We're in the top ten on Puerto Rico Tourism

"Puerto Rico: Shit or get off the pot" has been popping up in my Google searches for Puerto Rico Tourism, which is cool, I guess.

Number 9 & 10 on my search*

* of source, with personalization in Google's PageRank formula your results may very. Especially if you're sharing you're browsing history with them. Then it becomes very unlikely that we could get the same results, even if we do the same search.

Puerto Rico's Cultural Climate - Summer 2008

During any given time period, the moods of a nation, their curiosities, and their needs vary. In ancient times, you know like before Google, now to be referred to as B.G, the cultural temperature of a nation was discovered by asking people questions.

Since the arrival of the Internet and our savior Google, now to be referred to as A.G. we do the asking and Google just runs some database reports and ba-da-boom ba-da-bing, we quickly have a good idea what's on our minds. Over at Google, they refer to this feature as Google Zeitgeist. Note: zeitgeist means "the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era."

Puerto Rico - Top Gaining Google Queries: June 2008*

1. snake
2. celula (cell)
3. hemafrodita
4. Mapa de Puerto Rico
5. caravelas
6. marisa miller (model)
7. lajas
8. fallen angel
9. fruity loops
10. Zooey Deschanel
11. volcom
12. ocean blue
13. Indiana Jones
14. naruto wallpaper
15. letras chinas (Chinese characters)

* These are not the most searched for terms, these are the search terms that increased the most from May to June. Google hasn't updated the site with July's results.

Not to be outdone, Yahoo, in association with Telemundo has started producing their own zeitgeist, called "10 Principales Búsquedas." While these search terms are not strictly from searches in Puerto Rico, they do give us the best view into what people are searching for in Yahoo.

Top 10 Yahoo/Telemundo Queries: July 2008*

1. Sin Senos no hay Paraíso
2. Miss Universo del 2008
3. Animales
4. Monica Bellucci
5. Amor y sexo
6. Aracely Arámbula
7. Galilea Montijo
8. Riesgos de la marihuana
9. Ingrid Betancourt
10. Alimentos orgánicos

* These results are from July, which Yahoo has not yet posted.

Conclusion

What's this all mean? What jumps out at me is the complete absence of any terms relating to the economy, energy, gasoline, credit cards, or what we can call matters of finance or running a home. I think, like television, most people are using the Internet to entertain themselves and/or distance themselves from the day to day worries of life.

I think the Yahoo list makes more sense. There are many search terms related to the events of June, which you would expect them to rank high in the total number of searches. However, while an interesting perspective, the Google list is like WTF, hermaphrodites? You have to wonder what kind of thought process, or links one has to go through to end up with the idea "Hey, let's look up hermaphrodite on the Internet!"

Another difference I would wager is that the Google list represents a younger demographic. The list has many terms that I'd associate with searches made from users between the ages of 16 and 24.

On the other hand the Yahoo list represents, current events, and lacks anything of specific interest to a younger generation. Then there's "Riesgos de la marihuana." Seriously, how many kids are going to search for that? The search term they are more likely to use would be more like "How to roll a blunt" or whatever that is in Spanish.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about snakes. If you get bold, go ahead and share them in a comment.

Flickr Creative Commons Contributor: Gerald Yuvallos

Google and Adobe rescue local Flash websites

Well I'll be [...fill in your favorite expression for being shocked and amazed at the same time, mine is...] a monkey's uncle. Which depending on which side of the argument for the Flying Spaghetti Monster you fall, might be true. Apparently Adobe has heard the cries of anguish and of gnashing teeth of the millions of website owners whose sites were invisible to the all powerful Google, whose 3rd commandment was "Those shalt not use Flash (that is, if you want to your site indexed by our search engine)."

Many of you out there have heard my rants on the over-use of Flash in websites built here in Puerto Rico. Well today Adobe announced that they have developed a special Flash application player especially for the major search engines. The new reader will permit the search engines to run a Flash movie as if the search engine were a regular user of the Rich Internet Application (RIA). With the reader the search engines will finally be able to understand what's inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.

Both Google and Yahoo worked closely with Adobe engineers to develop the new Flash player, which to be clear is ONLY for the search engines. Except for improved search results, Internet users like you or I will not be affected. According to Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on Google's indexing team:

"the new player will better index all of the text that users can see as they interact with a Flash file. If a website contains Flash, the textual content in the Flash files will be used when Google generates a snippet for the website. Also, the words that appear in Flash files will be used to match query terms in Google searches."

Fracking Amazing News for Puerto Rico Websites

This is amazingly fantastic news for the thousands and thousands of local websites which were done with Adobe Flash. Essentially they will immediately begin to show up in search results without having to do anything. So while local website owners benefit immensely from this announcement, it doesn't necessarily mean that websites will automatically start receiving first page search results. Standard search engine optimization will still be necessary to achieve those types of results. In addition, Adobe recommends that sites make use of deep links so that links coming into a site will drive relevance to the specific parts of an application.

While Google has already implemented the new technology, Yahoo (like everything else as recent events indicate) is lagging behind. Adobe promises to extend the benefit of the new technology to other search engines by exploring ways to make it more broadly available.