms.)