Basketball is happening around me (good news: I am not in last place in my office bracket pool thing) and I got curious, for some reason, about the dimensions of a basketball. So I asked Google: basketball diameter.

Most of this SERP is junk, but the first organic result is actually perfect, answering my question above the fold (and they even included the answer in the meta description, so I didn’t even have to click at all if I didn’t want to):

A standard NBA basketball is 9.43 to 9.51 inches in diameter, or 29 5/8 to 29 7/8 inches in circumference. It is inflated to a pressure of 7.5 to 8.5 pounds.

But instead of trusting their own organic search ranking algorithm to provide searchers with the best answer, Google scraped the #2 result to give me an incorrect answer: I specifically asked for the diameter of a basketball; what appeared above the search results was information about a basketball’s circumference. This is a very bad experience.

Google should stop scraping publishers’ sites to put answers directly in search results in cases where the nature of the question is strictly factual and where the facts would actually be wrong.

Shire, Maker of Binge-Eating Drug Vyvanse, First Marketed the Disease:

The retired tennis player Monica Seles spent this month making the rounds of television talk shows… to share her personal struggle with binge eating…

binge eating is a real medical condition…

Ms. Seles is a paid spokeswoman for Shire, which late last month won approval to market its top-selling drug, Vyvanse, to treat binge-eating disorder, a condition that once existed in the shadow of better-known disorders like anorexia and bulimia but was officially recognized as its own disorder in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association.

As Shire introduces an ambitious campaign to promote Vyvanse but also to raise awareness about the disorder, some are saying the company is going too far to market a drug, a type of amphetamine, that is classified by the federal government as having a high potential for abuse…

The company helped put another once-stigmatized condition — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — on the medical map and made billions of dollars from the sale of drugs, like Vyvanse and Adderall, to treat it…

Suppose you are a pharmaceutical company. You invest millions, billions, of dollars in laboratories and chemists, and at the end of a very long process, the outcome is a new drug. Let’s call it, for fun, Mezuyafir. You then have to figure out what conditions that drug can treat.

If it cures a diagnosable disease, that’s good! But if it just changes the chemical composition of people’s brains to make them more happy, more docile, more virile or more focused, that’s even better.

What you now need to do is come up with a medical condition that matches with your new drug. In some cases, the condition may be real and serious; in other cases the condition might be real but not very serious; in other cases the condition will inevitably be frivolous. Let’s call it Magafitis.

Then, though it is legal under many circumstances in the United States to market your new drug directly to consumers, you actually market the hell out of the condition with lots of crass commercial advertisements that advise people to “Talk to your doctor about” whatever problem that they never realized was a problem.

Hey, Magafitis can be serious! It’s a serious issue! Someone knows someone who knows someone who spent a year in bed recovering from Magafitis! And there is a whole forum on the internet for people to share stories and tips about how to find a doctor who takes Magafitis seriously.

Advertising works, so lots and lots and lots and lots of people are going to start asking their doctors about that issue. And the doctors out there – bless them all – are very good at prescribing drugs.

Suppose two thirds of the people who talk to their doctors about Magafitis get prescriptions to treat it. If your new drug Mezuyafir is the only one available that treats Magafitis, the condition that you just made up, then millions of people are going to start taking it, and you’re going to become very rich.

Welcome to pharma marketing.

What linguists say about Kevin Spacey’s bizarre Southern accent on House of Cards:

…the show has always had one big, scenery-chewing constant: Kevin Spacey’s Southern accent… is Spacey’s accent accurate at all? … Spacey is hitting certain features very well, some distinct sounds are being ignored… Frank Underwood sounds like a Southerner born before World War II…

I’ve noticed a few interesting things about people’s accents – especially the accents of people who have migrated from one country or region to another – in the nearly two decades that I’ve been listening to them carefully. One is that people who are consciously using a “prestige” accent can be very convincing for short periods, and when they aren’t under stress, but that when they need to speak at length and don’t have prepared remarks, or when they are in difficult or stressful situations, they’ll frequently revert to their more “natural” accents.

In the first two seasons of House of Cards, I observed quite the opposite from Kevin Spacey’s character Frank Underwood. During normal conversation or soliloquy, he used the simulated “South Carolina” accent described by Vox, but when his character was under pressure, the accent got milder or disappeared altogether.

This is the opposite of what I’d expect: after a long political career in Washington DC, Frank Underwood’s “South Carolina” accent should be almost completely neutralized. But the longer he speaks at any given time, or the more strain that’s being put on him, the more evident his character’s roots should be.

I’m surprised at Kevin Spacey’s oversight on this matter.

Back in 2012, I predicted that Google Offers would fail:

… This is not how a service works when its developers actually want it to succeed.

While the Google Offers home page is still up and doesn’t explicitly state that the service has been shut down, Wikipedia writes about Google Offers in the past tense and says:

In 2014 Google announced it would be shutting the service down.

Here’s a message I got on Linkedin:

Hello Natan, This is Rony Sebastian,President,Softnotions. It’s been
great to connect with you.

We are expanding our network in the corporate space and I’ve been
tasked with finding suitable people / companies to open discussions
with

Looking forward to talk to you soon.

regards R K S

I’ve never met this fellow or heard of him in my life.

There’s no way that he can reasonably say that it’s been great to connect with me, because he hasn’t connected with me.

“Expanding our network in the corporate space” and “finding suitable people / companies to open discussions with” are pretty uninspiring.

Does this sort of approach actually work for anybody?

Two years ago, I was asked to answer this question on Quora:

How is SEO not a racket?

I’ve spent the last few years researching SEO companies and trying to learn how everything works. My company used a firm for a full year and here’s what I’ve learned:

1. There’s no standardized certification process to become a ‘specialist’. From what I understand anyone can learn the tricks of the trade relatively quickly from a mentor after being hired.
2. Virtually every company uses the same strategy to get your ranking up: keyword research + link building. So basically, companies charge 100 – 150 (or what a lawyer charges on average) an hour to write copy with keywords on relative sites that link back yours.
3. The results of having our site ‘optimized’ were barely noticeable, or could easily attributed to other factors, and the cost for a year of the service was 20k+.

There are virtually zero independent sources that I can find that have investigated this industry, which is enormous.

Can anyone tell me what is so specialized about the field that they are able to charge $150 an hour?

Here’s what I wrote:

I’m afraid the few years you spent researching SEO companies was not a wise investment, because there’s a lot you haven’t learned.

You’re right that there’s no “standardized certification process.” Some people see that as a good thing, because it allows SEOs to be judged by the value that they contribute instead of by a set of credentials that may or may not mean anything. But some people see it as a bad thing, because it allows charlatans to operate quite openly.

There have been several attempts to create some kind of certification, but until now it’s been difficult because the field is changing too rapidly (necessitating constant re-learning and discarding old techniques) and because the opacity of search engines’ ranking algorithms leaves open a lot of room for debate and discussion among SEOs about why or why not anything works. Moreover, who’s going to certify the certifiers? Who’s going to approach the top SEOs in the business and suggest that they take some classes and a test to get certified so they can continue doing their jobs? Search engines don’t want to get involved in this either, because it would involve either a test that’s super basic or giving away their trade secrets.

Can “anyone … learn the tricks of the trade relatively quickly from a mentor after being hired”? Kind of, but not really. A smart, motivated person with some skills will be able to pick up the basics of SEO quickly. But, as with many things in life, it takes hard work and a long time to get really good. I’ve been in SEO for years already and I can say that no two days are ever alike and that I face different and new types of challenges pretty regularly. And amassing the experience to be able to identify every SEO issue under the sun remains elusive because there are always new kinds of issues… because search engine algorithms evolve constantly… which is kind of the point of why SEOs are often (but by no means all the time) necessary.

Keyword research and link-building are, indeed, two of the cornerstones of a sound SEO strategy, though keyword research is ever more sophisticated (and difficult, with less data being passed by Google), while link-building is about 95% different from how it was five years ago. Trying to sum up all of SEO as “keyword research + link building” misses the point, though, and would be a bit like saying that being a doctor is just, “listen to the sick people + prescribe them medicine.” Ok, but what do you listen for, and how does that tell you which medicines to prescribe? And is there nothing else that a doctor does?

As far as your own site, I’m sorry to hear that you weren’t satisfied…

• Maybe you got ripped off by a scammer. Did your SEO company make any guarantees to you about ranking for certain keywords? Did they show you some of their successful clients’ sites? Did you talk to any of their clients to gauge their satisfaction?
• Maybe your SEO firm did shoddy keyword research or spammy link-building. Or maybe both, since they often go together.
• Maybe your product sucked and nobody wanted it.
• Maybe all the SEO work done on your site was perfect… but perfect for three years ago, not for this year.
• Maybe SEO just wasn’t a good fit for your site and some other form of online marketing would have been better suited.
• Maybe SEO is about a million times more complex than keyword research and link-building, and maybe there were any number of SEO issues that prevented your site from succeeding. Were there crawling or indexation problems? Duplication? Thin content? Uninformative title tags? Was your site ridiculously slow? Were crass commercial advertisements covering the whole thing?
• Maybe your competitors were hiring SEOs at the same time, and all the sites in your niche improved dramatically, but the gains canceled each other out.
• Maybe you have no conversion funnel. Maybe the SEO firm you hired never asked you what a “conversion” on your site would actually be.

The rates SEOs charge are based on supply and demand (lawyers, however, are members of a guild that restricts supply to raise hourly rates artificially). The range of income for SEOs is pretty vast. Good ones who can demonstrate their value can consequently earn a lot of money. Lousy ones don’t last very long, moving along from the spammy version of SEO to the spammy version of some other legitimate strategy, like affiliate marketing.

I encourage you to share your site here and let SEOs publicly dissect it and tell you what’s wrong with it. You should easily be able to tell who’s full of shit from who knows his shit. Or read the answers that professional SEOs have written on Quora and message one of them privately.

Now I see that somebody has paid me the ultimate compliment: my complete Quora answer has been ripped off, word for word, for the purpose of selling an extremely crappy (and possibly nonexistent) service on a website called “The Art of Service,” which bills itself as “a cutting edge IT Service Framework Company.”

The domain THEARTOFSERVICE.COM is registered to one Gerard Blokdyk of Samford, Queensland, Australia, whose email address is [email protected] and whose telephone number is 07328-97690 (+61 7328-97690 when dialing internationally).

Complain to Quora? I might consider it, except that Quora actually allows this sort of bullshit.

I’ve frequently seen people’s excellent Quora answers copied verbatim and published in online publications like Business Week and Slate with only something like “This article originally appeared in Quora” as attribution (shame, shame).

Of course, Gerard Blokdyk has given the same extraordinarily shitty attribution to me, without bothering to mention my name. It just seems worse in this case because, while Business Week and Slate are pageview mills, a business model that leads them perpetually to scramble for more eyeballs to view their pages to get more money from advertisers, Gerard Blokdyk’s business seems to provide nothing whatsoever of any value to anybody.

Normally google’s knowledge graph information appears in the upper right corner of a search results page:

I also frequently see it appearing at the very top of search results, pushing all the organic information down:

But here’s a new version of knowledge graph information appearing in search results that I had never seen until now:

I searched for original fairway to find out where my beloved local supermarket chain got its start. And I was surprised to see this information included directly in search results, in-line with the first result:

Headquarters: New York City Revenue: $810 million

While I assume this data comes from the knowledge graph, it’s also possible that this is a “smart answer” with information scraped from the ranking page, which is Wikipedia and which does include this information. I tend to suspect it’s not a smart answer, however, because the information was not relevant to my query.

Remember the definition list? Like its much more popular friends, ordered list and unordered list, definition list was an HTML element that allowed us to organize information within a document. When it came up in conversation recently, I decided to see if it was still around, so I searched in Google for definition list.

The top ten search results are all about the HTML definition list, answering my question adequately:

1. HTML dl tag – W3Schools
2. Lists in HTML documents
3. <dl> – HTML | MDN
4. Definition List – CSS-Tricks
5. Definition lists – misused or misunderstood? | Max Design
6. The dl element | HTML5 Doctor
7. Definition Lists | HTML Dog
8. Definition Lists. <DL>, <DT> and <DD> – BenMeadowcroft
9. Definition Lists Extension — Python Markdown
10. Learn How to Use and Style HTML Definition List

But instead of just letting their organic search result, which was very good, stand on its own, Google ruined it by inserting a totally irrelevant and incorrect scraped result before all the others:

I wanted information on the HTML element called “definition list.” I did not want a “definition” of the word “list.” Google understood this well enough for their organic search results, so there’s no reason they should have bungled it by including this awful thing ahead of them.