I was at the flex for the Campfire One event last night to mingle with the Blogarazzi, drink hot chocolate while being regaled with Guacamole recipes and tales of how Google’s new friend connect was going to allow anyone to add social features to their website with only rudimentary html experience. Google has jumped from gadgets to widget by leveraging all the work done to support their Open Social and Open Auth to make it easy for web-masters and web-apprentices to go social.

It’s not the quality of the widget that bothers me or even trade offs that webmasters make when they join a platform. I don’t mind that Google is leveraging open source to meet Facebook’s platform play. Facebook has lots of dough and lots of hubris.

I am bothered by the sudden lack of oxygen in the room as Google inhales whatever momentum social networking has left and makes sure that the next phase of social networking companies will suddenly need to be Google Centric. Microsoft used vaporware and some very predatory contracts to drive competitors out of business. Open Social, Google App Engine and now Friend Connect demonstrates that Google has perfected the art of co-opting everyone else’s efforts by offering them an infrastructure umbrella.

Google has absorbed the best ideas of the emerging social web for pennies on the dollar while making sure they have the inside track on monetization. They have done it with a team of hard working, dedicated engineers who want to make the web a better place. Unless you are a cynical search marketer or your start-up is suddenly having trouble breathing, you won’t even notice.

Google has been displaying local results for queries that contains a local component for some time now. A common query like san francisco restaurant displays 10 local search results along with a map. We now expect this type of local targeting because the query contains a geographic component which Google interprets as a geographic data.

Many search pundits have been calling recent changes in SERPs another Google dance. Evidence suggests that Google may be adding geographic information about brick and mortar stores and service companies to the algorithm along with reverse IP lookup to help boost site rank for regular results. Take the query engagement ring . I conducted this query in San Francisco and Los Angeles and got very different results.

Here is the same query in San Francisco.

Just to be sure I wasn’t seeing results from different data centers, I went ahead and queried multiple date centers using the SeoLog.com Datacenter Ranking Tool and discovered that the results didn’t match the LA results or the San Francisco results. In fact, some sites significantly better in both San Francisco and Los Angeles than they show on any of the data centers using the SEOLog tool.

We know Google been collecting service area information from webmasters from webmaster central. We know that they have extensive data from Google maps and third party vendors about where businesses are located. It makes sense that Google would add relevance to a website that represent a brick and mortar or service that is nearby. It appears they are starting to do so.

My son decided to make brownies last night. Since he is of the Google generation, the thought of a cook book never crossed his mind. Instead, he headed right to his laptop and searched for brownie recipe .

Imagine my surprise when he asked me why Google was suggesting adding weed to his brownies. I consider myself pretty liberal as a parent and I don’t fault Google for returning porn if my child enters a keyword that calls for porn, but I really don’t want them suggesting adding drugs to dessert.

What’s the difference between great link bait and spam?

Complaints to Google from sites you outrank seems to be the most important factor. Consider the two widgets below. The first sites ranks #1 for "online dating" while the second has been banned by Google for using spammy, off topic widgets after Google received some complaints about them. The second site has essentially been smoted from the index.

OK Cupid

Your Score: Read Minds

We’ve discovered your super power! Hope you like it…

You’re a psychic and you can read minds! But please don’t read my mind right now, because I’m imagining you naked. Of course, you’re probably already used to people doing that. Ah, the joys of being a psychic. At least you’ll always ace interviews and pass your college exams with no problems.

JustSayHi

81%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Free Online Dating

In fairness to Google, the folks at JustSayHi did stray into the dark side. After they ranked number 1 for most dating terms, they started promoting other domains with their widgets. They crossed the line with Google’s TOS. On the other hand, after a couple of failed re-inclusions, they decided to start over with a new domain and rebuild an entirely white hat site at One Plus You using the same quiz widgets. It turns out that Google considers the One Plus You quiz results widgets to be Spammy and Off Topic when they include the anchor text of "Free Online Dating".
The challenge for marketers is to know where to draw the line between very effective link bait and spammy, off topic link bait. As long as the algorithm rewards targeted anchor text, marketers will continue to find a way to get people to link to them using preferred anchor text.

I spotted another interest UI tweak from Google, as they finally put Related Searches at the top of the Golden Triangle. We have seen these sneaking into the bottom of the SERP for a while and it was only a matter of time before the show up on top.

Does this mean the mighty G has decided that disambiguation is a better guide to user intent than ESP?