There's only one search engine that anyone cares about.
Companies live or die by their inclusion in that index. SEO is a nasty little cottage industry that benefits from the algorithmic monoculture in search.
On a somewhat related note, there is only one display advertising program that anyone cares about.
If you get banned from Adsense because a competitor hammered an ad on your site, say - you're out. Forever. With no explanation from Google. Just an unhelpful "you've violated one of our policies but we can't tell you which one" stock email.
I've been there. I tried the (token) appeal system, and failed. It's hard to appeal when you don't know what you've done wrong. Google won't tell you what you've done wrong because it might reveal part of their algo and thus help the bad guys.
So I forlornly moved on. Amazon ads are perhaps the next most profitable display ads for me - they generate less than 10% of the revenue that Adsense did.
I love Google for their excellent free services. However, I've come to depend on them, and that's dangerous because they're so ubiquitous, yet owned by a single entity with a single culture.
As geeks I feel we need to re-examine our relationship with Google.
Android fanboys and "Google Openness believers" could sleepwalk us all into the next dark "Microsoft" chapter.
"It seems a lot of Android fanboys and "Google Openness believers" are sleepwalking us all into the next dark "Microsoft" chapter."
If anyone is "sleepwalking" anyone anywhere then I think it's the people making big money from companies like Google, not consumers or openness advocates. That is, people like you before you found yourself unceremoniously kicked out of the club.
My point is that Openness advocates seem to place Google on a pedestal. Whenever I see any criticism of Android, or Google, it's always immediately flamed down. Maybe because Google is the most "open" of the major vendors today. But don't ever imagine that Google is immune from the Microsoft scenario.
Microsoft competed with "closed" platforms of the day by releasing a platform that was (arguably) more open to developers, and could be installed on any hardware. Developers actually quite liked Windows back in those days. The PC clone wars ensured that Windows became ubiquitous, and it took years for people to realise just how sinister that was.
I'm not going to pretend that Windows was in any way open-source, but why aren't we drawing some parallels with Google's Android platform, and the any-hardware clone war it's waging with iOS and true open source mobile platforms.
I guess what I was trying to say is that Android users and openess advocates are not very relevant to the topic being discussed. Google's monopoly in search and advertising should be considered in relation to those who directly benefit and lose from it as these are the ones who will determine whether it continues or not.
They will wake up one day, like website owners did the minute Google decided to "compete" with them. It's not really a competition, Google controls all aspects of search and decides how much and what type of traffic to send to ads, to their advertisers, to it's own sections and to poor Jane's Delicious Pies that can't afford the $2.50 a click.
Judging by the increasing earnings Google is clearly winning, so to all the lurking Google engineers, a hearty congrats! You beat them fair and square, just as IE beat all other browsers when Microsoft decided that it was the best and made it the default one.
There's only one search engine that anyone cares about.
That's not my new experience. I have found that Bing (and Yahoo, partially) ranks sites differently than Google. Google is quite competitive and thus it's hard to rank.
I tried ranking in Google, but even the second page doesn't help. I optimized for Bing and now it brings much more than Google. Certainly, my SE traffic is quite low (few hundreds a month) but I found Bing traffic to be decent and convert well.
Companies live or die by their inclusion in that index
In a way that's true, but it's also true that some companies make a choice about how critical search engine traffic is to their core business. Other companies live or die based on things like word of mouth, repeat business, critical reviews, protected niches, the whims of fashion, cronyism, whatever.
Every time I see people spend time and money on "SEO", it makes me wonder about what could have been if that time and money were spent on making the core product more awesome or indispensable or beloved or well-known through other means.
In the tech context, yes. In a business context, it stands for "doing business as." My understanding is that it basically allows companies to be officially represented under different names.
I got a secret for you. Google is not the only search engine capable of sending significant traffic to your site. They are also by far the most sophisticated and strict about preventing manipulation.
Companies live or die by their inclusion in that index. SEO is a nasty little cottage industry that benefits from the algorithmic monoculture in search.
On a somewhat related note, there is only one display advertising program that anyone cares about.
If you get banned from Adsense because a competitor hammered an ad on your site, say - you're out. Forever. With no explanation from Google. Just an unhelpful "you've violated one of our policies but we can't tell you which one" stock email.
I've been there. I tried the (token) appeal system, and failed. It's hard to appeal when you don't know what you've done wrong. Google won't tell you what you've done wrong because it might reveal part of their algo and thus help the bad guys.
So I forlornly moved on. Amazon ads are perhaps the next most profitable display ads for me - they generate less than 10% of the revenue that Adsense did.
I love Google for their excellent free services. However, I've come to depend on them, and that's dangerous because they're so ubiquitous, yet owned by a single entity with a single culture.
As geeks I feel we need to re-examine our relationship with Google.
Android fanboys and "Google Openness believers" could sleepwalk us all into the next dark "Microsoft" chapter.