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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 hope it can be done effectively -- and wish them well in the attempt.
Seems like the old Altavista had something like that. There seemed to be two problems with theirs:
(1) At the time, I get the impression people couldn't figure out how to use it
(2) The affiliate spammers took the whole search engine down -- with what amounted to a DDOS attack on all the useful results. (Sort of like what Hotel-rezzers have done to Google.)
I'd like more powerful "reprocess" tools, but Google has so far aimed for simplicity instead. I end up going after what I want by more complex searches, or alternating between search and browse -- which usually works. (But I may not be the typical user.) If all the commercial results could be weeded out of my searches, I'd be much happier -- and obviously the commercial webmasters would be happier if would-be customers could go shopping instead of having to stumble over all those boring wikipedia pages.
And I don't know whether the general surfing population is ready to have to pick out a niche first. And after all, if you start fractally bifurcating your niches, pretty soon you look like, um, a directory, which is great -- for maybe 10% of users.
Of course it’s fair if you build a brand via PR (not google PR ;) ) you have to take the good with the bad, Google has had a good run with great PR but hey, so did David and Victoria Beckham , they built the Beckham brand via PR and used it to the max, now that the Beckham’s pr is about a different set of balls it does not look so rosy on the front pages.
But Google knows this, they will ride the bad PR until the next wave of good PR comes a long.
DaveN
...I have against Gmail's use of emails from people who send emails from non-gmail accounts and have no idea of the advertizing for which it is used...
I don't know, who does the email belong to? the sender or the recipient. Most people would agree is the later, and he is the one agreeing to GMail so there is no problem IMHO.
Comparing that situation to GG's posts being used without his consent is like comparing apples to oranges.
Regarding the posting of other people's information on a website, without permission and for profit, forget about GMail, isn't that what Google is founded upon? (And all the other search engines too of course!)
...Member comments are owned by the poster....
Did anyone see that?
Yes it is a forum, but there is also a TOS.
Regarding the posting of other people's information on a website, without permission and for profit, forget about GMail, isn't that what Google is founded upon? (And all the other search engines too of course!)
FWIW I think theres a big difference between stealing someones copyright and presenting search results in some sort of rank order for the benefit of users and the web sites returned in the results.
Scraping words from a discussion to present elsewhere, out of context, and with comments that give a slant through incorrect interpretation is (I think) parasitic.
Presenting ordered results for mutual benefit is, well mutual so fair enough.
Best wishes
Sid
[google.com...]
It tells you exactly how to have web pages that won't be cached in google.
It may be bad manners for them to cache the stuff without explicit prior permission, but at least they make correcting the problem fairly painless.
All gmail needs is a no-scan header to keep the content away from Google's prying electronic eyes. Maybe they could allow 5% of the 1gig to be filled with no-scan emails. That way we can all send emails to gmail users, but we can avoid signing up to Google's Big Brother ad server at the same time.
Presenting ordered results for mutual benefit is, well mutual so fair enough.
Sid you are of course correct there is a difference and where would we be without search engines?
However, whether we like it or not, the guy who displays this information would no doubt argue that he is also "presenting ordered results for mutual benefit". Maybe he has an IPO on the horizon too?
Scraping words from a discussion to present elsewhere, out of context, and with comments that give a slant through incorrect interpretation is (I think) parasitic.
Sounds like the tabloid press to me, LOL!
BUT - can someone please post a quick summary of the main points, I think I only got up to about page 10.
Agreed, and not just webmasters --the public, most notably via the financial/business press, has come to recognize search as a corporate, profit-driven venture and not just a nice, free service. G is just the lead dog and is feeling the whip.
>seems Google can't please anyone these days
Yep, I agree. Somewhere over the last 5 or 6 months, it seems that G went from 'beloved & trusted flower-child geeks' to 'money-grubbing corporate SOBs,' --maybe it was the IPO run-up? I do think that the timing was waaaay off the mark in Gmail in the US, coming after the public's interest in privacy has been refocused on scumware, the DNC list, and the (obvious failure of) Can-Spam. Had they released it last year, it would likely have been greeted with love & adulation from G fan-dom.
Sure:
How webmasters feel about a search engine is 100% directly proportional to the number of referrals said search engine sends them.
</end of story>
disagree with that 100%. However could be directly related to the consistancy (or lack thereof) of traffic and the algo.
But how the general public feel about a search engine is dirtectly related to their ability to find what they are looking for.
And slapping the webmaster down and delivering results only people with PHDs can appreciate is another story.
Webmasters will not be the final decision on Google's fate, the searcher will. The information GG gleams from this forum tells him nothing about user experience.
Boomer
How a webmasters feels about a search engine is 100% directly proportional to the number of referrals said search engine sends them.
Boy, that must be confusing if you have lots of sites, and some are going up while others are going down. ;)
That statement is only partially true in my case. Yahoo give me less referrals now than they did when they served up Google results. But a large percentage of their referrals are in areas where I wasn't doing as well in Google.
I also like playing with some of the other SEs to see what sort of results they come up with. I just wish they would all crawl more. Google and Yahoo are the only sites with more than 5% of my pages in their index.
And slapping the webmaster down and delivering results only people with PHDs can appreciate is another story.
I guess that's why I still like Google's results!
So far I've bought 2 PhDs (and got 2 othes as gifts) as well as a DDiv.
All you need to do to like Google's results is to spend $50 and get yourself one of the wonderful PhDs that are sold online.
A more appropriate way to put it is the ability to optimise for google has become much less predictable and consistant.
[edited by: trimmer80 at 11:40 pm (utc) on April 13, 2004]
How a webmasters feel about a search engine is 100% directly proportional to the number of referrals said search engine sends them.
That rings true over here. I think, for example, a random sampling of posts from update threads has shown that this is very true indeed, when it comes down to it.
Not necessarily: in fact, probably not.
Do you think hotelnow.com cares which of their thousand and one affiliates get the Google hit, as long as they get the sale? If Google gets better at tapping the source directly (or, less bad at filtering out the middlemen) the same number of sales will be occurring at the same merchants -- who do NOT hang out here, because their paid-on-commission-doppelgangers do.
This looks very much like the furor awhile back when airlines realized it was much cheaper to sell tickets on the web than through travel agents, and cut the commission. The travel agents squealed to high heaven, and the airlines really didn't say much in public -- but consumers were getting the same product and same service.
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
