The man behind Stone Temple has got some great material that simply hasn't been getting the attention it deserves. First off, there's this from his interview of Tim Mayer:

Eric: We saw in the documentation for Search Builder that putting a site into the search engine triggers a basic crawl. Can you tell us more about how that works?

Tim: What it does is to evaluate your site and potentially perform a deeper crawl of your site. For example a lot of people want to create site search. With that, you want a comprehensive search of the site. Sometimes the site is fairly well indexed. What we're saying is if you use Search Builder, we'll potentially include more of your documents into our index.

It's an incentive for people to use the Search Builder product on their site.

Let me just replay that for you in case you glossed over it - Tim Mayer just told us that a very good way to get your site more comprehensively spidered by Yahoo! is to employ Search Builder. Done and done, Tim. I've got a few clients who will be signing up very quickly.

The other piece comes, ironically, from another interview, this one with a great compatriot of mine, Dennis Mortensen of Indextools (SEOmoz's analytics vendor of choice):

The tool itself doesn't really do anything; it's the analyst. You can set the tool up to do certain reports, to investigate something, or to alert you on specific metrics; but the tool itself doesn't really do anything, it's a reporting tool. You need some kind of analyst, or you need some kind of objective that you measure on and take action on, before there will be any return on investments on a web analytics tool. This is actually part of our sales pitch. If you are going out and spending $100,000 on an Omniture solution; that might be your budget. You can actually have an IndexTools solution for $30,000, and hire a web analyst for the remaining $70,000, and you will probably have ten times the effect on your web site results by doing that.

Whenever folks ask me about why I use Indextools over Omniture (despite the day-parting and a few other advanced features), I'm going to use that exact logic. Dennis' points about click fraud, cookie setting and why he often recommends Google Analytics are also worth reading.

Thanks, Eric - you've gone far beyond the scope of most interviews we see in this space and for that, we're in your debt.