It’s Christmas time, a time for making wish lists that may or may not be fulfilled. What do you want for Christmas? What needs to be done before the family gets here? All of these questions usually lead to comprehensive lists that tend to rule our lives during the month of December.
Now you can add Google to the list of list recipients, thanks to Pandia.com. In an article titled, What we want from Google this Christmas, Pandia lays out 16 requests of the search engine king, most of which are quite reasonable. For this article, I’ll pull some highlights out of Pandia’s article, but if you want the full text, you’ll have to jump over there. Some of these are self-explanatory:
Make Blogger work
Get rid of spam
Buy a good bookmarking service
The Google Bookmarks service doesn’t really work, does it?
Give us real numbers
We would really like to know how many sites are linking to us, but your link command (link:www.pandia.com) is totally unreliable. We know, because Yahoo! sometimes reports 1000 times more links than you do, and we doubt that’s due to a larger database.
Spend millions on click fraud research
Give us a well functioning Gdrive
Get out of China
Continue working on Google Books
…An interesting list, to say the least. The last one about Google Books catches the eye because it goes against something Danny Sullivan said during his keynote at the Chicago SES. Sullivan isn’t comfortable with the Google’s book scanning project because of the copyright issues Google skirts when they index someone else’s work. About Google Books, Pandia offers:
Your book search may be the beginning of something wonderful – the ability to search the text of most books available in one place.
They also caution Google:
However, maybe you should communicate more clearly that you respect the intellectual property rights of the authors, and that you will not give searchers access to the whole text unless the copyright owners agree to this or they are compensated financially.
That particular statement engages the issues Sullivan spoke of in Chicago.
Needless to say, the majority of the search blogs jumped all over Pandia’s article and this includes Matt Cutts. One of Pandia’s requests had to do with a more accurate PageRank score in the Google toolbar. Matt addressed this head on saying Google does not want webmasters fixating on their green bar score because there are “over 100 other factors that go into our scoring,” which is a reasonable enough explanation, however, I wonder if that will satiate the masses.
Pandia’s last request had to do with wanting a Google travel mug, something Cutts addresses as well. If you want a Google travel mug, all you have to do is post a response to his blog entry with the phrase “DO NOT APPROVE – THIS COMMENT CONTAINS THE SECRET ADDRESS OF PANDIA HEADQUARTERS” in the text and they will send you a mug. Be sure to use a unique email address if you do intend on asking for a Google mug.
As for myself, the only request I’ve been able to think of is introduce the Mac OS-like dock navigation scheme you teased us with a while back (Hotdaddy,com, which used to be XtraGoogle, still has a mock-up of what that scheme could look like). That would go a long way towards solving some of the navigation issues the Google homepage faces (mainly a place to list the services they offer).
Add to 
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
