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It seems Google can't please anyone these days.
What is the root of it all?
a) The Florida update?
b) Big - just plain bigness (everyone loves to pick on the big guy)?
c) Poor management?
d) Public relations dept screw up?
e) Competitors planting seeds of division?
f) All of the above?
Agreed, and not just webmasters --the public, most notably via the financial/business press, has come to recognize search as a corporate, profit-driven venture and not just a nice, free service. G is just the lead dog and is feeling the whip.
>seems Google can't please anyone these days
Yep, I agree. Somewhere over the last 5 or 6 months, it seems that G went from 'beloved & trusted flower-child geeks' to 'money-grubbing corporate SOBs,' --maybe it was the IPO run-up? I do think that the timing was waaaay off the mark in Gmail in the US, coming after the public's interest in privacy has been refocused on scumware, the DNC list, and the (obvious failure of) Can-Spam. Had they released it last year, it would likely have been greeted with love & adulation from G fan-dom.
Sure:
How webmasters feel about a search engine is 100% directly proportional to the number of referrals said search engine sends them.
</end of story>
disagree with that 100%. However could be directly related to the consistancy (or lack thereof) of traffic and the algo.
But how the general public feel about a search engine is dirtectly related to their ability to find what they are looking for.
And slapping the webmaster down and delivering results only people with PHDs can appreciate is another story.
Webmasters will not be the final decision on Google's fate, the searcher will. The information GG gleams from this forum tells him nothing about user experience.
Boomer
How a webmasters feels about a search engine is 100% directly proportional to the number of referrals said search engine sends them.
Boy, that must be confusing if you have lots of sites, and some are going up while others are going down. ;)
That statement is only partially true in my case. Yahoo give me less referrals now than they did when they served up Google results. But a large percentage of their referrals are in areas where I wasn't doing as well in Google.
I also like playing with some of the other SEs to see what sort of results they come up with. I just wish they would all crawl more. Google and Yahoo are the only sites with more than 5% of my pages in their index.
And slapping the webmaster down and delivering results only people with PHDs can appreciate is another story.
I guess that's why I still like Google's results!
So far I've bought 2 PhDs (and got 2 othes as gifts) as well as a DDiv.
All you need to do to like Google's results is to spend $50 and get yourself one of the wonderful PhDs that are sold online.
A more appropriate way to put it is the ability to optimise for google has become much less predictable and consistant.
[edited by: trimmer80 at 11:40 pm (utc) on April 13, 2004]
How a webmasters feel about a search engine is 100% directly proportional to the number of referrals said search engine sends them.
That rings true over here. I think, for example, a random sampling of posts from update threads has shown that this is very true indeed, when it comes down to it.
Not necessarily: in fact, probably not.
Do you think hotelnow.com cares which of their thousand and one affiliates get the Google hit, as long as they get the sale? If Google gets better at tapping the source directly (or, less bad at filtering out the middlemen) the same number of sales will be occurring at the same merchants -- who do NOT hang out here, because their paid-on-commission-doppelgangers do.
This looks very much like the furor awhile back when airlines realized it was much cheaper to sell tickets on the web than through travel agents, and cut the commission. The travel agents squealed to high heaven, and the airlines really didn't say much in public -- but consumers were getting the same product and same service.
