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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?
Easy for the tech literate to say.
I was struck by the fact that Motley Fool gave a thumbs down to gmail over privacy concerns. That is a message going to a pretty mainstream audience.
WBF
I know this is a little off topic here, but is their any big search engine out their that don't think about money all the time?
Personally, I think GMail will be a hoot - if my wife e-mails me and asks me what I want for lunch, will
I get Adwords for local restaurants? Or if she asks for 'a bit of the other' - will Google dish up local brothels?
The poor girl's never going to see me :)
Really, I think the advertisers are pretty important to Google as well - guess who that is? rfgdxm1, next you generally say, "The vast majority of searches are non-commercial so these are most important again forgetting that google makes ZERO money off terms/themes where there are no bidders/
It seems Google can't please anyone these days.
I'm pleased.
a) Google is serving results that are "good enough" on my informational searches. And on those rare occasions that I shop online, they do well by me in the areas that I tend to shop.
Google is sending me more traffic than ever before, so as a webmaster
I am happy. Florida was no problem as a searcher or as a webmaster.
b) I judge a company by their actions, not by their size or by what they might do in the future.
There are only a couple of billion dollar companies that seem to value their word, and Google is one of them.
c) Management that is able to behave in a moral fashion while growing their company? I would not define that as poor management.
d) I think the Public Relations department might be part of the problem. It is a geek company and most of them have no clue that the public would not view them the same way as other geeks.
I think that they could also do a much better of setting expectations appropriately.
e) While MS might be playing their old "grass-roots support" game, I really think that most of the whiners are sincere.
g) I think that the real problem is that your average business person cannot understand geek thinking or priorities.
It isn't about the money, though money is nice, it is about the search and being the best at it.
The same thing goes for serving up ads. They want to use their search technology to be able to serve up the most appropriate ads.
With Gmail they realized how well their search capabilities can help manage mail, so they decided to try and do it right.
If you really care about your privacy, run PGP or GPG. Push Google to support it allow the applications to work with it seamlessly. Push your firends and aquantences to install it and encrypt all your email.
I will be getting a gmail account, and I will use it for all the things like publicly available contact info on blogs and forums.
I asked one of the Google reps at the last Pubcon "Is the reason that you won't reveal the payout rates on Adsense so that you can hook in masses of webmasters and then drop the payouts over time? That way, nobody can argue, because no one has any numbers to compare it with".
He took offence at that question, but what a surprise that most publishers recently suffered a drop in Adsense income due to "upgrades". Google must think that we are all stupid. Remember those Looksmart "upgrades"?. Lying to people doesn't engender trust. That is reason 1.
Reason 2 is that the results really aren't very good anymore. I am getting fed up with so many junk, purpose built, sites appearing in the results. I should know, because I own some of them. Yahoo is MUCH better at filtering these out at the moment. The only strength of Google at the moment is the depth of spidering, and Yahoo can't be too far behind.
Reason 3 is that Google treats webmasters like dirt. It is great to have Googleguy(s) here, but that doesn't detract from the fact that Google holds together a massive web economy, yet does little to protect that economy. I have seen numerous sites get penalised in Google for absolutely nothing (and far more who did deserve it). I understand that Google can't be responsible for everyone on the web, but being this callous with the livelihoods of webmasters leaves a bitter taste.
I also think launches like Gmail do show that we want to organize many different kinds of information, not just the web, and I can see where some folks or companies would want to see Google only do search over the web. One good thing is that I think there's lots of good competition going on in search right now, and that makes everybody work harder to give better results.
