Yep. Well said. Google has to keep the yung'uns in their corner if they're going to continue to succeed. Right now it seems google is relying on it's reputation, but that ain't gonna cut it for long. No other businesses move as fast as those on the net. Here today, gone later today...
Buy a Dell, dude. You get google as default! Result of google paying dell some bucks to have this happen. Plus nothing I read about the deal says anything about dell maybe getting a cut on each search from google on each done on a dell.
Dell could easily get a cut when cash is generated from their custom Google start page, but I doubt it. I would be surprised if Google shelled out more cash after signing that $1b bundling deal with Dell. $1b is a lot of cash, even to Google.
I'm not sure Google needs any cash as an incentive. I think they (rightfully) feel threatened by Microsoft and the enormous resources they have to throw into the battle. As a recent columnist said, Microsoft has successfully reinvented itself more than once in the past. They seriously underestimated the value and attraction of the internet originally and that's what allowed Netscape to gain a stranglehold. But once they turned their sites on the browser wars, Netscape was (and still is) history. They've only recently decided to take search seriously. I anticipate the same outcome and so does Google. Note that Google is also promoting Firefox and other Microsoft competitors. I don't think they are getting any monetary rewards for that either and I doubt that they even asked for any.
as a user, I could care less about "money talk". corporate value doesn't matter for me if I want to find something on the web. In the past weeks, I have come across lots of searches where google was just "hiding" the real, most authorative result from me. Msn found it. the current situation can indeed be compared to the altavista vs. google discussion back in the back. If another engine delivers better result, there is no reason for me to use google at all. Sympathy doesn't matter when time and money are factors.
Google is paying the Mozilla Foundation for all of the traffic that it sends to Google. The big G certainly isn't reaping any monetary rewards directly from Firefox. And, as we all know, they're paying us to get people to use Firefox via the AdSense referrals. Google knows that they are going to be faced with some serious competition very soon.
I always trusted Google's results, but since 4/4 and now this 06/20 fake allert Google is less for webmasters. For usual surfers, Google will be same for a while.
I Yahoo now, it is absolutely sad I can't find anyting anymore I'm serious like I was trying to search for some Undrafted Players bios and stuff after the NBA draft, and Google absolutely could not match anything, MSN was the best but, Yahoo is my homepage so I Yahoo...
Google is awful for anything that's happened fairly recently. If search engines were like a library Google would be the archive and MSN would be the newspapers on the front desk.
Ya know, that sounds fairly similar to what Jessica Simpson herself said about the Internet... hmmm.... Imo, from what I can see, it's more like Google used to be some work of genius that someone created in their garage and now is closer to what a bureaucracy would put out. They are delivering what they think the end user wants, sure, which is noble and all, but how long has it been since they actually talked to the non-webmaster end user? I mean, c'mon, would it REALLY be so terrible for their image to send out 200,000,000 "How are we doing?" return postage postage paid surveys??? It's not like they couldn't afford it. I'm quite sure they could do it in such a way that it didn't look in any way bad or spammy. -Michael PS Btw, I just realized what a great idea that is, so if you repeat it, please do cite me here.
That's a very good analogy. And as we know, more people read newspapers than visit a library archive everyday. Google better tighten up.
Aye, but a very incomplete archive. With all the de-indexing and errors they have now. My pr 6 site has no cache and doesn't show up at all even for my unique business name (number one on msn and yahoo) - not found at all on google. Pretty lousy archive.
Google is the default on Safari on my mac. I never go to google.com to do a search. I noticed that the new version of IE has this search bar and it is set to MSN. If people don't install the Google toolbar ( I find that a lot of people couldn't be bothered ) then MSN is going to give them a real run for the money. People are really lazy. Once they get used to the search bar, they won't want to bother with Google. Especially if the results are getting better and better as they seem to be.
Comparing Google to Altavista is a stretch, at best. Altavista was a pet project of DEC, designed to demonstrate the power of their hardware. They never properly monetized search, and it never received anything close to the attention or funding it deserved. It was sold a few times and consistently mismanaged. Altavista neglected new search technology. Even if you disagree with Google's techniques, it cannot be said that they are stagnating in terms of search technologies. I've had sites get hammered in Google, and it sucks. But they are constantly trying out new spam-filters, and their increasing market share suggests that it's working. If a few innocent webmasters get crushed in the process, I'd imagine they consider it a casualty of war. In Altavista's prime, nobody thought search had a profitable future. The prevailing feeling was "why would you want to send people to other sites? That's less ad impressions for our portal!" I did a post on how Google is not Altavista back in April, after reading some articles about how overpriced Google is.
You're missing the point. Nobody is saying that Google is like AltaVista in terms of technology, marketing, or anything else. What SEObook and many others are pointing out is that before Google there was Yahoo and then Altavista at the top of the heap and both disappeared overnight (Yahoo has since reinvented itself but it too went down the tubes) when someone offering better and more consistent results came along. That is the same fate awaiting Google if they don't get their act together - even more so with the power and size and money backing MSN Search as it waits in the wings to pounce.
Excellent excellent thread! I remember years ago they used to dedicated class time and uni tutorials to teaching us HOW TO SURF THE INTERNET. When Google came, those classes dissapeared because it became so much simpler to get relevant results... I used to be an exponent of Altavista forever ago, Google's decreasing quality of results is really looking like a good push for those tutorials to come back again and perhaps I'll be an ex-exponent of Google as well. I don't care if what should be the authority site for "UNIQUE KEYWORD PHRASE" has too many "UNIQUE KEYWORD PHRASE" (UKP from here on in) links pointing to it, and not to its subpages. I don't even care if Google views UKP.com as spammy, I freaking want to see UKP when I search for UKP, damnit. Even the relevant sites are being penalized these days.
Great Forum, great Thread, great opinions! Asking my girlfriend - she said that she is experiencing more and more irrelevant results from google. She is an extreme google user and is on the www since the first days of the www. I really wonder that it is getting more and more obvious even to NON-SEOs. This motivated me to go over to my neighbours and friends and change their "startpages" to search.msn.com or yahoo.com (depending on their ability to deal with complexity ). I will see if anyone will miss google or if the alternatives please their demands. As a protest of my own, I will add some i.e. "time to change your search engine" links on some of my clients projects (I still have to find a good title). It is worth to stand up!
They got down. However, the google algo has improved dramatically the latest month.. atleast when I look at my own rankings. All time high
Hi Latehorn, Ok, so how'd you do it? You must have the secret to avoiding supp hell. Is there some chant I need to do, or perhaps scrificing a live chicken to the google gods???