March 24, 2010 at 10:47 pm
About this time last night, I was working on a blog post for Search Engine Land about the major search engines and how much they spend lobbying the government. In looking over the numbers, I had decided that my headline was about the enormous jump in how much Google has spent in the past few years … from $260,000 in 2005 to more than $4 million in 2009.
But what percent is that increase??, I wondered. That would be my headline.
I’m adequate at math, not great. I manually counted up by 260,000s … at 520,000, it’s a 100% increase … at 780,000, it’s a 200% increase … etc. I determined that it was about a 1500% increase.
But what if I’m wrong??!!, I thought.
And then an idea came to me: Wolphram Alpha!! The “computation knowledge engine.” It’s like a calculator on steroids. (Note to my son if he’s reading this: It can be used to help with homework, but not to replace you doing the work yourself.)
So, I went over to WA and tried this query: 4,030,000 is what % of 260,000. And would you look at this …
How perfect is that??!! And compare it to the same query on Google:
I appreciated the irony of using some other search tool to find out exactly how much Google has upped its spending on government lobbying. It gave me my headline: Google’s Lobbying Spend Up 1,500% Since 2005.
January 25, 2010 at 9:10 pm
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.
October 30, 2009 at 10:38 pm
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!
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.
September 10, 2009 at 9:17 pm
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:
Thanks for nothing, G.
May 9, 2009 at 3:20 pm
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.
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.
March 2, 2009 at 12:42 pm
(click for larger image)
December 17, 2008 at 10:35 pm
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!
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. 
