By Andrew Lehman
It was clear to me that in preparation for going public, Google was actually seeding its searches with inefficiencies in order to encourage profits. Regarding commercial searches, it’s only got worse with time. By embedding top 10 positions with Wikipedia entries, videos and other tangentially related content, commercial businesses continue to be pushed into the second page, forced to pay Google for ad space.
I recently read that Google has decided to place a heavier emphasis on “brand” or conventional corporate websites when deciding how to rank. It is adjusting its algorithm to make it even more difficult for those businesses without deep pockets to achieve rankings. One could call this the oligarchic algorithm.
I forgot to mention one thing – if the moderator could add this to my post –
DO NOT – UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES – LET GOOGLE MANAGE YOUR AD CAMPAIGNS !!! They may be the experts ad DESIGNING systems – but they absolutely SUCK at managing them. You will think you connected your credit card to a Hoover Vacuum !.
I have been studying Google Advertising for about a year now. It’s not quite as evil as the article liked to makes it out out be, but he does make some valid points. If you want an overview of how Google ads works I recommend viewing this page on their “quality score” which determines the bid price for Adwords ads. Most companies (and that especially includes corporations) pay what is called in the online ad world the “Google Stupid Tax” – where their corporate mindset of “more and big is better” overbids and under performs when it comes to bidding and writing ads and are too lazy (or stupid) to take the time to learn how to do it right..
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215
It is still possible to rank highly both in the free results (called organic in the biz) and Adwords. How to do that has become an industry unto itself. The best thing to do for small local businesses is to form a marketing co-op and and hire a service that knows this business inside out. I would recommend a firm called Rocket Clicks
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215
If you are a Do-It-Yourself type – I recommend starting with Perry Marshall’s Book “The definitive Guide to Google Adwords”
http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/
(I have no affiliation with either of them)
Small local business online ads have been the elusive holy grail since Adwords was developed. Even Google’s army of geeks haven’t been able to figure out the technology to make it work. Google’s use of the Yellow Pages gives them what they don’t have which is “boots on the ground” to pound the pavement and sell the product. They are not selling results (leads), they sell “clicks” and web site “traffic” (a totally useless metric).
They are totally incompetent when it comes to online advertising and are nothing more than sock puppets that mouth a script that they are given. Perry Marshall tells a hilarious story about them where he calls them the “20-30 something babes with the cleavage” that go in an charm the socks off the small businessman. It’s the blind leading the blind.
Funny, you should put this article up, because just recently I was noticing that wiki entries were among my leading choices when doing searches on google and to be quite honest – doing searches on google have become essentially worthless. Less and less of my searches are being done via google and their affiliates.
Extra credit. Can anyone tell who was the original developer of the web browser? Or the media player?
In each case, Microsoft set up their operating system to open their versions of each. I believe in the late 90’s their was an anti trust suit against Microsoft. But as I recall Microsoft won.
And how much money was lost by those two companies…
As an aside note, Catherine many times puts up articles about supporting your local farmers. When you think about it, the local mega chain grocery stores limit your choices, while typically most of the food choices are unhealthy. This in itself gets into the large food/agriculture conglomerates who provide you with such limited, unhealthy choices.
Actually – this is becoming more and more prevalent in all phases of your life. Limted choices, unhealthy, unsafe products that generate higher profit margins for these large corporations.
In the past few years a number of authors have written books on essentially hidden toxins in everyday life. Currently, I’m reading – What’s in this Stuff by Patricia Thomas and i do recommend it. There’s also some other books out there on the same subject that I perused that I thought would probable be as good.
On a related topic, the recent $200m investment in Facebook by a Russian company hit the news recently. The majority shareholder in Digital Sky Technologies is Alisher Usmanov, a notorious oligarh active in the brutal Uzbeck regime (similar to the Burmese junta).
http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/27/facebook-russian-billionaire-markets-faces-technology.html
“LONDON – Facebook just got a rather generous investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian fund that’s paying $200 million for a 1.96% stake. That values the social networking site at around $10 billion, or well above the $3 billion that private equity investors reportedly valued the site at in April. How did that happen? It may have helped that Digital Sky is backed by a deep-pocketed investor: Russian steel tycoon Alisher Usmanov, who is worth $1.6 billion at last count, reportedly has a 32% stake in the private Internet investment fund.
Four-year-old Digital Sky was founded by Yuri Milner, former head of the highly-trafficked Russian portal Mail.ru, and Gregory Finger, who previously headed the Moscow office of hedge fund NCH, when the pair pooled together their individual interests in Mail.ru. The two founders are now its majority owners. Goldman Sachs and Renaissance Partners have also reportedly given financial backing to the fund.”
This information was sourced from Craig Murray’s blog.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/convicted_black.html#comments
I think there is a flaw in this argument. Most users doing a commercial search would not be satisfied with a wiki entry, so what would it matter if the wiki came up top rank? To boot, while I admit that google has some enormous power in the search world, if it became obvious that they were playing search games, they wouldn’t keep that top position for long. To play devil’s advocate, so what if they did tilt search results. They are allowed to have whatever business model they want. If it comes to light though, it would be their risk and the end of them.