There’s been a lot of talk recently about Google censoring search results in China (here’s an article from Asia Times Online about the issue), but I haven’t seen much about Google kicking the German site of BMW out of its results for trying to game the search engine.

Financial Times had an interesting article last week about this. What BMW was up to was using doorway pages, a black hat SEO technique, to improve its standing in Google’s search results.

Bravo, Google.

Takeaway for marketers: There are no shortcuts. If you’re going to do it, do it right.

Despair.com has long been one of my favorite sites, an elegantly simple and brilliantly cynical twist on the Successories motivational products.

These new demotivational videos are terrific. You can even download them to your iPod: Watch them on the way to work so you’re properly demotivated before you start your listless day.

MyHeritage.com is a genealogy and photo-sharing site with a unique gimmick: Upload a photo of yourself, and the site matches your face against its database of 2,500 celebrity faces to see who you look like. The site ranks the celebrity images with percentage numbers, presumably to say that you look more like this celebrity (61%) than that one (57%).

After a brief registration process, I gave it a whirl. MyHeritage told me I looked like Margaret Thatcher. After Maggie, the top five rounded out to be: Quincy Jones, Werner von Siemens, Francis Bacon and Bill Gates.

All due respect to Baroness Thatcher, that’s pretty harsh. I tried a different photo and MyHeritage matched me up with with: Ansel Adams, Tim Rice, Robert Palmer, Kevin Costner and Axl Rose. Okay, Ansel’s a bit craggy, but that’s a list I can live with.

I tried a few celebrity photos. Bono looks like: Milos Forman, Bono (I should hope so! Though in the photo I uploaded, he had glasses on; in the photo returned by MyHeritage, he had no glasses on; maybe that’s why Milos looks more like Bono than Bono), Elena Dementieva, James D Watson and Billy Bob Thornton. For Groucho Marx, MyHeritage returned: Jean Reno, Tom Hanks, Jane Addams, Josemaria Escriva and Greta Garbo.

Nobody in the database matched up with Frylock from Aqua Teen or Stewie from Family Guy.

“I don’t like work … but I like what is in work: the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself, not for others — which no other man can ever know.”
—Joseph Conrad

Today marks the 78th birthday of Frank Frazetta, the massively talented fantasy illustrator whose compelling images on paperback covers in the ’60s and ’70s could make books sell regardless of what was written on the pages inside. Released in 2003, Painting With Fire is a terrific documentary about Frazetta; it’s running this month on IFC if you’re into this sort of thing.

Takeaway for marketers: Compelling counts.