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Boy am I ever glad we're getting close to the weekend. This has been one crazy week in our office and I'm be so looking forward to walking away from it all for at least one day.

Yesterday one of our computers that we use to store a lot of backups went down and normally we wouldn't be too stressed about that because a motherboard failure or a dead power supply wouldn't cause any problems in the hard drives but this wasn't any normal sort of failure. This failure was caused by ants - an entire ant colony crept into the box via some of the vents at the back and had set up home in the computer.

For a while we thought that they had got into the hard drives but fortunately they're fairly well sealed so the data was safe but the ants had sure got into just about everywhere else. While ants might look as though they're reasonably clean creatures ants that live in houses tend to carry a lot of fluff around with them and that can really clog up the inside of a computer.

Maybe it's time you stopped work, turned your computer off and then opened it up to see what critters are living inside your box. You might be surprised at what you find.

Paid search clicks declining
While the number of referrals to web sites from the search engines is increasing it seems that the number of referrals ... or the amount of traffic ... coming from the paid search listings is declining.

Hitwise is reporting that for the four weeks ending May 9 has dropped around 2.6 per cent on the same period last year. While you might expect some drop because of the current financial situation I would suggest that such a drop in the number of searches would be seen in both paid and organic but that's not the case.

As I said before, organic searches are growing so people are still out there looking for information, looking for things to buy ... but they're just not using the paid search links to find them. So it definitely pays to keep striving to reach page one of the organic search engine results pages even though it may look easier just to buy your way to the top of the paid searches.

New things from Google
Yesterday Google announced its latest move in taking traffic away from websites. It's called 'Rich Snippets' and it uses meta data from web pages to list important information on the search engine results pages. In many cases the information Google can display will mean that the people conducting the searches won't have to click through to a website at all because everything they want will be displayed when they do the search.

Of course Google calls it 'an enhancement' while more cynical webmasters call it scraping. Admittedly you don't have to make it easy for Google to scrap your important content because you need to add some code to your pages before they can grab those 'snippets'. However, as some people have pointed out, if you don't then will Google still list you on the first page of its results?

Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that if you set your page up so that Google can extract the important information you're also setting your page up so that every other scraper under the sun can steal your content too and that's interesting. You see, like everything else it does, Google is putting plenty of spin on this and it's claiming that by introducing these 'snippets' it will be better able to keep spam out of the results that are generated.

Google even suggests that it's in webmasters' interests to add in the code to their web pages that will allow Google to generate those snippets because it's a way of defeating spam. But if by including that code you're then allowing scrapers to rip off your content and include it as their own how is that doing anything to defeat spammers?

There's an old fairytale that tells the story of the family that killed the goose who laid the golden egg that seems appropriate here. If Google goes on taking the information we include on our web pages and displays it in a way that means surfers don't have to click through to our websites how long will it be before people will stop building websites because there's no longer any return on investment for them?

There's not much point controlling the Web if people aren't building websites now is there?

And that's where I must leave you for this week. I'm off to help Steve put together some analytics reports for a couple of our clients and then I'm going to have a little dig in our other computers to see what critters are hiding in there.