Archive for February, 2009

by Mike Krumboltz

Last night, Bobby Jindal gave the Republican Party's response to President Obama's speech on the flagging economy. Blogs aren't exactly glowing over Gov. Jindal's folksy monologue. But while Jindal's style of speech left many pundits panning his performance, much of what he said had people scrambling for the Search box.

Jindal went through a checklist of the unusual ways the government plans to spend taxpayer dollars in the controversial stimulus. Volcano monitoring and a "magnetic levitation" train route from Las Vegas to Disneyland were the two big examples he targeted as wasteful. Here's the scoop on those two projects:

Volcano monitoring
Among the various pieces of juicy, juicy pork in Jindal's speech, this one resonated the most in Search. Queries on the term immediately spiked as people wondered what the heck volcano monitoring really is. It sounds a bit like something Dr. Evil might use to take over the world, but LiveScience has the real answer and it's not that nefarious.

Volcano monitoring is simply research conducted by the United States Geological Survey that aims to help "geologists understand the inner workings of volcanoes as well as providing warnings of impending eruptions." Some of the equipment involved in this pursuit includes seismic and volcano monitoring systems. Scientists argue that the $140 million price tag is small when one considers it could help prevent a natural disaster.

Magnetic levitation
A levitating train running from Las Vegas to the land that Mickey built? Sign us up! Alas, it's not quite as unnecessarily awesome as it sounds. According to a buzzing blog, "the proposed train route is not some playground for the SoCal and Sin City heathens." Apparently, it's a proposed transit option for "working-class people who need jobs and transit options."

In Search, people were desperate to know more about the technology behind the proposal. Queries on "what is magnetic levitation" floated upwards. A popular article from HowStuffWorks explains the benefits of the technology. "Maglev" trains can travel up to 310 miles per hour, because instead of using old-fashioned tracks, the trains "float over a guideway using the basic principles of magnets." No friction = fast trains. Sounds revolutionary, but these things already exist in Korea, Germany, Japan, and China. And, in a few years, perhaps Las Vegas, too.

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Beer pong (Searches increased by 883%). Reports on the Web are circulating about the dangers of the drinking game. To avoid oral herpes, mono, or the flu, don't share your cup, and sterilize that ball. All together now: eeeeewwwwwwww.
2. Bobby Jindal (+612%). Is it just us, or does the Louisiana governor sound like Kenneth the Page from "30 Rock?" The Republican delivered the response to Obama's congressional address. Read more about Jindal in the Buzz Log.
3. Northern Trust Bank (+341%). A recipient of the bank bailout that recently handed out pink slips turns around and threw some big money on lavish employee junkets. Perhaps the "trust" bank should think up a new name.
4. Ashera cat (+285%). Cost of owning an exotic breed: $22,000. Walking said 30-pound cat-leopard on a leash? Priceless.
5. Let the good times roll french (+272%). Parlez-vous Mardi Gras?

by Vera H-C Chan

A record-breaking stingray capture, by the numbers:

• 1 rod and line


• 90 minutes for one British biologist (with help) to reel in the freshwater fish


• 13 men to drag said fish onto a boat


• 125 pounds—that's the difference between the stingray's weight at 771 pounds and the previous record rod-&-reel capture of a catfish

The Thailand capture of the massive female stingray was part of a program to tag such residents of the Maeklong River in Thailand. The captive, part of a "vulnerable species" listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, measured a hefty 7 feet by 7 feet. That doesn't include the 10-foot-long poisonous tail.

Such creatures are dangerous, of course: Famed Australian TV personality Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin died from a stingray barb at the Great Barrier Reef in 2006.

The numbers currently put one Ian Welch on the world record books. (Pictures of Welch posing with his female companion can be found here.) The stingray's resistance nearly dunked Welch into the river, and he was literally saved by the seat of his pants when a crewmate grabbed his trousers. 

Another reason that this marine fish is so huge: She's pregnant. (Cue soap-opera gasp.) After she had been towed to the bank (too big to be onboard the boat), she was duly marked, had DNA samples removed, and returned to the river whence she unwillingly came. Welch gave her a farewell smooch, then spent the rest of the day with a cold beer and memories of her.

By the way, one number isn't known: the exact stingray population count, which has shrunk 20 percent in the past decade. With this lady's help, at least one more will be added to this number...and with a tale to tell.

Back in December, we launched a YouTube Channel to make it easier to learn about Google Analytics. Now it looks like some users are giving us a run for our money! Rich Brooks of Portland, Maine has created a video series explaining how to use Google Analytics to enhance your online marketing efforts. Check it out.

• Google Analytics: How People are Behaving on your Site
  
• Where Does Your Traffic Come From?
• Using Google Analytics Filters for Better Traffic Reports
• The Google Analytics Dashboard
  

It would be great to see an Analytics video from every state. Do you have a video? Add a comment and let us know!

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics Team

by Claudine Zap

Four is definitely a crowd. That's the pronouncement of Paula Abdul, who would like to keep the number of judges on "American Idol," now in its eighth season, to the cozy, Kara DioGuardi-less, three.

It's not that Paula Abdul doesn't like judge number four. According to OK! Magazine, she and the newest addition get along just fine, but "…We tried four judges before and it doesn't work." Abdul's reasoning: It interrupts the show's flow with four people weighing in instead of the more efficient three. Translation: Paula Abdul gets less talk time.

Besides Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and the infamously snotty Simon Cowell have been a winning combination for the reality show as they dole out pronouncements while whittling down the contestants in search of the best songster. Viewers also get to weigh in by phone voting.

Maybe fans should be asked to vote on the judges, too. While Paula may prefer to be the queen bee of "Idol" judging, online searches for both divas remain high. Abdul does have an edge when it comes to "hot" and "QVC jewelry."

Good thing Abdul's working on side projects. She says her contract is up after this season, and hinted she may not return.

by Vera H-C Chan

How green was Jocassee Valley, until the regional power company built a nearby dam and gradually flooded it? One hotel owner protested the development and succeeded in having Attakulla Lodge be the only structure from being bulldozed. Ultimately, he couldn't stop the valley from becoming a lake.

Now, almost 40 years later, local divers found the hotel still standing...well, submerged under 300 feet of water, as well as parts of the old cemetery and a few trees. The underwater trip down memory lane aired on HLN cable show "News To Me" on Feb. 21, and clips have been circulating online, triggering searches for "lake jocasee."

No plans to re-open. Guests wanting a temporary watery rest will have to look elsewhere. In the meantime, the video can be seen on HLN sister channel, CNN.

by Vera H-C Chan

Fat Tuesday seemed a pretty good day for a boy from Baton Rouge to make his primetime debut.

Well before he was given the spotlight to respond to President Obama's address on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Bobby Jindal has been groomed for for Republican greatness. His 2006 Louisana win to be the nation's first South Asian-American governor provoked Web interest in the up-and-comer.

Then, his April 2008 "Tonight Show" appearance was thought to signal his willingness to being thrown into John McCain's vice-presidential pool of likely candidates. Four months later, as citizens impatiently waited for news on running mates, Jindal consistently ranked among the 5 most-searched Republican veep possibilities (although reportedly he had bowed out of consideration so as not to be on a losing ticket). And when the GOP did some deep introspection following Election Day, searches on possible "2012" contenders included Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Jindal. 

His Tuesday night response once again brings in a fresh tide of questions, onine and off, about who is Bobby Jindal. Below is some more background on the man who may define the GOP's future.

• Why Was He Chosen to Give the Republican Response?: 37-year-old Jindal snagged the national spotlight again as the first governor to reject certain stimulus package handouts, specifically those expanding unemployment benefits. However the governor, who argued his case on "Meet the Press," will take monies for transportation investment.


• American Dream Quotient: Jindal cheered Obama's "personal story," and brought up his own Punjabi Indian parents "from a distant land," as well as his father's childhood poverty. According to a detailed NOLA.com family profile, Jindal's mom came from a well-off family, and emigrated to the U.S. (while pregnant) to do graduate work in nuclear physics. Dad grew up a poor child among nine siblings. Despite the class differences, they both belonged to the same caste.


• What's in a Name?: His legal name is Piyush Jindal, but at age 4, he demanded to be called Bobby—inspired by "The Brady Bunch." Notably, Obama went by Barry growing up, before reclaiming Barack in his college days.


• Question of Faith: Born a Hindu, he converted to Catholicism. An extensive Esquire profile traces his religious shift back to high school. 


• By the Book: He double-majored in biology and public policy because his father wanted him to be a doctor, but Jindal was a natural-born wonk. He went for political science studies at Oxford after getting a Rhodes scholarship, an honor he shares with Bill Clinton.


• Republican Personified: Rush Limbaugh called him "the next Ronald Reagan" (Jindal has an excerpt of his Limbaugh interview on his website). The governor is pro-life and voted for a Constitution amendment to restrict marriage to male-female unions. Day jobs include being a George W. Bush's appointee for an assistant secretary position in the Department of Health and Human Resources, a U.S. congressman, and House assistant majority whip.


• Picture-Perfect Family: His wife Supriya Jolly Jindal got degrees in chemical engineering, business, and (almost) marketing. They have three children: Selia, Shaan, and Slade. The last popped out so quickly, dad delivered No. 3 with nurse-assisted telephone instructions. Yes, the pre-med studies probably helped too.


• Does Jindal Really Want to Run in 2012? No and yes. Asked on "Meet the Press," the governor said he was focused on a second-term 2011 run, but wouldn't rule out the bigger 2012 race. A Democratic strategist though calls Jindal's aspirations "one of the worst-kept secrets in Louisiana."

As far as the current Oval Office occupant is concerned, Obama thinks Jindal's spoiling for a contest. During his Monday press conference following the meeting with governors, he chided stimulus package naysayers for politics as usual and "looked at" Jindal when he said, "There's going to be ample time for campaigns down the road."

Perhaps. Then again, the Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention fell four years and four months before he secured the Oval Office. By that timeline, Jindal's primetime debut is already seven months behind schedule...but at least it's done. Meanwhile, laissez les bon temps rouler.

We wanted to let you know that an update was released earlier today that will improve Internet Explorer’s reliability for users running the Windows 7 Beta. The update is now available via Windows Update, and can also be downloaded via Microsoft Update.

In this post we’ll discuss how we used the information that we’re receiving from Windows 7 Beta customers to determine the reliability fixes to include in this update.

We use the term “reliability” to broadly encompass all types of stability problems including crashes, hangs, memory leaks, etc. When we measure reliability we rely primarily on instrumentation built into Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7. For example, the Customer Experience Improvement Program enables us to better understand how customers use our products, and Windows Error Reporting provides detailed information about the problems customers encounter. Shortly after the Windows 7 Beta became publically available these systems began to send information back to Microsoft.

After a week of monitoring this feedback we felt that we had reached a representative sampling of our customers. We found that approximately 10% of customers who had downloaded the Windows 7 Beta had experienced some type of reliability problem in IE8. We also found that a small number of users were experiencing crashes on a more regular basis and that about 1.5% of all Internet Explorer sessions had encountered a crash. This is relatively good for a pre-release version of Internet Explorer running on a beta operating system. We were also pleased to see that the new IE8 Crash Recovery feature was successfully helping customers recover from these crash situations 94% of the time.

One of the approaches that we use to analyze this data is called a failure curve. A failure curve is essentially a bar chart where each bar represents a unique failure (crash, hang, etc.). The height of the bar represents the number of occurrences in the last 30 days. Below you can see the failure curve for Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 Beta. The color indicates whether the failure is caused by Internet Explorer or a 3rd party toolbar or extension running inside of Internet Explorer.

 

As you can see about 40% of our reliability problems were caused by Internet Explorer and about 60% by 3^rd party components. Another interesting point is that 17 unique issues account for 50% of all reported reliability problems. Because users generally have lots of toolbars and extensions installed, it’s common to see this many 3^rd party components at the top of our failure curve.

Once we had the failure curve set up we began investigating each unique issue starting from the top of the curve. We started to understand the technical details of our own issues and developed fixes for them. For 3^rd party problems we worked closely with our partners to address each issue either through an update to the 3^rd party code, by working around the problem inside of the Internet Explorer code base, or as a last resort by preventing the 3^rd party component from loading.

Most of the issues that we discovered through the Beta are fixed in the Release Candidate 1 which is now available for Windows Vista and Windows XP. We also wanted some of these fixes to reach our Windows 7 Beta users now.  We decided to piggyback onto this first update for the Windows 7 Beta.

This update will address many of the top crashes and hangs from the Windows 7 Beta, which includes those caused by Internet Explorer as well as 3^rd party components like Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat, and several others. We have also included fixes to enable printing PDF files and an architectural change which improves cookie management. This update does not contain other changes introduced between the Windows 7 Beta and Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1.

We encourage everyone to download this update and provide feedback. Your feedback was the driving force behind many of the decisions we made and we appreciate your continued participation during the Windows 7 Beta cycle.

Herman Ng
Program Manager

by Claudine Zap

If shouting was a qualification for starting a political party, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli would be running for office.

The unlikely insta-hero for the anti-stimulus crowd came in the form of a televised rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Santelli called for a "New American Tea Party" to protest the Obama housing plan, which, he said (yelled) rewards "bad behavior." Nothing like finding your voice when you're already an on-air cable reporter, surrounded by like-minded derivatives traders. But the people love a good kerfuffle, and Santelli has become a YouTube sensation, with almost 800,000 views of the Rick rant.

As Salon noted, "The right wing hasn't been so excited since Obama used the fateful expression 'spread the wealth,'" in his now-infamous interview with Joe the Plumber.

The idea of a new tea party has caught on, at least online. Already, stimulus-haters are causing the term "New American Tea Party" to surge in Search. There's a website and a Facebook group, along with protests planned around the country, and sponsored by various anti-tax groups.

Picture a bunch of revolutionaries dumping tea into the Boston Harbor. Now, instead of rebellious colonists, imagine Chicago traders armed with Red Bulls. Get the idea?

Still, from the school of "be careful what you wish for," U.S. News pointed out on its blog that the original Boston Tea Party actually resulted in more expensive tea. How about yelling about that?