Tag Archives: Search

Ducking out of Google Search

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When Google were just a search company, they made the web one of the most usable things ever. Life was great and everything was a Google away.

Today, as they face the challenges of Facebook, Apple and potentially Microsoft in the turf they made their own, they’ve changed their search algorithms so much that finding a good result can be a challenge at the best of times on a desktop browser. Though surprisingly in the Safari browser on iOStheir results are more like the “good old days”.

So like many other companies who either fail to disrupt themselves or whose attempts at disruption are less successful than expected, they’ll do whatever it takes to maintain their lead. From next week they will make your Google Web history available to it’s other products. A bit like when Microsoft integrated Office into Windows, perhaps?

Because they still have a lot of soul, they at least make it very easy to prevent them from gathering said web history.

Well before the recent discovery Google were compromising, without permission, the privacy setting I had chosen in my browser, I’d already mostly stopped using them for search in the last 6 months. There will still be the odd time what is still the best search engine on the planet has to be used. But, for now, I prefer the growing ability of DuckDuckGo and other services to answer my queries.

DuckDuckGo sounds like they don’t want to be evil after all.

What impact will Wordads have on Google and Adsense?

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Today WordPress announced Wordads, because in their own words

You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense

My initial reaction to this was great, I might finally get to control the ads which appear at the bottom of these posts. But my curious nature took hold and made me wonder if the few products Google rely on for most of their revenue are slowly becoming commoditised.

First we had the worlds biggest Social Network creating it’s own ad network. I know Facebook’s social ads revenue is still reasonably small, but the revenue from it appears to be doubling year on year. Considering the size of Facebook and the engaged temperament of its users, will it become an ever more attractive place to advertise online – especially with its ability to make those ads highly targeted to viewers?

Then the worlds most used smartphone platform introduced an intelligent personal assistant including voice search. Yes Siri still uses Google Search, but in many cases it does so only as a last resort or if you specifically ask for a web search.

It seems that many are translating a greater proportion of their web use to smartphones and the iPad. (And it wouldn’t be a wild assumption that Siri will appear on the next or even current iPads.) At what point of Siri’s maturity could it start make a serious dent into Google’s search dominance? And what then would be the roll on effect to Google’s advertising revenues from search?

And now we have the world’s biggest blogging platform – a social network in itself – introducing an advertising platform. Is it logical to assume it is going to start to eat into the 28% of revenue currently sourced by Google through Adsense?

While all of the above is personal speculation, I bet the real speculators are focusing on the 32% revenue growth Google delivered Quarter on Quarter this year. And will continue to reward the share price with their heads in the sand.

Perhaps they are right, it isn’t logical to assume that Google are sitting pretty on the past surely. And with the recent culling of superfluous projects there, it’s logical they are focusing their resources on improving their search and advertising functionality and especially as that search integrates with Android.

But can they innovate fast enough and will their next big thing be good enough to head off the Online Search and Advertising disruptors before they are eating more of their pie than the investor market would like?

Wordads is hitherto just an announcement from Automattic. But with almost 70 million blogs and 2.5 billion page views per month, even if only a small proportion use Wordads, it’s bound to be more than a tiny thorn in the established players behind.

After William Gibson on Google’s Earth

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… Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their product.

… In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory…We’re citizens, but without rights.

via nytimes.com

The first extract above should be required learning for all Google Users who Continue reading →

Are some bloggers addicted to the Google Juice?

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If I read an article about why people should return products which don’t meet their needs then you’d likely find me agreeing with it vigourously due to its simple logic. For instance, despite my agreement that the recently released iPad is going to be fantastic driver for change in the consumer devices space, I have decided that I don’t need one presently. I like to think I am good at the balancing of my WANTS and my NEEDS in our consumption driven society.

But then, while reading the final paragraph, I had to do a double take. The author of said Continue reading →

Facebook changing the rules of the Web?

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On Tuesday I was hanging out with my friends at Gnip trying to make sense of it all when my cell phone rang. It was Facebook’s attorney.

He was with the head of their security team, who I knew slightly because I’d reported several security holes to Facebook over the years. The attorney said that they were just about to sue me into oblivion, but in light of my previous good relationship with their security team, they’d give me one chance to stop the process. They asked and received a verbal assurance from me that I wouldn’t publish the data, and sent me on a letter to sign confirming that. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission.

Obviously this isn’t the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me.

via petewarden.typepad.com

This is not quite as big as the Wikileaks video showing US Military Murdering civilians and reporters in Baghdad, seeing as no-one is dying. But shit, this sounds like a worry. Facebook really are getting beyond getting on my goat. This is OUR information, not yours. Stop treating it as such.

Interesting article on Wikipedia nofollow

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Following the recent announcement of Wikipedia adding nofollow tags to external links, basically saying that Wikipedia cannot guarantee that outgoing links are not spam, I think we bloggers can retaliate by flagging all our links to Wikipedia as nofollow. Therefore, I have developed a small WordPress plugin that automatically adds rel=’nofollow’ to all outgoing links to Wikipedia.org, regardless of language.

First, what is rel=”nofollow”? It is a hint to all the major search engines that link that I am making should not be counted when calculating search engine ranking. In practise it means either that the link is user-generated, such as blog comments, thus may be spam or not approved by the page owner, or that I do not like or approve of the contents of the page that I am linking to. For instance, if I were linking to an extremist group for the purposes of illustrating a viewpoint I found objectionable, I’d add the rel=”nofollow” tag to indicate to the search engines that they should not credit my link to the target site for the purposes of boosting the target site’s search engine ranking.

Now, what does Wikipedia adding rel=”nofollow” tell me? First, it appears to me as if they are taking a point of view that their links are not trustworthy or cannot be guaranteed, but whilst Wikipedia does not offically claim to be trustworthy or definitive, the common perception is that it is. Thus, by adding this attribute, they are bascially saying that even if the article is as correct as it can be, the source material they referenced to produce the article (remember there is the “no original research” edict in Wikipedia) is not being fully credited!

Second, rel=”nofollow” has not stopped spammers spamming blog comments, so if they think spammers will lessen up on Wikipedia they are kidding themselves. In fact, knowing that I get a reasonable amount of traffic directly through their kimono article, more than through kimono searches on Google, et al, perhaps spammers may even start hitting Wikipedia harder since rel=”nofollow” may be taken as a white flag, and with the overworked editors less worried about giving search engine boosts through bad links, perhaps they will slacken off.

Third, a lot of blogs link to Wikipedia as an easy reference point for various terms, so with no outgoing links from Wikipedia, search engines will raise Wikipedia even higher in the ratings. With the rumours that Wikipedia may soon start accepting advertisements, one could even conclude that this is not much more than an attempt to boost their revenue.

via whatjapanthinks.com

I wasn’t aware of this. I like the idea of linking to sites to backup my assertions, but don’t like the idea of it generating search engine stats for certain references.

What is News? And why does the Business Model need to change?

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I was at Media in the Pub last night mainly because I was interested in the debate advertised, but also because I’m hitting up on this writing lark again. It was an interesting and interested crowd, and the Speakers didn’t repeat themselves (too much) during the presentations and following debate. Which I felt was one of the failures of the recent Media 140 conference.
Unfortunately, at the end of the debate I still had the ongoing feeling that no one is being very radical at all in their suggestions. More detail of what was suggested by the panelists can be found over here at Mumbrella (with some interesting comments to boot), and while some of them seem logical and some touching on the interesting, I was disappointed that nothing revolutionary came out.

So while we are waiting for the rad new thing to take over (and no it isn’t Microsoft paying News Limited to Index their sites and block Google), I have my own observations on the subject;

  • There needs to be an acceptance that ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ has pretty much always been funded by Advertising
  • Take the Times of London until 1966 as an example or indeed every newspaper up until the recent past filling their front pages with advertising (and see it return recently)
  • People and Businesses will always want to advertise their products and services
  • Those people who wish to advertise know that news or interesting content will always attract eyeballs
  • Give the Advertisers a reasonable number of return eyeballs and they will spend their money with you
  • At present ‘old’ media is losing those eyeballs, but online and other ‘new’ media has yet to prove it has the recurring eyeballs
  • And while they are doing that, newspapers and magazines can continue to overvalue the advertising space they offer
  • However a tipping point is approaching and I think as well as ‘Media Owners‘, most journos know this and rightly fear for their future in this ‘inbetween’ time

In summary, advertisers will still want to Advertise somewhere, news will still be created and reported on, all that is changing is the delivery vehicle. So does the Business Model REALLY need to change?