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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?
Just wanted to push a quote from todays edition of the largest Danish business daily into the discussion - they (in turn) quote Jacob Nielsen for saying that if you're not on page one of Google you're dead meat (or something to that effect).
He held a nice conference here two weeks ago and presented some interesting findings, and a few of them were actually related to search behaviour, but that's not the point, really. The point is that influential people do listen to that no matter what the webmaster community says. We can argue as much as we like, but i still see Google getting ever more popular in the mainstream media as well as the business press and the business community at large.
Also, today i was at a meeting with a few businesspeople from various parts of the internet research community, and i swear i didn't even mention Google, but Gmail came up nevertheless. I kept my mouth shut (tried at least) but i must say that the issues mentioned were nowhere near those views that have been aired here - not the slightest mention of the "privacy" word, not even the key benefit that you could search your email - they had got the message that it was 1G mail storage (as the name sort of implies) and they were thrilled. As for targetted advertising, they got the idea (somebody else explained it) and they had no immediate reservations other than, "it's not for business use then".
I'd say that is pretty far from the posts i see here, and excuse me for saying this, but the word "siege" is not the first that comes to mind.
How well have portals done in the past couple of years?
Heading down the wrong path, trouble is sure to follow.
It's cause and effect motor that powers modern media.
The real issue it would be neat to discuss here is just what is going on with the press. They used to think Google was the darling that could do no wrong. And now, they are attacking at every corner and opportunity. Google introduces a new feature, and it is cause for a negative press story somewhere on the web.
That happened about the time yahoo dropped google. I would expect yahoo and microsoft have been talking to every reporter in sight about how bad google is. For the most part reporters don't have a clue about tech so someone is educating them and feeding them stories
Sexy girl, what's up with your boyfriend?
Instead of asking what's up with the press, the better question is "What's up with Google?"
Google is taking chances
As any gambler knows, when you take a chance sometimes you win sometimes you lose. What did you expect, that Google would never trip over it's shoelaces?
I respect Google for taking chances and biting off as much as it can.
Some companies aspire to be a leader while others are perennial followers. Google is a leader.
Viva Google.
Many people choose their domain names with the targetted keyword in mind and then name their site similar. If you do this it seems often this new ongoing algo takes you out of the results unless you have stunningly good strengths in other aspects.
I think G was a much better search engine pre florida from a webmaster/user point of view. It was not perfect, but it generally made more sense and you knew where you stood. There was spam but that same kind of spam is still there, and primitive spam at that. And generic characterless directeries. But pre florida, with the spam were some very relevant results. I see less of that now. Many aspects of legal seo were common sense. Your title of your site or page reflected the content. Now it seems that that is not what is important and may even be penalized.
It seems many webmasters, an important part of the little people/user base, are unhappy. My guess is that this is not helping G.
Anyway, I do wish google well.
In October, Google was a hero. Journalist rarely wrote negative stories.
Florida, however, caused such a wave of negative emotions about Google that journalists slowly started to realize that now they wouldn't be tarred and feathered if that attacked Google.
By January, the shield of goodwill was largely gone and since then journalists have started to treat Google more like they treat other businesses, that is, they look for the dirt.
lot of people are now coming up
yahoo kicked google and launched its own crawling.
i hope they also launch yahoo adsense
and there are more contextual ad providers.
MSN is also trying to tap search markets.
Gmail will eat up lot of advertising of adsense, so publishers will face less adverts.
Also local search lowers the traffic of websites
So google will face annoyance from lot more people
