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Google Loosing Fan Base?
by: Aaron Mathew Wall
"Nothing last forever but the Earth and sky." - from Dust in the Wind by
Kansas.
Google has spent the last year evolving from a search engine to a giant
media corporation. At birth Google was worried about only one thing, search
- and that focus is why it became so successful. As Google spreads out many
are wondering, are they doing it too fast? Are they letting quality slip? As
any company evolves it will make mistakes, but has Google lost sight of its
goals?
Google gained large distribution when Yahoo switched to it to drive down
Inktomi stock price, only later to buy Inktomi. Google then came to power
stealing traffic from Yahoo by providing clean, relevant results, and good
search tools for surfers and webmasters alike. Many estimate that Google
controls in excess of 75% of the search market.
Microsoft is still working on its search engine. Yahoo recently acquired
Overture and is working behind closed doors in much the same way as MSN is.
LookSmart has not updated Wise Nut in a long time, is hated by a large
portion of the internet community, and is soon set to loose most of its
distribution. And Ask Jeeves (owner of Teoma) has its top results powered by
Google AdWords. With Google powering Yahoo, AOL and many other sites Google
lacks a clear competitor today.
Right now Google can take its huge lead and extend it, or let it slip. No
system is perfect and there will always be complaints, but I have to wonder
if Google has forgotten why or how it became such an icon.
Many people have reported their Google Toolbar has been failing to return
PageRank 90% of the time. While the hysteria around PageRank is somewhat
overrated, it would be more assuring if the feature worked often.
One of the biggest problems search engines face today is a lack of
quality content on the web. Earlier this year Google introduced a program
called AdSense which displays its pay per click AdWords ads on many mid
sized web sites. AdSense was designed to help pay to produce better content
sites. Soon after Google introduced AdSense they included a related searches
link set underneath the ads which made webmasters angry. This technique was
siphoning off traffic from websites back to Google with no payment of any
kind. Quickly Google had to repeal this move.
Google has also signed its AdSense members to a gagging clause. Beyond
that gagging clause many have complained about getting kicked out for
reasons they could not even challenge. Then for these same members to see
how much money Google had owed them up to that point they had to agree to
another set of terms that prevented them from criticizing the AdSense
program. But the ads get worse.
Google was in a race with Overture to be the first to provide broad
matching on its search terms. Google got there first. The idea behind broad
matching is that it will allow Google to sell more of its ad space by
providing ads on similar terms that were not yet sold. Overture allows
different bid prices on different levels of matching. Google sets a single
price on the ads, and this causes a huge problem for those who do not know
how to use the system.
First the broad matching ads are less relevant. The term broad indicates
far reaching and is self explanatory to its end effect on relevancy - which
is in the exact opposite direction of Google's roots. This new type of broad
matching matches many remotely close search phrases to those paid for by the
advertiser. Couple near matching with the fact that ad sites and pages are
scanned for relevancy (which is frequently inaccurate) and a big problem
starts to come about with how to provide relevant ads on the syndicated
results.
While many of the SEO experts know how to use negative keywords,
tracking, and other advanced features, the smaller advertisers do not always
have the resources or understanding to effectively use this new, more
complex medium.
Now instead of rewarding businesses for hunting out the phrases that
exactly match them (and thus providing higher quality search results),
Google is rewarding the largest companies by allowing them to be lazy.
Google is shooting itself in the foot by degrading relevancy for short term
profits.
Large companies bid on generic cover all terms at prices where they loose
money on every transaction until the competition goes under. Not only do
these name brands enjoy higher click through rates (due to brand
recognition), but those with stockpiles of cash can afford to burn through
thousands without a blink. Many small sites can not, thus the sad state of
internet media is that it is now consolidating much the same way as offline
media is.
It gets even worse for the small website now though. These same ads which
they are using may now appear on pages that sometimes do not even remotely
fit the ads. I was looking at the GMT clock time zones to ensure my clock
was set at the right time today (so I missed daylight saving time). The page
which had the different time zones listed a few cities and a group of
AdWords. Most of these AdWords were targeting Las Vegas (most likely the
most expensive US city). Las Vegas was not even one of the cities mentioned
on the list. Not a relevant ad set. Bad for all parties involved.
What is the result of this change to AdWords? Lower quality ads at a
higher price. Nick Denton predicted that the expansion of these ads across
the web (especially coupled with decreased relevancy) that users will start
to ignore them. Much the same way as banners have faded, only a few years
may be left before this advertising medium chips away and destroys itself.
What about the regular Google search results? At least they are strong,
right? Sometimes they are rather week. Some clients have had search results
dominated by the same sets of interlinking sites. Aiming to fight spam,
Google is acknowledging this fact by incorporating a new major algorithmic
change on the web live. My site went from #17 to #7 to not in the top 1000
websites for "search engine marketing". While I still have customers that
need work done on their sites, this sporadic re mixing is not refreshing in
my mind, as well as in the minds of many of my customers.
I have already had concerned emails arrive from friends worried about
loosing thousands of dollars a month as their top listing evaporated. All I
can tell them is wait and see.
Much of what people have feared would happen to Google after it goes
public has already happened. It is clear that competitive open source
alternative search engines such as Nutch are not desired so much as
required.
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