You’ve heard the story. Larry and Sergey drop out of school, start a company in a garage, then become billionaires. But will Larry and Sergey ever grow up? An article by John Heilemann at men.style.com

On August 19, Going Public Day for Google, and Larry Page and his comrades are eyeing the lavish breakfast laid out before them at the NASDAQ building: poached eggs perched on tiny pedestals, piles of canapés, pots of crème fraîche. In a few minutes, Larry will preside over the ceremonial opening of the market, then he’ll troop up the street to Morgan Stanley to watch Google’s stock start trading. At 31, Larry is about to cross the threshold into bona fide billionairehood. So you’d think he’d be as high as Courtney Love right now—but he doesn’t really look it. Buttoned up in a suit from Macy’s, strangled by a stiff white collar, he isn’t eating, isn’t schmoozing, and is only rarely smiling. Maybe it’s the absence of Sergey Brin, his fellow Google founder, who has chosen this morning, unaccountably, to stay back in Silicon Valley. Or maybe he’s just exhausted. But even when his elders approach and kiss his ass, Larry’s at a loss for words.

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I just noticed that Google is now "advertising" its Google desktop search tool. On Google.co.uk search for .

The competition for desktop search tool is strong and Google propably does not want to loose this battle!

I have just noticed a few referrers from http://c4.corp.google.com/xalerts and http://newsapps.corp.google.com/newsdb/dbupdate.mhtml to our seo blog

Do you have any "inside information" about these? Any suggestions? Are they related to Google News (our blog is indexed in Google News)?

Dan Thies writes a very interesting article about Keyword Competition Metrics where he analyses how you can define the level of competition for a search term. Dan looks primarily at three types of competition data:

• How many sites/pages are competing?
• How well linked are the top ranked sites?
• How much are people paying for PPC traffic?

The number of results given by Google for the query is a bad estimation of competitivity. Dan suggests to search for intitle:search inanchor:search instead, because your competitors may use the keywords in the title and in the anchor texts.

Orion has also posted a good post on SEW forums about Keyword Competitiveness. He points out that keyword competitiveness means different things for different people:

• Some have stated that search results is a measure of keyword competitiveness (KC).
• Others argue whether or not the search volume from Overture or WordTracker is a fair indicator of keyword competitiveness.
• Many claim that the search results from Google combined with the keyword volume from Overture provides a better estimate of the competitiveness of a term or phrase(s).
• Even others use a composite metric from keyword tracking tools coming from dissimilar meta engines. This is equivalent to combining dissimilar analytics and business intelligence metrics from dissimilar media outlets.

Interesting subject, stay tuned as we'll talk about it on that blog in the future.

Google has just released .

The Toolbar checksum

As you may know, the Google Toolbar has a built in code (in a DLL) for computing the checksum associated to each URL viewed in the browser. This checksum depends only on the URL and is needed to retrieve the PageRank displayed in the toolbar.

In September 2004, we already reported that Google has changed this checksum algorithm. On the same day, it was cracked and the code of this algorithm was released all over the web.

The new algorithm

Our tests show that Google has just changed this algorithm. Once again! :-)

Let's see some examples:

Tested URL: https://prweaver.com/

• With the last version (2.0.114), the checksum is
• With the new version (3), the checksum is 7163426257

Tested URL: https://prweaver.com/blog/

• With the last version (2.0.114), the checksum is 6831794505
• With the new version (3), the checksum is 4

Comments

I have noticed that the new checksums begin with '7', whereas the checksum of toolbar v2 begins with '6'.

At the time I'm writing this post, I can't find yet any other blogger reporting this change. I'm sure there is already a new crack somewhere on the web...

Why do you think Google is changing its checksum algorithm?

Chris and Gurtie at Search Guild have published a working script that webmasters can insert into their webpages that kills Google AutoLink links.

What you need to do:

• Insert the script anywhere in your html
• or link it using the