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Just when I thought that I had seen all of the cool Easter Eggs from Google Street View, those crazy Googlers give us some more blog bait. Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley teamed up with the Google Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side to put on an avant-garde performance for the street view cameras. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to drive through a marching band or a marathon, here you go:

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You can check out some behind the scenes video and pics from the full cast at http://www.streetwithaview.com.

If you are in search marketing or search engine optimization then you know what a wealth of data that Googles Insights for Search can provide. I probably use Insights at least a dozen times a day and this morning I came across the Google Insights Bookmarklet. This is a clever little bit of javascript that works like this; simply copy the bookmark onto your Firefox toolbar and after you have entered a search on Google or Yahoo you simply click the bookmark and it opens up the Insights page with your query already populated.

This keeps me from having to open a new tab and then go to the insights page and copy and paste my query, all of which takes about 4 seconds to complete. Mutliply that by, say, 10 x a day x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year and I have effectively saved myself 167 minutes a year that I can use to find other ways to save time.

I cannot express in words the frustration I have felt recently while trying to influence the results of Google Base. These feelings reached the boiling point last Friday when I placed a product search for a key term that one of my clients is adamant about ranking highly on. Here is a pic of the results:

As you can see, one site dominates the listings. This occurred sometime Thursday night and as of this Monday the results are still the same. Traditionally Google Base results are fairly spread out amongst competitors provided the proper key term is in the title and description. This is the first instance where I have seen this behavior on a highly competitive term.

Now, why could this be occurring? I can really only think of two reasons:

1) Google Base is temporarily insane and will eventually correct itself.

2) Google Base is undergoing some sort of change and this is simply a side effect.

3) This competitor’s feed has some sort of mojo that no other competitor has.

I think that it may be a combination of all three. Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the initial teaser results on the term do not reflect the same as the first page of product listings: