Adoption.com and thousands of other websites have migrated their site search to Google SiteSearch, which is a free solution providing much higher quality search results.  (To test this technology, do a search in the search box on the upper right of the Adoption.com website.)  However, the biggest problem has been that Google SiteSearch will only show pages in the results that are contained in the Google search index.  For example, Google does not index all of the “deep” content on the Adoption.com website, such as all of the records in the Adoption.com Reunion Registry or the posts in the Adoption.com Forums.  As a result, the websites which use Google SiteSearch are usually not allowing their site visitors to search all of the website content.

Also, Google SiteSearch has not allowed any preferencing of content if a website owner wanted a certain section of content to show up higher in search results than another section.  However, Google SiteSearch has been the best option available, so website owners have continued to use it.

Google has just announced a premium version of Google SiteSearch that solves these problems.  For a fee, Google will now include all of the content from the website within the search results of Google SiteSearch.  Also, with this paid service, website owners can preference content on their site that they would like to show higher or lower in search results.

The pricing can be moderately expensive if you have a very large number of pages of content on your website.  However, for the quality of search results that Google SiteSearch provides, along with the ability to monetize those search results through Google Adsense, most website owners will probably feel that the pricing is fair.

In examining the history of visionary companies we were struck by how often they made some of their best moves not by detailed strategic planning, but rather by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and–quite literally accident.

This week I read an interview in Founders at Work with Paul Buchheit of Google. Paul was the creator of Gmail and developed the first Adsense concept. He also suggested the now-famous Google axiom “Don’t be evil.” The part of the interview that stood out most to me was that before Paul began the Gmail project, he didn’t receive a detailed spec with features, as you would expect from a company such as Google and a project of the magnitude of Gmail. Instead, Paul was given the non-specific charter to work on some type of email or personalization project. They just said, “We think this is an interesting area.” Paul went on to create the Gmail email program that has helped to revolutionize email.

Google didn’t try to micromanage Paul Buchheit. They hired a very talented employee, pointed him in a general direction, and then allowed him to do something even more amazing than what they were expecting. Google has done this repeatedly. Each of the Google developers is allowed to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing. In this way Google tries many new projects, and then runs with the ones that work.

The authors of Built to Last call this concept “branching and pruning”:

The idea is simple: If you add enough branches to a tree (variation) and intelligently prune the deadwood (selection), then you’ll likely evolve into a collection of healthy branches well positioned to prosper in an ever-changing environment.

Note how essential the pruning step is in this process. If we just try a lot of things and don’t prune, we will have a lot of projects falling somewhere in the mediocre to good range. To have a tree filled with great branches, or a company filled with great projects, we have to discipline ourselves to continuously prune away the less healthy branches or business concepts as we continue to add new branches or ideas.

William McNight was the visionary CEO of 3M, one of history’s most innovative companies. 3M utilized this “branching and pruning” concept extensively to develop products such as Post-It notes and Scotch tape. 3M allowed their team members to sprout tiny “twigs” in response to problems or ideas. Most of these twigs did not develop into anything. However, each twig that showed promise would be allowed to grow into a branch or even a tree.

3M developed a system which created a culture of continuous innovation. The following elements were implemented by 3M to create this systematic innovation:

• 15% Rule – allowing people to spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing and initiative. 3M executive Geoffrey Nicholson said “a lot of the things [that led to the Post-it] were accidental.” However, if 3M employees had not been doodling with weird adhesives during their 15% time, 3M would not have invented the Post-it note.
• 25% Rule – 25% of annual sales need to come from products introduced in previous 5 years.
• Golden Step Award – for team members responsible for new 3M business ventures.
• Genesis Grants – internal venture capital to develop ideas.
• Technology Sharing Awards – for team members who developed technology and successfully shared it with other divisions.
• Own Business – 3Mers who championed a new product could get the opportunity to run it as her own project or division.
• New Product Forums – sharing the latest innovations across the company.
• Dual Ladder - allows technical and professional team members to move up without sacrificing their research or professional interests.
• Problem-Solving Missions – small teams sent to customer sites to solve specific problems.
• High Impact Programs – each division selects one to three priority products to get to market in a short time frame.
• Profit Sharing – to stimulate individual investment.

McNight’s philosophy was captured in the following phrases which became part of the 3M culture:

• Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it might sound at first.
• Encourage; don’t nitpick. Let people run with an idea.
• Hire good people, and leave them alone.
• If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.
• Encourage experimental doodling.
• Give it a try–and quick!

McNight understood that not all experimentation would prove favorable:

Mistakes will be made [by giving people the freedom and encouragement to act autonomously], but… the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it is dictatorial and undertakes to tell those under its authority exactly how they must do their job. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative and it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

Johnson & Johnson is another example of effectively implementing this concept of trying a lot of things, keeping the things that work, and quickly getting rid of the things that don’t. R.W. Johnson Jr. said, “Failure is our most important product.” He understood that companies must accept failure as an essential part of this innovation process.

In conclusion, the process of “trying a lot of things, keeping what works and getting rid of what doesn’t work”, if understood and harnessed, can be a powerful process to stimulate progress. For this to work I need to experiment with a lot of ideas, nurture the good ideas, quickly get rid of the ideas that don’t work, and accept failure as an essential element of the innovation process.

Find Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies at Amazon.com

(source for much of this article: Built to Last)

Google Grants are awarded in the form of free AdWords advertising.  The AdWords advertising helps these organizations increase awareness to their causes and traffic to their websites. If your organization already uses AdSense program, it is not eligible to apply for a grant.

Find out if your organization is eligible.

This new feature is powered by FeedBurner and only took a few minutes to implement. Not only does this service send my subscribers updates via email, but it also provides many other services to monetize and promote my blog. Last year Google purchased FeedBurner for a rumored price of $100 million, although Google will not confirm the price. This is another great example of the many free services which Google provides to small businesses for free. See my recent blog on this topic.

FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds.  FeedBurner tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

• According to Nielsen/NetRatings, FeedBurner is growing faster than MySpace and Digg with 385% traffic growth.
• Total feeds: 1,507,966
• Number of publishers: 846,311
• Number of podcast and videocast feeds: 207,436

Google was visionary with this acquisition, jumping in as a market leader in feed-based advertising. This is a newer type of advertising which attaches contextual advertising to email and RSS feeds. Google can afford to give away this amazing service for free because it hopes the feed owners will choose to use Google Adsense to monetize their feeds, which can now be conveniently done in FeedBurner, with the click of a button.

(1) INNOVATION IS THE GOAL, NOT PERFECTION

Some programmers prefer to code for months or years on a project before launch so that they can release the perfect product.  Google prefers the “launch early and launch often” strategy.” 

Marissa says that she tells her developers, ‘The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants–and making it great.’ The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.”

(2) SEEK IDEAS FROM EVERY SOURCE

Google has a list of ideas where employees can vote and comment on ideas.

(3) ALLOWING TIME TO INNOVATE

Google allows developers to spend one day per week (20% of their time) working on any project they want to.  This time for innovation has lead to many of Google’s successful new products and services, which Google owns, of course. 

(4) MORPH A PROJECT INSTEAD OF KILLING IT

If the market is not responding to a product, instead of dropping it Google tries to modify the product into something that the market needs.  This exercise becomes an exercise in innovation.

(5) HELP EMPLOYEES SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE WITH EACH OTHER

Each Monday employees write an email with a bullet list of 5-7 items that they did the previous week.  Then the data is made available to the other employees in a format that makes it easy to find out who is working on certain projects.  Google also shares massive amounts of data with their employees so that they know what is happening in the business and what is important.

(6) CREATE THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE

Instead of focusing on what makes the most money, Google focuses on what is going to be the best for the users.  By putting the users first, though, the money usually follows.

(7) MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON DATA NOT POLITICS

Design often becomes a very political issue because different people have different opinions of which design elements they like better.  Instead, Google performs large numbers of tests on different ideas and elements, and select those which prove to be the most effective, regardless of who likes them.

Marissa says, “We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We’re trying all those different things.”

(8) CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS

Marissa says that, “People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: ‘We know you said it was impossible, but we’re going to do this, this, and that to get us there.’”

(9) HIRE BRILLIANT STAFF

Even though Google has a thousand times more employees than when Marissa started, she feels that “the types of people who work here and the types of things that they like to work on [hasn’t changed]. It’s almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google.” Google is only hiring the best and the brightest, and because they have created that culture, they are able to recruit and retain those kinds of people.

Last week Google launched yet another of these free tools, Google Ad Manager, which I will describe later in the blog. This application will radically alter how we do business, how much time and money it costs us to do business and the amount of revenue we can generate from doing business.

Here are a few of my favorite web-based applications for small businesses provided by Google (and a few other companies):

Google Custom Search allows website owners to add powerful site search capabilities for free. Our companies spent tens of thousands of dollars licensing and developing technologies, such as Nutch/Lucene and Atomz to power our site search engines, and the quality of search results was never adequate. Google provides its site search solution with advanced features such as misspelling suggestions, and synonym searches. Not only does Google offer site search for free, but it also incorporates keyword-targeted ads that allow website owners to generate revenue. Competitors, such as Yahoo offer similar products, but the quality of the Google site search appears to be superior.

Google Adsense allows website owners to make money from advertising from the first day their site launches. I remember in the early days of the Internet that new websites might go years without substantive advertising revenues, which were sold in-house, as the sites grew to be popular enough that customers wanted to advertise on them. Then I remember additional years where websites flushed thousands of dollars of unsold advertising inventory down the toilet each month. I remember being elated when Google began to provide the ability for website publishers to put targeted advertising on their sites, fill remnant inventory, and make money without a sales force. Many competitors exist in this space, such as Yahoo and MSN, but Google seems to deliver a higher return for publishers because it has more advertisers bidding competitively.

Google Adwords allows website owners to run effective, targeted advertising campaigns for inexpensive prices. Other than free advertising, Google may be the most effective large-scale advertising on the planet. I remember when Yahoo used to charge $50 or more for every 1000 ad impressions they would deliver for on search results for the keyword “adoption”. Website publishers can now get targeted advertising for their sites for a fraction of that cost. Further, those campaigns can be turned on or off at any time, can be targeted based on geography and other characteristics of the visitors, and provide statistics that allow for amazing analysis of return on investment. Yahoo, MSN and Ask also provide similar solutions which make sense for publishers to use in conjunction with Google Adwords.

GoogleTalk provides free communication tools for remote staff members, such as instant messaging and voice chat. We used to pay ridiculous amounts to call employees in other countries. Now, we know when remote employees arrive and are working by when we see them log in to GoogleTalk. When they are working, we can effectively communicate with them with the instant messenger, and essentially call them and talk to them for free with the voice chat. MSN messenger does provide video chat, but GoogleTalk seems to be more reliable for voice chat, which usually is very adequate. This tool does more than anything to facilitate remote teams to work together effectively.

Gmail and Google Apps proved the ability for site owners to get free email hosting and spam filtering for their domain. We spent tens of thousands of dollars combating SPAM over the years when we hosted our own email. Not only does Google do a dramatically superior job filtering spam, but our mail doesn’t have all the downtime issues we had previously, it has a world-class web-based interface, and it is free. I also love how easy it is to find archived messages with their search feature.

Google Analytics provides free website analytics or statistics for website for free. Although this Google service still needs some improvement, and needs to run faster, the free pricing is incredible, when some of its competitors want to charge sites like mine thousands of dollars a month. Quantcast and Compete.com offer solutions which we need to test.

Google Ad Manager was launched in beta last week. It provides a free web-based system that allows website publishers to manage and deliver advertising on their sites. It has advanced features, such as geographic targeting and support for graphical, video and text ads. Our companies may have spent $150,000 or more to ad features to our ad serving technology, which Google Ad Manager now offers for free.

Google offers many other valuable features which businesses can integrate, such as:

• Google Maps (ad mapping to your website or an interactive map for site visitors),
• Google Calendar (build and share calendars),
• Google News Alerts (receive the most recent news for your industry),
• Google Notebook (clip and share info as you surf the web) and
• Google Docs (shared documents and spreadsheets like Microsoft Office).

Even though these Google applications are revolutionary and invaluable to small businesses, many other companies provide valuable free or very inexpensive solutions which are phenomenal tools for small businesses. Some of my favorites are:

• CraigsList (free classifieds),
• Backpack (shared to do lists),
• eLance (freelance project marketplace),
• eBay (auctions to buy or sell almost anything),
• DomainTools (domain name research tools),
• RememberTheMilk (task management and reminders),
• Central Desktop (collaborate, communicate and share files),
• Wesabe (money management and tracking),
• LinkedIn (networking),
• HiRise (contact and client relationship manager),
• YouSendIt (send large files),
• FreshBooks (time tracking and invoices),
• Amazon.com aStore or WebStore (get paid to sell Amazon.com products and let them handle the fulfillment),
• WordPress or Blogger (add a free blog to your site) and
• eNom (many free features with domain registration, such as world-class DNS).

Over the last eleven years, our companies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing and supporting applications which Google and others now offer for free. I expect that if the value of all these free services being used by businesses were valued, that Google would be the largest angel investor in small businesses.

Small businesses need to thoroughly explore all of the Google offerings to ensure they are maximizing the benefits that they can receive from these amazing, free or low-cost web applications. Because of all the free or inexpensive applications which are now available, this is an exciting time to start a small business online. eBusinesses can use these tools to launch more successful projects in a shorter period of time and with a smaller initial investment. Thank you Google.