Google almost has a monopoly on both internet search and PPC advertising, but is irrelevant to my point. I don't care about monopolies that do not threaten my business. Google is attacking one of my company's largest revenue streams, link sales. Why support my enemy? Microsoft on the otherhand, while certainly a horrible company, has done nothing that overtly attacks my business. As I said before, "I have no qualms about buying or using a product from a huge corporation, just as long as it's in my interests to do so. With Google, it goes against my interests to support their company, and so I refuse to do so."
I don't get WHY they would do this though. What's the point? What are they getting from knowing what everyone is doing?
i dont mind too much if it makes for better targetted results and all that i dont think the information will be used againts me
Very smart advertising. AdWords (combined with the power of doubleclick) now can deliver even more relevant and targeted ads. This is also supposed to help them tailor "personalized search" better, so that the results match your browsing patterns. What they get out of this is millions of profiles on individuals web surfing habits. This data, especially after a few years, will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions.
I don't! I have never used any of their products other than their search engine and advertising; and I am using that less frequently after comparing results from competitors. With the exception of their free usenet archive, to me most of their other offerings are superfluous rubbish for which I have little or no direct need. I have looked at the toolbar and cannot see that it offers me anything I cannot find elsewhere.
well, they just do it best and they are the biggest because of it, but everyone can use any search engine they like, no one is forced to use anything of Google just as you have switched to other products/services.
I think this is scary indeed.. That means that George WubelWew and his cronies know what we're up to too? hey?
Google is clever. If they penalize link sales, they will do that in such a way, the authority sites are not affected! (Because if they penalize authority sites strongly by not sending them traffic, that will be shooting to their own leg in the long term. Google is here because they find good content for us!) So if you have very valuable content with strong backlinks, i dont think you will be much affected if you did not do sth stupid like labeling the links with "Link Sales" . And i agree that Google is getting worse in terms of NOT following their own rule "dont be evil". Google is more clever than M$. Because they know how to do public relation. Regular Internet users still love Google, because they give them free web applications, looks smart and childish but professional and support open source somehow. Time will show what will happen. I dont believe Google is following their own rule PERFECTLY. But who is perfect?
I know what you're getting at, but MS does not threaten our incomes or our sites. They are just trying to supply their products to us. Google is going too far.
I dont use the google bar for this reason. I use a firefox plugin to get my PR and I use customize google plugin for firefox to randomize my google cookie id which = they have no history on me
I haven't been using it for well over a year. The only reason I installed it in the first place was for pagerank, and when I really want to check up on that outdated metric there are other websites I can go to for it. The power in this sort of quantity of information is immense. It's one of the reasons supermarkets rule the high street, and smaller retailers don't stand a chance. It's probably hard to picture it as important, because on an individual level it may not be that significant. So I searched for Kansas widgets last Tuesday? Big deal. But multiply that over a few billion search results and you have the ability to track and predict trends, and to present targeted ads to milliions of people every day. They don't just know what you have done, but what you might want to do tomorrow, and that's a perfect opportunity for making money.