Google, in it’s wisdom, has decided that you can just take your crummy search words and shove them.

While writing a previous post about Facebook’s own insanities, I was looking for like-minded writers on the Internet. It’s common to do this sort of search. The most famous example is to put in a company’s name and then add the word, “sucks.” (Don’t look at me like that – we all know you’ve done it).

Watch Closely – This Affects You

What Facebook did made me want to barf, but you’ll notice in the screen shot below that Google (in it’s infinite wisdom) figured I really meant “bar” – and gave me that in every single result:

The only problem? I didn’t mean “bar” – I meant “barf.” I actually had to change my search and treat my word like a phrase (by putting quotes around the word) in order to get the results I was looking for:

Notice that Google’s first idiot results numbered 767,000, compared to the correct 4,320. Isnt’ that enough to make you crazy?

The Queen of Search

I went out looking for help with this one and called on someone who knows (and I mean really knows). Tara Calishain is the author of “Google Hacks” and earlier this year she had written Google Localizes Google Suggest, “Improves” Spelling Suggestions:

Say I’m searching for Carolynn. There are plenty of people named Carolynn. However, there are more people named Carolyn and Google will a) suggest that as the correct spelling and b) put Carolyns in my search results.

Which is just completely nuts. It’s not only nuts, but other than Tara, no one is writing about this or complaining about it! Even Tara is a bit too gracious and generous, calling it Google’s “well-meaning results.”

In response to my fulminations, she wrote back:

Hi Michael. This is Google thinking it knows what you want to search for better than you do.

Yahoo and Bing and Ask, Oh My!

So, Google thinks it knows better.

There must be something in the tech water. People with lots of specialized and abstruse knowledge drink it and it makes them arrogant and stupid.

Mark Zuckerberg drinks it regularly. AOL binged on it for years and finally ended up face down in the gutter. But, you’d never think Google would succumb to the same kind of temptation. Until now.

Thank goodness Bing, Ask and Yahoo are not following Google. I’m moving my search business over to someone who cares what I’m looking for and trusts that I know what I’m doing. I’m going to bet others will be following fairly soon.

Sell your Google stock now.

As we said in our last post about shortened URL’s -”Twitter Spam: the Long and the Short.ly of It,” – that’s not the worst of it when it comes to your safety.

Nope, it’s your friends you have to watch out for. But, it’s not their fault at all. Take a look:

We’ve followed Gene Leganza (@gleganza) for some time now. He just happens to be a mucky-muck analyst over at Forrester Research – not exactly the type of guy you’d think would send you an unsolicited invitation to his Mafia Wars family.

But, as you can see from the screen shot above, he did send me just such a private “Direct Message” message, asking me to click and join.

Not a Good Idea to Click

Just one small point. Gene never sent the message. Some sort of auto-bot did. And, there are scads of other such messages, inspiring a torrent of complaints and anger on Twitter itself (just do a search for “twitter spam” on seach.twitter.com if you doubt us).

Here’s another example of the kind that may be filling your Twitter private messages. Again, looks can be deceiving:

The Worst Thing About It

Here’s what really hurts. What do the most of the folks conclude who get these types of private messages from their followers? Yup, they blame the messenger. That’s what Twitter expert Laura Fitton  thought, before she took a second look, (screen shot at the beginning of this article).

But, Gene never did send it. And, Kim never did send it. Gene doesn’t play Mafia Wars. Kim works for the Four Seasons, not some sort of online money making scheme. But, both links will infect your computer and start sending out similar messages to your followers, without your knowledge.

Gene and Kim (and thousands of others) have had to re-jigger their Twitter accounts and send out apologies to their followers. Gene says he took the time to connect to each one privately. He told us:

What really bugs me about it is that it made me an unwitting agent of spam. It impacted my followers’ trust in me.

Complicity and Duplicity

It’s clearly time for Twitter to get serious about these sorts of scams. Thankfully, more and more conscientious and brave folks are bringing up the topic. Michael Arrington’s series of articles about the complicity of the gaming industry and social media sites should make your hair stand on end.

And a simple search on any major search engine will return thousands of results for things like “twitter spam” and “mafia wars spam.” The same searches in the News sections of those search engines will give you the latest stories – and there are many.

The same searches in the “News” sections of those search engines will give you the latest stories – and there are many.

What’s to be Done?

Wish to heck we knew. But, it’s frightening. And, it’s keeping us from clicking on most anything anymore.

Do your own research. Write your own blog posts. Become part of the discussion. This sort of nonsense has the power to bring down not just Twitter, but our entire trust in the online world.

Those fake followers are almost more of a nuisance than anything, taking up your time as you evaluate whether they’re worth it.

Diving Off the Diving Board

While those idiots and swindlers are doing their best to ruin your Twitter experience, perhaps the bigger threat to you and your computer comes in the form of those shortened URL’s.

Think about it. Does it really make sense that the bad guys know how to send spam on email but don’t know how to send it out on Twitter? In fact, the URL shortening company Bit.ly flags 2 to 3 million untrustworthy messages of its own per week!

Clicking on one of these shortened links is like diving into a swimming pool without checking first to see if it has any water.

The Future Looks Dim

Twitter says that it’s going to start testing those shortened URL’s to make sure they are safe. If they do as good a job at that as they do at getting rid of pornographers, swindlers and multi-level marketers, things sure don’t look good for the home team.

Sure, there are technical additions available that offer some extent of protection. Firefox and other browsers offer add-on’s and plug-in’s that will give you a preview of the longer links. However, those don’t assure the link is not malicious.

One of the best overviews of this topic is from Brian Krebs’ Security Fix blog in the Washington Post, “Spammers, Virus Writers Abusing URL Shortening Services.”

What it comes down to is this – Twitter has the potential to be a true national resource, acting as an ingenious social meeting place and an invaluable public square.

But, the assault on it by the by the online version of drug dealers, pimps and criminals is simply not being taken seriously enough. Right now, as I write this, you can follow the carnage by doing your own search for “twitter spam” on search.twitter.com.

With Friends Like That

But, hang on to your hats, folks, because that’s not the worst of it. It’s actually your friends you need to watch out for on Twitter – not just the spammers and the URL sleaze balls.

More about that in our next post.

Who is Dominic? Is he one of your LinkedIn connections? Nope. In fact, Dominic has the sum total of four (yes, count them, 1, 2, 3, 4) connections. Poor souls.

But, even though he has few friends (no wonder), he has joined something like 40 LinkedIn Groups. And, yes, he happened to join one of the groups you belong to – which is how he got entrée to your inbox.

So, you say, no problem. There must be a privacy setting on LinkedIn that would keep Dominic out of your life. You know “privacy settings.” Those are the adjustments social networking sites don’t publicize at all and that you never have time to fiddle with even if you do discover them.

But, this is a problem. The only privacy setting that would keep Mr. Spam out of your inbox would also keep the legitimate members of that group from communicating with you.

There Goes the Neighborhood

And, that’s the problem. I do want to “Allow members of this group to send me messages via LinkedIn.” I just don’t want zeroes like this guy to have access to me.

In fact, I want LinkedIn to throw his sorry behind out the door – now. If they don’t, their once verdant social networking neighborhood will turn into a slum of social nitwits. And, that’s when we’ll all leave. I’m just leading the way, leaving now unless LinkedIn begins to eject Dominic Spam and his ilk swiftly and summarily.

Tell LinkedIn you feel the same way, or Dominic and his friends will soon be cramming your inbox with a ton of this kind of garbage, too.

Raise your hand if you have heard someone say, “I can get anything I need on Google.” Now raise your hand if you’ve said it yourself. Thanks, you may put your hands down now.

The preconception that Google finds everything you need is the topic of one of our recent blog articles, “Can You Speak the Language of the 21st Century?” Read it and you’ll find out that the best search engines (including Google) actually reach only a tiny fraction of the Internet’s vast information.

Here’s another preconception. It’s the one that says that Google shows you the best stuff. They don’t. You just think they do.

When You Want to Find the Very Best

Here’s a cautionary tale that reveals not only the limits of the best search engines, but also how rapidly the entire world of searching the Internet is changing.

The Executive Director of the Colorado Society of Association Executives, Joan Tezak, called us not long ago and asked:

“Can you get me a recommendation for silent auction software? Our current program is getting old and we think there are better programs out there.”

Just so you know, “silent auctions” are a popular and effective way for associations to raise money at their conventions and events.

Now, we know NOTHING about silent auction software. So, like many of you, we did our patriotic duty and logged on to Google. There, we found a host of both paid ads and what are called, somewhat misleadingly, “organic” results, all of which are pictured below:

The organic results were surrounded by those scads of ads that have made Google one of the richest companies in the world. Advertisers pay dearly for the listings that appear above and just to the right of the regular Google results.

The top two companies listed in Google’s organic results were Auction123Software.net and BarCodedAuctions.com.

However, there were a bunch of other possible results and we didn’t have time to research each of them. That made us wonder how else we could quickly get back to Joan with a reliable answer.

Twitter Followers, Do Your Thing

Curious about something we’ve been testing the last few months, I logged on to my @MichaelBenidt Twitter account. There I “tweeted” my followers the question that is shown at the beginning of this blog article. Translated slightly from Twitter language, I wrote:

“Who knew there were so many “silent auction” programs for managing a non-profit’s fundraising event! Let me know if you know of a good one.”

Now, I don’t have that many Twitter followers (around 250 back then). But, in only a couple of minutes, @EilSmi wrote back:

Eileen Smith told us that the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, for whom she serves as Director of Communications and PR, had used AuctionAnything.com for several years – and they loved it.

Think about that. In about the same time it took to get scads of untested results from Google, we were able to get a top level recommendation from a trusted source.

Eileen vs. Google

But what about those top two Google silent auction programs – wouldn’t they be the best? Might Eileen’s program be good, but not very popular? After all, AuctionAnything.com did not even show up on the first page of Google’s healthy organics.

The Baloney Detector

We’ve grown fond of using a free Internet site called Compete.com (we call it the “Baloney Detector“) to test Internet traffic claims. In this case we compared the traffic of the top two Google results to Eileen’s recommendation to see which had the most traffic. Eileen’s won in a walk.

How can that be?! Aren’t the top Google results the best? And, if not, aren’t they the most popular? And, beyond that, if they are neither the most popular nor the best – what the heck are they?

Google, of course, keeps their exact secret sauce under wraps. Experts agree, however, that the top results in Google merely have the most links from other web sites. That’s a little bit of a letdown, if you think about it.

You see, something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has hit the big time. It promises placement at the top of the Google results page. If those promises are to be believed, then what you find in a Google search has been jiggered by cadres of SEO folks.

The Biggest Threat to Google is You

Does that mean that you shouldn’t use Google? Absolutely not. Does that mean that asking a question on Twitter can replace reliable research? Nope. What it does mean is that we all have to lose our preconceptions about searching the Internet if we’re going to get reliable information quickly.

The fact is that Google is threatened – and not by another search company. It’s threatened by you. Google just might not be able to compete with an informed you, searching for just what you need in just the right place with just the right tools – without preconceptions.

You should be. You may have heard someone say, “I can get anything I need on the web from Google.” You may even have said it yourself. It’s hogwash.

Studies show 9 out of 10 people think they’re getting what they need from their Internet searches. That means your employees, your executives and even your board of directors.

There have been many studies about our searching skills, but one of the most famous is the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s “Search Engine Users,” which is sub-titled “Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naïve.”

So now, if you haven’t heard of the “Deep Web,” “Invisible Web” or “Hidden Internet” it’s time to stop reading this article right now and  search these terms on your own. (Then, come back please!)

OK, I’m glad you’re back.

Did you find out in a few seconds of searching that you might be, um… shockingly out of touch?

Follow-up Question, Please

Here’s a follow-up question. When you searched for these terms, did any of you search somewhere other than the web? How many of you did your search in the “News” area of Google (or Yahoo or Ask.com)?

If you did, you found things like this article about Google’s “Deep Web” search initiative – “Google: “We’re Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data.”

How many of you searched “Video” or “Blogs?” Did any of you search Twitter or the Questions section of LinkedIn?

Through Twitter you might have made your way to this: “Google’s PDF Search Throws Some Light on the Dark Web.” It’s about increasing the effectiveness of PDF search. Wow!

And, that’s only the beginning. We could go on – and on.

The Cost

Not knowing how to target your searches is costing you and your company time and money every day.

If you’re missing most of what a search engine can help you find, you are lost. If you don’t know that search engines (even the best of them) can get to only a fraction what’s on the web, you’re seeing the world of information about as clearly as the photo you see above.

We call search effectiveness “the language of the 21st Century.” It’s the language of search skills and strategies that ensure you target just the right information quickly and effectively.

More importantly, these skills keep you from being sucked in by the hawkers and swindlers.

Time to start learning this new language, don’t you think? That way, you’ll see the world of information clearly – like this:

We wrote on here recently that we couldn’t find a way to search Twitter – on Twitter (Whenever Twitter Closes a Door, Google Opens a Window). Turns out we were right. You have to go next door for your Twitter search. Dumb, but….

And, it turns out, tons of the Twitterers (Tweeters? Tweety Birds? Fritterers?) we’ve talked to don’t know this.

Go to Search.Twitter.com

Nice thing about Twitter’s next door bar – you can get as drunk as you want, and you don’t even have to pay for the restaurant meal. You can drink searches to your hearts content (see who’s talking about you – or her – or him).

Let’s try it. Today we’re attending the Colorado chapter of the National Speakers Association. There are two keynote speakers at the event – David Nour and Ron Karr.

There are lots of results for online social gadabout, David Nour. One would hope, David! There is only one – thank you, Gina Schreck – for Mr. Karr. But, there will be more. He tells us he has a book coming out next year, and you can bet he’ll do his best to get you to Tweet about it.

How ’bout you? How famous are you? And, are you Twittering on about yourself, or are others Tweeting your wonders to the world? It makes a difference.

As a local sports news anchor says, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”

So, there you have it. Whether you use it or not, people searching for you on Twitter is the next online phenomenon you’re going to have to feel insecure and worried about. Is this a great Internet, or what?!

Joining the Twitter Army

Sheryl and I are heading to the Defrag conference in Denver this week. A high percentage of conference attendees have Twitter accounts – and they “tweet” regularly (often incessantly).

So, to get in step with the convention faithful, we are both signing on the dotted line and have already started Twittering away.

We think there’s a disconnect, though. When we attend a normal business conference – like the Florida Healthcare Association, the Washington State Department of Community, Trade & Economic Development or any of the conferences we’ve been to recently – almost no one has a Twitter account.

It sometimes seems that technology folks think normal people are just like them. But really, the difference between a business convention and a technology convention these days is vast.

Now, don’t get your undies in a bundle! We know that many of you think Twitter is going to take over the world and that soon we’ll all be checking our cell phones to find out that @DopeyDan is “tired and now going to bed,” and that @CrazyMomma is “wondering what Twitter users think about the election.”

And, perhaps, that’s true. But, more likely, in our opinion, many of these cool technologies will never make it beyond their early adopters. And, too often it’s because they’re just not that easy to use.

Google Opens Twitter’s Window

As we said in the opening paragraph, we think we ought to be able to plunk in the name of our friends – and get the scoop on whether we can follow them on Twitter.

It appears to us that the Twitter search function is currently dysfunctional – at least it has been for the past 24 hours. When we look for our friends to see if they have accounts – we get the result you see above.

As Snoopy would say, “Arrrrrgggghhhhh!”

Not to worry, though, we could still find some of our friends by using Google to nose its way into the Twitter site.

Are You There, Gina?

I knew right away that if I was going to play the Twitter game, I needed Mike Keliher and Gina Schreck by my side. Mike we already wrote about – but Gina, from Synapse3Di, is something else again.

For one thing, she’s way more optimistic about new technologies than I am. For another, she’s the antithesis of someone who is stuck in a rut.

Gina is always learning and trying something new. One of our favorite sayings comes from Steve Lishansky:

“The hardest people to work with are those who have been reasonably successful doing unsustainable things.”

That’s something you could never say that about Gina.

So to find Gina, type in the Google search box (or Yahoo, Live, Ask) exactly this (or the photo above):

GinaSchreck site:twitter.com

And, like so many things on computers, here’s another way. Click on the advanced tab – and then fill in the site you want to search – instead of searching the whole freaking universe. Either way, you’ll often get what you’re looking for:

Even though Twitter was on the fritzer, we were able to add a few more folks to follow.

By the way, the number one way Twitter suggests you find your friends is to surrender your entire email database to them. Doesn’t anyone care about online privacy anymore?! Have the folks in your email address book signed a release?!

Facebook recently… well, let’s not even go there…… Online privacy is a different article.

Bottom line is we’re Twittering now – and we’ll follow you – and you can follow us. Unless, that is, you have something better to do.

In our previous blog article we wrote about the best political fact checking sites on the Internet (Just the Fact Checker, Ma’am).

These nonpartisan (and mostly fair) web sites are great, but who has time to wade through them to find the specific information you need? Instead of wasting your time wandering around the site, use Google (or Yahoo, Live or Ask) to get what you’re looking for in a snap.

Site is a 4-letter Word

Here’s how you do it. Type the following into the search box – using the 4-letter word site:

“bridge to nowhere” site:www.factchecker.org

Hey, you! Don’t just sit there – go to Google and type it in! You’ll see that you get 20 results where the exact phrase “bridge to nowhere” is mentioned on the FactCheck.org site:

Now, you might say, why not just use the search box provided on the web site itself? Give it a try.

When you use the same search phrase, “bridge to nowhere,” you only get 8 results from the FactCheck.org site. And, the recent highlighted article in the Google search above, “The Whoppers of 2008” does not appear.

Homework

Go ahead and give this a try by using different phrases you are interested in and trying them out on the sites we profiled in Just the Fact Checker, Ma’am.

One more example for the road:

ayers site:www.politifact.com

This search shows that the topic of William Ayers has been out there for a long time, but you’ll also notice that unlike FactCheck.org, Politifact is using Google as it’s internal search tool.

We were reminded of our own search tip when we couldn’t find Saturday Night Live’s spoof of the Katie Couric/Sarah Palin interview. So, instead of wandering around the SNL web site trying to find the video – we took our own advice and did a Google search like this:

couric video site:www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/

The video was the very first result – Tina Fey playing the role of Sarah Palin.

The bottom line? When it comes to the campaigns, there really are some very nice 4-letter words. Try using one. Your mother will be proud of you.

Editor’s Note: For more background on this topic, we’ve also written about how to use search engines to search just one site at a time by using the word site: in “The Search Power of a 4-Letter Word.”)

Perhaps the best known political fact monitor comes from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. You’ve probably heard of it as FactCheck.org. It’s a nonprofit and nonpartisan site that monitors the accuracy of the folks who are running for major offices like, oh, president and vice-president.

We like FactCheck.org because they don’t take money from corporations, political parties, labor unions or lobbyists. Seems to keep them objective.

Another place you can keep tabs on the truthfulness of your favorite candidate (or your least favorite) is the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. They actually even fact-checked the recent Sarah Palin – Joe Biden VP debate while it was going on.

And, since we just returned from two trips to Florida, we can’t leave out the St. Petersburg Times nicely put together “keep ‘em honest” site called Politifact.com. It’s a joint venture with Congressional Quarterly, but that doesn’t keep them from having a sense of humor. For instance, they rate the candidates’ assertions as either “true, mostly true, half true, barely true, false, and pants-on-fire.”

All of these fact-checking sites, though, got us to thinking. When a candidate wants to pull the wool over your eyes they don’t always do it with factual errors, misstatements and deceptions.

No, by golly, they can do just as good job of wool pulling with their personality, delivery and charm. And, heck, those other fact checking sites don’t do much to check for personality quirks at all.

Which is why Saturday Night Live may be the best fact-checker of them all.

Now, I know you can watch SNL on some sort of older technology called television. But, I also know it comes on way past my bedtime – and maybe yours, too.

Instead, you can check the Saturday Night Live web site at SaturdayNightLive.com any old time. Go ahead, try it and get a personality fact check on the candidates:

You might even say that unearthing the inauthentic in our candidates’ personalities might just be more important than all the facts in the world.

Nice job, Tina Fey, Jason Sudeikis, Queen Latifa and the rest of the crew at SNL. Your satirical sketches do a great job of checking on the most important facts.

Gosh darn it. Doncha’ kinda’ wish these kinds of sites had been out there checking on those banking and real estate bozos before the economic meltdown?