Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google have now overtaken eBay as the biggest internet firm in terms of stock market value.
Google made profits of $204.1m (£108m) in the three months to 31 December.
Just aggree, my site search points now to Y! and Adsense is dropped as well as I'm spreading the message of G$$gles illness to the people arround me looking at my judge ...
BTW:
Don't like even to have the old Google back now - there should be some more big players in SE area to bring some market and free information back in.
[edited by: xcomm at 11:41 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2005]
That makes today perfect to unfold an update that seemingly has irked so many. It's annoying, but I'd say Google believes investors could not care less about flustered webmasters ... especially on a day when they annouce record earnings / profits.
Google Inc. is all about money. And IMHO ... so are Yahoo Inc. and Microsft Corp.. As webmasters we are the people who build sites and depend on these money hungry companies, who at the heels of the hunt, put their interests miles ahead of ours.
It sucks.
Shares in Google closed up more than 7% on Wednesday following the firm's announcement of a huge rise in profits.Google have now overtaken eBay as the biggest internet firm in terms of stock market value.
Google made profits of $204.1m (£108m) in the three months to 31 December.
I haven't bothered reading Google's accounts, perhaps someone else can say how much of Google's asset base is attributed to "goodwill" and the value of the brand name?
These are areas where Google is shooting itself in the foot with this update.
I'm just going to freely express my opinion as a webmaster. If someone visits my site and they are referred by google, they are being deliverd a popup message which states that MSN Search is currently showing better results. They are then given the option to visit MSN Search.
I can understand that sometimes things go your way, and then sometimes they don't - but Google seems to want the best of both worlds (be popular and not have to answer to webmasters). Ultimately, it was webmasters that promoted and educated users about their search product.
If webmasters made them, we also have the power to break them. My goal here is not to break anybody, but Google were referring me 90% of my traffic... My goal is balance out the engines in whatever small way I can. Google need to be taken down a peg or 2. I've alo got a 10,000+ email database of subscribers (mostly webmasters & tech people) which will come in useful.
My main concern with this new update is that if you search for my brand name (and there are quite a few that do based on referrals), then right now my site does not even rank. Our brand name is perhaps the best in my industry, and Google are, in my opinion, diluting my brand name and causing my company money. The first result for my brand name is a spammy page which is a "scraper site" which is actually SERP's page from somewhere - so that's basically useless.
In fact, I just realized. This first result for my brand name is an AdSense site - is it possible that this was done deliberately, or at least is a known side-effect os something they've done in order to make me advertise with AdSense or something? That won't happen, in fact quite the opposite. I am just about to go over to AdWords and cancel my advertising there (we spend about $4/week on that).
And yeah, what is with the name. 'Update Allegra'?
If you want good results, I reckon Overture's Alltheweb is the way to go.
We have a whole set of sites clearly not properly indexed (as several people have mentioned). If one of those improperly indexed sites contacts inbound links to *your* site, then isn't it quite possible that Google is missing some of your inbounds?
Where my rankings have dropped, for all intents and purposes it looks like a PageRank drop - so perhaps it *is*, because there are missing backlinks.
It looks like Google is running on a partial index and has an incomplete PageRank calculation.. perhaps.
backlinks appear to have been updated [216.239.37.104...]
