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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?
I vote, "all of the above"
There is an old, very wise saying: "If it ain't broke don't fix it!"
Google's management has been highly focused on the up coming I.P.O. I would even venture to say much of their management hires have been only for that reason.
A VERY BAD Choice!
G SERPS still remain as good as can be expected and in comparison with the other big players are less spam ridden IMHO.
It seems Google can't please anyone these days.What is the root of it all?
1) If you spread yourself too thin, you make mistakes.
2) If you make mistakes and compound them with denials, no matter how respected you once were, you will loose all respect.
3) When people loose respect for an individual or organisation, they are more inclined to be critical.
It's just a guess, but was there a change at the top, maybe around a year ago? Time and time again, successful companies are brought down by a new and useless boss. The giveaway is when they insist on changing colorscheme, names, etc. British Airways is the best example I can think of right now.
Kaled.
My point is still, the lack of relevant results has been noticed by the Joe Surfers I am acquainted with. A large enough pool of people to suggest that it's not just webmasters here that have noticed the poor SERPs.
And Brett's point wasn't to equate your "droves of people leaving Google" = "under siege." Look at the home page here, I think that is what he meant.
[edited by: SyntheticUpper at 11:21 pm (utc) on April 10, 2004]
Interesting you put florida as the first choice. Florida was when G set out on the impossible dream of creating an algo that could not be gamed and interrupted the symbiotic rhythm that the monthly update had evolved into over time with those trying to "game" it.
Taking away something as simple as the monthly update rhythm can be enough in this capricious world to start a cascade effect that points back to some basic misunderstanding.
Gone are the days of coming to WW to see what moon cycle the google update fell in.
Yahoo and MSN have gone way down while Googles has gone up even though I rank very well on all of them.
I guess techy people are moving to Google while your regular type of person who wants to buy a book or something along those lines uses MSN or Yahoo.
As far as the Mail thing goes, who the hell cares! Don't use it or send sensitive stuff to people who do and then you don't have to worry about it.
No mail is totally safe unless you encrypt it anyway. As an IT administrator, I can read anybodies email on the server before they pull it off. How secure is that yet I don't hear people ****ing about it.
Google is the engine people love to hate depending of course on where you fall in the serps for any given month. The month you rank well, Google is great, fantastic, blah, blah, then an algo tweak and suddenly you don't rank so well and all of a sudden Google sucks, horrible results, then your site comes back and bingo Google is God again.
I really hope they fix all this, but if you think like I do, I'm not sure if I can ever forget this one.
The article in question refers to January. That is nearing ancient history in Internet time.
I have no stats that are meaningful, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that webmasters' love affair with G has turned sour. That, to me, does not bode well for G.
WBF
