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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?
...Incorrect. Google's customers are the people who buy Adwords.
:D I was waiting for that answer. Being an adword advertiser myself, I am not going to say that you are wrong, but a case could be made that the customers are the searchers. For one, I doubt Google would ever admit to thinking of them as the product.
If they are happy they'll continue to use the service, if not, they'll simply go to another Search Engine.
You can't believe the amount of people in our office how have remarked they can't find anything with Google anymore.
Two of our engineers had Google Bookmarks to matter relating to research projects from months ago. Following those bookmarks today is now not even on subject, much less on target. The same search in Yahoo still returns valid results.
The boys who started Google need to consider what it was that made them successful in the first place.
Boomer
I think that both Yahoo and MSN don't have future in general search business because they own lucrative services like autos, travel and real estate and others, and sooner and later anti-trust attorneys are going to catch up with them for using their search engines unfairly to harm their competition.
They will either spin off their search engines or will make them like yellow pages displaying only their and their business partners products. (Not much different from current situation but with clear marking that the entire serps is Advertisement.) In general search engine area, that people can trust to produce unbiased results, a few pure search engines might emerge to challenge Google.
I still think Google is money /advert mad recently, and this is behind most of the complaints.
And I'm gob-smacked that the old sausage about Florida being fundamentally about anti-spam is still being bandied about. I didn't think propaganda had such a long shelf-life ;) It was just a convenient excuse for many good sites going under. Don't forget, many of them came back - so were they spam or not?!
In the end for everyone, having 3 major players in the SE world will be awesome for everyone. It is more of a diverse group and it isn't all the same people coming to your sites as when Google owned the world.
This is competition and I can't think of to many more cut throat businesses that have such high stakes as this. As long as Google has traffic they will always be in business.
When anyone is that big, extra scrutiny is merited.
Incorrect. Google's customers are the people who buy Adwords. The searchers are the product that Google sells. Never forget this.
There's a bit of a terminology mix-up here.
Google provides 2 main categories of products / services:
Search results and Advertising.
These are the products!
You're right that Adwords purchasers etc. are its customers, you could also classify the searchers as customers in the sense that they receive a product or service, but because they don't pay, they might better be thought of as stakeholders.
But there's no way the searchers are a product!
(unless Google has an artificial insemination service in beta: Goo-GooGle? :)
I must admit I'm probably biased, having a site that does well with Google, and is nowhere with Yahoo.
I put up a new page and in less than a week it's getting hits from Google regionals all over the world - fr, it, au, hk, tw, you name it. But my traffic from Yahoo (who Slurp me regularly) is pathetic, mainly I suspect because they are trying to force me (as a previous Inktomi PFI user) into paying for Overture Site Match.
