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Sergey Brin, Backseat Crisis Manager

Did you happen to read Sergey Brin’s account of his recent relief trip to Haiti? It’s heartfelt and somewhat interesting, and it ends with three suggestions for how the crisis management could be better:

“First, while there is tremendous relief effort from the US, UN, Haiti, and NGOs, the coordination and organization between these remains unclear.”

“Second, it is necessary to scale up the provisioning of shelter, food, water, sanitation, and health care by at least an order of magnitude.”

“Lastly, there are several categories of people who should be evacuated out of Haiti to other countries (notably the US) where there is far more capacity to provide care.”

For real, Sergey? You go and spend a couple days in a country that was already in poor shape before the earthquake, and you think that qualifies you to tell the experts — the people who’ve been dealing with earthquake relief their whole lives how to do things? C’mon now. I’m sure they appreciated your help, but I doubt they appreciate your advice. Stick to running a search company, and let the relief experts do what they do. Kthxbai.

Google thinks I’m cuuuute

If you do a search for Matt McGee on Google, you not only get lots of my blogs and web sites … but you now also get photos!

goog-images

Google has clearly recognized my devilishly handsome looks and decided that the world needs to see more of me, too, without having to click the “Images” button. I agree.

Seriously, I have no idea why a vanity search on my name is suddenly showing images. And if you ask one of the Google Images engineers — which I did — you’ll get the regular “we can’t share the secret sauce” reply.

And yes, I regularly do vanity searches like this.

Google FAIL

Got an email today from Google telling me that I have to link my AdSense account with my Google Affiliate Network account. Okay, no big deal. The email tells me to get more information at the Google Help Center. So, I click the link and end up here:

google-fail

Thanks for nothing, G.

Google Profile Business Cards Have Arrived

I ordered my Google Profile Business Cards at about 1:30 am PT on May 1st, right after I wrote the story about them on Search Engine Land. And here we are, 7 business days later, and my cards have arrived.

google-profile-business-cards

Not sure exactly what I’ll do with them, since I haven’t bothered to do much with my Matt McGee Google profile page. Plus, I already have biz cards for Small Business Search Marketing, the four local blogs that Cari and I write, and even @U2. It’s not like I’m desperate for more business cards, but seemed kinda cool to be one of the first to order the Google cards.

Google Ad Targeting = Fail

(click for larger image)

google-fail

Google Lip Balm helps me survive the bitter cold

One of the Tri-Cities is Kennewick.

Kennewick is an Indian word thought to translate roughly to “land of mild winter.”

For the past week, the Tri-Cities has been more like Antarctica. We hit -6 last night. We haven’t been above 25 degrees since last week. And the bitter cold is supposed to last another 4-5 days.

Luckily for me, I have official Google Lip Balm to get me through the cold!

Google lip balm

And get this: It’s vanilla-flavored! Yummm!

Best of all, if it’s cold where you are now, too, you can buy some of this stuff, too. :)