Google offers a lot of free and good services for webmasters. No wonder they dominate the search engine market. Yahoo is making now some moves into the right direction with their BOSS and Search monkey apps.
I’m having trouble feeling much sympathy for the poor abused advertisers google has by the throat. I don’t go to the web for advertising.
I’m a bit late to post, but would like to emphasize one aspect of this that most folks don’t think about enough. Google has been slowly and quietly expanding into other business models, and we are now seeing them begin to edge out advertisers who compete in those areas.
I work for a travel comparison engine that provides an easy-to-use, simple search service to users. We’ve been buying ads on Google for years. The ads have always converted well, and the site has always worked great for our users. Yet recently, Google has claimed that sites like ours don’t offer a ‘unique’ or ‘helpful’ enough user experience, and therefore we’re going to be priced out of advertising with them.
Why would they do this? They claim it’s to enhance their user’s experience and offer only the most relevant results, but it’s pretty obvious what’s really going on. Over the past few years, Google has been showing a little travel comparison engine of their own, embedded in their search results, when users search for simple travel terms like ‘lax to jfk’. It’s clear to those in our industry that Google has finally decided to wipe out any competitors that use this same model from their search results. In a sad attempt to try to hide their true intentions, they’re claiming it’s all about cleaning up their search results and offering better options for users. Even though what we offer apparently works great for our users and our clients, Google doesn’t seem to care about that.
I’m not saying search engines don’t have the right to filter results and decide which types of sites offer the best experience for users. But if Google wants me to believe that’s what they’re doing, they should let their already-well-established bidding and rating systems determine which sites work and which don’t, not categorically decide ‘this business model must be wiped out’ when that model happens to collide with a Google product.
Google has made a monopoly on web search, which means they are now, for all practical purposes, the gateway to the web. As they branch into other businesses, they have total power to squash their competitors by not allowing users to see them. Is this an ‘evil’ practice? I’d say so. Is it illegal? I don’t know, but it definitely doesn’t feel good to be at the mercy of a giant like Google.
Google lives in a glass house. They don’t want to throw stones, so this is a mute point.
One thing i have noticed is that gmail is getting harder and harder to use in IE 7. It is just plain slow and works bad (a change that happened shortly after chrome was release). seems like google is trying to run MS out of the browser market (which should be a good fight)
We developed a software solution to downscale google traffic, which was starting to have an impact on performance. For example, we could limit google requests to an 1 second interval, or to arbitrary intervals, and respond with Temporary unavailable headers, which google crawler should support.
In the end we still decided on an alternative solution, we just scaled out our servers to cover the amount of google traffic coming our way. We didn’t want to be penalized for shaping google traffic in any way, so we just sent the traffic to their own instance not connected to visitors.
The reason for increased google bot crawling is in part due to usage of google analytics. Other crawlers use page parsing to get the links of the resources that need to be crawled. Google gets their links also via google analytics.
In other words, if yahoo wanted to index more content, they should develop a statistics package which can work concurrently with google analytics (or not even statistics, minimally you would only need a piece of javascript which takes the current link and reports it to yahoo). That’s the only way i see, that yahoo can become relevant as a search engine again. I probablly didn’t do a search query on yahoo atleast for five years.
Sometimes, the question is not about good or bad, it’s about what gives you the advantage, and whats the price for that advantage.
I dont’ know if this right place to post this interesting fact. hope others can enjoy this.
If you search the word search (no quotes) in google and just press ‘I’m feeling lucky’ you are redirected to www.live.com.
Hmm. Interesting.
continue same on live.com. we dont’ have lucky button here but the first result it shows is ‘search.yahoo.com’
ohh, now what yahoo thinks who is best for search - google again ?
no one believes they are first 
Its a scary but very realistic thought. I personally love Google, as a search engine and as a company. But we have became so dependent on it that I know people that are unable to imagine how the internet was even usable before the G era, some others just believe that Google has been there since the beginning of time. We would become internet-crippled without it now.
In the other hand, who wants to compete with Google anyway? I read an article that stated that MS Live developers used Google as its search engine: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/158/1025158/microsoft-workers-prefer-google
Google also provides MS specific content search: http://www.google.com/microsoft.html
So they are the good guy but apparently a very tough one too.
I shiver in fear of one day finding out that a bunch of kamikaze hackers manage to take down Google for an entire day. I better see brimstone and fire raining from a red sky.
It may be that most people already use google.com as their homepage, and by default they are coming from google, when in reality they are typing it right into their address bar. You may want to factor that into the results. I’m sure it will only alter the results slightly. I agree google kicks ass, why hold it against them ?
if the guy running the show is consistently giving me outstanding software that legitimately improves the quality of my life, for free, then why the hell wouldn’t I want him dominating the market?
…my Big Brother is a goooooooood Big Brother, it’s ok…don’t worry…
In the beginning there was Alta Vista, and it was good, but for some unknown reason they did case sensitive searches. I told them this was very, very stupid and they told me I was very, very stupid because that’s how people like to search; they like to be precise. Of course they did eventually switch to case insensitive searchs but the damage had been done; they were clearly idiots and the world knew it.
It’s like when I called Circuit City and tried to buy a TV but they couldn’t tell me how long it would take to ship it until AFTER I had actually purchased it. Since my buying decision hinged on the time span for delivery. I was TRYING to give them my money and they couldn’t be bothered to even TRY to help me give it to them. I TOLD them that was a stupid policy and would cause them to go out of business and I was right.
So, what I think we should all take from this is that you people need to just do what the hell I tell you to and stop damn arguing with me…
Why is the word ‘monopoly’ in inverted commas. In the fucking article you linked to you might want to re-read this section:
Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact[11] on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft’s dominance of the personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to the monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Real Networks, Linux, and others. Then on April 3, 2000, he issued a two-part ruling: his conclusions of law were that Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, and his remedy was that Microsoft must be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.
Note that his remedy was overturned on appeal, though his conclusions still stood.
KDog: I investigated, and keep in mind that Expedia and Orbitz are listed in Google’s search results for the exact keyword you used.
add up the fact that google is a huge company , and there’s no way to keep that philosophy for long…
No one is perfect, and I am sure there were some cases where Google really did do evil, but there are many more cases where Google seems to have done evil, but really was not Google’s fault, for example, and these are the ones I really hate.
KDog: Google for seattle, washington, you will see Google Maps at the top. Google for 1+1, you will see a calculator at the top. See the feature of Google they are talking about? I personally think this feature is helpful. And Expedia and Orbitz are listed.
Plus, even with this feature at the top, the rest of the results are ranked normally.
Also, notice how this feature, when used, looks clearly different from normal search results.
@Alex: The point isn’t whether you like sponsored links or not, the point is that Google is actively limiting choice, and people should be aware of that and be questioning their intentions. They can do this just as easily for organic search listings, and have now proven they are WILING to.
@Yuhong: Similarly, the point isn’t whether Google’s integrated tools work well or not, it’s that they are actively locking out sites that have just as much right to compete in that space.
The problem is Microsoft is not innovative in the areas
like search,they don’t really care cause their
business is not completely search.
The most interesting question is: Is Google adjusting their search results to optimize ad revenue?